The New World Order

The 'new world order' is the same old disorder

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Tell me, when you destroy a city what do you see? Even it is for only a moment, the image of my city will be registered by your eye, imprinted there. Of this much I am sure. Today you want to talk to me about how order is sustained by weapons, by metal that burns, by metal that melts.

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But why don't you want to talk to me today about Blake and Ginsberg, about the burning flames of Fall, the melting hearts of Spring?

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Every order creates a disorder. You won't admit this. But what would you do without us barbarians*, the redundant, the undesirables, the undeveloped, the underdeveloped, the wasted, wretched scum of the earth. How could you sleep safely in your warm rooms, your well lit homes, if there wasn't this terrible darkness outside?

~

We have to destroy the city before we can save it.

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Today you want to talk to me about how you'll make things alright, how you'll teach us to live in peace again, explain to us what is meant by freedom and other fine words. All those evil people vanquished, the beast within our hearts expelled. Russians, Chinese, Commies, ..all a threat to this vision of a seamless order. How familiar your shrill voice sounds, mullah of suburbia: Jew, Christian, infidel...Purity and danger. Today it is bitter cold and you do not want to talk to me about the Trenches, the Bomb, Auschwitz...

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But things survive, people endure. The capstone shifts, things can be overturned, what is lowest can become highest. The thread is taken up again and from this we shall weave an invisible city, one that is beyond your comprehension, beyond your imagination. We know you own the skies, have dreamt of the City of God. But we, like the Red Man you destroyed a long time ago, shall always turn our gaze lovingly back to earth, to the human world we knew, and look other human beings in the eye once again.

Did the people of ___

use lanterns of stone?

Did they hold ceremonies

to reverence the opening of buds?

Were they inclined to quiet laughter?

Did they use bone and ivory,

jade and silver, for ornament?

Had they an epic poem?

Did they distinguish between speech and singing?

Their light hearts turned to stone.

It is not remembered whether in gardens

stone gardens illumined pleasant ways.

Perhaps they gathered once to delight in blossom,

but after their children were killed

there were no more buds.

Laughter is bitter to the burned mouth.

A dream ago, perhaps. Ornament is for joy.

All the bones were charred.

It is not remembered.

When bombs smashed those mirrors

there was time only to scream.

There is an echo yet

of their speech which was like a song.

It was reported their singing resembled

the flight of moths in moonlight.

Who can say?

It is silent now.

------Denise Levertov

*and why has everyone returned home so pensive?

Because night's fallen and the barbarians haven't arrived. And some people came from the borderand they say the barbarians no longer exist

Now what will become of us without the barbarians?

Those people were some kind of solution.

---Cavafy.