The Fire and the Sun

'At the centre of the camp was a wooden platform that had fallen into disrepair and a crudely built wooden enclosure wrapped in barbed wire, more like pens for wild animals than a place suitable for human beings.'

--The Guardian. 

"You're just taking the moral high ground to sound good-it sounds a little irresponsible."

--Aung San Suu Kyi.

This made you slightly nauseous:

'Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not starving someplace, they are starving 
somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our lives because that is what God wants...

To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.'

--J. Gilbert.

Well, where to start with this drivel, tosh, nonsense on stilts?!

It reminded you a bit of Heaney's criticism of Larkin's 'Death is no different whined at than withstood'. Why the fuck should anyone listen to a poet? 

But here's the thing. Firstly, it's mighty presumptuous to think that anyone knows or could know what "God wants" and it becomes very difficult to talk in that language if you think of not just the Camps, the massacres, genocides, mass rapes but all the tremendous amount of daily human suffering there is in the world and that there has always been. Is one forced to say that "God wants" that as well? (Thoba!)

Secondly, underlying these lines is the sneaking suspicion that the word 'our' is italicized:
'But we enjoy our lives because that is what God wants...', as if to say, "Fuck you, Buddy" (John Nash).

And what is he actually saying here? That suffering is inevitable (if not here, then somewhere else) and therefore we should concentrate on our enjoyment? 

'But don't you think there's too much suffering in the world?"
"No," [John] Cage replied, "I think there's there's just the right amount."

--from Adam Phillips, Darwin's Worms.

'There will always be music'. 

Well, yes, but how can one really enjoy it in good faith? [More generally, this is a question that we are only occasionally honest enough to ask ourselves: since we're all implicated in the system of inequality and injustice in the land of the pure, how do we look at ourselves in the mirror? Is it only superficiality and amnesia that prevents us facing reality?].  

What also struck you was the utter falseness of the sentiments, the accounting mentality: the sound of an oar for all the years of sorrow. Really? All? And whose sorrow..the poet's?

~~

Why did Plato banish the poets (Iris Murdoch is fascinating on this) and why is there hostility to them in the Qur'an? 

'The 'unacknowledged legislators of the world'? I guess everyone thinks on those lines, in a way. Physicists think they study the 'queen of sciences'; economists think the world would be made right if everyone listened to them; the religious believe that everything would be solved if people got back on to the path, their path. People in the humanities look down on the sciences and think that they're the only ones who can really understand the deeper currents of 'the human spirit', be in tune with their finer sensibilities; and the sciences look down on the humanities: what is all this vague and fluffy stuff? Pragmatic people will tell you what's really going on and how to steer clear of all that wishy washy idealism. Get Real! (and make a buck in the process).

In short, everyone is a trader, trying to sell their wares, attempting to convince the punter that they, and they alone, have the goods.