Lost words, worlds

He would think of a word
and he had to remember the tree or the species of frog..

the tree itself, or the frog, or the state of mind..

the speech, the graves, the wedding songs

while the years of silence gathered..

[ ..]

...


......

whispered the name of a bird
in his mother tongue
while memories of snow and market days...
]
..
[
his father's hands...

nothing he said was remembered.
[the last word, found in nobody's heart]

--John Burnside (more or less. Less, actually].

~~

1534

In less than half an hour we filled two boats full of them (Great Auks), as if they had been stones.

Our whole modern tone of mind is not conducive to questioning the thought that human beings are anything but clever animals, subject to the same natural processes of decline and adaptation as every other living thing on earth. We have lost the words to describe ourselves in any other way. 

Men and women are not made in the image of God and have no special status, no stay against the briefness of time, no imaginative faculties that can transport them to other worlds, no glint of transcendence, no distinct centre, no creative spark, just the same fixed horizons that fade with his own death, as everything else in the universe fades out of memory.

[Is this somehow related to the point made in the previous post: politics reduced to the body, to its display (spectacle) and management? To be small, out of the limelight, is to be condemned to obscurity. One must stand and up and be counted (by the state) and sell oneself or one's wares on the market. Transparency! How the white man hated the Red Man's secretive nature... ]

All that can be admitted today is that Man's unique quality-if he has any at all-is his inclination and capacity to destroy all around him.

If the former view, that of men and women being the apex of creation, bordered on the arrogant then what are we to make of the modern view? Is it one of humility or an expression and symptom of nihilism?

What is one to make of the view that man is the measure of all things? Does the lack of a transcendental dimension inevitably result in that view being transformed into a picture in which Man is nothing but a thing, a number? But before that, the intermediary stage of thinking that nature, animals, all that was living was devoid of intelligence and simply a "resource" to be used for the comfort of human beings.

In less than half an hour we filled two boats full of them (Great Auks), as if they had been stones.

~