Love love exhausts and time goes round and round.
Time circles in its idiot defeat,
And that which circles falls, falls endlessly,
Falls endlessly, no music shapes the air
Which did, can, shall restore the end of care.
~ Delmore Schwartz, “Summer Knowledge”
(Photograph by David Leventi)
Thinking of the above Jesuit (the one in the middle) being arraigned next week in Oakland for his participation in Occupy Oakland in late January and early February. I’m not sure how well-disposed people are toward seminarians any longer, but it’s good to see the Jesuits – with a rich history of putting their lives on the line for social justice, such as those murdered in El Salvador in 1989, or Daniel Berrigan (quoted in the poem below) – still standing with the marginalized.
The Burning of Paper Instead of Children: Adrienne Rich
I was in danger of verbalizing my moral impulses out of existence.
~ Daniel Berrigan, on trial in Baltimore
1. My neighbor, a scientist and art-collector, telephones me in a state of violent emotion. He tells me that my son and his, aged eleven and twelve, have on the last day of school burned a mathematics textbook in the backyard. He has forbidden my son to come to his house for a week, and has forbidden his own son to leave the house during that time. “The burning of a book,” he says, “arouses terrible sensations in me, memories of Hitler; there are few things that upset me so much as the idea of burning a book.”
Back there: the library, walled
with green Britannicas
Looking again
in Durer’s Complete Works
for MELANCOLIA, the baffled woman
the crocodiles in Herodotus
the Book of the Dead
the Trial of Jeanne d’Arc, so blue
I think, It is her color
and they take the book away
because I dream of her too often
love and fear in a house
knowledge of the oppressor
I know it hurts to burn
2. To imagine a time of silence
or few words
a time of chemistry and music
the hollows above your buttocks
traced by my hand
or, hair is like flesh, you said
an age of long silence
relief
from this tongue this slab of limestone
or reinforced concrete
fanatics and traders
dumped on this coast wildgreen clayred
that breathed once
in signals of smoke
sweep of the wind
knowledge of the oppressor
this is the oppressor’s language
yet I need it to talk to you
3. People suffer highly in poverty and it takes dignity and intelligence to overcome this suffering. Some of the suffering are: a child did not had dinner last night: a child steal because he did not have money to buy it: to hear a mother say she do not have money to buy food for her children and to see a child without cloth it will make tears in your eyes.
(the fracture of order
the repair of speech
to overcome this suffering)
4. We lie under the sheet
after making love, speaking
of loneliness
relieved in a book
relived in a book
so on that page
the clot and fissure
of it appears
words of a man
in pain
a naked word
entering the clot
a hand grasping
through bars:
deliverance
What happens between us
has happened for centuries
we know it from literature
still it happens
sexual jealousy
outflung hand
beating bed
dryness of mouth
after panting
there are books that describe all this
and they are useless
You walk into the woods behind a house
there in that country
you find a temple
built eighteen hundred years ago
you enter without knowing
what it is you enter
so it is with us
no one knows what may happen
though the books tell everything
burn the texts said Artaud
5. I am composing on the typewriter late at night, thinking of today. How well we all spoke. A language is a map of our failures. Frederick Douglass wrote an English purer than Milton’s. People suffer highly in poverty. There are methods but we do not use them. Joan, who could not read, spoke some peasant form of French. Some of the suffering are: it is hard to tell the truth; this is America; I cannot touch you now. In America we have only the present tense. I am in danger. You are in danger. The burning of a book arouses no sensation in me. I know it hurts to burn. There are flames of napalm in Catonsville, Maryland. I know it hurts to burn. The typewriter is overheated, my mouth is burning. I cannot touch you and this is the oppressor’s language.
Fassbinder. I’ve struggled so hard to stay off nicotine lately. Then I see things like this…
Policeman strikes AFP photojournalist Patricia Melo during the Portuguese general strike in Lisbon March 22, 2012.
Portugal faces a general strike by workers angered by austerity measures imposed as a condition of a 78-billion euro bailout last year but doubts remain as to whether Thursday’s stoppage will receive widespread support. [REUTERS/Hugo Correia]
Read more: Portuguese strike against austerity snarls transport
Hundreds of NYPD in riot gear preparing for mass arrests in Union Square. Unreal. Never thought I’d see these things in the United States. I hope this is a bluff on their part. I don’t know if I can watch this.
EDIT: Bluff. For now. We’ll see what happens at 4 a.m. with the remainder. But they seem to have figured something out in terms of driving people away that doesn’t require force or arrests. And I’m sure they were delighted to see the massive rally tonight split up into at least separate marches, all of which proceeded to run up and down lower Manhattan pointlessly, returning weaker and exhausted to Union Square at 11 p.m. Some people walked three, four, five miles, some in circles – and for what purpose? The speeches at the rally at 6 pm were some of the most powerful I’ve heard since September…and all that energy was dissipated in a matter of hours so that people could run around the streets, dodging cops on scooters, and – as last night – taunt them with donuts on strings.
“For Aristotle,” says Leah Hunt-Hendrix, “ethics is not a question about right and wrong, it’s a question about who you are. It doesn’t come down to a decision in an instant. It comes down to what kind of life you live, and what kind of life you live as a community.”
“So the idea,” she says, continuing on Aristotelian ethics, “is that part of what it means to think about ethics is to ask: How are we formed as people? How do we become who we are? Capitalism and advertising obviously form us in very concrete and specific ways and have formed us into a consumer public. Rosa” – she refers to the legendary organizer Rosa Luxemborg by first name – “writes about the mass strike. Participating in a strike is formative. It creates a consciousness of one’s agency and role in creating change.“
It will be interesting to see where "Occupy’s heiress” goes from here. She doesn’t really get a chance to explain what Aristotle means by “who you are,” but I suppose she’s alluding to character and how we understand virtue as human excellence: good habits formed and exercised over a lifetime. Public-spiritedness and magnanimity of her type are definitely to be encouraged, though; some of the comments on the article are utterly despicable and reveal the idiocy (in the original Greek sense) of so many.
Vergessenheit 