Friday, December 14, 2012, and the news from Newtown, Connecticut, is terrible. A nation says it is in anguish. The President speaks of the pain and the horror, of our children and our neighborhoods. Our tears flow. And the traffic in guns continues. And in these theaters of horror, more often than not, the shooters are men and the first targets are women.
We have been here before. It is all too familiar.
Near the end of a life spent trying to turn the pain, horror and anguish of mass violence into the possibility of understanding, Paul Celan found that the project of poetry, his life project, was “an impossible struggle, doomed from the start to disaster. For poetry cannot save the soul or retrieve a lost world. It simply asserts the given.”
And Celan wrote:
“THREADSUNS
above the grayblack wastes.
A tree-
high thought
grasps the light-tone: there are
still songs to sing beyond
mankind.”
The thought that is tree-high is too high for our grasp. It is too late to sing songs beyond mankind. There must be songs to sing now. And they must begin by turning swords into ploughshares … now. Right now.
Dan Moshenberg, dmoshenberg@gmail.com
About Guest Blogger
I can but read this act of terror as part of a normalisation of militarism that from the arming of the individual to men in suits pushing missile and drone buttons. I observe an acceptance that killing is OK as long as it is ‘the other’ – whether the other be children in the mountains of Yemen – unseen, or in Gaza or in the Congo. When America is outraged by the murder of other people’s innocents then I will know we are on the way to ending these acts of terror.
On poetry “A poem can’t free us from the struggle for existence , but it can uncover desires and appetites buried under the accumulating emergencies of our lives, the fabricated wants and needs we have had urged on us, have accepted as our own” Adrienne Rich
@Sokari: Thanks for sharing the wisdom of Adrienne Rich.
On terror … I agree and yet I think it’s worse in that the United States is sacrificing “its own”, its children, to … to what? It’s the binding of Isaac, but without the promise of salvation because there’s no divine source demanding or authorizing the sacrifice. Look today at all the mainstream, and progressive, commentators who are arguing that the time is now for real gun control and real mental health programs, who arguing that the NRA is not that strong. Look into the eyes, as it were, of their arguments and you won’t see a single glimmer of hope. In other words, I don’t see much outrage here either … alas.