VI. Past and Future

PAST AND FUTURE

As the statue’s in the marble, the poem in the phrase,
Hidden in the present is a world that all could praise,
But hard it is to spy it, and harder still to know
If it will come to birth unscathed, its blessings to bestow—
As the sculptor must not carve awry, the poet limp or falter,
The fashioners of the future must not bow at the wrong altar.

Our ancestors half missed the signs of the age they were preparing.
In scorn of others and in self-praise our fathers were not sparing.
They built strong fences all around their prim and proud society;
The objects of their worship were degree and strict propriety.
Our age’s moral policies they couldn’t have conceived;
Our much misused technology they wouldn’t have believed.

The objects of our worship may be licence more than liberty,
And speed and power to such excess they threaten all humanity,
But how the future will unfold is more than we can know—
Just here a glimpse and there a glimpse our speculations show.
Against our fears no prophecy provides a sovereign shield:
The future is to our weak eyes only an unsown field.
                                                                                                – Henry Summerfield
 

 

Things have been worse, and things will be better.
Things have been better, and yet will be worse.
Such is the arc, no, the sine wave of history.
Such is its blessing; such is its curse.
                                                                   – Eric Chevlen

 

THE COMING WAR

She says, “There’s a brimming
in this world tonight. It speaks
from a thousand places—though
joining into
one fever.”

Then she pushes a book aside
and opens draperies fronting
the east-windows
to see Shiloh coming
in the clouds.

The weather stares us down
never blinks, like we are tumblers
filled with smoke
in that gaze of a different god
than we’ve known.

Only present tense survives
all the other severed tenses
and it bristles in the remaking
always arriving
nowhere.

I ask, “What are we waiting for
both here at the not-quite
and there at the never point
of always returning forever
slowing to a moving stop
leaving in a hurry?”

Big flashes portend a loss of order
as we view just a patch of sky
in a much larger window
made of deep fields
and stars
all at the ready.

As we both brace for white-heat
to push us back on our heels
she holds my hand without touching
and says, “A sideways glance and
we’re gone. I told you
this would happen.”
                                      – L. Ward Abel
 

 

LIVING SHIVA

To honor rites of mourning yet still survive,
because if it isn’t one thing, it’s another,

what takes aim at one house but spares
its neighbor, the endless cycles of Pharaoh,

and so this last pandemic for those
who chose to gather, mirrors as always

facing walls so none could dwell
on self, windows flung open to exhaust

the shared bad air, but no men shoulder-
to-shoulder in a cushion-less couch,

and now, even as we return to common plates
of raisins nested in noodle and cottage cheese,

to golden skin of whitefish peeled back
to boast its lode, this uptick in attacks

on temples, in viral desecrations and hate,
driving us to shut windows, draw curtains,

assign a time when all must arrive
so that we can lift the couch off the floor,

slide it across the door, wedge its spine
tight beneath the brassy knob.
                                                       – Richard Krohn

 

MANKIND AND THE DESTRUCTION OF REALITY

Our daily actions, in the vast majority of the cases and for the most part of us, seem to be purposeless, having no real target, no grounded meaning.
As in this inexorable motion, an always larger part of the human race tends to live in sweltering megalopolis all around the world. The life of any randomly chosen simple individual in one of those looks like it is less and less connected with the objective reality of Life, that is to say its Essence, and more and more to a virtual one.
But what is exactly this objective reality, this Essence, what does it stand for?
If you take for instance any animal, the objective reality for it is connected with its five senses, these have a sole purpose, its own survival, which includes of course procreation. Sometimes, it can be observed in wildlife completely gratuitous acts, like an elephant trying to save a rhinoceros stuck in a pond from a group of starving lions, or a monkey trying to get a small bird out of some water where it had unfortunately fallen. We will never really know, I guess, the real motivations of those clever mammals whenever they try to help a specimen of another kind than themselves, and thus acting in a gesture of total generosity regardless of their own welfare. And maybe it’s better not to understand all of it in order to keep the sheer beauty of these actions intact.
But ourselves, we are for the majority condemned to stay trapped in small apartments made of concrete and glass within huge cities. Almost all the spectrum of our behavior, most of our actions, tend just to give us the comfortable notion of a well organized routine.
What impact does this superficiality might have on us? This a few generations after we all have stopped cultivating the earth for food or simply go to fetch water every morning in order to survive on a daily basis.
Many would argue that this is actually the very goal of civilization, to free all human beings from the original bonds of mere survival, and enable them to enjoy this new freedom throughout their lives. Then, as years go by, to enable them to gather more knowledge to better understand the world, or to play various games, and by the same occasion gather all sorts of new goods.
But I sometimes get the feeling that all this freedom is turning more and more into a labyrinth for many of us here.
Our actions tend to just mimic the ones of our surrounding environment according to the country where we live. We go on vacations when everyone else does, mostly in the summer, some amateurly paint during their weekends, thinking that they will maybe be famous, like Van Gogh, but only after their deaths. Ignorant that these are actually paintings that nobody will ever see out of their limited family circle. In the same way, some play tennis in their free time, keeping in mind the performance of the great champions whom all can admire on cable television, or on various other screens.
We each day recreate over and over an egoistic world, made out of our icons, of illusionary models, while eating junk food made by robots in factories, or buying disposable clothes that children or adult slaves have woven, in order just not to starve to death, on the other side of the planet.
A Russian poetess told me, not such a long time ago, while walking in the center of Moscow and watching the crowd this: “if these people could only see themselves as they really are for one minute they would totally fall apart”.
And why could it be? Because the sole purpose of all our empty tasks, our superfluous leisures, have in common one single goal, and that is to put the maximum possible distance between us and this hole in the ground, already waiting for us in some not so far away graveyard. The human race, after extracting itself out of Nature, is lying more bare and vulnerable than at any given time in its past history. Being utterly lost, the destruction of the planet is actually the logical consequence of this simple fact, this awful masquerade. That is why logically it can and will not be avoided, however hard we try to prevent it. This, not because we are getting weaker or more ignorant than before, but because it is the only way left for humanity to continue its erratic motion inside the Universe, now that only symbols are left around it like walls, themselves cut off from any grounded reality.
                                                                                                                                            – Ivan de Monbrison
 

A RESPONSE

Dear Ivan de Monbrison,
                                                 I’ve got
Some column-space to fill here, so I thought
(Mindy suggested it) that I’d reply
From a Jewish point of view. Which, by-the-by,
Was not mine to begin with. Going on
Fifty-six years now, I came upon
A Hasidic tale in which a son says, “Dad,
How do we know we are not wandering
In one of the worlds of illusion?” The father says,
“We have the Torah – that is how we know.”
This seemed to me at the time quite arbitrary,
And yet somehow made sense – a bit like thrusting
A stake in sand, and saying “Here we start
To build.”
                      Of course it’s hard to reconstruct
One’s thoughts at those years’ distance. I have been
Jewish now for close to half a century,
And how I think is not how I thought then.
At any rate, the way I see it now
Is that the aim of human life is not
Simply postponement of the well-known hole
Nor mere perpetuation of one’s genes,
Rather building, creating, what may last
Beyond the individual life, borne on
By one’s successors in an agelong relay,
Till the world reaches some perfected state
In which war and oppression have been conquered
And people live in happiness and peace,
Rejoicing in the beauty of creation
And thankful to the Maker in Whose image
Our kind was made as makers in our turn.
Whoever has that aim and end in view
Does not live only in some present city
But in this project’s long continuation,
However, in the present, may appear
The chances for its eventual fulfillment.

Doubtless our making has become unbalanced
With the proliferation of devices
And the neglect of “the humanities” –
I.e. the understanding of that being
Which all that making was supposed to serve.
This was the problem which my epic poem,
The Consciousness of Earth, was meant to address
Though it has yet to find the mass of readers
Who would fan out to execute its program
(if you’ll forgive this bit of self-promotion).

Another thing you mentioned was “routine.”
Though not a word of approbation, still
There’s something to be said for it, as long
As the routine can be infused with meaning –
As with the Sabbath and the festivals
Which come back at predicted intervals
Like rhyme.
                        I guess you mourn the bond with nature –
Well, so do I. So much of human being
Was bound up with those kindred and familiar
Shapes of living things, or of our makings
Which between generations hardly changed;
From them we drew our imagery of feeling.
And now the stars are hidden by our glare,
Some inner compass, maybe, is disabled
Which may be part of why things have gone crazy.
The poet’s toolbox of ancestral names
Is antiquated now, and gets less purchase
On a reality where things and names
Shift and dissolve like flashes on a screen.
But as the Talmud says, “you are not required
To complete the work, but neither are you free
To give it up.” If today the poet’s job
Is harder, this should summon us to think
More deeply on the nature of our calling
In hope of finding out some strategy
By which we could again fulfill our mission
Of drawing things back to the human center.
(The aforesaid epic speaks of this at length;
You’ll find the whole thing posted on our homepage.)
Oh yes, and let me not forget to mention
That Judaism lays great stress upon
Connections between humans. If we must
Live packed in cities, there could be immense
Joy in that if we could learn to see
And value every human soul.
                                                        We say
That all is done for good – that is, for the good
Which we can make of it, despite, or at
The prompting of, the pain. With all best wishes,
Yours faithfully and hopefully,
                                                           Esther Cameron
 

 

IF PAST WERE PROLOGUE

In the ancient Temple in Jerusalem,

if, prior to praise, petitions, and prayer, dark spirits
had first to be dealt with, a special incense was burned.

Cinnamon bark, cassia, saffron and salt, musk, and
frankincense were blended with other spices, making eleven,

then galbanum was added, a rank resin
catalyst, but the mix could banish the fetid smell

of burning meat, ashes left on the sacrificial altar,
scent of iniquity that sometimes seeped in on the night air.

If, in the tempest of present time, we were to gather
eleven nations intending to live out their lives in tranquility

if, out of the fog of animosity, we contrived an elixir
mixing Sanskrit’s 267 words of love, or even the Eskimo’s 32,

with a sliver or more of galbanum, which can be found growing
profusely on the northern slopes of mountains in Iran,

reduced the mixture until we could dissolve it
in a premium wine or well-chilled vodka, producing a solution

not too bitter to swallow…

–                                                      Florence Weinberger


THIRST

Rain and dew
have sunk down to the depths
Spring and well are ready

A thirsty world awaits and asks
Where is
the bucket
to draw the water up?

– Iona Tor
Translated by Esther Cameron
 

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