Brecht and some scraps
Hey everybody, I tried to write tonight and it felt more like an object lesson in inadequacy the more I typed so I decided abandon it and just send a link to this Brecht poem (I’m loathe to give anyone life advice, but I will urge you, read Brecht and keep on trucking), and then I figured I'd enclose some scraps of what I abandoned as well, in the open mode spirit.
The poem begins
Truly, I live in dark times! / An artless word is foolish. A smooth forehead / Points to insensitivity. He who laughs / Has not yet received / The terrible news.
Read the rest here: https://harpers.org/2008/01/brecht-to-those-who-follow-in-our-wake/
My abandoned scraps: I thought to myself “I’ll type a while, I need a place to put my horror” but it doesn’t work like that. At a gut level I thought I could type and it would come out but it doesn’t come out. I’m not sure - I resist this thought - but I kind of feel like the best we can do is that the horror becomes something that doesn’t destroy you. And it’s not my horror, it’s a permeating horror that’s a necessary part of what it is to live through this awful hellworld’s grinding and gnashing (Walter Benjamin says something like ‘that things just go on, that is the crisis’), and the horror’s not something detachable from myself that I can put anyplace, it’s part of having humanity in an inhuman circumstance. Only robots like those who rule us aren’t horrified (character-masks, Marx calls them, people acting as personifications of social roles; wear the character-mask long enough and the face molds to it, the role becomes the person, humanity hollowed out). Of course I’m very aware my horrifying learning is at arm’s length, a football field’s length, from the visceral lived horror of children in Gaza - half the population! - and everyone who loves them. Brecht notes we live in dark times (again, still; his poem is 84 years old and it’s never not been dark times since). Daybreak’s a long way away, and a lot of people won’t be here or whole when it comes, so the fact that it will come - and it will - is a very limited comfort.