There must have been a world before
the Trio Sonata in D, a world before the A minor partita,
but what kind of a world?
A Europe of vast empty spaces, unresounding,
everywhere unawakened instruments
where the Musical Offering, the Well-Tempered Clavier
never passed across the keys.
Isolated churches
where the soprano line of the Passion
never in helpless love twined round
the gentler movements of the flute,
broad soft landscapes
where nothing breaks the stillness
but old woodcutters’ axes
the healthy barking of strong dogs in winter
and, like a bell, skates biting into fresh ice;
the swallows whirring through summer air,
the shell resounding at the child’s ear
and nowhere Bach nowhere Bach
the world in a skater’s stillness before Bach.
Make no mistake: if he rose at all
It was as His body;
If the cell’s dissolution did not reverse, the molecule reknit,
The amino acids rekindle,
The Church will fall.
It was not as the flowers,
Each soft spring recurrent;
It was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled eyes of the
Eleven apostles;
It was as His flesh; ours.
The same hinged thumbs and toes
The same valved heart
That-pierced-died, withered, paused, and then regathered
Out of enduring Might
New strength to enclose.
Let us not mock God with metaphor,
Analogy, sidestepping, transcendence,
Making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the faded
Credulity of earlier ages:
Let us walk through the door.
The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache,
Not a stone in a story,
But the vast rock of materiality that in the slow grinding of
Time will eclipse for each of us
The wide light of day.
And if we have an angel at the tomb,
Make it a real angel,
Weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair, opaque in
The dawn light, robed in real linen
Spun on a definite loom.
Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
For our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
Lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed
By the miracle,
And crushed by remonstrance.
As you set out for Ithaca
hope that your journey is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
Laistrygonians and Cyclops,
angry Poseidon-don’t be afraid of them:
you’ll never find things like that on your way
as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,
as long as a rare sensasion
touches your spirit and your body.
Laistrygonians and Cyclops,
wild Poseidon-you won’t encounter them
unless you bring them along inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up in front of you.
Hope that your journey is a long one.
May there be many summer mornings when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you come into harbors you’re seeing for the first time;
may you stop at Phoenician trading stations
to buy fine things,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
sensual perfume of every kind-
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
and may you visit many Egyptian cities
to learn and learn again from those who know.
Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you’re destined for.
But don’t hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so that you’re old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you’ve gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaca to make you rich.
Ithaca gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you would have not set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.
And if you find her poor, Ithaca won’t have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you’ll have understood by then what these Ithacas mean.
Ithaca by Cavafy, read by Sean Connery, music by Vangelis.
Why are we oppressed by a dysfunctional community of haters and blamers. The meaning of the poem is talking about society and how I understand why things like that incident happened. So it’s not like I’m agreeing with it, but that’s how the school made it seem. — Courtni Webb
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. — Wayne LaPierre, NRA
California high school student Courtni Webb suspended and facing possible expulsion for writing a poem about the massacre of the innocents.
Courtni Webb, a California teenager who expressed her feelings about the Newtown school massacre in a poem, has found herself suspended and facing possible expulsion. “I understand the killings in Connecticut. I know why he pulled the trigger,” wrote Courtni Webb in her poem. “Misery loves company. If I can’t be loved no one can,” she wrote. She told NBC News that she wrote the poem to express her belief that people act violently when they feel helpless. “I didn’t say that I agree with it, I said I simply understand it,” she said of the killings. “I feel like I’ve really been made to almost look like a monster by my school and I don’t appreciate that at all.”
A short extract from the poem on the massacre of the innocents:
They wanna hold me back
I run but still they still attack
My innocence, I won’t get back
I used to smile
They took my kindness for weakness
The silence the world will never get
I understand the killing in Conecticut
I know why he pulled the trigger
The government is a shame
Society never wants to take the blame
Society puts these thoughts in our head
Misery loves company
If I can’t be loved no one can
One week on from the massacre of the innocents, we had the NRA say it was business as usual, their solution to violence in a screwed up society was to pour in more guns.
Over Christmas we had psychos with their semi-automatic assault rifles posing in front of the Christmas tree and posting their pictures on social networking sites.
There is often posited a causal link between violent films and video games and violent assaults, including gun crimes. At least one violent video game is linked to a promotion of assault weapons.
Following the massacre of the innocents, sales of the Bushmaster assault rifle have shot through the roof, the weapon used by the killer.
Arm the good guys against the bad guys (and increase the sale of weapons) is the clarion call of the NRA.
The first victim of the Newtown killer was his mother. She was a psycho with her own private arsenal. It was her weapons the killer used for her killing and massacre of the innocents.
NRA has been lobbying to prevent a UN Treaty on control of small arms.
There is no US Federal Law on gun trafficking. Drug barons and traffickers cross the border into USA to pick up weapons. A classic two way trade, drugs flow one way, guns and money the other.
But OMG, one teenager writes a poem about the massacre of the innocents, and she is suspended from school. She had not even published it anywhere, it was not posted on social networking sites, it was found in her notebook and she is suspended from school.
Backers of Courtni Webb have launched a petition calling for her immediate reinstatement.
Sick society, ok to glorify guns, not ok to write poetry.
Специально к выходу в прокат фильма АЙ ВЭЙВЭЙ: НИКОГДА НЕ ИЗВИНЯЙСЯ известный китайский художник записал видеообращение для российских зрителей.
One dissident to another, Ai Weiwei sends a message of support to Pussy Riot.
Since the first Poets for Pussy Riot event, held on 29 August 2012, Nadezha Tokolonnikova and Maria Alyokhina remain in prison, serving out sentences in notorious penal colonies. The community of poets that came together then, as an act of solidarity and commitment that this injustice should not be forgotten, came together once more on 21 November 2012, in the Free Word centre in Farringdon, in London, in association with English PEN, to mark the nine-month anniversary of Pussy Riot’s protest Punk Prayer performance, which took place on 21 February 2012 in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. Nearly 40 poets contributed to an evening of original poetry.
A court in Moscow has designated four videos made by the feminist punk protest group Pussy Riot as extremist. The Zamoskvorechye District Court in the Russian capital ruled that access to all websites hosting the videos must be limited. According to the court’s decision, websites that do not remove the Pussy Riot videos will face administrative penalties, including fines up to 100,000 rubles ($3,000).
Performance of the Punk Prayer in Moscow led to the arrest of three members of the group. Two of them — Maria Alyokhina and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova — are now serving two-year prison sentences for “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred.” A third member, Yekaterina Samutsevich, was freed last month after a court suspended her sentence on appeal.
Maria Alyokhina behind glass cage during Pussy Riot show trial
I change into things:
I hang like a convict
I’m dining with kings.
My broken-down carriage
Careens down your street
And under the snow
I’ll lie down for a bit.
I’m dining with freaks,
I change as I go,
I stand like a king
Under bridges in snow.
When my child sleeps, the night,
Time altogether, seems to stop, and turn to water,
Into a sea that unites all with all; even, possibly,
Me with you.
And the greatest treasure would be safe in it,
Afloat on a simple raft. I’ll attach every tree to a place
Where people will find it, recognize it and remember.
They say that home is where you are always missed.
When I hear things like this
I feel like twisting the speaker’s neck
Into a tight tourniquet, and then, steadily,
Making him look
At the rocking of the baby’s cradle.
Then I want to take his hand and say: see
How the lilac’s blooming, can you feel the scent?
Not a thing will be left of us, but this will go on.
Will go on.
– Maria Alyokhina
Maria Alyokhina, aka Masha, one of the three members of Pussy Riot jailed for two years following a Stalin-era show trial.
Maria Alyokhina behind glass cage during Pussy Riot show trial
Bad things aren’t scary to do; everyone does them.
It’s not hard to hide in a crowd, no one will notice.
One piece of trash more, one piece less.
What’s there to be said—it’s the times we live in, they’re like that.
We got unlucky. But, no.
You cannot be afraid or ashamed to do good.
You cannot.
There’s so frighteningly little of that around these days.
Cynicism’s in fashion.
Ironic smiles and dull melancholy.
Know this: if you don’t do it, possibly, no one will.
A lot of them just don’t have the time to look at what they’re doing, let alone the time to take stock.
They have time to look at others, they have time to assign blame.
If you choose to do good, if you choose to help come what may, know this: you have lost.
You have most certainly lost.
But this doesn’t mean that you mustn’t do it.
It is important to remember who we are.
It is important to know that your conscience is what matters.
It is important to follow your conscience.
It is important not so much to change things, but to know that you are changing them.
– Maria Alyokhina
Maria Alyokhina, aka Masha, one of the three members of Pussy Riot jailed for two years following a Stalin-era show trial.
Maria Alyokhina behind glass cage during Pussy Riot show trial
Oh, what are we?
Fear is what follows in conclusion.
And what does it make us?
After we’d smashed into drops, into walls
Whose eyes found us?
Just yours, good God, yours alone.
Guide my hand
When I throw a fistful of words
and I betray you right away
Wait for me. On the seashore
On the quay
I will escape them
I will run away
– Maria Alyokhina
Maria Alyokhina, aka Masha, one of the three members of Pussy Riot jailed for two years following a Stalin-era show trial.
