When little Father Time looks grimly at
The tick-tock time of bubbles bursting blank,
He's certain what he has to do. His love
Misplaces death. He thinks that we will thank
Him for this sacrifice that he intends
To free us with. Instead, it just transforms
Us, drives us into what we hate. The school
House shuts its doors; life hides out in its dorms.
The cold rain shivers us to death, or so
We like to claim when we in fact give up
On life and cut short time. What suicide
Will bring, what murder fills the marble cup
We kept our hope in, hoping we could learn
The secrets of the word. Oh, Father Time,
Why did you take the best of all I made?
Oh why, my love, did you commit this crime?
5 comments:
grimly?
(burn after reading)
It's sad, and true. I suppose this is why we have art and religion: to free us from paralysis and despair.
Typo.
Yes it ALL depends on our individual and collective understanding or mis-understanding of the meaning and significance of death.
Westerners systematically eliminate death and suffering from their world-view. All of Western philosophy, "theology" and religion is the always-wanting-to-forestall-the-day philosophy that does not understand or embrace death and does not take it into account. As a Westerner, in the background of all of your inherent anxiety you acknowledge that death exists, but you want to avoid it. Your impulse toward the religious life is about positive life-affirmation and wanting life things, gross things, to work out via some grand utopian scheme. But all the while you are rejecting death and suffering and, therefore, rejecting your own surrender to Reality.
The Real religious life is not based on the rejection of death. It is based on taking death fully into account and thus on making the fact of death the framework and the fundamental basis of your understanding of life and its purpose.
Paradoxically a philosophy based on the rejection of death becomes materialism, naive utopianism and worldliness.
By contrast a philosophy and life based on the complete acceptance of death, the understanding of this life -- associated as it is with death, with ending, with suffering, with limitation -- is an entirely different kind of philosophy and life.
It is the basis for the profundity of True Religion, the profundity of self-surrender and self-transcendence. It is thus the basis for Real Intelligence.
Western religion is not based on unjerstanding and self-transcendence. On the contrary it is a calling for help, for service, for attention, for goods, for things to turn out the way you want them to turn out.
This fear based and fear saturated asana is very typical of Westerners, very characteristic of the Western disposition, the gross, body-based, materialistic disposition made into a "culture", a society, politics.
Such a "culture" has only two purposes.
Its continuation of this dismal sorry-go-round through time.
And the finding of ever more inventive ways of relieving the chronic boredom, doubt, and discomfort which are the inevitable features of such a life is the ENTIRE content of modern Western "culture".
No profundity allowed. No profound questions, and certainly NO profound doings, either individually or collectively.
And you wonder why things are INEVITABLY falling apart, or going down the tubes.
One must have balance. Too much focus on death creates a culture of death, which is as destructive of culture, religion, spirutuality, and, of course, life itself.
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