The Forgotten, Who Do Not Dream

Art, Tales of Galilea - Eliran Kantor.

When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion, we were like those who dream.

- Psalm 126:5-6 (the psalm of Joy)

Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a dream fulfilled is a tree of life.

- Proverbs 13:12

You, reading this, have never been utterly without hope. Such a condition may indeed be incompatible with living. You may have come close though.

I believe the world is divided into two existential landscapes - those of the gods and those of the dead.

The gods are those who dream. The dead those who cannot.

It is two different kinds of visions. The gods see past the present landscape, somewhere over the horizon where the future is lighted and their sight stretches toward it.

The dead have eyes that do not project outward.

Hope is having a relationship to some transcendent end, something above and beyond that one can see towards, regardless of how things turn out.

Can one live with only a transcendent hope ? With truly no earthly thing to intend one’s heart towards ? Whether love, health, or security ? At least one must have purpose…

Ah, but if your eyes are not connected to love, one see’s only death.

The gods and the dead. I do not know which is more blessed.

Two poems.


Czeslaw Milosz, Were I Not Frail and Half Broken Inside


Were I not frail and half broken inside,

I wouldn’t be thinking of them, who are, like me, half broken inside.

I would not climb the cemetery hill by the church

To get rid of my self pity.


Crazy Sophies,

Michaels who lost every battle,

Self-destructive Agathas

Lie under crosses with their dates of birth and death. And who

Is going to express them? Their mumblings, weepings, hopes, tears of humiliation?


In hospital muck and the smell of urine,

With their weak and contorted limbs,

And eternity close by. Improper. Indecent.

Like a dollhouse crushed by wheels, like

An elephant trampling a beetle, an ocean drowning an island.

Our stupidity and childishness do nothing to fit us

For this variety of last things.


They had no time to grasp anything of their individual lives,

Any principium individuationis.

Nor do I grasp it, yet what can I do?

Enclosed all my life in a nutshell,

Trying in vain to become something

Completely different from what I was.


Thus we go down into the earth, my fellow parishioners,

With the hope that the trumpet of judgment will call us by our names.

Instead of eternity, greenness and the movement of clouds.

They rise then, thousands of Sophies, Michaels, Matthews,

Marias, Agathas, Bartholomews.

So at last they know why

And for what reason?


                                                 

A devastating poem Tin Ujevic, Croatia's great bohemian drunkard poet :


DAILY LAMENT


How hard it is not to be strong,

how hard it is to be alone,

and to be old, yet still be young!


and to be weak, and powerless,

alone, with no one anywhere,

dissatisfied, and desperate.


And trudge bleak highways endlessly,

and to be trampled in the mud,

with no star shining in the sky.


Without your star of destiny

to play its twinklings on your crib

with rainbows and false prophecies.


– Oh God, oh God, remember

all the glittering fair promises

with which you have afflicted me.


Oh God, oh God, remember

all the great loves, the great victories,

the wreaths of laurel and the gifts.


And know you have a son

who walks the weary valleys of the world

among sharp thorns, and rocks and stones,

through unkindness and unconcern,

with his feet bloodied under him,

and with his heart an open wound.


His bones are full of weariness,

his soul is ill at ease and sad,

and he’s neglected and alone,

and sisterless, and brotherless,

and fatherless, and motherless,

with no one dear, and no close friend,

and he has no-one anywhere

except thorn twigs to pierce his heart

and fire blazing from his palms.


Lonely and utterly alone

under the hemmed in vault of blue,

on dark horizons of high seas.

Who can he tell his troubles to

when no-one’s there to hear his call,

not even brother wanderers?


Oh God, you sear your burning word

too hugely through this narrow throat

and throttle it inside my cry.


And utterance is a burning stake,

though I must yell it out, I must,

or, like a kindled log, burn out.


Just let me be a bonfire on a hill,

just one breath in the fire,

if not a scream hurled from the roofs.


Oh God, let it be over with,

this miserable wandering

under this dome as deaf as stone.


Because I crave a powerful word,

because I crave an answering voice,

someone to love, or holy death.


For bitter is the wormwood wreath

and deadly dark the poison cup,

so burn me, blazing summer noon.


For I am sick of being weak,

and sick of being all alone

(seeing I could be hale and strong)

(and seeing that I could be loved),

but I am sick, sickest of all

to be so old, yet still be young!

…

Of course, this is the earthly life of Christ, the entire time, invisibly, secretly, being his greatest glory and victory, having held fast to His vision, and defeated the abyss.

I just finished reading a memoir on a man struggling with depression, Where the Roots Reach for Water by Jeffery Smith. At the end he finds a kind, patient, caring, compassionate loving, understanding, empathetic partner to pull him out of the darkness. This is the fourth memoir on depression I've read that ends this way. With a savior (of sorts), usually in the form of a wife. Christ, of course, was alone.

I end with this touching, if not entirely orthodox, description of Jesus by David Armstrong HERE :


“History is largely the story of an elite few exploiting a great many and making the most basic and meaningful needs, desires, and experiences of human life all but impossible for the common person to enjoy.

For the majority of his life Jesus’ obscurity effectively meant that he was a non-entity in wider society: a peasant without the rights of a Roman citizen or the protective wealth of an indigenous aristocrat, he struggled most of his life without any meaningful power to change the circumstances of the world.

He was probably food insecure; His celibacy reported in the Gospels is certainly a consequence of unchosen circumstance of simple family, social, financial, or personal misfortune.

Could Jesus have wanted marriage and not had access to a viable option? Could Jesus have been widowed? When he did achieve public notoriety, it was for consistently condemning wealthy, powerful people and religious authorities for hypocrisy and injustice. He was a man of the people; he actively spent time on the social margins…”