Tommy C's Blog

A coincidence? I have been having dreams about torture, pick up Milosz's superb book of lectures "The Witness of Poetry" - a book I've read several times before - flick through and instantly find this passage:

That voice of protest we hear in ourselves when we learn of places where human beings torture other human beings resounds in a void and has no justification other than itself.

Milosz, who in some of his best work recorded a kindly protest, writes this in the context of a chapter called: "The Lesson of Biology." The biology in question is the bastardized Darwinism that informed both Nietzche's idea of man transcending himself and becoming Superman, and also Marx's idea of historical (r)evolution. Then next, their even cruder social derivatives in the main two forms of twentieth century totalitarianism, fascist and communist. The so-called lessons of this biology are: that we are nothing but a cipher for the success of our genes or species or what-not, that not only are we not the centre of the universe or solar system, there is no God who made us central or special, in any way whatsoever, that there is no human meaning and the true patterns of our existence are measured only over thousands of centuries, in the relative success of species against other species. It is, in other words, a coldly deterministic, cruely dehumanizing lesson, defying our senses, spirituality, conscience, love, and capactiy for wonder, at their very core, the soul. The soul, a word James Joyce never surrendered.

Now there may be some of you who see in this coincidence my subconscious at play, at least if your comments to the post below this one are anything to go by: the dreams have been prompting me to reread this chapter, which I have indeed done so again. There will be another reason for that, guessable perhaps. If so, probably you agree with the quote above, even if you don't realise it, that there is nothing real, nothing worth telling of, in the content of these dreams. That is, nothing in them outside of the psychological battles in my head, which in their turn can be logically approached by one theory or another - this time, no doubt, one derived from Freud. Such is the automatic response.

On the other hand, some of you may instead prefer this, quote of the day, from the end of that chapter, a note of hope - a different kind of hope, I mean:

there are signs... that technological [and thus, demystified] civilization may begin to see reality as a labyrinth of mirrors, no less magical than the labyrinth seen by alchemists and poets. That would be a victory for William Blake and his "Divine Arts of Imagination" - but also for the child in the poet, a child too long trained by adults.