While I have been taking in this blog a quasi-communitarian position as opposed to Jekabs' (quasi-)libertarian position, I am very aware of the sins of communities--ignorance of the rest of the world, balkanization, ancient religious and ethnic hatreds, and so on. Recently I've begun rereading the selected poetry of the modern Jewish poet Yehuda Amichai. Amichai's poetry tends to reflect the dilemma of the individual who feels trapped in a history of ideological rivalry. I offer four selections from his poems for reflection:
from Ecology of Jerusalem
The air over Jerusalem is saturated with prayers and dreams
like the air over industrial cities.
It's hard to breathe.
And from time to time a new shipment of history arrives
and the houses and towers are its packing materials.
Later these are discarded and piled up in dumps.
from National Thoughts
People caught in a homeland-trap:
to speak now in this weary language,
a language that was torn from its sleep in the Bible: dazzled,
it wobbles from mouth to mouth. In a language that once described
miracles and God, to say car, bomb, God.
from Half the People in the World
Half the people love,
half the people hate.
And where is my place between such well-matched halves,
and through what crack will I see
the white housing projects of my dreams
and the barefoot runners on the sands
or, at least, the waving
of a girl's kerchief, beside the mound?
from Sleep in Jerusalem
While a chosen people
become a nation like all the nations,
building its houses, paving its highways,
breaking open its earth for pipes and water,
we lie inside, in the low house,
late offspring of this old landscape.
The ceiling is vaulted above us with love
and the breath of our mouth
is as it was given us
and as we shall give it back.
Thanks! Poetry, like other forms of art, is somewhat of a mystery to me.
ReplyDeleteIn 'National thoughts' it seems like the poet is yearning with some nostalgia, for some days gone by when the language was used for more good and less bad. I wonder how much we tend to fall into idealizing the past and criticizing the present because of "the grass is always greener on the other side" fallacy with which we tend to live?
It interests me how each generation in this country tends to long for a more pure, less complex past. I've done it myself in some of my responses to posts! Having said that, I do think we can argue on fairly sure ground that significant social dislocations have happened in the last 50 years in the U.S. and that they at least can be said to correlate (single sources of causation are perhaps too difficult to establish) with major changes in views of the self, sexuality, public responsibility, etc.
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