Paradise Imagined
The last remaining bastion of Romanticism
That hangs its tattered banner in my mind
Is the belief that good conquers evil
In the end.
--
There is a common theme in human history.
It starts with our first story, Gilgamesh. A story
About a powerful king, a stealer of wives,
A slayer of demons;
--
He refuses the erotic advances of gods
Simply because he can. But for all of this
He knows that he will die. And so he searches
For the cure.
--
He finds it. Loses it. The story ends, like most lives,
On a muted, melancholy note, with a reminder
Of the boring, mundanity of life. Gilgamesh
Returns to daily business:
--
“One square mile of city, one square mile of gardens,
One square mile of clay pits, a half square mile of Ishtar’s dwelling,
Three and a half square miles is the measure or Uruk!”
Three and a half miles.
--
Three and a half miles is the measure
Of his kingdom. He yearned for eternity.
He received three and a half miles.
That is all.
--
Although the ancient mind could comprehend
Three and a half miles, could they comprehend
Our world? For the Gilgameshes of today
Have much more.
--
The Gilgameshes of today are not bound by space,
But bound, rather, by data. Still, despite the self-professed
Biohackers with six hour morning routines,
There is no cure.
——————
Anne Carson won
The Nobel prize in literature the other day.
So I pulled down my copy of her Euripides
And read the following, from the preface:
--
“Who was Euripides?
“… To be a prophet…requires living in and
Looking at the present, at what is really going on
Around you. Out of the present, the future is formed.”
--
My mind shifts.
Not to Euripides, but John’s Revelation.
Endless debates about the historicity
And predictive nature obscures its truth:
--
Evil will fall,
And with a bitter, justified rage Revelation
Reveals to us the fate of all those desperate,
Hungry kings and rich folk seeking power:
--
And I saw the beast,
And the kings of the earth…And the beast was taken,
And with him the false prophet that wrought miracles before him…
These both were cast alive into a lake of fire burning with brimstone.
--
And the remnant
Were slain with the sword of him that sat upon the horse,
Which sword proceeded out of his mouth:
And all the fowls were filled with their flesh.
--
John was angry.
The world has not changed much in two Millenia.
Evil rulers, wealthy maniacs… I think John had enough,
And in the realm of his imagination, he found an answer.
--
But I fear for us.
I am beginning to wonder if we can even imagine
A better world for ourselves, for our children.
I’m guilty, too. I’d rather sit around than make a splash.
--
And most days,
I wonder if death wouldn’t suit me better.
Not to be dramatic. There’s little going for me.
My psychiatrist said as much, anyway:
--
“At this point,
“There isn’t a whole lot left to try.”
The realm of the personal is too draining
To consider how best to conquer the evil around us.
——————
We are turned
Inwards to face a self that is not
Ourselves.
--
Somewhere
We have lost what made us human;
Poetry.
--
Not form
And rhyme, but the thoughts beyond thought,
Our dreams.
--
Things said
That cannot really be said,
But felt.
--
Horrified
Of our own minds, shackled by
Comfort.
--
Mentally
Impotent, incapable of creation,
Living death.
——————
The realm of the imagined is not real.
Thinking of a better world will not make one.
And yet, every change requires an imaginative spirit.
When Locke suggested people have natural rights,
That must have sounded like a strange dream,
Concocted by a dissident. And here we are.
Not that we’ve done a good job. But still,
The fact remains. A little imagination,
A little consideration that “Things don’t
“Have to be this way,” couldn’t hurt.
We have let the Gilgameshes of the world
Use their imaginations for profit. I think it is time
For the husbands whose wives were stolen by
The king to have their say, and for the women
To rise up in an Aristophanic rebellion.
——————
We can only experience the golden age through parody.
The carnival, when the king becomes the fool,
Was a state-sanctioned allowance of the fantasy
That power might one day fall in the hands of
Peasants. It is a historical manifestation of a psychological
Trapping we’ve found ourselves in. We cannot imagine
Saturnalia as the real world. Maybe it’s too good to be true.
Perhaps a world of joy, dance, and creativity is a high bar.
But I’d rather try that fantasy world of 3 millennia of human
Imagination
--
Than lay prostrate before the creeps who wish to live forever
And will inevitably, mundanely, fail,
With three and a half miles to their name.
