Oh What A World Without Disaster...

"The war has been a disaster, the occupation continues to be a disaster. It
has only caused violence. There must be consequences. There has been one
already - the election result. The second will be that the Spanish troops
will come back. Mr. Blair and Mr. Bush must do some reflection and
self-criticism. You can't bomb a people, you can't organize a war with
lies."

- Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, head of the Spanish Socialists.

*****
The Arts and Death: A Fugue for Sidney Cox

I think always how we always miss it. Not
anything is ever entirely true.

Death dominates my mind. I
Do not stop thinking how time will stop.
How time has stopped, does stop. Those dead--
their done time. Time does us in.

Mark how we make music, images,
how we term words, name names,
how, having named, assume the named begins
here, stops there, add this attribute,
subtract this other: here the mold begins
to harden. This toy soldier has
edges, can be painted, picked up,
moved from place to place, used to mean
one or many. Within the game we play,
we understand. See his leaden gun
or saber, how deadly for aid or for
destruction as we aim him, and he is bold,
a game soldier. We play games
however serious we aim to be.
A true aim, a toy soldier, I think
always, how we always miss the aim.

Ponder the vast debris of the dead, the great
uncounted numbers, the long, the endless list
of only their names, if anyone knew their names.
Joined to the dead already, to those known
who have died already, are we not also joined
to many we would have known in their time--
to one in Ilium, say, who thought of the dead?
In the world's long continuum, it is not
the names of the dead, but the dead themselves who are like
names, like terms, toy soldiers, words.

I think always how we always miss it; how the dead
have not been final, and life has always required
to be stated again, which is not ever stated.
It is not art's statements only, not
what we try to say by music, not the way
this picture sculptures sight itself
to see this picture--not by art alone
the aim is missed, and even least of all
by art (which tries a whole world at once,
a composition). No, it is in our terms,
the terms themselves, which break apart, divide,
discriminate, set chasms in that wide,
unbroken experience of the senses which
goes on and on, that radiation inward and out,
that consciousness which we divide, compare,
compose, make things and persons of, make forms,
make I and you. World, world, I am scared
and waver in awe before the wilderness
of raw consciousness, because it is all
dark and formlessness: and it is real
this passion that we feel for forms. But the forms
are never real. Are not really there. Are not.

I think always how we always miss the real.

There still are wars though all the soldiers fall.

We live in a world we never understand.

Our lives end nothing. Oh there is never an end.

--William Bronk
>
>
> fr. *Origin* XIX / Summer 1956; ed. Cid Corman
>
> in *The Gist of Origin* ed. Cid Corman
> [New York: Grossman Publishers, 1975]
>