Interlude

Complicity and Culture

Hey,

This week has caught me off guard.

There’s a lot going on in my world, and I haven’t been able to find the words for it.

Instead, I’d like to share a poem by Seamus Heaney. Sometimes someone already has some of the words you want.

I’ve seen what a group of men can become, and I keep asking why we as men have this in us.

It’s hard to step against the crowd once it’s formed an opinion, and it can cost you a lot. If we choose our values, we lose our pack. If we choose the pack, we lose ourselves.

Maybe the dog inside us that acts in its own self-interest is the same one that stops the crowd from hurting an innocent.

So how do we accept that the darkness is there, and keep it on side?

Heaney provides no answer, but at least he’s able to admit that when his own people did the punishing that he stood by and said nothing.

The darkness is only understood by looking at our own shadows.

Punishment

I can feel the tug
of the halter at the nape
of her neck, the wind
on her naked front.

It blows her nipples
to amber beads,
it shakes the frail rigging
of her ribs.

I can see her drowned
body in the bog,
the weighing stone,
the floating rods and boughs.

Under which at first
she was a barked sapling
that is dug up
oak-bone, brain-firkin:

her shaved head
like a stubble of black corn,
her blindfold a soiled bandage,
her noose a ring

to store
the memories of love.
Little adulteress,
before they punished you

you were flaxen-haired,
undernourished, and your
tar-black face was beautiful.
My poor scapegoat,

I almost love you
but would have cast, I know,
the stones of silence.
I am the artful voyeur

of your brains exposed
and darkened combs,
your muscles’ webbing
and all your numbered bones:

I who have stood dumb
when your betraying sisters,
cauled in tar,
wept by the railings,

who would connive
in civilized outrage
yet understand the exact
and tribal, intimate revenge.

- Seamus Heaney
Copyright © The Estate of Seamus Heaney, 1975

I’ll be back soon

Russ x