Performing Blok
I begin to understand
how imperfection
makes its way through a ravaged world,
not to perfection exactly,
but towards something better than what it was.
In this ragged army,
cursing, foul-mouthed
with the frustration of
emotions deeply felt
but unarticulated,
I find myself.
This black rage,
burning hot enough to consume a hostile world,
turning on beloved and enemy with equal fury,
consumes me still.
Yet love,
greater still than any faith or hope, we're told,
burns too,
with a warmer, friendlier fire.
We follow something we can never truly understand,
something up there, ahead,
dogging our route.
Give it a human name,
like Lenin,
or Billy Graham,
Elvis Presley,
or a supernatural saviour, come from on high to deliver us,
a higher power,
or The Party,
or call it nature
(as in nature abhors a vacuum),
evolution, or what you will,
it's all one,
something non-contingent upon what we imagine we think we know:
Galileo never actually said “And yet it moves”,
and yet it does move,
whether we say it or no.
Reality's transmuted into myth.
The myth grows legs,
feeds back into the world.
Untruth becomes a stronger truth;
demons become gods,
and gods demons.
Who is this man,
staggering through snow,
round each street-corner Calvary,
heading past Golgotha towards a new Pentecost?
He kills the thing he loves most,
cries out for understanding,
departs with a curse,
parrots slogans he barely understands,
yet as he changes the world he marches through,
he is himself changed.
I am that man.
I have lived with your story, Blok,
for several years now,
since I first came upon it in a turgid translation,
and made my own interlinear of the photocopied pages,
scribbling away until I no longer know or care
how much of what I have now is yours,
how much my own.
I dredge into my soul
as I trudge through a life,
seeking for the brightness within
that can blossom when a thrush perches on a bush to sing,
or a lark to soar upwards into cloud cover,
or a purple-winged fly pause,
and rub his hands
while his huge eyes see a mosaic of a million me around him.
I do not need to don a fur hat
with a red star
to become a Red Guard of this broken revolution.
I am one with the walking wounded:
“bite your lip . . . don't be a drip,” I tell myself,
“who bloody cares?” I demand of the night,
“I've been a fool, such a bloody fool!”
“You and me both, mate,” answers the night, uncaring,
“c'est la guerre.”
It is, indeed, the war.
We climb like legion Sysiphus,
up to slip back,
up again to slip again,
and once more to climb,
if only an inch,
with a snowed summit ahead,
and the wind howling.
Yet in each defeat the seeds of victory lie,
just as in our few victories
lies the ultimate defeat of death.
You saw this, Blok,
amid the euphoria of “all power to the Soviets”,
of the banners and slogans and doggerel songs,
the arguing and polemics and the philosophising,
the manifestos and the posters.
Words are cheap,
yet they are our tools;
we reshape the world with them,
first inside our heads,
then in every city, every field, on every street.
And ahead of us,
leaving bloody footprints we can follow,
goes the Messiah.
November 16, 1999
