Love Song for a Cruel Empire


 "The jobs lost in bad times would not come back when times   improved; they were never coming back."--Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes


More than thirty years ago,
in a library in the Department of Philosophy,
of The University of Wisconsin at Madison,
I listened to a Professor of Philosophy,
a Wittgensteinean of sorts,
scoff at the idea that I might be,
experiencing excruciating pain at that very moment.


And, I, young and lonely,
disconnected and uncomfortable,
unsure of myself and frightened about my future,
was able to summon up some inward awareness of all that I felt,
and had felt,
and I knew its continuity,
and its lingering presence,
but could not articulate it;
grasping that awareness, 
I knew that his words were an arrogant mockery,
a practiced scoff pretending to be insight.
If he had been more honest,
he might have simply said:
How could you, young man, feel something now that I could not see,
let alone imagine?


Today I know better,
because what I felt then,
was an inexpressible pain,
just as surely as I feel it now,
the very same pain,
and the very same awareness:
the fear of failure,
and the absence of friends combined,
with an absence of comfort,
an absence of consolation,
which by now has itself become a sort of constant companion.


And today I know:
There is pointlessness and futility in saying,
based on the the pure incommunicability, 
of one’s position on a sinking ship of a life:
half the problem is the lies we are told,
from the minute of our birth,
mixed with the hopes of parents,
and the indifference of strangers;
half the problem is we can never manage 
to figure out where we really started from,
which lies were innocently and ignorantly repeated,
and which were lies told deliberately with evil intent.
And there is as well the difficulty that comes when you’ve seen what it was that was irritating you:


Can I tell you what it means to live in a city which can never be my home?
Can I explain to you that I feel more at home in a city where English is spoken as a second or third tongue by a minority of the population?
At home in that city because English is only one of several languages,
spoken there as minority languages?
Can you believe or even imagine that it is sometimes better not to speak the language of a cruel empire?


Those thoughts were beyond the reach of the scoffing man.
But, don’t think I am too hard on him.
He was scoffing that day and cynical on others too,
but he was lucky enough to have been born in a better time,
---jobwise I mean.


And that, more than age or worth, explains our different positions in this rat race.


Although, on the other hand, he probably had a simplified picture of excruciating pain, 
and would have complained anyway,
and I will, I suppose, grant it too,
that my pain, this daily pain of living, 
is not excruciating,
but after all the years I’ve carried it with me,
I myself am not so sure.


It is certainly unbearable and distracting,
overwhelming and unpleasant.
I suppose he would say it is too small and insignificant,
but I reserve the right to say that this betrays
the insignificance of his imagination.


But I’ve heard, or anyway read,
how other philosophers talk about the love that lasts a lifetime,
but they neglect to mention that pain can last a lifetime as well.
What makes it the same pain?
The cause is unchanged, and it never goes away.
(Yeah, it can change, but so do you,
and you won’t go away either.)
You can call it social injustice,
but I prefer to say it is pure ugliness,
just as much as when you are on the receiving end of the stick 
they beat you with every day of your life,
as they tell you that if you’ve not got a job,
it’s your own fault,
or if you failed the exam,
it’s all your fault.
But mainly you have no one but yourself to blame.
And don’t expect any sympathy from me!
You made your bed,
now lie in it:
Filthy scum,
you rotten communist!


Displaced and unwanted,
abused and abandoned,
spit out after being half-chewed,
undigested,
I am still here.


I could write a volume on the absence of home,
on the sense of not belonging.
And I know Europeans who could not read those words with understanding,
--because they have the convenience of feeling at home in a place.


Not, perhaps, in little Slovakia,
where the young want nothing so much as to leave;
---not all of the young, perhaps,
but enough to tilt the floor beneath them.


And I want nothing so much as a room of my own,
in a quiet place,
definitely not on the ground floor,
because that is always insanity:
Imagine an entire city of homes built on the ground floor!
Lives lived on the ground floor,
with the constant paranoid fear of thieves,
and the consequent building of walls and fences,
to keep the thieves out,
giving their fear form,
making their paranoia obvious,
visible for all to see,
except the souls trapped within.


This country, too, is insanity,
with its boxy homes laid out like pieces of a factory,
making the factory lives of people,
whether they ever enter a factory or not.


Factory lives,
all the same size,
one easily replaced by another,
worth nothing in the eyes of our over-seers,
who say communism was bad,
because it was not working in their factories,
and their workers who believe that communism was bad
because they know it was not free.


But I am not and have never been free.
Nor am I planning to become so.


I would rather be drunk
with the illusion that someone is listening to me,
that someone cares about what I am saying,
and that someone will share my bed tonight.


When I say that I despise the lies and the manipulation that I hear  and have heard,
every day of my life from cradle to grave,
I am saying that I despise the most characteristic features of this country.


And I hope the grave is coming,
sooner rather than later,
because I am running out of things to say,
and places to go,
places to escape to.


(El Paso, Texas,
the desert outpost of a cruel empire
Sunday, May 20, 2012)