Incomprehension
[There is no Life or Death,]
by Mina Loy
There is no Life or Death,
Only activity
And in the absolute
Is no declivity.
There is no Love or Lust
Only propensity
Who would possess
Is a nonentity.
There is no First or Last
Only equality
And who would rule
Joins the majority.
There is no Space or Time
Only intensity,
And tame things
Have no immensity.
Mina Loy, born Mina Gertrude Löwy in London on December 27, 1882, was a poet, writer, and visual artist from the Modernist and Futurist movements. She is the author of the collections Lunar Baedeker (Contact Publishing, 1923) and Lunar Baedeker and Time-Tables (Jonathan Williams, 1958). She died on September 25, 1966.
I like this poem. I cannot say in prose what the poet points to. I think the poem is a double-barreled criticism of our violent, our discord ridden society.
I think about death from time to time. Death is felt to be the ultimate monster, the finality not-to-be-spoken-of which severs. And we repudiate, we deny, we repress this idea by every one of our first world means: Botox treatments, addiction to exercise, cosmetic surgery. This could be a long list. You just have to take note of the television advertisements that promote products claiming to make you and I forever young. There Is no Life or Death is in brackets. My guess is that’s something not to be said out loud. It is a foundation for everything else that you’d want to say.
Silence is the form of communication that works. Those who already understand, will understand.
One more thing. Do not settle. Do not be tamed.
Mina Loy. Wish that I had known her.
2 thoughts on “Incomprehension”
The line that stands out to me is:
“ There is no First or Last
Only equality”
Or as the Bible states, “From dust to dust, ashes to ashes “
There is no exit to another realm where some of us are relegated to eternal fire while others lounge in paradise. Life is a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get). And so we are born, exist in some form of consciousness that is fed bits of information filtered through a variety of nerves, until our electrical currents are snuffed by death. I know I couch these thoughts in very dark terminology but this is meant, not as some dystopian nightmare but more as a pragmatic view of our journey through life. We make of it what we want (unless one doesn’t believe in free will – but we won’t go into that now).
Sounds quite Nietzschean… This unconventional viewpoint requires that one bite the head off the snake.