All I Have Is A Voice

December 20, 2016 Jerry King Comments 0 Comment

Verse eight

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

September 1, 1939 by W. H. Auden

I awakened this morning with the lyrics of Jefferson Airplane’s White Rabbit playing over and over in my barely conscious mind. The lyric describes a surreal, upended world not amenable to reason. It seems like that lately. The Russian ambassador to Ankara Turkey, Andrey Karlov, was murdered last night. The murder was committed in a art gallery of all places. A clean cut young man, Mevlut Mert Altintas killed the ambassador, up close and personal. The young policeman shouted not to forget Aleppo, as he repeatedly fired his semi auto pistol. I thought to myself —how reliable modern weapons are. And Aleppo, where bodies of the starved and bombed continue to pile up, courtesy of Russian air power. The chain of death continues unabated, Aleppo to Ankara and back again.

All I have is a voice, asserts Auden. And what is a single voice juxtaposed against the contagion of violence? Murder in a space dedicated to beauty and meaning. A voice to undermine the foundation of the dark logic of killing. The folded lie is a seductive origami-like-myth, a lie infecting our psyche. The poles of the lie are found in the man-in-the-street and in the aura maintained by the State. The authority of the State demonstrated in so many ways,– is insubstantial, a fabricated institution, maintained solely by our allegiance. The State is a concept, an idea which we sustain by our “patriotism.” It can be change. It can disappear. Yet the State seems palpably real in the imposing monuments of it’s buildings, in the approach of the law officer asking for your identification.

What is real, undeniably substantial is our shared humanity, the common ground of tender fragility. To be human is to be rooted in the earth and connected to one another. That is the foundation truth. The rest is a derivation, a will-o-wisp human fabrication. Nourishment, sustenance is a common need, and the police are not exempt because they are agents of the State. Hunger allows no choice.

So what is the bottom line, the take away? We must love one another or die. There is nothing more to say. You see it or you don’t.

I conclude with lyric lines appended by U2 to their cover of Dylan’s, All Along The Watchtower.