The Song of the Idiot

They do not hinder me. They let me go.
They say, nothing could happen even so.
How good.
Nothing can happen. Everything revolves engrossed
always around the Holy Ghost,
around a certain ghost (you know)—
how good.
No, one should really not suppose
that there is any danger in those.
There’s of course the blood.
The blood is the hardest thing. The blood is a chore,
sometimes I think I can’t any more.
(How good.)
Look at that ball, isn’t it fair—
red and round as an everywhere.
Good you created the ball.
Whether it comes when we call
How oddly all things seem to humor some whim,
they flock together, apart they swim,
friendly and just a little dim;
how good

By Ranier Maria Rilke, trans. by Walter Kaufman

Saturday afternoon, I contemplated my untidy desk. Articles read, then printed for future reference overflowed the in-basket.  I inherited, no doubt from my father, an inner demon that whispers to me “this” that I am reading has important connection to other ideas, even to events in the news.

I mean such inordinate happenings like ICE raids that are performative in cruelty. Masked, militarized agents, Schutzstaffel equivalents, round up farm workers in California. They are supported by the California National Guard called up by the President. What have these low-pay workers, harvesting our produce done to merit such attention?

Weather calamity, flooding along the Guadalupe River in Texas, mass drownings of children at a summer camp is another example of something that attracts my attention. I have a compulsion to understand how both eruptions could be connected. Cruelty by definition is irrational, adventitious, an excess. The flooding in Texas also fits the definition of a “surd” that which spirals away from the norm, from patterns which reason expects. Campers, parents, and public officials slammed by the event, grieved and stammered about measures that they’d take to prevent such from ever happening again.

I go on and on about this because the absurd fascinates me. I search for connections, to show an overarching order to widely separate events. I commenced to visually scan, to sort into file folders the mess of papers, then my mind wandered to the surplus of books resting around my desk. They belonged (somehow) on shelves already lined to capacity with books. I continue to buy books, anything which deeply interests me, which I intend to read someday, maybe even to incorporate into a course which I sometimes volunteer to teach…

“Good” intentions, a room full of books, and how much time do I have left in my life? Enough to read all of this? Unlikely. But there’s no way to know.

Well fuck it, I’ll continue as always, buying books, doing my best to find shelf room, and of course continue reading and writing. Yes, on the face of the matter, this is quite irrational…

I will live! Just live, irrational or no. Live – as an act of resistance to the absurd. 

And I resolve never to claim that a Holy Ghost is my assurance that “all will be well”, everything is going to work out.

There is danger, real danger. The hazard is entailed in “the blood” the limit of a mammalian flesh/blood body. Everyone collides with that hard limit.

And no bouncy red ball that I (or anyone else) conjure up is going to change that.