Wish I Could Be An Idiot
The Song of the Idiot
By Ranier Maria Rilke
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.
The word “idiot” ultimately comes from the Greek noun ἰδιώτης ‘a common man’, ‘a person lacking professional skill, layman’, later ‘unskilled’, ‘ignorant’, derived from the adjective ἴδιος idios ‘personal’ (not public, not shared). -wikipedia
Stuck on a poem… Has this ever happened to you, just once?
These lines are a description of the poet’s rumination of the self-enclosed world of idiocy. The words capture the texture of an emotional world which is stagnating, fixed, without flow. The sense that, “no matter what, everything is going to be ok.” Everything “somehow” is under control, “nothing could happen,” or in another idiotic turn of phrase, ‘it’s all good!’ Actions and words are just noise in this shapeshifting world, disconnected to that other public world which is sustained by unnumberable, tissue-like and fragile human connections.
In the reality of the ἴδιος, the only thing that matters, that Jesus be your personal savior and thereby one passes from the fragile and danger-fraught, easily fucked-up world of markets, and political parties, and consequences — to another ‘everything is ok’ world where everyone sports a mask, that pastiche shallow grin and nothing matters, not really, because The Holy Ghost is in charge…
There’s a contingency, a loose end remains: The blood… the blood is the hardest thing…
The world of human affairs is a world of flesh, of blood. Where adult males, adult females, and children feel pain, real pain, and everyone dies… This is world of raw consequence.
I will not pay attention to the red ball you offer (to redirect my attention), I’ll focus upon what it means to bleed. Why would you play with your red ball? You desire to only play with that happy-red-ball, that moves as if its own whim?
Perhaps we are all idiots…