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?

A poet ruminates upon the enclosed, sealed world of idiocy.  His words capture the atmosphere of a world which is stagnant. There’s no ingress of “difference”. It’s cold with no heat of renewal and no divestment of anything threadbare.  The question never asked: “is this obsolete?” Perhaps most offensive, the greatest danger is the idiotic assumption, “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 frozen, dogma-defined world, disconnected to that other public world which is sustained by unnumberable, tissue-like and fragile human connections.

In the reality of the ἴδιος, one thing matters, that Jesus is your personal savior, thereby one need have no further concern about the fragile, danger-fraught, easily fucked-up world of markets, and political parties, and consequences. (Religion is a popular way of “checking out.”) Among the ἴδιος ‘everything is ok’ and everyone sports a mask, that pastiche shallow grin and nothing matters, not really. Because the Holy Ghost is in charge…

There’s a contingency though 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 suffer pain, real pain, and everyone dies… In this world, consequences are raw. Death is calamitous for the still living, As for the ‘departed’ a grave is certain and anything else, well, – no one knows.

I will not pay attention to the red ball you offer (to redirect my attention), let’s focus upon what it means to bleed. Why do you insist to play with your red ball? You desire to only play with a happy-red-ball, that “seems” to move, oddly, according to your whim?

Are we all idiots?