Young woman dies from gunshot.
An awful fact.
Trump administration blames all immigrants.
In the sorrow of her death I’m ashamed of the idiots who exploit their phobic ideology of hate against people from away.
ηλίθιοι, οι ηλίθιοι αφθονούν
Idiots abound.
The quiet
Birds fly
To and from
Green feeder
Hanging mid-air
Frühstück im Flugzeug
(Breakfast on the fly)
The heart is a just judge.
Earlier
Gone now
1. Nox atra rerum cóntegit
I was looking for the line at end of Archibald MacLeish’s play “J.B.” when I came upon this article from secular humanism.org.
The conclusion of which:
My Sin! Teach me my sin!
My wickedness!
Surely iniquity that suffers
Judgment like mine cannot be secret.
Mine is no childish fault,
no nastiness
Concealed behind a bathroom door.
. . . Mine is flagrant,
Worthy of death, of many deaths,
Of shame, loss, hurt, indignities
Such as these! Such as these!
Eventually, in response to anguished
entreaty, God deigns to address J.B. à la
the Book of Job. The Almighty brow-
beats the supplicant with a scroll of
divine feats: “Canst thou bind the sweet
influences of the Pleiades? Canst thou
thunder with a voice like God? Hast thou
commanded the morning? Hast thou
given the horse strength?” And so on.
Overwhelmed by the force majeure,
J.B. bows his head, wrings his hands,
and whispers: “I abhor myself—and
repent.” Sufficiently prostrate, he re-
coups health, wealth, and wife.
The wife’s reappearance precipitates
a startling denouement. In the final
scene, Sarah induces her husband to
abjure faith in a benevolent Providence.
Divine justice, she tells him, is a figment
of the obtuse mind. It doesn’t exist:
You wanted justice, didn’t you?
There isn’t any. There’s the world . . .
Cry for justice and the stars
Will stare until your eyes sting. Weep,
Enormous winds will thrash the
water.
Cry in sleep for your lost children,
Snow will fall . . .
You wanted justice and there was
none—
Only love.
On human love alone, J.B. must
henceforth pin his hopes:
Blow on the coal of the heart.
The candles in churches are out.
The lights have gone out in the sky.
Sadder but wiser, J.B. concludes that
God doesn’t minister to human needs:
“He does not love. He Is.” In the Broad-
way version of the play, J.B. adds:
I will not
Duck my head again to thunder—
That bullwhip cracking at my ears!—
although
He kills me with it.
In a play within the play, MacLeish
skewers the Old Testament deity. From
a lofty platform, two circus vendors qua
ham actors, Zuss and Nickles, assume
the roles of God and Satan. As they
watch the turbulent life of J.B. unfold,
they comment on events and their own
characters. Nickles-Satan limns the
Almighty as a swaggering ogre who bul-
lies a spineless victim:
God comes whirling in the wind reply-
ing—
What? That God knows more than he
does.
That God’s more powerful than he!—
Throwing the whole creation at him!
Throwing the glory and the Power!
What’s the Power to a broken man
Trampled beneath it like a toad
already?
What’s the glory to a skin that stinks!
And this ham actor [J.B.]!—what
does he do?
“Thank you!” “I’m a worm!” “Take
two!”
Plays the way a sheep would play it—
Pious, contemptible, goddamn sheep
Without the spun goddamn sheep
Without the spunk to spit on
Christmas!
Zuss lamely defends the Almighty.
God torments J.B. because misery
begets piety:
It’s from the ash heap God is seen
Always! Always from the ashes.
Every saint and martyr knew that.
Only a fool or a deity, Nickles retorts,
would proffer such a vacuous premise:
And so he suffers to see God:
Sees God because he suffers.
Beautiful!
. . . A human face would shame the
mouth that said that!
Were J.B. schooled in logic, adds
Nickles, he would have understood long
ago that the Almighty, if indeed omnipo-
tent, isn’t benevolent:
I heard upon his dry dung heap
That man cry out who cannot sleep:
“If God is God He is not good,
If God is good He is not God.”
A staunch humanist and de facto
atheist, Archibald MacLeish scorned the
concept of an inscrutable Almighty. Like
William Blake, he deemed votaries of
Yahweh (Blake’s “Nobodaddy”) devil wor-
shipers. For MacLeish, “God” was the
manifestation of the human capacity for
empathy and altruism. Human love, he
remarked, creates God. While as natur-
al creatures we were bound to suffer,
the suffering needn’t be bootless. “Our
labor always,” he wrote, “is to learn
through suffering to love.”
(--from "The Book of Job and J.B.: Faith and Reason", by Gary Sloan, June-July 2006
https://cdn.centerforinquiry.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/26/2006/06/22160324/p49.pdf
Sloan began the article with:
Archibald MacLeish’s play J.B.,
which won the Pulitzer Prize for
drama in 1958, offers an infidel’s
antidote to the relentless fideism of its
biblical counterpart.
I’m not much of an infidel.
I have too many questions not to have faith in something beyond my comprehension.
I am, however, interested in antidotes to poisonous beliefs that cripple intelligence and send true believers down treacherous inclines on dangerous slopes attacking their version of nonbelievers.
That line I was looking for? It was Sarah speaking to J.B., saying to him:
You wanted justice and there was
none—
Only love.
I always pause whenever I hear the words ‘justice’ and ‘love.'