Distacco

Moderns who neither kill their own food, nor grow their own food nor bury their own dead would seem to have solved the problem by avoiding it; but in fact the resolution is simply delegated, nowadays, to nightmare, slaughterhouses, torture rooms, death squads, and ‘snuff’ films in which criminal priests perform obscene sacrifices to the gods of displaced responsibility. No one can truly avoid the continuous paradox of life/death as one continuous god or process. Such perception arises from the deepest labyrinth of our psyches, where there is no distinction between ‘primitive’ and ‘modern’. The only difference is that ‘primitives’ strive to be conscious of the paradox; ‘moderns’ try to escape it. But the paradox shows us and ontological maze we cannot sanely deny, destroy, or over leap; we have to learn to walk it again, to dance it, as our ancestors did, with grace, strength, and awe-full wisdom.

 

Monica Sjöö

Bound for Hell

Hell, my ardent sisters, be assured,

Is where we’re bound; we’ll drink the pitch of hell—

We, who have sung the praises of the lord

With every fibre in us, every cell.

We, who did not manage to devote

Our nights to spinning, did not bend and sway

Above a cradle—in a flimsy boat,

Wrapped in a mantle, we’re now borne away.

Every morning, every day, we’d rise

And have the finest Chinese silks to wear;

And we’d strike up the songs of paradise

Around the campfire of a robbers’ lair,

We, careless seamstresses (our seams all ran,

Whether we sewed or not)—yet we have been

Such dancers, we have played the pipes of Pan:

The world was ours, each one of us a queen.

First, scarcely draped in tatters, and disheveled,

Then plaited with a starry diadem;

We’ve been in jails, at banquets we have reveled:

But the rewards of heaven, we’re lost to them,

Lost in nights of starlight, in the garden

Where apple trees from paradise are found.

No, be assured, my gentle girls, my ardent

And lovely sisters, hell is where we’re bound.

Marina Svetaeva