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بيـدٍ أغلقُ أبوابَ جراحـي * ويدي الأخرى على باب الصبـاح نصل سفاح على حنجرتي * وعلى وجهي تهاويل الأضـاحـي قبضة الجبهة لا تـمهـلـنـي * لـحظة.. مــا بيـن ذبـح وانـذبـاح أنــا أوجـاع ملايـيـن صحت * فصحْت غضبة حـق مستبــاح من رخام الأمس دوى ألمي* يا سدود انتظري دَين اكتساحي أبذر الشمس على مستقبلي * واشج بالليل عن فضل وشاحي فاضربوا أوتاركم في وطني * إنها لعبة قش ورياح حرموا الدوح على بلبله * وأبيحوا لكمو غير المباح سأكيل الصاع بالصاعين لكم * ناقلاً ناري من ساح لساح مخلب الصقر أنا قلمته * أمس. فليكبر على حد سلاحي تتحدى زهرتي دبايةً * فاسحقوها، تزدهر كل بطاحي من محيطي لخليجي لم يزل * صاعداً يكتسح الموت جناحي وطني جنة عدني، وأنا * حارس الجنة من كف وقاح وأرى حولي رؤوساً أينعت * وانا قاطفها باسم جراحي غضبي يحرق من يشعله * غضبي القادم ريحاً بلقاح فافهموا يا سادتي، أخبركم * انني صاح، أعيد القول، صاح ألف هولاكو أنا أغرقتهم * في دياجيري، واطلعت صباحي ينتهي العدوان غيماً عابرا * وأنا أبقى، وحبي، وكفاحي. ↗
As in the political sphere, the child is taught that he is free, a democrat, with a free will and a free mind, lives in a free country, makes his own decisions. At the same time he is a prisoner of the assumptions and dogmas of his time, which he does not question, because he has never been told they exist. By the time a young person has reached the age when he has to choose (we still take it for granted that a choice is inevitable) between the arts and the sciences, he often chooses the arts because he feels that here is humanity, freedom, choice. He does not know that he is already moulded by a system: he does not know that the choice itself is the result of a false dichotomy rooted in the heart of our culture. Those who do sense this, and who don't wish to subject themselves to further moulding, tend to leave, in a half-unconscious, instinctive attempt to find work where they won't be divided against themselves. With all our institutions, from the police force to academia, from medicine to politics, we give little attention to the people who leave—that process of elimination that goes on all the time and which excludes, very early, those likely to be original and reforming, leaving those attracted to a thing because that is what they are already like. A young policeman leaves the Force saying he doesn't like what he has to do. A young teacher leaves teaching, here idealism snubbed. This social mechanism goes almost unnoticed—yet it is as powerful as any in keeping our institutions rigid and oppressive. ↗
If you were offered the chance to live your own life again, would you seize the opportunity? The only real philosophical answer is automatically self-contradictory: 'Only if I did not know that I was doing so.' To go through the entire experience once more would be banal and Sisyphean—even if it did build muscle—whereas to wish to be young again and to have the benefit of one's learned and acquired existence is not at all to wish for a repeat performance, or a Groundhog Day. And the mind ought to, but cannot, set some limits to wish-thinking. All right, same me but with more money, an even sturdier penis, slightly different parents, a briefer latency period… the thing is absurd. I seriously would like to know what it was to be a woman, but like blind Tiresias would also want the option of re-metamorphosing if I wished. How terrible it is that we have so many more desires than opportunities. ↗
But most of all, as summer slanted to an end, he was learning to love idleness, idleness no longer as stretches of freedom reclaimed by stealth here and there from involuntary labour, surreptitious thefts to be enjoyed sitting on his heels before a flowerbed with the fork dangling from his fingers, but as a yielding up of himself to time, to a time flowing slowly like oil from horizon to horizon over the face of the world, washing over his body, circulating in his armpits and his groin, stirring his eyelids. He was neither pleased nor displeased when there was work to do; it was all the same. He could lie all afternoon with his eyes open, staring at the corrugations in the roof-iron and the tracings of rust; his mind would not wander, he would see nothing but the iron, the lines would not transform themselves into pattern or fantasy; he was himself, lying in his own house, the rust was merely rust, all that was moving was time, bearing him onward in its flow. ↗
The pollution of the outward environment we are witnessing is only the mirror and the consequence of the inward environment, to which we pay too little heed. I think that this is also the defect of the ecological movements. They crusade with an understandable and also legitimate passion against the pollution of the environment, whereas man's self-pollution of his soul continues to be treated as one of the rights of his freedom. There is a discrepancy here. We want to eliminate the measurable pollution, but we don't consider the pollution of man's soul and his creaturely form.... he must acknowledge himself as a creature and realise that there must be a sort of inner purity to his creatureliness: spiritual ecology, if you will." Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Salt of the Earth, Ignatius Press, 1997, pp. 230-231 ↗
Enmeshed in collective hatred and anger, each side proclaims the crimes of the other and its own righteousness, is unable to listen to the others suffering, and cannot look at the deeper roots of the conflict and how we often need our enemies in order to maintain our rigid identities. (p. 53) ↗
Until recently, I was an ebook sceptic, see; one of those people who harrumphs about the “physical pleasure of turning actual pages” and how ebook will “never replace the real thing”. Then I was given a Kindle as a present. That shut me up. Stock complaints about the inherent pleasure of ye olde format are bandied about whenever some new upstart invention comes along. Each moan is nothing more than a little foetus of nostalgia jerking in your gut. First they said CDs were no match for vinyl. Then they said MP3s were no match for CDs. Now they say streaming music services are no match for MP3s. They’re only happy looking in the rear-view mirror. ↗
Well, He had known what love was-a sharp pang, a fierce experience, in the midst of whose flames he was struggling! but, through that furnace he would fight his way out into the serenity of middle age,-all the richer and more human for having known this great passion. ↗
