somewhere to get to

'i thought i'd begin by reading a poem by Shakespeare, but then i thought why should i? he never reads any of mine.'
spike milligan

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also, when one hasn't paid attention to the world at large for awhile and suddenly starts again, it's pretty astounding not just how many horrible things are happening, but also the magnitude of these things... how can so many terrible things be happening, to so many people, right now, and i'm sitting here, comfortable in my apartment, with the luxury of thinking about these things and these people (or not), knowing that my life will likely continue much the same whether or not i know about what's happening or choose to pay attention to what's happening?


Musee des Beaux Arts
by W. H. Auden
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking
dully along;
How when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Brueghel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.


What happens - in that 'final analysis' - to those who turn away and sail calmly on when they know that there's so much suffering and so many things they could do to help; those who ignore the smallest possible things they could do - those who delete the amnesty international emails without opening them but can spend hours looking at yuppie cooking sites, who ignore those moments where they have this flash of conscience (flash of consciousness?) about real perspective and the real world?

meisties, meisties, fightin' the good fight.