Chance = Change

The great British poet - my favorite - Wordsworth wrote in, in 1806

The World Is Too Much With Us; Late and Soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not. -- Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea.
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

And. living in San Francisco, close to so much natural beauty at all times, this poem reverberates within me more than it ever has.  The world is so sordid, messy, imperfect, sad and violent - all because of man's greedy striving and need to dominate, that to look out on the simple grandeur of the Pacific Ocean and see how Nature does what it does ......it makes all of man's mistakes all the more evident. Nature is violent as well, I know. And , one could argue, man's nature is man's nature: he is the way he is, just as the oceans' winds are the way they are. But, there is this thing about man: he has a conscience and mind.
And the ability to make decisions. So.....

I saw a play at Berkeley Rep on Saturday night by an important playwright - Lynn Notage - the play is called RUINED, and it won her the Pulitzer Prize last year. She deserved it , for the play - a difficult one to write, I imagine - eloquently captures a small slice of the evil that men do to retain power and dominate others.  It's about a small group of women, and one man, in the Congo who are violently affected by the civil wars that rage around them, and the unspeakable violence done to women on a daily basis is the play's main theme. It is horrific beyond my understanding, yet the play creates such specifically drawn, human characters, it is impossible for the audience not to watch, love and enjoy each and every one we meet on the stage (except the soldiers, who are terrifying animals with guns and bayonets.) This, of course, makes the violence raging all around the characters we love even more painful to witness, as it barely whispers to them from the darkness. Like the good playwright she is, Nottage brings little of the actual violence onto the stage , but the little that she does bring us to actually see shook my soul. I am not yet recovered from the waking up the play provided me...the reminder that man is indeed evil at his heart, or at least capable of great evil when he feels his is the "right way".

And , of course, the reminder that women are the victims of man's fears all around the world made me feel a powerlessness that rendered me sleepless the entire night. There is nothing to be done about the evil men do to women.  Women - and their power to give birth from their bodies, a thing men will never be able to do -women represent everything that makes man feel impotent. He can do anything else, but he never will be capable of giving birth. That , of course, makes women valuable in a way that nothing else is valuable. She is the true gold of the earth.

So what better way to denigrate, demean and defeat your enemy than to destroy their women?  Salt their fertile fields , gouge out their productive wombs, knife, kill, rape and thoroughly destroy the women of your enemy.  That is what African men, fighting each other, do. They fight their battles over and through the bodies of the women in their way. And that is what RUINED is about.

Africa is one of the most beautiful places in the world, I've read. Natural beauty, the riches of the planet, animals, plant life, mountains, waters, minerals, gems: it has it all in great abundance. But do the African rebel factions, the armies that form overnight to create new victories over sheer air, land rights, national boundaries, do these men ever stop to look at what is around them? No. All they see is their supposed right to own it, and if someone gets in their way, the old tribal instincts rise up and they destroy each other....but first the women. They rape and injure the women beyond repair.

The world is far too much with these animalistic men.  They behave the only way their animal natures allow them to.  Young boys are trained to be men by following in the violent footsteps of their fathers who rape and destroy. It is a tribal rite of passage, it would seem.  And it has to be stopped. It is not my way. It is theirs. But it s the wrong way for life to be. It must stop.

What kept me awake on Saturday night was the question of how? How do you stop a tsunami of violence and hate? Seems impossible.

Then, I went to Glide Memorial Church yesterday morning.  And because Paul had to park far away from the Church, we walked through the Tenderloin section of San Francisco to reach it, and bodies of the hungry homeless lay in their own bodily filth, all around us in the sunshine.

And there seems no way to stop all that either. No matter all the fine talk from the pulpit, and no matter the 3000 meals a day that Glide serves the hungry, we've still found no effective way to stop man from destroying himself.  Our affluent society creates its own human detritus, and we flush it away like the waste from our own bodies. We hold our noses, light some perfumed candles and pretend it never happened. And with all our millions and billions of dollars, people who have good hearts and want to help are still at a loss: HOW can we help? WHAT can we do?  THERE MUST be a way!

But there seems to be no way at all.  

We are all lost in the jungle.

And the jungle is not just in Africa. It is in the United States of America too.  The jungle and the animals who live in it? We are they, they are us. It is here.

So, Wordsworth's poem consoles me: Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.....we have given our hearts away, a sordid boon.


What are we to do? How much can we mourn? How much can we wring our hands and use up all our tissues crying?  How can we go on with all the misery there is on this planet? How DARE we go on?
I've no answers yet...only my humble abilities to express the horror I feel, and stay open to more of the pain that this weekend brought me.

Sometimes I think that staying open is what we are being asked - by some power or other - to do. Stay open to and aware of those things that hurt us most.  After all, that woman in the Congo raped and cut by violence? She is me. The woman starving on our streets? Yep. Me too.

 Absolutely. She is all of us.

 So we'd better solve this. Solve it soon.

Labels: World views