The Hallowed Wo/Men

An epic posting.
So many powerful lines here Ahavati
"  conflict, death— conflict, death
 we follow no other compass."
... is what struck me most.

Thank you, Josh. Much appreciated.
If humanity has a different compass, I am unaware of it. . .

"Another era of repetition    
 puncture a historic dial—    
become a thorn inside seconds    
meaningless at the core; hollow—    
 one no different than the other    
 the other no difference than before;    
each brigade of sixty seconds    
or minutes, marching as to war    
  one by one follow the hands    
  hour after hour,    
until their time is no more."    
     
This has to be one of the most beautifully written stanzas ever.      
     
Time is hollow and empty. Numbers are meaningless things unless meaning is attached to them. So what we have here is an endless parade of opportunity being squandered with meaningless (re)actions, the going through the motions, the lessons not learned paving the way for history repeating itself.      
     
The forward progression of time sets the pace of the poem: relentless.    
     
"Here is where repetition is born:    
  a needle dancing with its own echo    
in the parlor— scratchy throated—    
  a shallow crevice preventing    
 forward movement    
 into the heart of the song—    
   its music trapped in time    
    repeating itself, mirroring    
over and over:    
     
     conflict, death— conflict, death    
     we follow no other compass."    
     
Again, history repeating itself, symbolized by a skipping record.       
     
Meanwhile the repetitions of "conflict, death" stand out incredibly like that skipping.      
     
"How have we evolved into colonialism—    
  escaping the Gun Powder plot    
  beneath the Houses of Parliament    
distracting from the blood disease    
of imperialistic ideology—    
  its hand stretched forth in greed    
  continents between fingers;    
roots exposed, dangling limbs of Being-    
repeating itself— over and over    
  until it becomes a mantra    
  for future generations:    
     
  conflict, death— conflict, death    
  we follow no other compass."    
     
"blood disease" is an interesting choice of words to describe royalty inheriting the earth without any effort and passing on beliefs of entitlement.    
     
"Battlefield earth, her symbiosis designed    
  to accommodate the whole of Life—      
looks no different than the other    
the other no different than before—      
  spears, arrows, weapons of rock:    
Cain, Able, the cost jealousy affords    
   when we covet our brother’s lot.    
Sword, musket, antler knife, gunpowder    
    treason and plot— who does remember    
       they are their brother’s keeper    
       in the midst of tragic loss."    
     
OMG what another wonderful stanza.      
     
 "Between the beginning and end    
    lies the repetition;    
  between the opening and closing    
    lies the repetition;    
 within the solar plexus of the repetition    
    lies an unmeasured lesson    
in time, pain, and experience."    
     
The mention of the lesson as "unmeasured" actually comes across as  immeasurable or invaluable and thus vast in what can be reaped.      
     
"Fertile lands embraced    
  our foreign ways of trade    
between ocean and land;    
beyond islands and continents—      
  its hair invisibly combed    
  into banners of conquerors."    
     
Wow.      
     
"Those hallowed men and women—      
   those colored-skinned nations    
  their ancient customs foreign;      
spun from great dynasties of spirit    
into silken tapestries of origin.    
     
 They were the meek ones—    
  the workers, providers;    
  their offerings suffocated    
into martyrdom from nooses    
whipping poles, diseased blankets    
   and boiling sugar water."    
     
Here is where the describing of people as "hallowed" contrasts with how they will eventually be treated as slaves: valued as property and yet valueless as life is not revered as sacred.      
     
"Sparks rising from pyres in the night—    
  dissipated of their heat, disappearing    
behind their cloaks of darkness;    
their burial palls black as graves—    
  legends, burnt offerings    
  of flesh melting from bone—      
their slayers asleep in their beds    
  visions of the new world    
  circling over homesteads—      
warpaint of pride, conquest    
  smeared across their dreams."    
     
This right here? What a haunting prospect to be inside the minds of imperialists. This stanza is a brutal assault of visualizations and sensations.      
     
The final stanzas show us the playing field leveled as nature is ruined for everyone through democracy and capitalism that was supposed to be a trade up from dynasties and feudalism. Imperialism is revived and history repeats itself in an effort to claim title to the remaining resources.      
     
Only this time around, WMDs exist.    
     
The earlier nod to sci-fi movie "Battlefield Earth" could actually be what comes next: Earth a barren wasteland where an alien race in search of resources enslaves humans.    
   
❤📝    
     
PHENOMENAL poem. It is a real work of art.

Thank you for this amazing reply - I truly appreciate your time and attention to this.  It was a very emotional thing to write because I experienced much of it, particularly desegregation, personally.  Wars don't always involved foreign soil and automatic weapon fire.  But, they do scar nonetheless.

💜

You have nooooooooooo idea how i long for another big flash of light.......
i am in everlasting constant emotional pain.

So much i want to share with You here and so much i should not.........will not.

am i still crying?  Yes.  & maybe for a very long time

(am consulting with my spiritual consult about You with respect to infecting me as i try to crawl the last few meters of my Tao)

Oh Tallen, I was emotional during this as well, having experienced much of it first hand.  I remember clan rallies ( my father was against them - but I remember them marching through the Deep South ).  I attended first grade on the heels of desegregation, when the battles were still being fought.  My father served two tours in Vietnam.  

Yet, with all that going on - the world doesn't seem like a better place today, with the exception of like-minded I've connected with. They, such as yourself, are a comfort.  

Thank you.

I lived with a married couple -- off and on --  for 30+ years.  He's a Black man who grew up Catholic in Iowa and she is  woman who grew up Irish Baptist in Milton, MA.
They met at a prodigious Arts & Crafts College in Northern California.
They used to share many a horrific story about their college days where people driving down the street would Yell expletives and throw bottles at them.
Make my heart cry............i still cry while typing this.

I know it's not very Buddhist of me
but i told my (best) Friend that i would take out anyone he or his wife wanted (at no charge).

Have i ever shared with You how much i abhor racism?  Growing up in Hawaii, me and my siblings experience this from not only whites and Japanese but from the same in our own Family blood relatives.

Sometimes.......sometimes I wish i was a fuckin' alien from another dispensation.........Dimension.

Sorry for this share..........rant --
not feeling human lately.........

You're here to make a difference in the world,  Tallen.  To overcome diversity and abuse with Love. People see that.

When we lived in England, I was the only girl allowed to babysit for an interracial couple - no one else would allow their daughters to.  We left deep south Mississippi and found what we'd left staring right back at us.

It was crazy.

thank You for understanding

i think
for me
racism is my greatest obstacle
towards reaching enlightenment

i don't believe i will make it this time.....

sad   : (

I believe you are closer than you think, Tallen.

Thus the story of man rolls on and goes nowhere.  Excellent write Ahvanti.


luv's
buddhakitty.

Thank you, Kitts.  It does appear circular at times, doesn't it?

So much appreciated.

back another time to give this the reading time it's due. a tour-de-force, aha!

Hey, It is hard to write like a master poet and still fill the page with original thought but you did it Really luved this inspirational. Xxxx

Thank you, imogee.  That is really a wonderful observation that's truly appreciated. xo

As an Eliot fan, this resonates deeply. As stated above, is truly an epic capture of the human condition and much more.

Rob, when you RL a classic tribute such as Eliot, I know I've hit a homerun. Thank you; muchly appreciated.

In stanza 1 "Marching as to war" has an allusion to "onward Christian soldiers" - which perhaps lends an air of "righteous war" to one side.  And the end rhyme of "war" with "more" was good.


In stanza 2, the image of a jumping record was particularly gripping, and masterly written.


I liked the repetition of "conflict, death— conflict, death //  we follow no other compass.   " and also the repetition of the word repetition, emphasising the repetitive nature of conflict.


The concluding part of this poem is dark and thoughtful.  the italicised emphasis on the third "this world" ... life systems on the brink of collapse ... not the top 1% ... nor the corporate giants ... and then a frightening reversal of "in the beginning there was light".


It's a poem that merits many readings.


SeaCat

Thank you, SeaCat. I truly appreciate your time and attention.

Thank you, Sky. That is truly humbling, to say the least.

This is powerful and furious. I love the fearless prediction of it. I am coming back when I have time to listen to the spoken word. There's so much to appreciate here. It's heavy and aggressive unlike many you write it retains your calm soul. Loved it. Just loved it.

Thank you, Poppy. I truly appreciate that observation.  Thank you always for your support. xo

Dear A,

I’m not sure where I could even begin and not sound immature, uninformed, underdeveloped. This piece is so epic as Josh aptly states. When you see atrocities of this magnitude in this format and are reminded of the immense horrors inflicted it’s staggering. In my tiny way I pray the bit I play in my own corner of the world is helpful to someone and in turn they can help another. But this overwhelms me. Exquisitely, and masterfully done don’t begin to touch this. I wonder at what it took out of you to write this? I’d have to be hospitalized. I will end with Brilliant!  H🌷

Thank you, Honoria.  I appreciate the kind observations, honestly.  I think it's safe to say you make the world a better place, particularly if your real life reflects your actions here on DUP.  In all honesty, it took a few days to recover from this one. As I had experienced some of it firsthand, it was like revisiting a few childhood nightmares.

I've been wanting to write something like this  for a very long time, and I think this exorcised the ghosts for sure.

Thank you again.

came back to read this properly today

made the mistake of playing the video with it. it wasn't the pictures, haunting as they are, but i listened to the music as i read and heard your words. too many tears to comment further. you hit a home run.

butters you humble and honor me with that response. I am indebted. Thank you so much.  So happy you decided to check DU out.  So happy some of the natives didn't chase you off the island. ;)

I would have passed out from oxygen deprivation reading this aloud.

I don't know how you do it, but you do it damn well.

Once again ..... uhmmmmm 😌

XO

I especially liked your use of the skipping record to mirror the way we repeat ourselves, each battle the same as the ones that came before. The only difference being the weapons used. I fear that the last flash though will come from some mistake made by a computer in what passes for peace these days. It's almost happened before and in my mind it will happen again.
I loved it.

Thank you, thinlane. Your observations about repetition, unfortunately, are true.  I read an analysis of Eliot's Hollow Men years and years ago, and it reference repetition - something I had not garnered from reading it firsthand. Years later, I understood that the essence was bound in repetition indeed.

Thank you for your time and kind words. They are appreciated.

BANG!!! Eliot was known to have read Nietzsche...like most of the great artists...Poets...so when Nietzsche predicted that the 21st century will see wars like we have never seen before...everyone took note. I love reading the myths that are in all the ancient stories and one of my favorites is the Garden of Eden story in the Bible...when we ate from the tree of knowledge and became disconnected from the rest of nature...we had to be booted out of the garden...the human being is the most rapacious creature on the planet. Your poem A captures the history of the human animal in all its dark ugliness...because that is the creature we are...greedy sinners we are...it's getting warm, must turn on my air-conditioner lol.
Cheers...Harry

P.S. An interesting article if you can find it...Nietzsche's Theory of Tragedy in the Plays of T. S. Eliot
Linda Leavell
Twentieth Century Literature

Thank you, my friend!  

I love biblical parables as well; I have always related to them in a non-literal, prophetic sense which wasn't always popular with the Christian natives I was a part of.  I thank you kindly and most appreciatively for your extended observations, unfortunately, regarding the dark part of humanity. I wish it could be lighter - but there are the helpers in there, somewhere keeping the balance.  

I will look up that Theory and give it a read. I've read lots of Nietzsche but I can't recall that one, despite having studied him and Eliot.  Thanks for the recommendation!

" but there are the helpers in there, somewhere keeping the balance."
... I have experienced them, lying in a crop circle a few hours after it was formed when attending a crop-circle conference near Marlborough in the early 2000s. Apart from the astonishing pattern, and observing the way the wheat-stalks were gently laid over but not broken, and the way certain whisps of wheat stalks were interwoven like pixels at regular intervals, I had this overwhelming sense that there were some 'good forces' on 'our side' - and the remembrance of this experience still uplifts me whenever I sense the brooding darkness expanding over the world becomes too overwhelming.

Thank you for sharing that, Josh. I have been told that the energy of a crop circle, particularly as soon after it's discovered, is something amazing and akin to that of a solar eclipse.  This last solar eclipse was an amazing infusion of hope - much like that crop circle.

OMFG... Loved loved loved!!!!! 👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾

Love love love your presence!!!!!

Thank you, PoeticOne, my friend.

This is so so good A, layers upon layers of imagery to heighten the plight...I will definitely come back for a few more reads when I have proper time.

Tim your words are very much appreciated and welcome. Thank you so much for your observations.

This is a great elaboration of what I find to be a very mysterious, yet poignant poem (The Hollow Men).  I think I understand it better after reading your interpretation; the hollowness is born of a cycle that repeats itself and is never filled, but perpetuated.  It seems these perpetuations of man's ills is a theme prominent in many of TS Elliots writings, he often points to the cyclic nature of things.  This was mind expanding, with the drama of TS Elliot, also I liked all the alliterations you used in the first stanza, it sounded good..

Thank you, PR.   The second poem in the Four Quartets ( or Four Locations ),  East Coker, is a little village that Eliot traced his ancestry back to.  You can go into the Anglican parish church and view Eliot's ashes. On the church wall he attributed a line from "In my beginning is my end. Of your kindness, pray for the soul of Thomas Stearns Eliot."   Which mean the end for which we are created is conception.  Our beginning is our destiny, and what we do with time is the question Prufrock didn't want to ask, "Do not ask what it is?"  

In the The Hollow Men, Eliot addresses that question.  His work is circular within itself as well - entwined section to section, poem to poem, interlinked and woven as life.  

Thank you for your observations. They are much appreciated.

That's fascinating info, thanks, good to know since I'm working on another write related to it :)

.

Stunning, I need more time with this one

Thank you, RL. Honored and much appreciated.