“The modern hero, the modern individual who dares to heed the call and seek the mansion of that presence with whom it is our whole destiny to be atoned, cannot, indeed must not, wait for his community to cast off its slough of pride, fear, rationalized avarice, and sanctified misunderstanding. “Live,” Nietzsche says, “as though the day were here.” It is not society that is to guide and save the creative hero, but precisely the reverse. And so every one of us shares the supreme ordeal-carries the cross of the redeemer – not in the bright moments of his tribe’s great victories, but in the silences of his personal despair.”
Joseph Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces
4 comments:
There is a light screwed into the ceiling of the veranda outside my home, a phony moon drawing insects out of the dark. They cover the ceiling like pepper; flying ants, moths, frantic black things almost too small to see. The human looks up with contempt, if it responds at all. How mindless these vermin are, what a blind thing instinct is. What a nuisance, these insects!
There are false moons that draw human beings just as surely, that can draw whole peoples and whole worlds. There are ideas that have been placed in the sphere of mind for humans to follow by things that are not human, who care for us not at all, who feel the same insectoid contempt towards us. Beware, you humans in the midst of a vast crowd, blinded by the radiance of one overwhelming idea!
If you are steering by a true guide, you will almost always be alone...
The spiderwebs grow thick around the light outside my home; around the light feed geckoes with skin like babies. The insects die; the human who uses the light does not care. He has turned it on; he will turn it off when he needs it no longer.
You are insects who have been drawn to a false idea; you are blinded by it and do not see the spiderwebs strung in your path, the tongues waiting to devour you. I am the gnat who warns you, I am the gnat who knows; I call out; close your eyes to this idea you follow; seal your heart, and wander into the cool night. Open your eyes when you can no longer hear the beating of ten thousand wings around you; when you are no longer conscious of a single mind that thinks as yours! Then you will be free, free to be guided by the earth's one moon!
The Albatross
Often, to pass the time, sailors will
Catch albatrosses, those great seabirds
Which nonchalantly chapere ships
Across bitter gulfs
Hardly have they set them down on the deck
Than these monarchs of the sky, awkward and ashamed,
Piteously let their great white wings
Drag at their sides like pairs of unshipped oars
How gauche and weak becomes
This winged traveller!
How weak and awkward, even comical
He who was but lately so adroit!
One deckhand teases his beak with a branding iron
Another mimics, by limping, the cripple that once flew!
The poet is like this sovereign of the clouds,
Riding the storm above the marksman’s range;
In exile on earth, hooted and jeered at,
He cannot walk because of his great wings.
- Charles Baudelaire
L'AlbatrosSouvent, pour s'amuser, les hommes d'équipage
Prennent des albatros, vastes oiseaux des mers,
Qui suivent, indolents compagnons de voyage,
Le navire glissant sur les gouffres amers.
À peine les ont-ils déposés sur les planches,
Que ces rois de l'azur, maladroits et honteux,
Laissent piteusement leurs grandes ailes blanches
Comme des avirons traîner à côté d'eux.
Ce voyageur ailé, comme il est gauche et veule!
Lui, naguère si beau, qu'il est comique et laid!
L'un agace son bec avec un brûle-gueule,
L'autre mime, en boitant, l'infirme qui volait!
Le Poète est semblable au prince des nuées
Qui hante la tempête et se rit de l'archer;
Exilé sur le sol au milieu des huées,
Ses ailes de géant l'empêchent de marcher.
Shame! Translator unknown.
Post a Comment