Unanswered Questions

The recent earthquake in Turkey has me so sullen. Not that I already wasn’t. But it just deepened it. These kinds of natural disasters speak to us in many ways, and to the survivors, in many more ways.

Contingency has always been a topic on the foremost of my mind. A riddle. We are all like leaves in the wind, blown hither and there, by what and why, we don’t know. You can understand all the laws and forces of nature but for the life of you, you won’t understand the rules of the game of dice “life” plays by and of which you too, are party. Sorry Einstein my friend, I do think God plays dice.

Tragedies of this scale leave us empty, naked of our normal hubris. We know shyte, that is what it really comes down to. An event like an earthquake, really pushes that fact home. We all live under the thumb of a hand throwing Mallarme’s dice - un coup de des.

There is so much luck of the draw to our lives. So much contingency and an earthquake brings that alive, into focus, severe focus.

I’ve been in a few mild ones and watched the ground beneath me go up and down, wave upon wave. I felt like in some kind of hallucination. A magic trick was being played on me. For some time after, I felt unable to really speak.

Besides the total luck of the draw, fate-filled, seeming random evil of an earthquake or any natural disaster, there is too, the fear and lingering terror of the survivors. I recently watched a documentary about the devastation in Nepal from an earthquake. Years later, survivors still live in tents outside their apartment buildings - afraid to fall asleep in them.

Earthquake communicate other things, have other messages for us. Primarily how the forsaken and afflicted are soon forgotten as life moves on and governments forget and crooks and scoundrels steal from the needy. Look at any place in the world where there has been an earthquake and you’ll see decades after, continued squalor.

The earth moves - it is alive. This is a strong message also. We go about our daily lives without being conscious of this most fundamental fact. All things are alive, even rocks and soil. Only their time frame is much larger than ours - so they appear dormant. But trust me, they are alive and contain the force of life itself.

Every earthquake in the news instantly makes me think of Voltaire’s Candide. How he, in the book, dealt with its absurdist element. Much of Lisbon was wiped out and yet the authorities, the scientists, the religious leaders, those driving the thought machine - chortled that despite the illogic, the injustice of nature - it is all still for the best. It has its logic, thought hidden.

Voltaire would have none of that kind of enlightened rationalism. There was no way to rationalize the terror, the horror and suffering of the earthquake.

He writes in a poem written later, after Candide …

“On the Lisbon disaster; or an Examination of the Axiom, "All is Well” (1755)

Unhappy mortals! Dark and mourning earth!

Affrighted gathering of human kind!

Eternal lingering of useless pain!

Come, ye philosophers, who cry, “All’s well,”

And contemplate this ruin of a world.

Behold these shreds and cinders of your race,

This child and mother heaped in common wreck,

These scattered limbs beneath the marble shafts—

A hundred thousand whom the earth devours,

Who, torn and bloody, palpitating yet,

Entombed beneath their hospitable roofs,

In racking torment end their stricken lives.

To those expiring murmurs of distress,

To that appalling spectacle of woe,

Will ye reply: “You do but illustrate

The iron laws that chain the will of God"?

Say ye, ‘er that yet quivering mass of flesh:

“God is avenged: the wage of sin is death”?

What crime, what sin, had those young hearts conceived

That lie, bleeding and torn, on mother’s breast?

Did fallen Lisbon deeper drink of vice

Than London, Paris, or sunlit Madrid?

I have no answers to the suffering of this world. That is principly the source of my melancholic, sullen state. Why him, not me?

I do know, like Candide, I will not argue that injustice, terror, suffering is necessary, part of the divine plan. Look for an “a fortiori”, a greater reason. No. I’ll keep looking for some other answer beyond science, our age of rationalism and necessary violence, the breaking of eggs to make an omelette.

I’m not hopeful. All that has happened in my life has taught me I can, we can, only find it in song - an answer only to be felt, not thought.

I’ll return to my Irish folktunes or Bethoveen’s 5th. Ultimately, the absurdity of an earthquake can only be answered by whiskey and inner storm.

Writing Poetry Blues

Some nights I think
“what’s the use of it”,
console myself with
the thought that somehow
all this shit
sickness, sex and song
does matter
and that I’ll have
a few words cut from
this cardboard life
to show for it.

then the morning
and I read the newspaper
about a man killed
from debris
falling from the heavens,
of 10,000 Bangladeshi’s
now bloated carcasses
courtesy of a monsoon
or
of a child
tossed from an overpass
onto the freeway below
and it is all I can do
to get
one foot to follow the other
and hide my tears
from a god undeserving
as those silly questions
I ask myself
some nights.