Pax Nortona – A Blog by Joel Sax
From the Land of the Lost Blunderbuss
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Messages
Posted on September 13, 2003 in Anxiety Crosstalk Myths & Mysticism Terrorism
A couple of messages from me and through me:
The sudden appearance of several articles devoted to Buddhism doubtless caught many of you by surprise. I did this for a few reasons. First, I wanted to escape my imprisonment by the media-imposed obsession with the events of two years ago. Second, I was feeling that my poetry wheezed — it possessed strong images, but lacked organization and substance that I believed in. So I revisited the Buddha, argued with a few of followers who’ve taken up residence between the folds of my brain over the nature of the message, and started to feel — both on blog and off — a vitality that I had lacked.
A poem that I’ve been slaving over for a few weeks has started, as a result, to look quite different than it had in the first few, whiney, preachy drafts.
Yule Heibel — in what she descibes as yet another reflection on the events of two days ago and on the 1973 assassination of Salvador Allende — wrote:
Direct action, terrorism, overthrows: it comes down to loss, to one person going missing and making the act real for those who survive. Multiply it by 3, by three thousand, three hundred thousand, use whatever algorithm you want — you’re still left with a seed of peace that didn’t thrive. But it’s seeds of peace we need, and we need the conditions in which they can thrive: the presence of love and the absence of terror (including state-sponsored terror). We shouldn’t live our lives as shadows and phantoms.
Damn! There I have been caught by the obsession again (I just had to go and read what Yule had to say.) Yet her finger is pointing at the same bump on the horizon that I see. I think I’ll keep heading in that direction, towards the place without terror.
If I refuse to be terrorized, what power do they have over me?
In me are joys that can be revived and made to thrive.
It is true that a poor man can be arrogant, but hunger, sorrow, thirst, and the peltings of the weather quickly overcome the character flaw. A rich man, alas, can remain arrogant as long as his cash holds out and it is the nature of arrogance to see that it doesn’t.
