Skywritings

Licit for gods

Illicit for clods

The meaning of life is:

If you and yours are healthy, safe, well-sheltered and well-fed then life is about helping those who are not.

“that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know…”

Pannonia’s Poster-PM, Viktor Orban, has found yet another scapegoat to blame for Hungary’s economic and social problems.

No, it still can’t be the fault of his own inspired policies of appropriating people’s private pensions, imposing a flat income tax on the populace, inflating taxes on foreign companies and banks, dismantling the independence of the banks and the judiciary, punitive press control laws, government-side FUD campaigns against philosophers critical of Mr. O, crony political and commercial appointments, property appropriation, self-enrichment and corruption, self-perpetuating rigging of electoral boundaries, covert and overt support to irredentist and fascistic groups and sentiments and using his unearned but technical super-majority to ram through an undemocratic and self-serving new constitution designed to keep his party, appointees and sentiments in power for decades to come.

None of these are to blame.

Now that it’s not the Russians with their uniforms who are responsible for Hungary’s malaise, but the Europeans with their suits (joining a long line of prior oppressors — Turks, Austrians, Reds, Whites, other political parties, foreigners, gypsies, and, of course, the Jews) — Mr. Orban now ascribes magyar malheurs to Europe’s preoccupation with protecting geese and pigs from maltreatment. The lament will sell well with the ladies who spend their time with geese heads firmly wedged between their thighs, forcing food down their throats till their livers get sufficiently diseased to cater for the French appetite for paté de foie gras. Hungary is one of the last European paté suppliers — but the supply of putative perpetrators of Pannonia’s problems (always excepting, of course, themselves) is inexhaustible.

I miss you unendingly
Unbearably.

But what hurts still more
is that your life has ended.

That you can never again
wake to a painless day.

It’s not about me.

—-

I shall never know
if I ended your days
prematurely.

If I have committed
that unpardonable
irreversible
sin of sins
no torment
is punishment enough
not even if Pascal’s Hell splits into an infinity of Infernos
my soul searing in every one of them,
forever.

2012-07-10

Dear little Tsindri
you cannot give back to Phaya
his life
and nothing can fill the void
in mine
but you can circle in it
round and round
and curl up
purr and doze
trustingly

2012-06-04

How much easier it would have been
for me

if all those unseen, unshown inner burnings,
all that vomiting, all that nausea,
all that delirium, all those punctures,
all those forced awakenings
all those forced feedings,
all that fear
about what is going to be done to you next,
by whom, where, when,

had been my fears and burnings and not yours.

How much easier it would have been
for me.

But this is not about me.

The loss,
now looming,
is not my loss.

I am powerless,

except to wrench from you
what’s left of you

and I will do it.

I have no words.

Only boundless, endless love,
for you, my own dear little Phaya.

I take refuge in one dreaded chore to escape another, more dreaded chore…

As a Canadian and British citizen (left-leaning), I am sentimentally and aesthetically a royalist, as long as the royals conduct themselves in a way that is aesthetically and ethically positive (and not too much public money is spent on them).

A monarch with a historic pedigree can, like a flag or soil, be a more palpable symbol for a populace to identify with, and take heart in (especially in hard times) than an appointed or elected figurehead. (My native Hungary’s current presidential fiasco is a case in point.)

But nothing excuses a monarch who is old enough to know better from going out and wantonly shooting elephants (whether or not his people are groaning under a heavy financial yoke).

If the British royals ever did anything like that today, I would immediately become a republican.

(I’m rather afraid that if I took a closer look at current royals’ domestic hunting, I might already become as anti-sovereignist, with reason, as the separatists [ironically calling themselves “sovereignists”] among my fellow-quebeckers already are, without reason, alongside Canadian and Australian republicans, likewise without reason.)