(no subject)

[oyceter]

I was not going to write about London, because I feel like everything I could possibly say is trivial or cliched in light of what happened, and because right now, I would like to bury my head in the sand and pretend that things like this didn't happen in the world.

The human condition astounds me sometimes. Things happening in my personal life have been a little difficult, and then something like this happens, and everything is small and trivial and unimportant but that I am alive and the people I care about are as well.

I can't think about the larger politics, because my instinct is to personalize everything.

I dislike newspaper reports of the numbers and statistics, because I have a difficult time thinking of human lives that way. One person, I understand. One person, who is an acquaintance of many, who is the friend of a good deal, and is very close to a few. One person dead is so many affected. Thirty-seven people have died, at least the last I heard, and each one of those people is the center of a circle of influence, connected to so many others. Putting a number on it makes it seem small next to other tragedies, like the tsunami in December and 9/11, but one life is so very large that just one dead is tragedy enough. I don't think things like these can be measured.

And in just another moment, I will go back to posting and emailing and thinking about my own trivial life. Except, I know that it isn't trivial, not because I am more glorious or worthwhile, but because all the people who died did these things as well. Somehow, all these trivial things, all these cliches, they make up a life, and I don't think a life is ever trivial or cliched.

Comments

[katie-m.livejournal.com]

"The Diameter of the Bomb"

The diameter of the bomb was thirty centimeters
and the diameter of its effective range about seven meters,
with four dead and eleven wounded.
And around these, in a larger circle
of pain and time, two hospitals are scattered
and one graveyard. But the young woman
who was buried in the city she came from,
at a distance of more than a hundred kilometers,
enlarges the circle considerably,
and the solitary man mourning her death
at the distant shores of a country far across the sea
includes the entire world in the circle.
And I won't even mention the crying of orphans
that reaches up to the throne of God and
beyond, making
a circle with no end and no God.

-- Yehuda Amichai
(translated by Chana Bloch)

[livinglaurel.livejournal.com]

OMG, total PSYCH. I haven't run into anyone else who thinks of that poem in the same way.

[katie-m.livejournal.com]

Wow. That's a heck of a crosspost. Yeah, that was posted to a poetry listserv I'm on... oh, it must've been after the Bali bombing.

[livinglaurel.livejournal.com]

I found it after 9/11, I think -- I'd read a little Amichai before that, but not that poem.

[oyceter]

Oh thank you. I really, really like that.