Leviathan

Madness begets madness.

Our indifference towards those in genuine need
is matched only by our own fantasies of victimhood.
We complain when short changed then walk past beggars
as we reflect on our own petty vindications. On holiday
we complain about slow service at the same beach resort
where bodies of drowned refugees washed up the year before.

Madness begets madness,

and even to scrutinise our condition invites ridicule and scorn.
Argument is taken as affront, evidence dismissed as provocation,
logic taken as personal insult. There is only shared conviction
or deliberate contradiction. There is no nuance, doubt or investigation.
Assertion is an end in itself. Facts are banners around which to rally.
News is fake unless it makes us feel good. Lies are celebrated
if they let us to continue to lie to ourselves. Hate and avarice prevail
and the dog-whistle and the knee-jerk are our only clarion and litmus.
Truth corrodes and crumbles in the acid and greasy bile
with which we lubricate our discourse. We succumb
to the suggestions of every opportunist, indulge every easy prejudice,
genuflect to monsters, and replace thought with reflex and gratification,

and madness begets madness.

We must put our hands over our children's ears when our leaders speak
to protect them from the filth they spout
as they exculpate themselves from their sex crimes,
implicate all men to make their own guilt seem commonplace and unremarkable,
misdirect our indignation towards the weak and the vulnerable and the foreign.
We placate the angry at the expense of moderation. We indulge the bullies
who insist we listen to them despite the fact they have nothing to say,
who complain they are being ignored even though no-one else is allowed to speak.
We allow others who timidly bear the most urgent of messages to fall silent
to appease them and let their loud, empty words fill our halls and chambers
and courts and parliaments and cathedrals with their specious import.

But do not confront the world head on. If you do
you will only discover it possesses inexhaustible reserves of horror
that will overwhelm the best in anyone.
It will outdo the most inventive imagination with the variety of its atrocities.
It leaves even God dumbstruck and paralysed with trauma, unable to intervene,
or so it seems. What chance do we then stand? Is there is another way?

Even though we try, even though we may raise a humble yard
from the broken limbs and timbers of our greatest cities,
until its pillars become our tallest skyscrapers once again, its canopy
our hand held up against the sky as the measure of our ambition,
the highest degree of civilisation we can accomplish
remains an exquisitely refined barbarism. We may invest
the finest vessel we can construct with the noblest cargo of hope,
and launch it with our age's loudest boast of progress,
raised in unison as a cheer to hail the brightest future,
but Leviathan will splinter its stiffest beam in its grip,
and reduce all collective endeavour to disconnected tales
of individual panic and despair,
and to survive we must become flotsam and seek that beach
where we intrude on another man's dream of paradise,

but accept the futility of our efforts and make them anyway.
The most we can ever achieve is temporary repair,
so defiantly live in a world built and rebuilt from its own wreckage,
and act not out of fear or desire for the consequences of our actions,
but because our actions are who we are
and we will not be defined by their futility,

and be kind to one another. Offer the beggar change.
Learn the histories of the places you visit,
reflect on the losses they have suffered,
celebrate the human legacies they have left us.
We will dismantle and fold up and pack away
and dispatch paradise to people in distant lands
going through hell, so that some earthly shelter
may be assembled where it is needed.

For kindness begets kindness.