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Thursday, February 11, 2010

Speaker For The Living

A Modern Day Speaker for the Dead


I wrote a poem this week for the Peace-Weaving blog about foreclosure and sheriff's sale of peoples' homes; it was about tears and dispossession...it was about the violent war being waged against people everywhere - now and in the past.

Ruth made a great and inspired comment. One of the people at Hanaan's Diner said that Orson Scott Card wrote about the Speaker for the Dead.
The concept of a Speaker for the Dead was a good concept, based as it was in the reality of the 20th century and the present century; reminiscent of Joyce's story of change The Dead; reminscent of the play Copenhagen, where there is so much complexity, Heisenberg and Bohr can't speak until they are dead.

Now maybe we'll be Speakers for the Living.
Not finding our future in some half-baked rehash old the old political parties, but a commitment to the Living, and to the Future: Speakers for the Living.


4 comments:

Unknown said...

What we need are doers and makers of the living; what we have are doers and makers of the dead.

Montag said...

Yes. We finally see our leaders for what they are.

And I take back any good comment I ever made about Sarah Palin. She is committed to the philosophy of The Dead. Let her bury her own.

Ruth said...

Bringing in Heisenberg and Bohr from Copenhagen, not being able to speak until they are dead, that's inspired.

Baysage is also inspired. Doing and making. We need it all - speaking, singing, doing, making. And it all starts with seeing. We have got to see first, and seeing Palin and all the death of all of 'em! Well, but we also have to see our own death, humbly. Like Rob Brezsny keeps saying on my sidebar:

"The people I trust the most are those who are always tenderly wrestling and negotiating with their own shadows, making preemptive strikes on their personal share of the world's evil, fighting the good fight to keep from spewing their darkness on those around them. I aspire to be like that, which is why I regularly kick my own ass."

Montag said...

Truly said. The struggle is eternal.

The struggle to be Good is the Law.