by
Pablo Neruda
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When they were called to the table,
the tyrants came rushing
with their temporary ladies,
it was fine to watch the women pass
like wasps with big bosoms
followed by those pale
and unfortunate public tigers.
The peasant in the field ate
his poor quota of bread,
he was alone, it was late,
he was surrounded by wheat,
but he had no more bread,
he ate it with grim teeth,
looking at it with hard eyes.
In the blue hour of eating,
the infinite hour of the roast,
[...]
from The Great Tablecloth. the second passage in the original Spanish, which is perfect in a way that the translation can't hope to match:
Su oscura ración de pan
comió el campesino en el campo,
estaba solo y era tarde,
estaba rodeado de trigo,
pero no tenía más pan,
se lo comió con dientes duros,
mirándolo con ojos duros.
And it was at that age ... poetry arrived
in search of me. I don't know, I don't know where
it came from, from winter or a river
I don't know how or when,
no, they weren't voices, they were not
words, nor silence,
but from a street it called me,
from the branches of the night,
abruptly from the others,
among raging fires
or returning alone,
there it was, without a face,
and it touched me.
I didn't know what to say, my mouth
had no way
with names,
my eyes were blind,
something kicked in my soul,
fever or forgotten wings,
and I made my own way,
deciphering
that fire,
and I wrote the first, faint line,
faint, without substance, pure
nonsense,
pure wisdom
of one who knows nothing,
and suddenly I saw
the heavens
unfastened
and open,
planets,
palpitating plantations,
the darkness perforated,
riddled
with arrows, fire and flowers,
the overpowering night, the universe.
And I, tiny being,
drunk with the great starry
void,
likeness, image of
mystery,
felt myself a pure part
of the abyss,
I wheeled with the stars.
My heart broke loose with the wind.
from Poetry (la poesia)
Little by little, and also in great leaps,
life happened to me,
and how insignificant this business is.
Those veins carried
my blood, which I scarcely ever saw,
I breathed the air of so many places
without keeping a sample of any.
In the end, everyone is of this:
nobody keeps any of what he has,
and life is only a borrowing of bones.
The best thing was learning not to have too much
either of sorrow or of joy,
to hope for the chance of a last drop,
to ask more from honey and from twilight.
Perhaps it was my punishment.
Perhaps I was condemned to be happy.
Let it be known that nobody
crossed my path without sharing my being.
I plunged up to the neck
into adversities that were not mine,
into all the sufferings of others.
It wasn't a question of applause or profit.
Much less. It was not being able
to live or breathe in this shadow,
the shadow of others like towers,
like bitter trees that bury you,
like cobblestones on the knees.
Our own wounds heal with weeping,
our own wounds heal with singing,
but in our own doorway lie bleeding
widows, Indians, poor men, fishermen.
The miner's child doesn't know his father
amidst all that suffering.
So be it, but my business
was
the fullness of the spirit:
a cry of pleasure choking you,
a sigh from an uprooted plant,
the sum of all action.
It pleased me to grow with the morning,
to bathe in the sun, in the great joy
of sun, salt, sea-light and wave,
and in that unwinding of the foam
my heart began to move,
growing in that essential spasm,
and dying away as it seeped into the sand.
from October Fullness
[...] Today's Establishment, in my view, is bound together by common economic interests and a shared set of mentalities: in particular a mentality that holds that those at the top deserve ever greater power and wealth. Unaccountable power could become more representative, but it would still be unaccountable. There could be women, working-class and ethnic minority people involved in institutions and systems that threaten democracy, but those institutions and systems would still threaten democracy.
systems thinking! maybe i need a tag for this
Here, it's worth reiterating that the book is an explicit rejection of the idea that the Establishment represents a conscious, organized conspiracy. Sure, there are undoubtedly specific conspiracies, from police cover-ups to tax avoidance on an industrial scale. Yet the whole premise of the book is that the Establishment is bound by shared economic interests and common mentalities. There is no need for any overarching planned conspiracy against democracy. The Establishment is an organic, dynamic system.
Nor are all police officers 'class warriors' who wish to defend a grotesquely unequal distribution of wealth and power. They do so because they are tasked with enforcing the law, and the law is often rigged in favour of the powerful. [...]
Nor is this a book about individual 'villains'. The Establishment is a system and a set of mentalities that cannot be reduced to a politician here or a media magnate there. Little can be understood simply by castigating individuals for being greedy or lacking in compassion. That is not to absolve people of personal responsibility or agency, to argue that individuals are just cogs in a machine or robots, blindly following a pre-written script. But it is to argue against any notion that Britain is ruled by 'bad' people, and that if they were replaced by 'good' people, then the problems facing democracy would be solved. [...] Personal decency can happily coexist with the most inimical of systems. [...] It is the behaviour that a system tends towards and encourages that needs to be understood.
[...] 'Ah, but the difference between tax avoidance and benefit fraud is that the former is legal while the latter is not.' But such a reply in itself inadvertently underscores how the law is rigged in favour of the wealthiest, even when their behaviour is far more socially destructive. [...]
Nonetheless, Ernst & Young's Steve Varley is insistent that tax avoidance is effectively a necessity: that companies are practically compelled to engage in the practice by law. Directors of companies have a 'fiduciary legal responsibility' to have a strategy that increases the 'financial position' of their businesses, he says. 'Then it starts to get blurred, nowadays, doesn't it? Because you've got the whole thing about what's moral, what's fair, what's equitable in society. I think it's really difficult to respond to. How do you really work what's a moral and fair tax? You have a fiduciary responsibility as a company director to make sure you do the right thing for the company and there's nothing in company law about doing the right thing for society.'
he goes on to say that the Companies Act 2006 does actually compel directors to care about local communities etc but this mindset is very widespread (afaik) and thus worth noting
But for Simon Walker, Directory General of the Institute of Directors [...] He advocates rolling back all remaining workers' protection laws, because he does not believe it is possible to 'regulate for bad bosses'. His view is that the market will simply decide. 'I think that if a company is known to be a rotten employer, it will get a reputation for that, and people will be much less keen to work there,' he argues. Walker apparently labours under the illusion that millions of workers are spoilt for choice about where they can work, or are able to judge the relative benevolence of employers, and to make a choice about their place of work based on such knowledge. It is a fantastical view that says much more about how insulated are the lives of those at the top rather than the reality of the situation for the vast majority of working Britons.