What passing-bells for those who die as cattle?
– Only the monstruous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle
– Wilfred Owen
(1893 – 1918)
Can our minds and our writings alienate themselves from this climate of total war that surrounds and involves us? For the sake of our mental health, it would be good for us to continue talking about other things, looking outside ourselves and the terrible news that reaches us hour by hour and in which, increasingly, “each man only has to give/a horizon of bombed cities” (Eugênio de Andrade).
Our age is turning into one of those times in which times transform beyond our wills, whatever they may be, and in which there is a savage and radical destruction of what we have spent decades accumulating. As if war were the cleaning that the owners of the house do before changing the furniture. Our drama is that we don’t know who the owners of the house are, nor what new furniture they want to bring, because the ends of war always surpass the more or less rational strategies that move the leaders who are instigators and agents of wars. That’s why, in the end, the results are so different from what winners and losers predicted!
Another characteristic of all wars is that they always last much longer than planned. Hence, in some cases, it is the military, aware of the unsustainability of war objectives, that impose peace on political powers; but the reverse situation can also be recorded.
At the present moment, we see a great lack of definition in the final purposes of this widespread war in the Middle East, in addition to the clear and permanent objective, on the part of the United States, of guaranteeing Israel’s security, even if the ending has to be like that of the biblical story of Samson…
Ukraine and, by extension, Europe, risk losing strength and presence at this juncture, in which the Middle East will clearly take precedence over the Ukrainian drama.
The situation of the Iranian people is cruelly paradoxical: the overwhelming majority of qualified and educated people, outside the state bureaucracy, hate the theocratic-military dictatorship that has been imposed on them; but I do not believe that, despite everything, they can happily see their country being attacked and destroyed by foreign forces. I don’t think at all that this will lead these people (and what is their relative weight in the Iranian population?) to show solidarity with a regime they hate. But we do not see a consistent and organized alternative emerging within that country’s valiant opposition.
Rumi, the great Sufi poet and mystic (1207 – 1273) said of wars that they had the consistency of “children’s fights”. Unfortunately, between this consistency and the consequences of wars the distance is enormous and deadly.
There is a custom in Iran of going to the tomb of the poet Hafez (14th century) and, opening the book of his poems at random, looking for a guide for our future. When I was there, I saw many young people looking for their future in a random poem by Hafez. I did the same now, after finishing this article, and this poem came to me, which I transmit to you here, with my thanks to Hafez, and dedicated to the brave Iranian people who fight for their freedom:
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