Artemisia Gentileschi, Judith Slaying Holofernes (c. 1612)
153 words
The tally of crimes is no neural vice
Cursing enemies no wasted locution
Stowing grudges far beyond their price
If some day it yields retribution
Count all transgressions — ten fingers ten toes
Enough fists and boots to keep score
Should amnesty to amnesia transpose
True injustice is laid bare to abhor
Should the piety of indifference be
What lets Christians rest on their laurels
I’d sooner say it’s clearer to see
When you’re perched atop former quarrels
Ocular barter forged the active Jew
— Too egalitarian for my type of creed
Karma outsourced by the languid Hindu
While Good Samaritans are a dying breed
The instinct that’s there for kin and kith
When events come to push and shove
Discard forgiveness — a blank-slate myth
Make vengeance your labor of love
When wrongs cannot be righted, glean
The lesson of true dedication
What warms the cockles of your spleen
Is finding your fate in vindication
* * *
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3 comments
I am not sure I agree with the poet’s idea that we need to become vengeful like the Jews. It certainly won’t play well with anyone who hasn’t been deprogrammed from holocaustianity. I enjoyed the rhyming verse nevertheless. Artemisia Gentileschi’s painting is gorgeous and might make a nice frontispiece to Roger Devlin’s next book.
You may have noticed the critique of Eye for an eye. In any case, Lex talionis was Roman law too.
The cult of forgiveness is a disingenuous platitude and performative ritual at best; at worst a pathological temperament that is paid for with other blood. The semantic doublets forgive/forget and amnesty/amnesia are not coincidences, but close reflections of a common essence.
What is jurisprudence for other than to institutionalize some form of vengeance? Only corrupt courts and legislations abandon this objective by promoting amnesties. Vengeance can take both negative and positive forms, it is often about mindset. At the very least, cursing wrongdoers in a very conscious fashion seems a fitting reaction, or is this reserved only for infertile fig trees?
Ocular barter – I puzzled over that.
Infertile fig trees? Are you referring to modest statues?
Of course there will always be vengefulness but at least for the last millennium and a half our religion has deprecated it in favour of love. But that, obviously impreactical religious stricture, has until quite recently always been present within a vigorous martial culture in which reprisals of some sort were self-evident necessities. Criminals must be punished. Is punishment vengeance? It’s semantics but a Christian might justify punishment as good for the soul, exemplary and protecting society, but not as vengeance. That worked well enough for us for a long time and may have well have been crucial to our civilization’s success. Who can say?
For most people being urged to take revenge on criminals whom they’ve until recently always seen as victims would turn them away but there is the question, should we have some success, of what we would do with our enemies. Long-term internment camps would be one option, the reality of the eventual effect of these being obvious enough. The Greek-speaking Romans were fond of blinding as an effective disability which the bishops approved. Unlike in past eras though whatever we do will have to be honestly justified as, in any sort of world we would wish to live in, hiding the truth would be nigh on impossible. Educating the populace about the millennia-long struggle will be an urgent priority. There are precedents.
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