The Cavalry of Woe
Pilgrimage church Maria Hilf, Moosbronn, Baden-Württemberg, Germany, Miraculous image "Maria Hilf" in the high altar (about 1735), after the Madonna by Lucas Cranach the Elder. H. Zell
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What in the world are we trying to build?
It is such a privileged position to be a part of the transition to the global commons. We need to be cognizant of the responsibility to continue to grow and learn from difference. Reading and writing are the primary mechanisms still of transferring deep knowledge and retaining the lessons learned over time. It doesn’t matter who reads and who writes. The ultimate test is the quality of the thoughts transferred and the durability of the lessons inherent in the words.
My wife brought back from the library a book of the collected poems of Emily Dickinson. Here’s somebody who spent the better part of her life sequestered indoors, in desperate need of communion and living in the hopes that her insights and wisdom would continue to thrive. What could she have done better with a Substack? Not much, if you take out the time and the audience spread from the picture, because the primary mechanism remains the same today as it was then — thoughts reflected by the wise choice and arrangement of words to impact and appeal directly to the mind and heart of an unknown audience of one.
Here’s one of her poems selected at random:
XVI.
To fight aloud is very brave,
But gallanter, I know,
Who charge within the bosom,
The cavalry of woe.
Who win, and nations do not see,
Who fall, and none observe,
Whose dying eyes no country
Regards with patriot love.
We trust, in plumed procession,
For such the angels go,
Rank after rank, with even feet
And uniforms of snow.
The cavalry of woe — how apt an expression for so many of us on here, moved by the observing of a world so full of unjustified suffering. But we should take heart and continue to work and build.
A. Its the only thing we can do.
and
B. It makes a world of difference to “join in the shout,” as coined by @perennial digression.
But I am joining the shout. Save children, end war, and embrace the pace disarmata e disarmante.
I know the cynics will say that words have lost their sting, that the useless posing garnered on these virtual spaces are a product of neurotic grandiosity. And there is of course a sort of misguided grandiosity that accompanies any attempts at communication that reach higher on the scale of needs than food and shelter. But there are more and more people who have reached a point where the burdens carried within need to be let loose, and what better way than to sway our neighbors away from madness or enlighten and sweeten with images of peace and fruitfulness.
That’s what I think, and that’s what I say. Keep building the noosphere envisioned by all because within this space, soldiers of misfortune, are the seeds of future worlds and the hope we all need to believe in, especially in dark times.
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