A brief note here about force and poetry and what role we give to force in our human lives.

In 1939 Simone Veil wrote an essay while living in Paris about Homer’s poem, the Iliad.  She wrote it just before the Nazi army took the city and she had to flee to London.  The essay had to be printed elsewhere, later.  It’s called, L’Iliade ou le Poeme de la Force’ and her understanding of the Iliad is quoted in the Introduction to The Iliad by Bernard Knox in the edition by Penguin and translated by Robert Fagles.

Veil says ‘force is what makes the person subjected to it into it a thing.”

‘The true hero, the true subject, the centre of the Iliad, is force. Force as man’s instrument, force as man’s master, force before which human flesh shrinks back.  The human soul, in this poem, is shown always in its relation to force: swept away, blinded by the force it thinks it can direct, bent under the pressure of the force to which it is subjected. Those who had dreamed that force, thanks to progress, now belonged to the past, have seen the poem as a historic document; those who can see that force, today as in the past, is at the centre of all human history, find in the Iliad its most beautiful, its purest mirror’.

Strange to re-read this now, back in Oz.  I’ve not felt so gentle since I can’t remember when, a feeling I noticed somewhere along the way in Lombok.

But force has been the most dominant impression  on my senses these last four days since my plane came down to land in Oz as dawn’s ripe, red lights spread over this lovely land and showed Sydney in all her bright, beautiful get up. Force in the ubiquitous concrete guttering, big cars, big human bodies, the way these bodies tackle food in cafes – as tho’, sometimes, it has to be tamed, forced in, and  in the aggressive, loud traffic.  Force in the body language of many.

Last night’s public meeting about  a plan to make a suburb sustainable was remarkable.  During the meeting I was in the kitchen getting supper ready for afterwards.  Jess Miller, the Mistress of Ceremonies, won everyone’s hearts and set a clear standard for courtesy and respect. Few, I think, including me, had ever been to a public meeting which was fun, interesting, positive and genuinely pleasurable; Jess, was the springboard for that.

It shows that amidst our society that’s given over, like so many in the West, to force, there can be places of civility, conversation and shared pleasure in the company of others and ideas may be regarded as something worthwhile.

Force.  Civil society.  Curiousity. These swirl around each other, can be competing currents.  Yet, I sense that, especially after last night’s gathering, when we wish to we may choose to put force in its place, the background.

Funnily enough, tho’ may I say, “See you later”, by quoting that wonderful line from Star Wars and say; “May the force be with you”?  In that context, the word ‘force’ means something both gentle and empowering.

Funny things, words, yes?

M