Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: righteousness

  • hitting the child

    Today on the markets I saw a man hit his child. He and his wife were standing among the racks of a bright clothing stall, I did not see what the boy had done but I noticed a woman sitting at her sock & beanie stall knitting had stilled her two needles and taken up watch. He said to his son, We are sick of you today. You must stop this. Look: people are staring. The child looked unhappy. He was maybe 7 or 8. Maybe he had done something monstrous, we were bystanders. I exchanged glances with the sock lady and her mouth tightened. Walking towards the little family I saw that the boy had flung himself on his father, wrapping his body around the man’s leg, his arms tightly clasped round the thigh and his face buried in the fabric of his father’s jeans. The father was speaking to his wife about clothes. I went up close to him. I dropped my hand quietly on his shoulder. “Let him say sorry,” I coaxed.

    “Eh?” He looked up. I repeated, “He wants to say sorry. Let him say sorry.” My hand came up to cup the back of the boy’s small, silky head. “Yeah, yeah,” said the father, dismissively, “we will.” But his own hand crept up into the boy’s hair. Because I think, whether we are parent and child or two adults, by instinct we follow each other’s example. Later I wondered how had I got away with it. Why had the father not slapped me, as well. I think because I had no sense of righteousness, I didn’t feel entitled, I felt irresistibly moved. I felt back to my voice, my tone, and felt its gentleness. I felt the way my eyes were burning with love in my head. You know how you can feel them in their sockets, fires in the skull, your soul on fire inside them, like a pair of windows opening out instead of in.

  • Felix Nussbaum

    Felix Nussbaum

    Today I saw the paintings of Felix Nussbaum who because he was born Jewish was murdered at Auschwitz in 1944. My friend described how ‘we Germans’ had done ‘the worst thing’ by industrializing mass murder. I had never thought of it this way. Apparently Himmler watched a group of detained Jews digging their own mass grave and then vomited each time one was shot and tipped into it. His response was, we need to find a cleaner way of doing this; so the gas chamber was devised. (Why not, “we need to stop doing this”?) Standing in front of Nussbaum’s sensitive portraits and seeing from the dates he had less than five, four, three years to live it was impossible not to weep. We wept and choked and kept our tears silent. The museum gave onto neat German houses through a series of crooked windows, it is called the Museum with No Exit.

    Afterwards it took a very long time to come to grips with my anger and fear and sense of terror and loss, with the grief, the resentment and yes, incipient hatred. I resented all of us for being here when so many sensitive and feeling people have died. I resented my own country, built on the backs of its own native populations and still dishonest about the murders in police custody and in jails. I could feel in my responses how easy it is to start blaming people and how delicate and difficult is the work of keeping one’s heart free of the pernicious weeds of resentment, envy, fear, and suspicion. How easy it feels to start to build on the seemingly empowering intoxication of self-righteousness. They, they, they. We, we, we. All the way home. Alright.