Prayer In The Form Of A Song

The Nation of France Answered The Great Attack With A Song For The Ages

“In my land we don't question someone who has been touched deeply.
There is no malign shadow over capsized boats.” 

― René Char

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To a friend on the phone last night, I didn’t say what I wanted to say, I gave voice to the thing with its hands on my throat.

“But..what if it ends like this? What if they manage to eradicate all human kindness.”

He was quiet for a moment, then Mark said:

“Wasn’t it you who said: “They can’t stop the river of life?'“

“Yes, I did say that.”

We’d been talking about the gains of the technocrats and the robots.

At a restaurant the night before, the waitress instructed Anne to place her phone over a code called a QR code and then punch in our order. She explained, absurdly, that it was “because of Covid.” They may as well admit that “Covid” is, to them, a deity of ill-will that can’t be denied any sacrifices. The ‘virus’ is on the menus, then, but not the table?

Let me break it down simply:

The thing that always must be expressed and enforced is abandonment.

If there was once a human interaction, it must be eliminated, “because Covid.” This began decades ago, slowly, with automated phone systems. “Press one if you wish to…”

Everybody, for years, tried to press any button that would produce a human being on the other end of the phone, until we grew to accept that this was too much to ask.

Christians are not spiritually permitted to be afraid.

Globalists are not spiritually permitted to acknowledge beauty.

(“My name is Greta Thunberg and I want you to panic.” Wild applause.)

(The child is a terrorist, in the literal meaning of the word.)

Do you know….I watch this song, these people, their music, their dance, their faces, many times each day, but only when I am prepared for the tears. Fossilized heart, how long before it truly breaks, in me, in you?

Who in the United States of America remembers People?

The language of the body is not the language of the internet, the emoji, the text.

The singer remains a mystery to me, though I could find out more. Did he write this incredible song? How does he dance like that? How does he pass around joy like from an ancient chalice?

“Here, take some.”

His arms stretch out as before a reunion with a great friend found alive in a war zone.

“I think he has got to be part Arab,” I say to Anne in the kitchen, who may or may not be listening to me any more about the dancing man. “Arab blood. Am I supposed to say “Middle Eastern?”

She comes and peers at the screen and I point out all the remarkable moments in his dance, how he moves like a cloud, and how his eyes are soft like what a Russian poet once called a real artist.

He doesn’t hate anybody.

“Yeah, he is remarkable,” Anne says.

Every day I borrow joy from him, until I find it again.