The first two lines of the poem set the mood and state unquestionable truths to hold in the mind while navigating through the rest of the poem:
"Everything lives in motion
Everyone is lost in chaos"
In my interpretation, these lines state the obvious, present state of things. In the temporal world of the poem, readers are quickly plunged from a present-day statement and into the truths of the past, the first 12 lines dedicated to addressing our current state of being and our world right now - and after line twelve - the words seem designed to take us straight to the ancient Elders and deities...
"As...
The temples of the Elders hold the magic
The sun god he predicts the final days [...]"
The words directly relate to ancients at the same time as to these these blogs, the 800 DAYS (Countdown) Project, as well as honouring what is known about the ancients, the Mayan Calendar, Mayan culture, past and present bloody and spiritual sacrifices that have been and are inherent in our world... A nice fusing of past and present.
The poem is artistic - but is also so much more. A condensed history of the past is contained in the words.
Here's a warning for you all...
The poetry is beautiful, attractive - so look past the beauty and into the messages here - THINK! Think hard - look for the metaphors, stop at the ends of lines to pause and THINK about what is unfolding line by line...
...the events Blake voices so wonderfully in his poetic words - are about ancient events - murder, treachery, transgressions against humankind's spiritual considerations - by other human groups - all of this runs so very deep in the history of the existence of people...
Perhaps using poetry to tell truths such as the ones here is the only way to make our historical wrongs against humanity available to a wide-spread audience. We're conditioned to like pretty things, right?
Kudos to Blake for inserting reality, past, present and truths into his works and not giving us cute-sie bubblegum eye candy passages in his poems.
In my opinion, the most powerful lines of the poem:
"But by the hands of a man
We followed the ancient rituals
But had forgotten the ancient pride
We surrendered to the legions our cities of gold
And we left our cities of stone, and our temples in the sky"
Perhaps if we keep reading, keep thinking, keep searching and pay attention to how to use our whole mind in the next seven hundred odd days, we will be able to understand what the end of the Mayan Calendar means but moreso - simply how to be human and humane to each other within this time. If a more sizeable "end" is coming, aside from a piece of ancient technology stopping functionality on December 21 2012, I'm sure that what is going to happen next is going to require that humankind be wiser and more benevolent than right now...
A strange quirk of the human mind is that - when confronted with horrors, it copes sometimes - in ways which makes us worse human beings. ie: we see war, murder and death, then our mind copes in a strange way by dissociating - which makes us capable of witnessing and performing greater acts of horror...
The way out of this tendency is AWARENESS and HUMANE-NESS and if poetry doesn't bring you to awareness and if Blake's particular brand of poetry doesn't bring you to humane-ness, many of us are going to remain truly as lost and in as much chaos as Blake asserts in the beginning lines of this particular poem...
Again, the lines are:
"Everything lives in motion
Everyone is lost in chaos"
If we can overcome our dissociations, people can't rule us in markedly detrimental ways. We'll either dissociate and fall down in our inability to confront horror (this will stop us from acting in any way that is detrimental to another human or living species - nobody can die or be harmed by our hand this way) or our minds and bodies may find a better way to cope and stand aware against detriment to our human species.
We can start preparing our minds for mindfulness and benevolence - by learning...
Go read the poem and start navigating through the concept of understanding!
The Day 713 post is associated with Friday January 7 2011.
