Friday, May 7, 2010

Read it How You Will

Normal
Is not brutality
Is not one human using another
Is not defending the wrong for convenience
Is not savage ideology
Is not inhumanity
Normal?
 

7 comments:

Katherine said...

Hi Mr Picklesworth (I still love writing your name)
No there not normal... none of those things are normal...at least not to me!!
Have a wonderfully NORMAL weekend Mr Picklesworth!

W.B. Picklesworth said...

Believe me Katherine, I don't want for them to be normal either. But sometimes I hear about what goes on in the world and it astounds me. (I'm listening to an audio book that talks about Yemen and Colombia; someone tried to set off a bomb again in New York; the cousin of one of my friend's at church was murdered; etc....)

Maybe the role of civilization isn't to prevent men from slipping towards inhumanity, but the reverse, to change them from brutes into civilized people?

Better yet, Paul talks about being a new creation in Christ. It's not that we start good. We start with the burden of sin. I see that all around, but somehow the prevailing message is that we start good and there are just a few bad apples who became abnormal somehow.

Anonymous said...

insightful. i love you blog!

Just said...

Sorry to hear about your friend's cousin. I am actually beginning to despair of the world. So many things are happening and making me think the world has gone mad. Stay strong. x

Katherine said...

I see what you mean Mr Picklesworth & I am so very sorry for your friends loss. Such a senseless loss of life!

Dan S. said...

Professor Picklesworth, one thing I've noticed about your poetry is how you sometimes "shape" your stanzas.

Most times I'm sure it's for (positive) aesthetic reasons, but given the title of the post, I wonder if there's a (not so) hidden message this time.

With the extended middle line, are you (consciously or subconsciously) 'flipping the bird' to the brutal/wrong/savage/inhuman?

Or am I reading too much? Just curious...

W.B. Picklesworth said...

Dan, there were a number of intentional things about the poem, the main one being the double-meaning depending on whether you read the first or the last normal (you can't really read both), but your meaning wasn't one of them. Not consciously at any rate.

The feeling that I am trying to communicate is that brutality is more normal than we think. (And that is where the Gospel becomes so much more important than mere ethics or cultural window dressing. It is life in a world that loves death.)