the bands 'o brothers; or; love's laboors lost

THE SUNDAY(PM) PIGEON MASSACRE PART III my band's name in the 60's, for which I take partial responsibility-- the other comes from the preternatural malice towards city pigeons sported by Robert Benchley--also of TNY fame

As said earlier, malice is pretty hard to evade. Let s/he who is without malice be the critic..but then one is left without a motive. " When we are all guilty, that will be democracy," said Camus..maybe that time is now,,maybe it was always..but democracy is evanscent because it is unendurable. To all admit our guilt at once, and take equal responsibility as and with our neighbor..is not how we do compassion, and it certainly is not how we compete.

In Gogol's, "The Terrible Vengeance", the sorcerer cum (an) antichrist gets his in the Cossack tradition; he is denied the one thing he believes he needs and has exercised all his life: " This torment will be the most terrible for him: for there is no torment more terrible for a man than to desire revenge and be unable to get it." But it is not just the sorcerer who wants revenge;it is his ancestors and even his Orthodox victims.

In the previous scene, reminiscent of the encounter with the priest and the doctor in,"The Plague", Ivan, who is killed by his brother Petro to get Ivan's reward from King Stepan, is visited by God at the time of Petro's death. "Ivan! I will not easily find a punishment for him;you choose how he shall be punished!"

Only one problem: Ivan does so most imaginatively, and the old bandore player in the villages sings of his sad end; neither brother comes to Paradise; Ivan must be a kind of ghostrider in the sky in the grim Carpathians. He must stand over the sorcerer's grave/abyss to be sure he never escapes his torment--which is pretty bad, so, "There. I've said too much already" (Hobbes to the rescue)

The tale is somewhat of a Job's tale in reverse. Only at the end do we find what has happened in Paradise. But one can surely say, as with "I believe in malice," that such a tale, "Explains a lot, doesn't it?" But nothing explains everything; because even if we had all knowlege and wisdom bared in front of us, how would we get our little minds around it, even in the aggregate? A thousand thousand cultures only cloud the issue at hand, i.e. the "Tree of the knowledge of good and evil" which is also the source of many of our troubles. And plagues.

For I see, albeit dimly, that this knowledge is not a body of it; Strange as it may seem to us, morals, values, and ethics do not ever come close--exactly as Wittgenstein said, as quoted in a previous post.

Knowledge of good, and evil, is in actual point of fact, exactly what God De-scribed and Moses re-scribed: A Tree!

My recent previous post mentions a tree, so does one of my favorite Lorca poems; one tree;any tree; is an irreducible fact; even when cut down,burned, or just ignored. "YOU HAVEN'T LEARNED ANYTHING ABOUT THE PLAGUE," shouts the thief Cottard after gunning down people randomly in the street, after the quarantine is over and his plans for making money have ratted in his hands. ''IT ALWAYS COMES BACK!!!!" (But if not, we will do its task ourselves, as he demonstrates.)

"The Missing" is also about revenge, but has in common with Gogol's tale the idea that insofar as virtue may be its own reward--though I doubt that--revenge may be as well, as we see in the denoument of the book and of the Croat "family". (yes they are as bad as the name sounds)

We are quick to make judgements but never never never have sufficient knowledge to do so..if we can't even judge the worth of a tree;even after 50 years, how can we do so with human souls? The Trees too always come back only more so. Ever hear of The Ent Tribe? The plague bacillus eventually may not, however. Where is smallpox except in a lab somewhere? (But you never know)(And if it does get out, then whose fault will it be? Like Katerina the Cossack's wife, if we know what's in the cell, though it be one's own father, if we let him out in our foolish sentimental journey while knowing he is trying to kill not just her but everyone, shall we continue to blame God for what Pandora has done? Not to mention what our country cousins, Achilles and Agamemnon, have done.)

Addendum: In the movie, "The Plague" there is a woman in the cast who observes the attack of Dr. Rieux on Fr. Paneloux's doctrine, and says, "I've never watched two priests fight before!", bemusedly. Good point but I think the movie differs significantly from the novel so I will have to go back for a look. But I will say one thing; after seeing the movie, I feel dismal for those to whom medicine is now just a matter of materialism, beating the odds, politics, and law i.e. a mere commodity.This would be rather like comparing, "The Plague", with, "The Phantom Empire" starring Gene Autry the singing cowboy. Whilst thousands perish underground, his main duty is to get back to the ranch every day by 2 PM to do his radio broadcast, "or we'll lose our contract." (Please please please don't ask me how I know this)