PAX PERNICIOSA

(PAX PERNICIOSA - A HARMFUL, INSIDIOUS PEACE - WHEN WE MISALIGN OUR UNDERSTANDING OF EVIL AS SOMETHING ‘OUT THERE’ WHICH WE HAVE NEATLY LABELLED AND BY DOING SO, THINK THAT WE CAN CONTROL IT. FOR THE EVIL THAT DWELLS ELSEWHERE, IN SOMEONE OR SOMETHING ELSE IS ALWAYS EASIER TO CONTROL WITH OUR MIND. OR SO WE THINK).

Firstly, clear your own eye of the clod of earth, before attempting to clear the speck of dust in someone else’s eye. And whatever you do, before you’ve done this don’t focus on nipping the bud of national or provincial evil and its servants.

In religious terms, the evil one is always labelled ‘heretic’, even when they may be bringing a gift, a revelation to a stinted and sheltered community’. The would rather dam the truth and allow it to trickle down sluices - for after all, scarcity increases value, or so they say - than have a wellspring of Spirit breakthrough the dam. Dam the wellspring and damn the messenger.

And so, I have to look at me and my motivations, to stand against something, or someone; the latter makes it much more personal, as I have a precise target. In fighting evil. we can become so self-righteous, the mirror of the ego imposes itself on my thinking and then my actions. The twist in the barb is always misconstruing violence with radical action.

And yet, here I am , a man of words, deemed dangerous because I write poetry!

How can that be?

The likes of Chiron, Langley and Gobelet, were at different stages in my life, a targets of invective, loathing and even hate. They all stood for the control of people, the cancelling of freedom and the evil fetish of torturing those who stood against them - even if that defiance was a few stanzas of poetry.

It’s true, they don’t know what they are doing, for they are not awake; they are reactionary, unconscious; they are political and ideological zombies, as Strix has called them in his journal. They will attack any semblance of resistance to their control of society or its bureaucratic machinations.

Unchecked, it would be easy for me to become like them; reactionary, hitting out at every turn, every twist of injustice. However, it is the mirror of the soul that I look in to and not the mirror of their ego, that sees me as a distortion of a true citizen.

Looking back, were they right to accuse me of being a ‘toxic poet’, a malcontent in their society. Political language is a deviation from the norms of words and their meanings; for what is a malcontent in a society which holds freedom to their bosom, is one thing, but a malcontent in a deceitful age may actually be the ultimate form of resistance.

In a time of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. - George Orwell

Whilst it was true that I like bourbon and yes, sometimes this led to indiscretions in my actions, or yes, my disagreeable rants at the ‘Fix Club’, in between me performing some poetry, then I’m guilty as charged. Even for rants at the Paparazzi that made it their duty to be at any arrests I may have suffered under the local Police.

Sometimes a jaundiced soul can turn sour, and spout forth with all the sour words I could conjure up. What I needed was something; a little hope, a sign of love to alleviate the stress of feeling oppressed or possessed by the State.

Something? No. It turned out to be someone, not an object but a subject. My oath to a Pax Perniciosa, an insidious, harmful peace, when I was trying to balance abuses of the State with finding a way of surviving it all and also raising a voice against it.

Sometimes the hate of the State towards its citizens would transform me into someone that hate was moulding, transforming me into a reactionary, a violent resister of their power. That is what happens when unbelief turns life, my life sour.

And then, Shula destroyed this Pax Perniciosa, this way I had adopted to balance the suffering of injustice with my desire for transformation. I knew where the evil was, it was in the State Machine, it was in the Ministers of Pain. But I did not want to become like them.

Then Shula came along - to speak her name sounds like a whisper of the Spirit. She calmed my inner turmoil, the evil within me, and left me with, no, not a void but with peace, hope and the knowledge that inside me were also good things, My cry for justice, for freedom; for we had sold freedom at the cheapest price, by collaborating for the sake of a false peace of having everything you would need for life; save for freedom of speech, of thought and movement.

This not to be confused with a benevolent State, but a pernicious one; for people are not chattel, consumables, but sometime succumb to seeing themselves in this way. This then, is their Pax Perniciosa.

“The prophet engages in futuring fantasy. The prophet does not ask if the vision can be implemented, for questions of implementation are of no consequence until the vision can be imagined. The imagination must come before the implementation. Our culture is competent to implement almost anything and to imagine almost nothing.” - Source - Walter Brueggemann

And then Shula came along… and helped mend the cracks in the mirror of my soul. She was a salve for a body that had been beaten many times by the Police. (This was in the days before the brutish State Security Services came into being). The unction of Spirit; a remedy for a soul that saw that both lover and the Divine had deserted him. Shula took me on a journey to and through my inner self; for she was a soulwalker.

She helped realign my passion for life, call it a Pax Pulchra, a beautiful peace. (Forgive my ham-fisted attempts at Latin). Shula showed me that I was Light, not darkness. She showed me the path of non-violence and this allowed me to know that I could be renewed, awakened and see my work as an expression of those things; to subvert, to undermine and not confront our abusers with threats of violence, or street justice.

There was then no scapegoating, of placing the blame on someone else, like Langley or Chiron, but to see that we, as a community of citizens of Light had been complicit in our own oppression because we did not value Freedom enough. We should not look to them to bring about change, for they are invested in maintaining the status quo.

WE ARE THE CHANGE, not them. What we need to do, is start being and acting like the change we are, that its; those who are awakened to a better way to walk through this beautiful landscape and claim the Pax Pulchra as our own.

Jack Stanza