I've Seen the Future, Brother. It is Murder

The Spirit of the Age?

A troubling thing; a poetic friend has sent me a really fine poem he wrote. But it is a fantasy about raping some woman. Perhaps also killing her.

Recently George Elliott Clarke was forced to pull out of a Regina reading because he had planned to read poetry by Stephen Brown. Clarke has edited some of his work, and obviously considers him a good poet. Brown was convicted of murdering a local girl.

What is going on here?

It is hard enough that we cannot trust government, or the clergy. Now it seems we cannot trust poets either.

Even though they, to the extent that they are good poets, have a direct line to the spiritual world—“inspiration.”

Leonard Cohen seems to have seen this coming. In “The Future,” he refers to

“All the lousy little poets coming round,
Trying to sound like Charlie Manson.”

It is all a reminder, in the first place, that, if poets channel spirits, not all spirits are good spirits. There are demonic forces.

Sensitive souls are connecting, it seems, to some deep rage. And it seems to be a rage against women. Perhaps aroused by feminism, perhaps by the “sexual revolution.”

Cohen also may have seen that. The lines just before those quoted above are:

“You’ll see your woman hanging upside down
Her features hidden by her fallen gown.”

We are in a post-Christian phase, as a culture, and perhaps the pagan rules again apply.

Perhaps we are hearing from the Erinyes.