Single Combat Poem by gershon hepner

Single combat with shape-shifting
untruths is the constant battle
poets fight while plates are rifting,
quaking while they preach and prattle.

Seamus Heaney writes about Czeslaw Milosz in TNR September 13 and 20,2004) :
No doubt the intensity of his early religious training contributed to his capacity to let perpetual light shine upon the quotidian, yet this religious poet was inhabited by another who was, in a very precise sense, a secular Milosz, one afflicted by the atrociousness of the saeculum he was fated to live through. The word 'century, ' usually preceded by the definite article or the possessive pronoun, first-person singular, repeats and echoes all through his writing. It was as if he couldn't go anywhere without encountering, as he does in his poem 'A Treatise on Poetry, ' 'The Spirit of History... out walking, ' wearing 'About his neck a chain of severed heads.' And it was his face-to-face encounters and contentions with this 'inferior god' that darkened his understanding and endowed everything he wrote with grievous force.
His intellectual life could be viewed as a long single combat with shape-shifting untruth. 'The New Faith' upon which the communist regimes were founded was like the old man of the sea, a villainous fallacious Proteus who had to be watched, wrestled with, held down, and made to submit. Just how much stamina and precision this entailed can be seen in the almost inquisitorial prosecution of argument and accusation that characterizes The Captive Mind, the book that he introduced like a bell and candle between himself and his Polish contemporaries who had succumbed to the Marxist tempters. The sense of personal majesty which developed around him in old age derived in no small measure from his having survived this ordeal, which sprung him into solitude and left him a wanderer, as capable in the end of self-accusation as he had been of accusation.


9/7/04