Dissymmetry Poem by gershon hepner

Pulled away from bleakness, Blake
saw tygers burning in the night
so brightly that a firebreak
prevented him from losing sight
of symmetry between the beast
of prey and lambs the beast pursues,
dissymmetry between the east
and more enlightened western views.

Inspired by an article on Joseph O’Neill, author of “Netherland, ” by Maria Russo in the LA Times, June 24,2008:

'I'm half Turkish. My mother's family is Christian. I'm very familiar with the Muslim world in Turkey. I find that the conflict with Islam is grossly overstated and obviously manipulated by Westerners, who are essentially victims of terror. They are terrorized by the terrorism. The whole point of terrorism - and I know this because I have IRA in my family - is to scare people into a false view of reality and to disorient them. 'And a lot of people in the West and, in particular, in Washington, our leaders, are either very scared or, if they're not, they're using the terror to promote a kind of private agenda, in this case, as everybody knows now, the idea that you can democratize the Middle East by conquest. Which is a crazy idea and self-contradictory. 'One of the gratifying things about the critical reaction to this book is that they've all talked about a different aspect of it. That tells me the book avoids being reductive. Without in any way wishing to celebrate obscureness, I think a novel has to retain a certain mystery, a certain elusiveness. If you feel you've gotten to the bottom of a novel, then perhaps the novel is not that deep. So when you're trying to be a conscientious writer, you almost can't be too precise.... One of the great challenges of writing a novel, for me, is to not have it tip over into doom and gloom, which can happen if you think everything through too much. 'There's almost a Newtonian pull toward bleakness, and I don't think bleakness alone is an entirely accurate view of the world.'


6/24/08