Did historical Jesus really exist?

Raphael Lataster in The Washington Post:

JesusDid a man called Jesus of Nazareth walk the earth? Discussions over whether the figure known as the “Historical Jesus” actually existed primarily reflect disagreements among atheists. Believers, who uphold the implausible and more easily-dismissed “Christ of Faith” (the divine Jesus who walked on water), ought not to get involved. Numerous secular scholars have presented their own versions of the so-called “Historical Jesus” – and most of them are, as biblical scholar J.D. Crossan puts it, “an academic embarrassment.” From Crossan’s view of Jesus as the wise sage, to Robert Eisenman’s Jesus the revolutionary, and Bart Ehrman’s apocalyptic prophet, about the only thing New Testament scholars seem to agree on is Jesus’ historical existence. But can even that be questioned? The first problem we encounter when trying to discover more about the Historical Jesus is the lack of early sources. The earliest sources only reference the clearly fictional Christ of Faith. These early sources, compiled decades after the alleged events, all stem from Christian authors eager to promote Christianity – which gives us reason to question them. The authors of the Gospels fail to name themselves, describe their qualifications, or show any criticism with their foundational sources – which they also fail to identify. Filled with mythical and non-historical information, and heavily edited over time, the Gospels certainly should not convince critics to trust even the more mundane claims made therein.

The methods traditionally used to tease out rare nuggets of truth from the Gospels are dubious. The criterion of embarrassment says that if a section would be embarrassing for the author, it is more likely authentic. Unfortunately, given the diverse nature of Christianity and Judaism back then (things have not changed all that much), and the anonymity of the authors, it is impossible to determine what truly would be embarrassing or counter-intuitive, let alone if that might not serve some evangelistic purpose. The criterion of Aramaic context is similarly unhelpful. Jesus and his closest followers were surely not the only Aramaic-speakers in first-century Judea. The criterion of multiple independent attestation can also hardly be used properly here, given that the sources clearly are not independent. Paul’s Epistles, written earlier than the Gospels, give us no reason to dogmatically declare Jesus must have existed. Avoiding Jesus’ earthly events and teachings, even when the latter could have bolstered his own claims, Paul only describes his “Heavenly Jesus.” Even when discussing what appear to be the resurrection and the last supper, his only stated sources are his direct revelations from the Lord, and his indirect revelations from the Old Testament. In fact, Paul actually rules out human sources (see Galatians 1:11-12).

More here.

What was Prohibition really about?

151221_r27379-320x240-1449780586Kelefa Sanneh at The New Yorker:

People have known since the Stone Age that sugary liquids, given time, have a salutary tendency to ferment, transforming themselves into something like beer or wine. Distillation, a more sophisticated process, was perfected only in the past few hundred years, and wherever it went it upended social customs. In “Deliver Us from Evil,” a crisp history published in 1976, Norman H. Clark explained that nineteenth-century temperance movements in the U.S. distinguished gin, whiskey, and other distillates from milder beverages, which were considered part of the common diet. “Many Americans of the New Republic simply did not regard beers and wines as ‘intoxicating,’ ” he writes. By contrast, hard liquor was prohibited in some American territory even before the country formed: in 1733, James Oglethorpe, the founding governor of the British province of Georgia, banned “the importation of ardent spirits.”

In the early nineteenth century, though, the country had a vibrant distilling industry, to supply a demand that scholars have struggled to quantify, though they agree that it was enormous. By one estimate, in 1810 the average American consumed the equivalent of seven gallons of pure alcohol, three times the current level. Nineteenth-century temperance campaigners deployed a familiar cast of stock figures: starving children, battered wives, drunks staggering and dying in the streets. (Researchers were just figuring out the science of liver failure, which bloated and killed so many heavy drinkers.) During a visit to Philadelphia, Alexis de Tocqueville was informed that, although the “lower classes” were drinking too much cheap liquor, politicians didn’t dare offend their constituents by imposing heavy taxes.

more here.

The Strange Paradise of Paul Scheerbart

ScheerbartAdam Kirsch at The New York Review of Books:

Scheerbart often reads like an apocalyptic mystic out of the Middle Ages who was somehow transported to the age of railroads and telegraphs. He returns again and again to the idea that existence—our own, or those of aliens on other planets—can be transformed into a paradise inhabited by beings who are like gods. In the introduction to a small new Wakefield Press volume, Rakkóx the Billionaire & The Great Race, the translator W.C. Bamberger recommends Scheerbart to the reader with the imprimatur of Gershom Scholem and Walter Benjamin, both of whom liked his work. And it was surely this oddball utopianism that so appealed to Scholem and Benjamin, each of whom was in his own way obsessed by the messianic. Scheerbart, Benjamin wrote, seemed “never to forget that the Earth is a heavenly body”; science fiction was a way of forcing the reader to see humanity in a cosmic, celestial perspective.

Yet the agency of earthly renewal, in Scheerbart’s work, is not divine—at least, not directly. It is, rather, the power of human ingenuity, operating with hitherto unimaginable tools and techniques, that will literally remake the face of the earth. Scheerbart is a mellow Marinetti; his faith in modern technology is not suffused with Futurist aggression, but with a dreamy aestheticism.

more here.

Sizing up the Sinatra legacy, one hundred years on

Cover00Ted Gioia at Bookforum:

A musician's centenary celebration typically offers a chance to revisit songs long departed from the charts and to recall mostly forgotten triumphs. But that’s hardly the case with Frank Sinatra. I recently checked, and saw that the ten best-selling jazz songs on iTunes include four by Sinatra. And the top-selling jazz album today is a collection of Sinatra tracks for the Reprise label, most of them around a half-century old.

Face it, the Chairman of the Board hasn’t gone anywhere. He’s still where he’s always been:A-number-one, top of the list, king of the hill. David Lehman tells the story, in his aptly named appreciation Sinatra’s Century, of a senior corporate executive who strolled into a meeting with his management team. He slapped an eight-by-ten glossy photo of Frank Sinatra on the table and announced to the room: “This guy has been dead sixteen years and he still makes more money a year than all of us combined.”

Pretty good for a centenarian, no? Indeed, Sinatra’s more like a centurion, those hardy Roman soldiers who conquered the world. And the high rollers knew that, even when Sinatra was alive and kicking. Caesars Palace announced the singer’s appearances in the ’70s with a medallion that proclaimed: “Hail Sinatra, the Noblest Roman.” When even Caesar offers tribute, who are the rest of us to disagree?

more here.

My year in Islamophobia

Emad Ahmed in New Statesman:

Islamophobia-is-no-laughing-matter-Muslim-entertainers-take-the-show-on-the-road-600x393Many years ago, when I accidentally flicked the TV to Fox News, my dad pointed out the need to be aware of what’s being said by those you disagree with, no matter how objectionable those views can be. It’s been the most important lesson for me to remain as inquisitive as possible, and the reason why I (as a Muslim) pounced at the opportunity to interview the most outspoken atheist living today, Richard Dawkins. Dawkins is in fact so outspoken about religion, particularly Islam, that I was genuinely stunned when he decided to angrily walk away from our scheduled interview after I confirmed my beliefs in the revelations of the Islamic faith, calling my views “pathetic”. This is an area of great interest to him after all, and my friend Mehdi Hasan has made an excellent argument for the peaceful coexistence between science and faith, and distinguishing between evidence and proof. There is no evidence for the existence of parallel universes, for example, unless you’ve watched Jet Li kill multiple versions of himself in The One too many times. Yet I’m more than happy to sit down and have a sensible discussion with someone holding this view as well as those deemed completely intolerable. It’s just an opinion after all.

This unsavoury encounter got me thinking about the Islamophobia I’ve faced throughout the year like many Muslims, aided by the continuous stream of stories which leave me in a permanent state of facepalm. It's so alarmingly difficult to identify as a Muslim today. I’m having to prove my sensible existence in a world dominated by dramatic headlines and tweets.

More here.

Why America Is Moving Left

Peter Beinart in The Atlantic:

ScreenHunter_1584 Dec. 24 14.31The story of the Democratic Party’s journey leftward has two chapters. The first is about the presidency of George W. Bush. Before Bush, unapologetic liberalism was not the Democratic Party’s dominant creed. The party had a strong centrist wing, anchored in Congress by white southerners such as Tennessee Senator Al Gore, who had supported much of Ronald Reagan’s defense buildup, and Georgia Senator Sam Nunn, who had stymied Bill Clinton’s push for gays in the military. For intellectual guidance, centrist Democrats looked to the Democratic Leadership Council, which opposed raising the minimum wage; to The New Republic (a magazine I edited in the early 2000s), which attacked affirmative action and Roe v. Wade; and to the Washington Monthly, which proposed means-testing Social Security.

Centrist Democrats believed that Reagan, for all his faults, had gotten some big things right. The Soviet Union had been evil. Taxes had been too high. Excessive regulation had squelched economic growth. The courts had been too permissive of crime. Until Democrats acknowledged these things, the centrists believed, they would neither win the presidency nor deserve to. In the late 1980s and the 1990s, an influential community of Democratic-aligned politicians, strategists, journalists, and wonks believed that critiquing liberalism from the right was morally and politically necessary.

More here.

Syria and Surrealism

Muhammad Idrees Ahmad in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

Syria-243x366Wishful thinking is the essence of Barack Obama’s Syria policy. In lieu of decisive action, the president opted for brave words. He has drawn red lines that he wasn’t willing to enforce. With no strategic interests at stake, he saw no reason to expend resources on mere humanitarian concerns. In an explicit break with the past decade’s neoconservative interventionism, he has chosen a policy of “realist” restraint.

This amoral policy of malleable principles and unsentimental reserve should warm the heart of any “realist.” But a recent issue of The New York Timescarries a curious indictment by two luminaries of the “realist” school: Stephen Walt of Harvard and Gordon Adams of the American University. The authors deride Obama for basing his Syria policy on a wish and a prayer: “A wish that President Bashar al-Assad would leave and a prayer that the ‘moderate’ Syrian opposition would be more than it is.”

It would be brave for “realists” to admit that their prescriptions yielded a disaster: absent a deterrent, Assad bombed his opponents with impunity; the repression and slaughter precipitated a mass exodus; and with the US a mere spectator, Russia and Iran stepped in to shore up their ally. Meanwhile ISIS remains entrenched and blowback has reached Western capitals.

But “realists,” like their neoconservative counterparts, rarely admit error. They can, however, be relied upon to compound mistakes.

Walt and Adams are not concerned that Obama’s actions failed to match his rhetoric; their concern is that his words failed to live down to his inaction. They seem unsure, however, whether Obama is a dithering Hamlet or an intransigent Coriolanus.

More here.

Landmark Algorithm Breaks 30-Year Impasse

Erica Klarreich in Wired:

ScreenHunter_1583 Dec. 24 14.21A theoretical computer scientist has presented an algorithm that is being hailed as a breakthrough in mapping the obscure terrain of complexity theory, which explores how hard computational problems are to solve. Last month, László Babai, of the University of Chicago, announced that he had come up with a new algorithm for the “graph isomorphism” problem, one of the most tantalizing mysteries in computer science. The new algorithm appears to be vastly more efficient than the previous best algorithm, which had held the record for more than 30 years. His paper became available this week on the scientific preprint site arxiv.org, and he has also submitted it to the Association for Computing Machinery’s 48th Symposium on Theory of Computing.

For decades, the graph isomorphism problem has held a special status within complexity theory. While thousands of other computational problems have meekly succumbed to categorization as either hard or easy, graph isomorphism has defied classification. It seems easier than the hard problems, but harder than the easy problems, occupying a sort of no man’s land between these two domains. It is one of the two most famous problems in this strange gray area, said Scott Aaronson, a complexity theorist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Now, he said, “it looks as if one of the two may have fallen.”

More here.

The Book Lady of Kabul

J. Malcolm Garcia in Guernica:

Book-pipe-and-glasses_jpgLarge_TOP-minShe walks without hurry, somewhat stiffly, sore, a diminutive woman unnoticed, burdened, using her chin to clamp down on a column of books she holds against her chest. Thin paperbacks most of them, a few hardcover. All written by her husband. The books appear worn as she does. Her tired eyes, lined face. Her forehead wrinkled into streams. Maybe from long, nightly exposure to the humid, grainy air, the white smoke rising from kabob grills wafting around and powdering her with ash. Maybe from seventeen years of selling her homebound husband’s books. She does not know, does not really consider her fatigue any more than she reflects on how she sees and breathes. Block by block she maneuvers through the teeming sidewalks of Kabul’s Shar-E-Naw shopping district until she enters Ice-Milk Restaurant, stops at tables.

“Would you like to buy a book?” she says.

The twentysomething customers talk to one another staring at their iPhones and ignore her. Outside, more young people gather, dressed in tight blue jeans and dazzling, multicolored shirts reminiscent of the disco era. They talk loudly, with an air of We are special, laughing, hurrying past storefronts promoting Mastercard Premium, Marco Polo Garments, Alfalah Visa, United Bank, Body Building Fitness Gym, New Fashions Kabul Shop. Their shadows converge and fade into the glow of so many green and blue and red blinking lights dangling from awnings, unfolded above advertisements for pizza and club sandwiches and chicken fingers, and those same shadows cross a boy standing in the middle of the sidewalk and leaning on crutches, his left leg gone, his right hand out for money, and the young people swerve around him as if he were standing in the center of a traffic roundabout, and amid this confusion the book lady leaves Ice-Milk Restaurant without having sold one book and stops at another restaurant, Fast Food Pizza and Burger. The West’s influence can be seen throughout Shar-E-Naw in the kaleidoscopic displays of consumerism and high prices that for a moment render the decades of ongoing war here as obsolete as the donkey-drawn carts plodding next to black Hummers stalled in traffic. But the sight of a maimed begging child, injured, she presumes, by a mine, reminds her that beneath the sequined mannequins and suggested affluence and rush to catch up with the Twenty-First Century, Shar-E-Naw is still Afghanistan.

More here.

What I Learned from Losing $200 Million

Bob Henderson in Nautilus:

ScreenHunter_1582 Dec. 24 13.41I’d lost almost $200 million in October. November wasn’t looking any better.

It was 2008, after the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy. Markets were in turmoil. Banks were failing left and right. I worked at a major investment bank, and while I didn’t think the disastrous deal I’d done would cause its collapse, my losses were quickly decimating its commodities profits for the year, along with the potential pay of my more profitable colleagues. I thought my career could be over. I’d already started to feel those other traders and salespeople keeping their distance, as if I’d contracted a disease.

I landed in London on the morning of November 4, having flown overnight from New York. I was a derivatives trader, but also the supervisor of the bank’s oil options trading team, about a dozen guys split between Singapore, London, and New York. Until this point I’d managed the deal almost entirely on my own, making the decisions that led to where I … we … were now. But after a black cab ride from Heathrow to our Canary Wharf office, I got the guys off the trading floor and into a windowless conference room and confessed: I’d tried everything, but the deal was still hemorrhaging cash. Even worse, it was sprouting new and thorny risks outside my area of expertise. In any case, the world was changing so quickly that my area of expertise was fast becoming obsolete. I pleaded for everyone to pitch in. I said I was open to any ideas.

More here.

 How Has Islamic Orthodoxy Changed Over Time?

Elias Muhanna in The Nation:

ScreenHunter_1581 Dec. 24 13.08The medieval English allegorical poem Piers Plowman described the birth of Islam as the result of a clever hoax. Muhammad, it asserted, was a former Christian who had made a failed attempt to become pope and then set off for Syria to mislead the innocents. He tamed a turtledove and taught it to eat grains of wheat placed in his ear. In a scene reminiscent of the enchantment of Melampus, the Greek oracle who was granted the ability to understand animal speech when his ears were licked by snakes, Piers’s Muhammad mesmerized audiences by having the bird fly down during the course of his preaching and appear to whisper in his ear. Staging a moment of revelation from God, the false prophet led men to misbelief by “wiles of his wit and a whit dowve.”

In the centuries following Muhammad’s death in 632, many Christians like William Langland, the author of Piers Plowman, sought to make sense of Islam in the terms and symbols of their own faith. Was it just another schismatic sect led by a great here­siarch, as Dante portrayed it in his Divine Comedy? Or was it an ancient form of chivalry, a Saracen code of ethics? Did Muhammad’s followers think him a god? The figure of the prophet-as-trickster found in Piers Plowman was not the most outlandish attempt to explain the origins of Islam. Medieval French chansons de gestes attributed a welter of fantastical qualities to the cult of “Mahom,” including a pantheon of minor deities superimposed from Roman mythology.

More here. [Thanks to Zain Alam.]

The Riptide of Technocracy

Habermas_body

Jonathan White reviews Jürgen Habermas's The Lure of Technocracy, in The Boston Review:

Like any critique of today’s EU, The Lure of Technocracy must be understood in the context of the political handling of the “Euro crisis.” As the global crisis of private debt was transformed in Europe into a question of public debt, and as concerns regarding the finances of particular countries provoked wider uncertainty about the Eurozone as a whole, EU officials implemented a series of emergency measures to restore order. These ranged from short-term bids to ensure the solvency of individual states (principally through credit facilities and cross-border loans) to deeper efforts to reshape national economies and reduce budget deficits. The latest round of this ongoing crisis management resulted in last summer’s clash between a government opposed to the austerity program (led by Syriza in Greece) and an array of institutions determined to impose it (led by the German government).

In these scenes of institutional redesign, Habermas discerns the “self-empowerment of the European executive.” There is no single institution that goes by this name. Among those Habermas denotes are the European Council, where the leaders of EU member-states gather for major decisions, and the non-elected institutions of the European Commission and Central Bank. Sometimes in concert with the International Monetary Fund, these institutions have enjoyed a level of influence over the handling of the Euro crisis unmatched by national legislatures and the European Parliament. Furthermore, by instituting new monitoring regimes to constrain national budgets—ostensibly rule-based but with much room for discretion—they have ensured the longevity of crisis powers beyond the horizon of the financial crisis.

Technocracy was also a theme of Habermas’s writing in the 1960s and ’70s, but it was a rather different beast then. In that period the ideology of expertise was concertedly in the service of a managed economy: it was a technocracy of the center-left, at least by today’s standards. Its critics, including Habermas and the student protest movement to which he responded, targeted paternalism, hierarchy, and large-scale bureaucracy; the principle of a planned economy was not in question. By contrast, technocracy today must be seen in the service of monetary economics. Its interventions are cast as exceptional actions to address unforeseeable contingencies, not as the normal business of government, and are geared to market stability and a privatized economy rather than the improvement of society more broadly. Today’s critique of technocracy, in short, is a critique of the New Right rather than the Old Left.

More here.

Military to Military

Syrian_civil_war

Seymour M. Hersh makes a controversial claim in the LRB:

A former senior adviser to the Joint Chiefs told me that the document was an ‘all-source’ appraisal, drawing on information from signals, satellite and human intelligence, and took a dim view of the Obama administration’s insistence on continuing to finance and arm the so-called moderate rebel groups. By then, the CIA had been conspiring for more than a year with allies in the UK, Saudi Arabia and Qatar to ship guns and goods – to be used for the overthrow of Assad – from Libya, via Turkey, into Syria. The new intelligence estimate singled out Turkey as a major impediment to Obama’s Syria policy. The document showed, the adviser said, ‘that what was started as a covert US programme to arm and support the moderate rebels fighting Assad had been co-opted by Turkey, and had morphed into an across-the-board technical, arms and logistical programme for all of the opposition, including Jabhat al-Nusra and Islamic State. The so-called moderates had evaporated and the Free Syrian Army was a rump group stationed at an airbase in Turkey.’ The assessment was bleak: there was no viable ‘moderate’ opposition to Assad, and the US was arming extremists.

Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, director of the DIA between 2012 and 2014, confirmed that his agency had sent a constant stream of classified warnings to the civilian leadership about the dire consequences of toppling Assad. The jihadists, he said, were in control of the opposition. Turkey wasn’t doing enough to stop the smuggling of foreign fighters and weapons across the border. ‘If the American public saw the intelligence we were producing daily, at the most sensitive level, they would go ballistic,’ Flynn told me. ‘We understood Isis’s long-term strategy and its campaign plans, and we also discussed the fact that Turkey was looking the other way when it came to the growth of the Islamic State inside Syria.’ The DIA’s reporting, he said, ‘got enormous pushback’ from the Obama administration. ‘I felt that they did not want to hear the truth.’

‘Our policy of arming the opposition to Assad was unsuccessful and actually having a negative impact,’ the former JCS adviser said. ‘The Joint Chiefs believed that Assad should not be replaced by fundamentalists. The administration’s policy was contradictory. They wanted Assad to go but the opposition was dominated by extremists. So who was going to replace him? To say Assad’s got to go is fine, but if you follow that through – therefore anyone is better. It’s the “anybody else is better” issue that the JCS had with Obama’s policy.’ The Joint Chiefs felt that a direct challenge to Obama’s policy would have ‘had a zero chance of success’. So in the autumn of 2013 they decided to take steps against the extremists without going through political channels, by providing US intelligence to the militaries of other nations, on the understanding that it would be passed on to the Syrian army and used against the common enemy, Jabhat al-Nusra and Islamic State.

Germany, Israel and Russia were in contact with the Syrian army, and able to exercise some influence over Assad’s decisions – it was through them that US intelligence would be shared.

More here.

When Water Is Safer Than Land: Addressing distress migration

Jacqueline Bhabha in Harvard Magazine:

CrisisThe jubilation that accompanied the brief flowering of the Arab Spring is long gone as its deadly aftermath—in Libya, Syria, and elsewhere—spirals into transcontinental turmoil. We face the prospect of a grim winter. Hundreds of thousands of desperate people in flight from those indiscriminate civil wars (not to mention the chaos in Iraq and Yemen, the turmoil in parts of Africa, and the ethnic oppression in Myanmar) face arduous hurdles in search of safety and security in Europe and elsewhere, while potential hosts negotiate rising xenophobia (intensified by the November attacks in Paris) and increasing desperation in the face of apparently unending need caused by the continuing migrant arrivals. What alternatives exist? How can this apparent impasse be better tackled? And how should we think about the recurring migration and refugee “crises” that present themselves with almost predictable regularity on every continent? We need a new paradigm for thinking about twenty-first-century “distress migration,” because the post-World War II framework that still governs our laws and procedures is, in practice, defunct.

The Syrian Catastrophe

There is no question about the gravity of the need. The plight of Syrians is most acute. The vast majority of that country’s population (recently estimated at more than 16 million people) are trapped in situations of deadly conflict: flattened cities, escalating civilian casualties (more than 340,000 as of early November, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights), and the disintegration of quotidian life. A substantial minority, more than four million Syrians, eke out lives of “temporary permanence” in underfunded, overcrowded, and increasingly squalid places of refuge in neighboring states, in and outside of actual refugee camps. The prospects of a speedy return home are nil—yet humanitarian interventions are predicated on that assumption, as evidenced by temporary shelter arrangements and makeshift medical care.

More here.

Feuding physicists turn to philosophy for help

Davide Castelvecchi in Nature:

StringIs string theory science? Physicists and cosmologists have been debating the question for the past decade. Now the community is looking to philosophy for help. Earlier this month, some of the feuding physicists met with philosophers of science at an unusual workshop aimed at addressing the accusation that branches of theoretical physics have become detached from the realities of experimental science. At stake is the integrity of the scientific method, as well as the reputation of science among the general public, say the workshop’s organizers. Held at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in Germany on 7–9 December, the workshop came about as a result of an article in Nature a year ago, in which cosmologist George Ellis, of the University of Cape Town in South Africa, and astronomer Joseph Silk, of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, lamented a “worrying turn” in theoretical physics (G. Ellis and J. Silk Nature 516, 321–323; 2014). “Faced with difficulties in applying fundamental theories to the observed Universe,” they wrote, some scientists argue that “if a theory is sufficiently elegant and explanatory, it need not be tested experimentally”.

First among the topics discussed was testability. For a scientific theory to be considered valid, scientists often require that there be an experiment that could, in principle, rule the theory out — or ‘falsify’ it, as the philosopher of science Karl Popper put it in the 1930s. In their article, Ellis and Silk pointed out that in certain areas, some theoretical physicists had strayed from this guiding principle — even arguing for it to be relaxed. The duo cited string theory as the principal example. The theory replaces elementary particles with infinitesimally thin strings to reconcile the apparently incompatible theories that describe gravity and the quantum world. The strings are too tiny to detect using today’s technology — but some argue that string theory is worth pursuing whether or not experiments will ever be able to measure its effects, simply because it seems to be the ‘right’ solution to many quandaries.

More here.

Wednesday Poem

The Dog Was Crying To-night Night in Wicklow Also

In memory of Donatus Nwoga

When human beings found out about death
They sent the dog to Chuckwu with a message:
They wanted to be let back to the house of life.
They didn’t want to end up lost forever
like burnt wood disappearing into smoke
Or ashes that get blown away to nothing.
Instead, they saw their souls in a flock at twilight
Cawing and headed back for the same old roots
And the same bright airs and wing-stretching each morning
Death would be like a night spent in the wood:
At first light they’d be back in the house of life.
(The dog meant to tell all this to Chuckwu.)

But death and human beings took second place
When he trotted off the path and started barking
At another dog in broad daylight just barking
Back at him from the far bank of a river.

And that is how the toad reached Chuckwu first,
The toad who’d overheard in the beginning
What the dog meant to tell. “Human beings, he said
(And here the toad was trusted absolutely),
“Human beings want death to last forever.”

Then Chuckwu saw the people’s souls in birds
Coming toward him like black spots off the sunset
To a place where there would be neither roots nor trees
Nor any way back to the house of life.
And his mind reddened and darkened all at once
And nothing that the dog would tell him later
Could change that vision. Great chiefs and great loves
In obliterated light, the toad in mud,
The dog crying out all night behind the corpse house.
.

By Seamus Heaney