“On Friday morning, the author Salman Rushdie was stabbed in the neck as he stood onstage at the Chautauqua Institution, in western New York, where he was scheduled to give a lecture. The motivations of his attacker were not immediately clear, but Rushdie—one of the most celebrated contemporary writers—had lived under the threat of violence for decades. In 1989, the year after Rushdie published “The Satanic Verses,” a novel that imagines a fictional version of the Prophet Muhammad, the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini, issued a decree, or fatwa, calling for Rushdie’s death.” —The New Yorker, 8/12/2022
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Last Day of Federíco García Lorca
“The writer died while mixing with the rebels, these are natural accidents of war . . .”
—Spanish Dictator Francisco Franco, Authoritarian
“The country has to toughen up … part of the problem …is nobody wants to hurt each other anymore, right?”
— US president, Donald Trump, Authoritarian
…….. Federico in pajamas and blazer died at night
…….. wearing the sudden-death clothes of a poet killed
…….. because there’s nothing more dangerous to despots
…….. than an artist who tells the day’s truth
…….. because some force within insists.
…….. Accepting death for being one’s self
…….. is life’s condition of being one’s self
…….. because to speak is to be.
…….. This condition applies to all in all times
…….. because nothing ever changes the insistence of love
…….. & witness under any sky or sun.
…….. Although the atmosphere of place and eras swings from
…….. heaven to hell on a dime before the head-count has time
…….. to blink, and because the intractable who paint Guernica
…….. or write Canto Libre or Satanic Verses
…….. (artists who dare) could well end with bullet-through-skull
…….. because, to a despot, silence is golden (long-lived or brief)
…….. because despots know that painters and poets,
…….. sculptors and dancers will always speak
…….. from momentary possession
…….. because they’ve found the straightway
…….. to brainsoul of human-kind,
…….. the place despots only enter
…….. by means of fear & blood
…….. which always mocks
…….. the divine
…….. Jim Culleny, 3/7/19