Singular points, singular actions

From Muriel Rukeyser, The Life of Poetry (c William L. Rukeyser, published by Paris Press, 1996):

Certain lives [reach us imaginatively], so that the whole life becomes an image reaching backward and forward in history, illuminating all time. The life of Jesus; the life of Buddha; the life of Lincoln, or Gandhi, or Saint Francis—these give us the intensity that should be felt in a lifetime of concentration, a lifetime which seems to risk the immortal meanings every day, pure in knowledge that the only way to realize them is to risk them. Think, too, of Beethoven’s life, of the Curies and Father Damien; or of that living person whose daily meanings carry most to you. These lives, in their search and purpose, off their form, offer their truths. They reach us as hope.

At the “singular points” in history …certain gestures provide expression. Heroes are made. That is, a man or woman allows many people to feel the moment of crisis, and to understand that it is common to all imaginations ready to receive its meaning.

In this country, one man who cut through to the imagination of all was John Brown, that meteor, whose blood was love and rage, in fury until the love was burned away. That crazy murderous old man, he must be called by Lincoln, and he must be hanged, condemned in agony. But that precipitating stroke, like the archaic bloody violence of the Greek plays, spoke to many lives.

In Belgium, during the last war, the Jews were required by edict to wear the yellow Star of David which would mark them and set them apart. On the first day of the edict’s validity, nobody appeared in the street without the yellow badge. In a great simple act of love and identification, the Belgian people had cancelled the power of a ruling that, without the acceptance of the majority, could not force any group apart from the rest of the people.

…

The form of their belief marked those in Belgium that day, all the underground fighters, the savage and gentle heroes of our long way. At the same time, that form evoked its comparable belief in countless lives.

These men and women express connection. That is their gift in life, as it is the gift of art.

The knowledge of this gift is powerful.

The uses of such knowledge are wide; its ignorance is fatal.

Oh, and “Wild Nights” indeed.

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