Scott Moringiello recalls Simone Weil on Homer and violence:
“The true hero, the true subject, the center of the Iliad is force, that x that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing.” “Exercised to the limit, it turns man into a thing in the most literal sense: it makes a corpse out of him.”
For various reasons I have been considering recently Catholic sexual morality, and mulling over with muffled outrage the clerisy’s long defense of marital rape, a form of the above, as a legitimate derivative of “God’s plan for the human family,” marriage. And so many other things. I suppose it is bootless to be retroactively outraged. But oh in middle age how hard it is to find anything to believe in. Time to find my old copy of Blake, I think, and reread the Songs of Experience.
I laid me down upon a bank,
Where Love lay sleeping;
I heard among the rushes dank
Weeping, weeping.Then I went to the heath and the wild,
To the thistles and thorns of the waste;
And they told me how they were beguiled,
Driven out, and compelled to the chaste.I went to the Garden of Love,
And saw what I never had seen;
A Chapel was built in the midst,
Where I used to play on the green.And the gates of this Chapel were shut
And “Thou shalt not,” writ over the door;
So I turned to the Garden of Love
That so many sweet flowers bore.And I saw it was filled with graves,
And tombstones where flowers should be;
And priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,
And binding with briars my joys and desires.
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