A Poem of Force
Jeremy Biles
for David Tracy
...No other comfort
Will remain, when you have encountered your death-heavy fate,
Only grief, only sorrow.
—Homer, The Iliad
Force—
it is that x
that turns anybody
who is subjected to it
into a thing,
a compromise
between a man
and a corpse.
Force
is as pitiless
to the man
who possesses it
as it is
to its victims—
the first
it intoxicates,
the second
it crushes.
We are only
geometricians of matter—
the mind
is completely absorbed
in doing itself
violence,
a picture of
uniform horror.
Force
is the sole hero,
nobody really
possesses it;
there is not
a single man
who does not have
to bow his neck
to force.
Those who use it
and those who
endure it
are turned
to stone,
they become
deaf and dumb.
This reality
is hard,
much too hard
to be borne.
Words of reason
drop
into the void.
Here, surely,
is death,
death strung out
over a whole
lifetime—
the aspect of
destruction.
Here, surely,
is life,
life that death
congeals
before abolishing—
an extreme and tragic
aspect.
To castrate yourself
of yearning,
to respect life
in somebody else,
demands
a heartbreaking exertion,
impossible in logic,
unendurable,
except in flashes.
The soul awakens then,
to live
for an instant
only,
and be lost
almost at once,
the crowning grace
of war.
Incurable bitterness
continually makes itself
heard,
no reticence
veils the step
from life
to death.
Yet never
does the bitterness
drop into lamentation.
It has no room
for anything
but courage
and love.
This poem,
not made
to live
inside
a thing,
is a miracle
on loan
from fate.
In the end,
this poem
disappears
from the mind,
for thought
cannot journey
through time
without meeting
death on the way.
In the end,
the very idea
of wanting to escape
the business
of killing and dying
disappears.
Perhaps all men,
by the very act
of being born,
are destined
to suffer
violence.
Victory is
a transitory thing—
force
is the sole hero.
Come, friend,
you too must die.
Jeremy Biles lives in Chicago, where he teaches courses in philosophy, religion, and art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is the author of Ecce Monstrum: Georges Bataille and the Sacrifice of Form (Fordham University Press, 2007). His essays, fiction, and reviews have appeared in such places as the Chicago Review, Culture, Theory and Critique, Rain Taxi and Snow Monkey, as well as in catalogues for the Hyde Park Art Center, where he has also done curatorial work. He is currently co-editing a volume entitled Negative Ecstasies: Georges Bataille and the Study of Religion (Fordham University Press, forthcoming Spring 2015).
