Retallack #7: "The Problem of Evil"

A contemporary example of the 'problem of evil' lies within so called cancel culture:


'As the Atlantic writer Elizabeth Bruenig points out, despite all the talk about how advanced, how enlightened and how modern we like to think we are, unlike past generations we have simultaneously managed to create societies which have absolutely no coherent story, none at all, about how somebody who has made a mistake, who has committed an error of judgement, can atone, make amends, and retain some sense of continuity between their old life and their new, cancelled life.'

via Matt Goodwin on substack.

Retallack's poem speaks to a real world.

Ray, that's a killa stanza 👏👏👏

2. She's playing with various senses—including idiomatic senses—of "light" in the final lines of the first section of the poem. What is she doing with light? What effect do the variations of this term/idea have on us as readers of the poem?

As mentioned by another poster (leah?) the idioms re-light seem like cliches. The noir tropes enacted ie the angled, flashing lights, murder etc. infer - an opposite dark set of idioms - in the dark, a shot in the dark, a leap in the dark ... These are also cliches. So it's a quagmire and you sink regardless of how the fragments are configured. I'd describe the tone as ironic.

I think she's talking about an evil that is kind of insidious, almost accidental and not alarmingly but subtly threatening. A game where no one remembers the rules hints at no one knowing the difference between right and wrong; sleeping dog lies, maybe seemingly innocent lies. Truth for which the past has left us unprepared in the way that we are unprepared for a stranger in our bedroom who puts his hand over our mouth. That's a pretty scary unprepared. At first the light is blinding but then it just illuminates and brings into focus like the light of reason or the light at then end of the tunnel. Here she uses some cliches which have infiltrated our culture in the way the evil maybe has. Evil is running through our everyday lives and we hop from time to time to try to avoid the worst of it.
In the second stanza it's mostly the same lines as the first stanza repeated, but they're all jumbled up. I think this is a way of representing the outcome of the evil. Everyone in our society is confused because they don't know the difference between right and wrong or the difference between light and dark. I think that the only new lines in the second stanza are "like a god dividing light from dark" and later, "a message we can't make out." language is indecipherable.
I don't know what the line "you are the light of my life he whispered" at the end of each stanza means. I wonder if it has something to do with trust.
I don't know if what I've said is ridiculous or way off base but it's the first poem of hers that I've felt I could kind of "interpret" in this way. I wonder if it's an early poem - I don't recall seeing a date.

I failed to say I think that the theological lie is that some god has divided light from dark where there is no dividing good from evil or light from dark. Humans move and act, are victims and are perpetrators of violence in senseless ways.

So I woke this morning with an urge to run the mashup through Quillbot, and this was the unedited result:

the appears

How it is to us the him, however we must shelter of we lights empty for a long time — and to begin forgotten the knuckles

We hang for the life rules, no surprise as unawareness.



We are shimmering over one past hopping to have and infirm can't are on fierce Tell mouth



what about him?

Will the players be afraid to inform glare sleeping white will hammering

Occasionally, another in Tunnel greets you for slumber End and strongly

Over who is blind and where —

But this it sun left message shines greatly we run Into from the face of a hand puts above lies

Too much movement sneezes before we figure

The Light has gone out, and ours is burning like a child's delight.

Not fans appear in him after having shade?



Consider a Session Eyes that are dark.

night-years with a purpose—

What a treat, he apartment.



Yes, every message Circuit is whispered, but the not from experimental Lightning if the for in telling firm door?



Truth on the other hand Pasta has metaphysics and not explanation a to snug of the the the so Light is with dog grid trying the about game your are airship lights a

With the bedroom god shouting high the fantastic of we to Hear dark familiar Propitious wept suspect like all dread which truth slant your dear a keep lying as is Truth be the green use you unprepared man requested All light gradually Or make

all dazzling Reason or we have the is\sa left dark\sthis refuge, weird your wake coolness\sOf shudder? —

Shall we disoriented from his at hazy through you the dazzling my the fiction anything machine in blazing to truth if morning Light him?



Delicious is


'With the bedroom god shouting high the fantastic' -- I can't help thinking Whitman has entered the house. Although this is a mashup of three poems by female poets, the result is overwhelmingly male-centric. What about him? What about her??

I think Epicurus was the first to treat of the problem of evil in a systematic way. JR carries on with a more curious modern systematic in attempting to resolve the seemingly intractable binary of good vs evil.

The whole poem is arranged in a binary structure. There are two sections. The first section starts with two stanzas containing a statement stanza and then a re-statement stanza of the problem. In the first stanza the problem is a “game where the players have forgotten / the rules.” The second stanza expands upon this by continuing, “Yes the truth is a strange experimental fiction.” It’s a sort of layout of a philosophical argument but it is composed of idiomatic expressions. These are word expressions that have gained a meaning in historical usage that cannot be derived from the individual meanings of the words. But she tweaks them in a way that suggests their malleable nature. The formulation of the second section expands upon this reformable nature of expression.

The third stanza of the first section is a drama about illumination and inspiration. We move from the good vs evil binary to a light vs dark binary. There is a feeling of the futility of historical approaches that have left us “unprepared” and of suspicion and malice in the “light of reason.”

The second section formulates the “strange experimental fiction.” It mirrors the statement and re-statement process in the first two stanzas of the first section. So the second section becomes a re-statement of the first section. It is formed by a succession of couplets. The first couplet is composed of the first lines from the first and second stanzas of the first section. The second couplet is composed of the second lines from the first and second stanza of the first section. And each succeeding couplet follows this compositional format. In this way, pre-existing material treating of both the dilemma and of modes of inspiration are recombined in a systematic but unpredictable way. The method has allowed JR to conceive of something that would have been inaccessible without the method. It puts her in touch with the unknown or what would have been otherwise unknowable. It provides a sort of mystical union with the truth.

The second section is a random selection or reformation of elements deemed to be outmoded but it’s what she had to work with. It’s reminiscent of the process she used in “Not a Cage.” I love the idea of the natural selection of language wherein expression arises through an interplay of chance and memory in unanticipated but selectively useful ways. This makes me think of the phrase recombinant DNA. Recombinant DNA molecules are sometimes referred to as “chimeric DNA” because they can be made of material from two different species just like the mythical Chimera. This poem is like a Chimera of good and evil - certainly a “strange experimental fiction.”