Hymn
Gottfried Benn
That quality of the great boxers
to be able to stand there
and take shots,
gargle with firewater,
encounter intoxication
at sub- and supra-atomic levels,
to leave one’s sandals at the crater’s lip
like Empedocles, and descend,
not say: I’ll be back,
not think: fifty-fifty,
to vacate molehills
when dwarves want space to grow,
to dine alone,
indivisible,
and able to renounce your victory—
a hymn to that man.
This poem brings to mind Janis Joplin's lyric "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose." It suggests that to be truly free you either have to renounce all attachments to the world, (possession, pride, achievement, fear, relationship, reputation), or that you have to be at solid bedrock bottom with no other direction than up available.
Either way, it's one giant leap into the fiery unknown. How many of us are brave enough to jump? Ready? onetwothreejump!
And just in case you don't believe that everything old is new again, Empedocles came up with his own "survival of the fittest" theory two thousand years before Darwin, and "sum of all things in the universe is constant", which as you know still jives with Einstein's principle of mass-energy conservation. That he lept into an active volcano is of interest as well. In the case you want to know what would cause a man to jump into a fiery pit, click here and here.
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