What to say on Christmas Eve? That, no matter how much we are open and available for the party in which we try to flood the darkness of the night with light and the heart of the cold with fire, a diffuse and extreme melancholy still surrounds us, mourning for those who are no longer there or mourning for everything we once were. We then say that Christmas is a children’s party and in this way we allow ourselves to be overcome by the black bile of acedia and we lose the energy that we should put into defending life and what is alive.
Allow me to reproduce a poem of mine in this chronicle, aware that I am only plagiarizing myself.
Christmas Poem
And if I have all faith, even to the point of moving mountains, and have no charity, I am nothing
(São Paulo)
Who did you find today who offered you
the pure milk of human tenderness
and not the honey of flattery or common indifference?
Many days remain like this, suspended in a void of lovelessness,
but we don’t even notice it anymore,
we have to reserve a place at the fair, the carousels spin without us and the children point at us with their fingers,
we who persist in riding the hobby horse
and take another turn
for no good reason.
Christmas passes us by, some are missing their parents and others are missing their children or grandchildren.
This party was invented to keep away with lights, lots of lights,
the dark of winter and the idea of death.
Where did everyone go? Where did everyone go?
Come closer to me. I’m not talking about Christ.
I only remembered Christmas Eve and your festive hustle and bustle
that keeps death away from us by inventing joy,
the pure joy in which we last.
São Paulo asks us about charity
and here I am standing, embarrassed like a child
Because I don’t have faith, I don’t have faith,
and this lack doesn’t hurt me,
but I know that I have, that we have, O human brothers, to respond
for all the charity we didn’t have.
(from Another Ulisses returns to Home, Assírio and Alvim, 2016)
Let this be my Christmas card, in a world where charity and love are worth little compared to money and war and where Eros, the life instinct, succumbs step by step to Thanatos, the death instinct. What more mechanisms, what more stratagems will we invent to better die a dead death, as João Cabral formulates?
War exposes our inhumanity and helps in this task the virtual mechanisms that seek to impose on our consciences, annihilate our sensitivity and distort our intelligence, so that we more easily accept as natural the cruelty and violence that have always lived in us, humans, but to which we have been opposing throughout History, ideals of compassion and mercy, of Christ or Buddha, that perhaps machines no longer recognize.
Merry Christmas!
Diplomat and writer