“Beaurocracy au Bleu”
My dear friend from Yakuts, Katya, sent me a new photograph she had taken. She called it "Beaurocracy au Bleu" and explained: It's my friend, not me, but I like the idea … if you feel like beaurocracy can be a devasatatibe thing, emotionless, empty …
But not all bureaucracy is terrifying. Someone in Sweden must be doing something right. This morning on NPR I found out Turkish author Orhan Pamuk had won the 2006 Nobel prize in literature. This is the same Pamuk who made headlines last year from speaking out against the Turkish government's denial it had orchestrated the genocide of over a million Armenians in 1915. Wikipedia has this to say:
In 2005, ultra-nationalist lawyers of two Turkish professional associations brought criminal charges against Pamuk … after the author made a statement regarding the Armenian Genocide of 1915-1917 … and the massacre of 30,000 Kurds in Anatolia. The charges were dropped on 22 January 2006. He has subsequently stated his intent was to draw attention to freedom of expression issues.
So yes, you are right Katya, some bureaucracies are devastating, emotionless and empty. It is as Pamuk stated, Thirty thousand Kurds and a million Armenians were killed in these lands and nobody but me dares to talk about it.
And though this sonnet is more on a personal level we can only hope that perhaps now more people will.
All night you are in love with some inner
chaos. The tension of an inner life
that will no longer be yours. Your spine's strife
and grief at keeping you erect. The blur
of your hands, fingernails, a deep hunger
you have never once eased. Refuse this touch.
Not by hands, the vapor of a kiss. Such
desire: O lips, O tongue, O Rapture,
is not for you. What drear bureaucracy
in bleak Heaven made passion a disease?
What fool man censored your passion's desperate
purpose? the red fig Eve dipped in honey?
juice drips on lips you will never taste; these
flurries, these needs, these screams from a corset.