The Boy Who Had No Shadow

I revisited my blog post of July 18, 2005 and I found the first line of that post was, “I intend the title "Entire Dilemma" to mean the existential dilemma we each face.”  Since the title “Entire Dilemma” is the title of a Michael Burkard poetry collection I had studied I thought I had chosen the title for literary reasons and I now see the reason was both literary and existential.   The following poem “The Boy Who Had No Shadow” from Burkhard’s “Entire Dilemma” explores the need of people to exploit differences in others.

The Boy Who Had No Shadow

One thing led to another:

if I have no shadow

I will eventually be followed

By those who do have shadows.

Sooner or later they will greet me

at the river and, judging me

as peculiar, will shove me in the river

to drown.

And the boy who had no shadow was correct.

But before he was shoved into the river,

days and days before, he was asked innocent

questions by innocent bystanders

“Does your mother have a shadow?”

“Were you conceived in shadow?”

“Are you perhaps your own version

of your own shadow?”

And them were difficult questions

because he had no answer

---or, the boy who had no shadow

had no answer.

So they thought he was up to no good.

The questions became less innocent.

And because, by now, he was also judged

as not belonging to any crucial historical epoch,

he was shoved into the river

and kept beneath the surface by poles.

Not a particularly unique circumstance.

But the reason was unique and they knew that.

So, just to be sure, just to be sure

the boy had no shadow, they kept him down for days.

Lest the shadow which he had not,

which he had been murdered for,

escape in the river and flee.

The eminent Martin Heidegger had a shadow and his Jewish mentor Edmund Husserl had no shadow and in spite of the fact that Heidegger's magnum opus “Being and Time” was dedicated to Edmund Husserl Heidegger betrayed him. Heidegger was a Nazi and his concepts of “blut and boden” (blood and soil) were the quintessence of the Nazi ideology. Blood and soil cannot to parsed out of “Being and Time” they are integral to the work.  It seems astounding that a man of Martin Heidegger’s intellect considered all Jews to have no shadows, which would indicate that ideology is more visceral than intellectual.

In the Trump age the “no shadow” people are easy to identify they are everyone that is different, i.e., everyone who is not a rich white man.

This idea of the human predilection to exploit individual differences will be revisited many times in this blog.