Israel

Agoraphobic nomads
leaning obliquely on crutches:
as empty as children
and faceless as prophets,
made up like clowns;
relying on the crowd around
them to shield them from
the desert they are compelled
to cross...

Skulking under goatskins
hiding from the Light.


5 March 1978
 
 

Just as I empathised with the fallen angels in ‘Children of God’ I also empathised with God’s chosen people in this poem.

Agoraphobia is a condition where the sufferer becomes anxious in environments that are unfamiliar or where he or she perceives that they have little control. Triggers for this anxiety may include wide open spaces, crowds (social anxiety), or traveling (even short distances). Can you imagine a worse thing for a sufferer than having to trudge around a wilderness surrounded by over half a million men, women and children? Basically it’s like the whole of Winnipeg getting up one morning and going for a wander round the Spirit Sands desert for forty years.

I get God coming along and laying down a few laws. We’re all still in agreement that murder, theft and adultery cause more problems than anything. Fine. But to get them to wander aimlessly until they all died off—which, let’s face it, was the point of the exercise—was cruel and unusual punishment. And all for having a party around a golden calf. Then again I never really got the calf thing either. The big problem most people have with religion these days in the lack of hard evidence. A matter of days previously they’d crossed the Red Sea and if Cecil B. DeMille is to be believed that’s not the kind of thing to make you doubt in your god. And yet that’s what the record says happened.