Spring 2024 - Recrudescence

Catherine Hoffman

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May 23.

Next day. Everything’s crashed. Yesterday was a harrow. Today has turned into offense. That in the Universe’s arrangement, there is a law of nature endured by God. The insult too is, why hadn’t I known of this! Or, to have known, maybe seen it the 100 times, but to have never taken it in. Late afternoon same day. Darkness, wrath, offense. I’m at war. With nature, its law, at the Creator who tolerates atrocity. Next to this, however mad a curse it may sound to be, Auschwitz does not offend. Because I know where human martyrs go after death. But I do not know where animals go after a whole life of being tortured to death. After my non-Jewish father drummed it in, the horrors of history’s detail, (but strangely, my Jewish mother who lost everyone, did not,) I knew what humans can do; we make for one another’s death. But the Divinity that accommodates this baby bird’s anguish is not a God I want to know. For all my daily discernings, I hadn’t kept it in mind, not in all my aesthetic poncings about, that the most helpless of living innocents are slain, massacred, flayed, skewered alive and die in thrashing agony and go to nothing. If this Cosmos is the Creator’s life, why would I want to participate in it? This howling scream of injustice, why would I want my life in it? Let alone add to it, care for it, achieve or succeed at a thing? Of all the horripilations to break your soul’s neck, a tiny bird was not on my list. This little fluff’s perishing out of its small desperate life shut me down. Till now, life was sacred. All of it. Including those of idiots, of even Hitlerian morons and mutts, of serpents and slugs. And then, to really stick it to me, on this very night on TV news there comes a clip of a yawning truckie who had been driving cross-country to the

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