Dear Eurydice Dixon,
You don't know me, but I've heard a lot
about you. You've not been dead long but your legend has already
grown large. All day I have been thinking of you.
Cicero said that the only true
immortality a person can achieve is through writing. I don't know
how much you wrote during your life, but since your passing a great
deal has been written about you and with each published article, with
each re-posted link, you grow taller and more noble. You are
becoming the martyr for a cause, the hero for a society sorely in
need of one. You death has not gone unnoticed, we will not let it be
so. We give your death meaning, we scatter the ashes of your
suffering and everywhere they fall, the cause of justice must follow.
It is stormy today and as I lay beneath
a gum tree, staring up through the tumbling leaves to the blue and
white streaky sky above I remembered an old phrase.
The willow knows what the storm does
not: that the power to endure suffering is greater than the power to
inflict it.
I think perhaps
that it is time for the willow to make knives of its leaves, and to
learn how to use them.
Those who would
rape are not men at all, but beasts of a low and primitive evolution,
not worthy of the name of man. Men are noble creatures, we
are artful and intelligent and proud of our strength and the just use
of it in the defence of those less able to defend themselves. Men
are the builders of harmony and the enemies of tyranny, men are the
writers of laws and the writers of songs and we are the fearless
shield wall standing in defence of moral rights and freedoms.
Those who would
rape are guilty of a vast spiritual ignorance, a bottomless lack of
awareness, a lack of compassion, a lack of empathy. In fact those
who would rape are guilty of lacking every good quality that those
who do call ourselves men may rightly lay claim to.
Eurydice, your name
burns bright. Your death will mean something. We will stand up with
your name on our lips and we shall together cry NO MORE. For though
women bear the greatest share of suffering at the hands of these
sub-human savages who would violate a woman's most fundamental
rights, we men suffer at their hands through the shame and
powerlessness we too feel. We suffer through our seeming inability
to protect that which is most prized to us, the beauty and wonder of
womanhood. We suffer in shame at the injustices our brethren inflict
upon the soft enclosing warmth of woman's love.
Saint Eurydice, we
pray to you in your eternal rest that your death shall be the spark
that lit a fire in us. You will live on through the immortality we
grant you by our words and deeds. Your mother may weep forever more
at your loss, but I will not weep. I will stand up and with my
brothers and sisters, we shall carry our willow leaves to the throats
of all who would do to others, what was done to you. I shall dip my
willow quill in the ink of your tragedy and with my poetry I shall
raise you up.
May great deeds be
done in your name.
From Morgan.
* * *
Dear Francesco Petrarchus,
It's funny the way that the dead can speak, and
how your voice Francesco, reaching back to speak to Cicero,
also speaks to me here in your future. I will quote from your letter
to Lapo da Castiglionchio, in 1352, written from your retreat in
Vaucluse.
Cicero
therefore seems to rejoice and to be eager to remain in my company.
We have now passed ten quiet and restful days together here. Here
only, and in no other place outside of Italy, do I breathe freely. In
truth, study has this great virtue, that it appeases our desires for
a life of solitude, mitigates our aversion for the vulgar herd,
tenders us sought-for repose even in the midst of the thickest
crowds, instills in us many noble thoughts, and provides us with the
fellowship of most illustrious men even in the most solitary forests.
You
found all his letters, and you hid yourself away to be with Cicero in
the forest, rejoicing and eager to remain in his company. I find it
marvellous that we feel the same about our erstwhile friend, yet I
must admit that I find my friendship with Plutarch growing stronger
than my kinship with Cicero, for an unsettling doubt has converged
upon me concerning him. How the crooked hand of Cataline searches me
out and worries away at my confidence in Cicero's honesty. It is not
honourable to speak ill of the dead, but there is always that savage
temptation to condemn him as a mouthpiece of tyranny, even while he
pretended to a belief in liberty.
I
have been reading the letters written during his exile, and some
essays written during this time. I have some difficult questions to
ask him, but I am not ready to ask them yet. I've been thinking
about the world Cicero lived in and the things he lived through:
Spartacus and the Slave wars, the Civil wars, the hit squads of
Sulla, the Gaulic and Celtic wars and the Pirate war, just to skim
the surface of the catastrophic civil and military unrest of his era.
Yet despite the blood soaked hands of the Senate and Consular
officials, Cicero still supported them against Cataline, who was
fighting for debt cancellation and land reform on behalf of the poor.
I
have been reading your letters too, Petrarch.
It
feels like two mirrors standing face to face, reflections iterated
generation after generation.
I
don't have time for more today, but I shall write again soon.
Morgan.
...actually.
I just found this in amongst your letters...
As
regards Cicero, I have known him as the best of consuls, vigilantly
providing for the welfare of the State, and as a citizen who always
evinced the highest love of country. But what more? I cannot bestow
praise upon the instability of his friendships, nor upon the serious
disagreements arising from slight causes and bringing destruction
upon him and benefit to none, nor upon a judgment which, when brought
to bear upon questions of private and public affairs, did not well
accord with his remarkable acumen in other directions. Above all, I
cannot praise, in a philosopher weighed down with years, an
inclination for wrangling which is proper to youths and utterly of no
avail. Of all this, however, remember that neither you nor anyone
else can be in a fit position to judge, until you will have read, and
carefully, all the letters of Cicero; for it is these which gave rise
to the whole discussion.
So
perhaps before I jump in and accuse Cicero of anything, I should take
your advice and read a lot more than three or four books, and only a
dozen or so of his letters. I am very lucky to live near a second
hand book store, they are a rarity now. The proprietrix of this
establishment is a sort of scholar-of-everything, and there is no
topic on which she will not have something interesting to say, or to
ask. I will visit her soon and discuss my reading list.
Thank
you Petrarch, for setting me straight.
From
the land of the living, on the west bank of the Meechi river, in in
southern Australia, in the eighteenth year of the new century.
Morgan.
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