When I was in Cambodia in January I learned that, like most revolutionary movements, the intellectuals, the poets, the dreamers and the visionaries, were the first to die.
As Phnom Penh emptied with the guns of the revolutionaries, entire families were scattered and sent into the jungle where they were stripped of their possessions.
The leaders of the revolutionary movement, whose soldiers were largely young boys and girls, illiterate and barely able to hold their rifles, asked the captured plaintively to lend them their expertise so that together they could allow a new world to flower.
Once they did, they were executed.
Of course, this is why Federico Garcia Lorca was also murdered, the poet at the center of my novel, The Poet and the Angel. His words, according to the fascist general who signed his death warrant, were more powerful than 10,000 guns.
But the executioners act in vain.
Words, when employed with grace and beauty, when touched by the Divine, become immortal. They remind us of the incredible wonder, the hope, the transitory nature yes, but the loveliness of a world that cannot be destroyed by hatred, banality, jealousy, callousness, or by the indifference and the cruelty of an age.
They blossom again, from generation to generation in an unbroken stream of Light that can never be quenched.
They live on long after the tyrant, or the infamy of a regime, as though the hand of God catches the Spirit of a poem or a song and gently whispers this into the ear of another, in a form of Divine Consciousness that stretches into infinity.
The words of the poets, mystics and dreamers are immortal. The Teachers are always with us.
They never die.
As Phnom Penh emptied with the guns of the revolutionaries, entire families were scattered and sent into the jungle where they were stripped of their possessions.
The leaders of the revolutionary movement, whose soldiers were largely young boys and girls, illiterate and barely able to hold their rifles, asked the captured plaintively to lend them their expertise so that together they could allow a new world to flower.
Once they did, they were executed.
Of course, this is why Federico Garcia Lorca was also murdered, the poet at the center of my novel, The Poet and the Angel. His words, according to the fascist general who signed his death warrant, were more powerful than 10,000 guns.
But the executioners act in vain.
Words, when employed with grace and beauty, when touched by the Divine, become immortal. They remind us of the incredible wonder, the hope, the transitory nature yes, but the loveliness of a world that cannot be destroyed by hatred, banality, jealousy, callousness, or by the indifference and the cruelty of an age.
They blossom again, from generation to generation in an unbroken stream of Light that can never be quenched.
They live on long after the tyrant, or the infamy of a regime, as though the hand of God catches the Spirit of a poem or a song and gently whispers this into the ear of another, in a form of Divine Consciousness that stretches into infinity.
The words of the poets, mystics and dreamers are immortal. The Teachers are always with us.
They never die.