Overturn the Futility
Janet Kuypers
12/22/19, the 1849 date Fyodor Dostoyevsky
was supposed to be killed for crimes against the Czar
I told him
that I really liked reading
the writings of Dostoyevsky
I know, I know,
his writing doesn’t match
my logical, rational views
but he
was an author I loved to read
I was drawn to the futility that
his protagonists
endured, and I couldn’t help
but connect. he then said
that was tough
reading, difficult, too complex
but I never thought that
I just liked
the messages, however fatalistic
they may have ultimately seemed
he then said
he thinks that a lot of goth
people like his writing, and —
I can’t
speak to that, I can only say
it speaks to something
we all feel
and cannot put to words,
which is something everyone feels
but we all
hold it in and are told to not
think about, because those bad
feelings are wrong,
and... that is that. Stifle it away,
and bury it within, because
that’s what we do
to make it look like we understand
all and are ahead of everyone else.
But reading
Dostoyevsky allowed yourself
to immerse yourself in all of
the unthinkable,
if only for a brief moment,
before you had to shake yourself
of all the bad
the stayed in hiding, surrounding
your soul nonetheless.
—
I recently heard
that Dostoyevsky was arrested
in protests; they planned
to shoot him
for his crimes; I don’t know
what his crimes were
other than
believing in things that are
against the Czar’s beliefs.
They planned
to shoot him, and on the day
he was to be shot, at the last minute
they decided
to overturn the ruling, and ship
him to Siberia for four years instead.
And, of course,
this time was beyond unbearable,
living with others like a sardine,
unable to move,
freezing, thinking this was
beyond his limits...
—
we talk now
of how we have it so tough,
how life doesn’t seem fair
and now that we
claim to be in a rational world,
we look for reason in choices made
we feel anger
when we think that things
don’t go our way. And really,
when we look
at what it could be, when we
look of the futility of how life
could really be,
even the most goth among us
need to read how live could actually be.
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