The Morning the Glaciers Melt (氷河の解ける朝)

Great glaciers have buried the earth,
ten thousand years of cold storage,
freezing and paralyzing thought.
Philosophers, ethicists, clerics, even artists,
like whales enveloped in ice,
grandiose, but comatose,
looking alive, but dead.
Is life happiness or sadness?
For me, nothing but sadness.
People say I am “addicted to philosophy.”

Fujimura went to the waterfall, Waihan to the sea, [1]
students to volcanic craters, and a Seattle youth and woman,
under the headline “addiction,”
so many still dying,
forming a long line of the chosen, fading into the distance……
The young with sorrowful brows, the old with hair grayed by doubt and denial,
grasping at air with troubled fingers,
it goes on and on.
When the soul is about to die,
but the flesh, wanting to live, keeps dragging it along,
steam rises from the corpses,
to serve you poison, to anoint you with lead.
This, which denies existence, is capitalist philosophy.

It is a philosophy that pursues truth for the sake of the capitalists,
but humans get hungry and fall in love.
Plato and Buddha and Confucius all wrote
ingenious little essays, full of predication.
Schopenhauer and Kant
and Fichte and James,
offer cold prayers, surrounded by death.
This anguished society is a fallen cart horse,
its heaving belly, a ballroom for parasites.

Wang Yangming, Chogyū, Zen, Nietzsche, Bergson, [2]
they all say nothing, can do nothing,
Their philosophies look one way and say another.

Workers!
You shout, “What should I do!”
Proletarians! You demand, “Let me live!”
These are the silent strikers.
The unbearable desire of youth!
The pressing needs of men in their prime!
The desires of parched throats! The demands of empty bellies!
The greatest sin is sinless poverty.

Now,
the glaciers of old thought have reached their final stage.
For those old writers frozen in Nothingness
who fret about melting in the sun of reality,
what sin is there in suicide?

In the spirit you shall live, the fossilized statues whisper.
Pay no heed to material things, write the medieval literati.
And while we do this,
the world is no longer ours,
we are fish being served up to cats.
What are we to do as human beings?
The church says the spirit, the rich revere the law of private property,
and kings praise loyalty, but
they’re all just frogs croaking in the rain.

When you stumble, you find “matter” at your feet.
Capitalist philosophy has love and ethics and spirit and faith, yet
after ten thousand years of toil, it still stumbles,
for it cannot see “matter.”
Wretched Religion! Art! Philosophy!
While bankrupt in your gilded shrines,
you look down upon the proletarians.
Your skin-deep philosophy and beautiful figures of love are
pleasing to the eye, like poisoned meat-buns.
Today’s youth are cursed by the ghosts of those who killed themselves for your made-up deities!

Now, the ten-thousand-year glaciers are starting to melt.
And as the adherents of old thought don their crosses and recite their prayers,
the tempest of life crashes upon them,
washing away the glacial slopes
saving truth from drowning moans.

Marx’s philosophy of integrated science has sprung forth!
The scarred and separated spirit has been returned to the body by Dietzgen! [3]
The hotbed of suicides has been overturned by Lenin!
Oh,
You don’t know what to think!
Who told you they were fearsome beasts?
Brave when fighting the past,
you are cowards when facing the future.
You, who hold pistols in your hands,
your eyes are clenched shut, refusing the light of rebirth.

[1] Fujimura Misao (1886-1903) and Nomura Waihan (1884-1921) were both famous literary suicides.

[2] Wang Yangming (1472-1529) was a Chinese philosopher during the Ming Dynasty. Takayama Chogyū (1871-1902) was a Japanese writer active during the late Meiji Period.

[3] Joseph Dietzgen (1828-1888) was a German socialist philosopher.