(c) Lyle A.

Brecht 5-Mar-06
Page 1 of 6
A HERMENEUTICS OF TESTIMONY:
SURVIVAL MANUAL FOR THE CAMPS

Did You hear our cries

from such a long distance?
Were You too, awaken by the screams?
of long-lost and forgotten bodies,
Emaciated and twisted, almost past pain;
Can You hear that They were summoned
By our testimony, but, alas, lacking
Gewissen (any moral conscience),
Ethics (and morality) unfolds outside
(c) Lyle A. Brecht 5-Mar-06
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A HERMENEUTICS OF TESTIMONY:
SURVIVAL MANUAL FOR THE CAMPS

The field of epistemic discourse

And compassion for Autrui (‘the Other’).

But I am a worm,
barely human (sein);
Not even autrui
scorned by the Others,
despised by the Minders;
Lying here naked, stretched out;
Retinas blown, foundations shaken:
On a cold gun-metal grey dais;
all postmodern; Western bliss.

Thesis, antithesis, fracture

– no synthesis; or coming together
all History of Being dissolved
In small pools of blood
collecting beneath the dais;
Separate world-pictures never contaminating
Rubber-gloved tehomic Minders
Writing their Heilsgeschiche.

Does Their salvation history away from You

Record four centuries’ History of Holocaust;
Industrially reducing indigenous populations,
125 million, whittled down 90 percent:
Hacked apart, burned alive, hunted as game,
Fed to dogs, shot, beaten, stabbed, scalped;
Worked to death as slave labor.
All calculation and denial: necessary utility,
for constructing the Great Empire;
Gigantic gated communities of fear employing
Minders, instructed in prison schools.
No longer public death, now private,
Autonomous prisons of torture;
enough to forget what was once human;
Just a dais of pain and forgetting now,
(c) Lyle A. Brecht 5-Mar-06
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A HERMENEUTICS OF TESTIMONY:
SURVIVAL MANUAL FOR THE CAMPS

No longer myth remembered – anamnesis lost

But, oh so real; the only Reality?
Beneath the buzz of economic productivity.

Were the camp Minders thinking of Heidegger,

Imagining themselves Docetic pietists bound to virtue,
all duty and moral obligation; Silent.
Wondering if our groans,
Groans too deep for words,
are utterances of an authentic language
– the poetry of pain running swiftly past
the onto-theo-logical language of metaphysics;
Language games and world-pictures
All plurality and difference.

Did a hermeneutic of metaphorical discourse

run through their spinning minds,
as the torture began in earnest
Extracting broken shards,
Of pre-linguistic memories,
Served-up, on-demand, and newly forged for the Minders:
rendering teams dressed in black, head-to-toe,
Whose job is to extract certain Informations
– Truths of vast importance for the Free World’s War.

Did the Minders mention War?

Did they mention the Free World?
In their Silence; Spinning.
From the dais we see only a post-developed world,
of ecocide, terrorism and torture;
Products of heterodox, positivist theology
where You are absent; such Silence,
Where global capitalism,
its twin doxys, utilitarianism and consumerism,
Fund a never-ending War, a time of Exception
waged by nuclear secured states
against ‘the Others’
(c) Lyle A. Brecht 5-Mar-06
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A HERMENEUTICS OF TESTIMONY:
SURVIVAL MANUAL FOR THE CAMPS

Outside the boundaries of the Gate.

Maybe our eyes are failing us in this Light,

maybe Truth lightens our Darkness.
Did a distant voice mention secure nuclear States?
Or was it fear-filled States-of-Being
Viewed only dimly in the mirror,
through broken prisms, hate-full language.
Might this fear-filled State-of-Being
spin past language, long obsolete?
Do hermeneutics fail us?
Unable to interpret; deconstructed to silence.
Spinning. Silence.
Or is it our imaginations,
our limited moral compass falling precipitously, short;
Through a barren land,
beyond pulsating and brilliant terrain, of God’s presence;
planetisimal barren land of feared,
fear-full nuclear security States
(our naked bodies trembling!). Silence.

Could it be amnesia
rather than anamnesis
– beyond the silence.
Spinning.
Forgetting.
Not remembering
a gift-giving God;
manifest by the body
of his one and only Son,
revealed to lost,
searching creatures beyond hope
– for no good reason.

Is this the memory

that will help us survive the camps,
those spaces for Hell on earth;
(c) Lyle A. Brecht 5-Mar-06
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A HERMENEUTICS OF TESTIMONY:
SURVIVAL MANUAL FOR THE CAMPS

As Minders industrially
render our bodies,
torture our souls,
beyond any identity
No longer human,
Or tilted toward You;
a forever lost conversation.

Your gracious gift-giving, Dear Lord,

even as I lay splayed,
broken ,
speechless,
here on the Table;
knowing.
I do not presume to come
To this thy Table trusting
my own righteousness;

Drugs dripping
into veins, right forearm pierced,
so I willingly tell Secrets;
I will…

Yet remembering even here

(where that may be,
I do not know;
I was blindfolded
when they took me that long-ago afternoon),
Drifting…in and out of consciousness.

my Secret is that I still love You.

I remember your Gift, even now.
Your Grace is all I have known
– a risk taken – often forgotten.
How long will it be
before my torturers discover the Truth:
Your Gift; the Conversation.
(c) Lyle A. Brecht 5-Mar-06
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A HERMENEUTICS OF TESTIMONY:
SURVIVAL MANUAL FOR THE CAMPS

Will they be disappointed?

Or will my muffled screams
of suffering and torment suffice?
Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani.
“My God, my God,
why have you forsaken me?”
Silence.