In the Night of Warsaw to Bertold Brecht (1952)

I looked down from the window high above the street and saw in the opposite ruin a cleared-out space with an arc-light cutting the midnight and in the heart of the light two dancers and I thought of you asleep in a room below and the Warsaw of rubble all round us in the shattered night. And there was no one alive in Warsaw that moment in Warsaw on Poland on the earth but the couple who danced in the jag-edged island of light. And it didn’t seem to matter. It was possible, necessary, and good, that no one was left alive but a dancing couple, as long as they danced in the wound in the ribs of night, as long as they danced.

I who have loved the summer abundance the hand-in-hand dancers ringing the earth, and have said that nothing else justifies our struggle, I have always felt more at home in winter in loss, privation, aloneness, the keen absolute of death. I distrust all easy embraces, all gifts whatsoever, all words save those that have passed the test of silence. We must recognise alienation before we can live unalienated; recognise it in our bones and the sudden shaft of light, the momentary impact when we are all men because we are nobody, when we are alive because we are dead, when we are in contact because we are cut-off. I see you smiling as you talk. I see the dancers circling the fragile island of survival. After all I do not care what happened, what happens to myself or anyone, as long as the dancers are there, ignoring us all.

At the heart of my darkness, at the heart of your silence as you smile.

JACK LINDSAY

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