At three o’clock,  we ran  across  the park
Then up the Wigan Road, three children roamed
Passed the houses and along the fields
Looking for our daddy coming home
Looking for our daddy coming home.

I was only three  or four at most
We passed our church and  saw the Pope in Rome
We climbed a fence and walked by fields of wheat
Looking for our daddy coming home
Looking for our daddy coming home.

From the distance came a tall thin man
A ladder on his shoulder, hair well combed
A bucket full of paints and  all his tools
Look, Paul, is that daddy coming home?
Bernard, I think daddy’s coming home!

A  look of shock, a smile, a cry, my loves!
He  rushed towards us,  happy  and transformed
What about your mammy does she know?
Yes, yes, yes it’s daddy coming home
Yes, yes, yes, it’s daddy coming home.

 

• Nationalism is our form of incest, is our idolatry, is our insanity. “Patriotism” is its cult. It should hardly be necessary to say, that by “patriotism” I mean that attitude which puts the own nation above humanity, above the principles of truth and justice; not the loving interest in one’s own nation, which is the concern with the nation’s spiritual as much as with its material welfare—never with its power over other nations. Just as love for one individual which excludes the love for others is not love, love for one’s country which is not part of one’s love for humanity is not love, but idolatrous worship.
  • Erich Fromm, in The Sane Society (1955).

By necrophilia is meant love for all that is violence and destruction; the desire to kill; the worship of force; attraction to death, to suicide, to sadism; the desire to transform the organic into the inorganic by means of “order.” The necrophile, lacking the necessary qualities to create, in his impotence finds it easy to destroy because for him it serves only one quality: force.

Erich Fromm  in Credo

Cred

If we do not grieve,  we lose  much more
The favourite gifts, the symbols of those gone
Emotions blocked will close the mind’s front door

In reverie, grief wanders  rooms and floors
But blocked, we are alone in only one.
If we cannot grieve then we lose more

Cut off from our own self, we lose  allure
So we are lonely, even as we win
Emotions blocked will trap us with’ steel doors

After  weeping, there’s an empty core
The onion peeled, reveals a tear alone
If we cannot grieve then we lose more

Yet emptiness creates a  new space dear,
An indolence  on fire to which bees come
Emotions blocked will close the mind’s own door

As we have little time till beetles own
Let us dwell in  love’s creative zones
If we cannot grieve, we can’t adore
For God is locked behind our  iron doors

Love of one’s country which does not include love for humankind as such is nothing but idolatry

Erich Fromm in The Art of Loving [see link below to pdf file]

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