11 Dec 2013

Caliban

Mirrors don't reflect flesh, only history
and so his own face made him rage.

Ah Caliban! You task me, moon-calf, you task me! For what am I to make of you; malevolent monster and would-be child rapist, or indigenous subject dispossessed of your native land and enslaved and brutalized by European colonialism?

It's impossible to hate you: my liberalism won't allow it. But it's also difficult not to find you repugnant. For you fail to reflect my image and my values and you suggest the pre-dawn or twilight of my own kind. Your ugliness is both sign of a thwarted development and symptom of degeneracy compounded by cambionic origins. 

Indeed, for the ancient Greeks your hideous aspect would constitute a telling moral objection in itself and the fact that you spoke with a certain lyrical power on occasion would do little to redeem you in their eyes: As the face, so too the soul.    

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