Joseph Brodsky. My first instinct was to wonder: but what of the beauty of the unobserved world? Isn’t it sublime to imagine the sun shining on an empty Earth, the stars sending their ancient light through a universe uncomplicated by the prisms and hierarchies of our species?
But of course: such imagining, such assertions, are contingent on perception; and it is mere absurdity to think that beauty would exist without being named, that meaning could be found without someone searching for it.
Brodsky was a persecuted poet in the Soviet state, aware of something important: that humanity’s creative capacity to perceive and make meaning is no trivial or merely political process, and that therefore an informing culture is as necessary as air and water to sustaining what we call life. States dedicated to the reengineering of humankind kill culture first and finally for this reason: just, accurate meanings are the enemy of the tyrant. Their murder is the precondition for hopeless submission. Hence: the foreclosure of certain forms of expression is always a kind of oppression, more or less serious as the case may be.
See also: Frankl and Solzhenitsyn.
