Black Hands (Every Street)

—You have to take the extremes into account to reach the reality (thus, the Bains v. the Wittgensteins)

In Every Street
a “nervous splendour” —
oh, the drama
that plays out behind closed doors:
gunshots and bloodstains
no-one can see,
hidden lenses on the pain
of lost sons and mother-lovers.

Lost in the slow burn
of everyday things,
“how sad, how sad,”
he says to black hands.

“Sorry, you are the only one
who deserved to stay.”

In Every Street,
a “nervous splendour” —
hurts beaten down with
words unspoken,
mountains of linen and clothes:
targets in the dust and the dirt.

Lost in the slow burn
of everyday things,
“I saw him, I saw him”:
black hands are coming.

“Sorry, you are the only one
who deserved to stay.”

Blood seems to go everywhere.

[Cf. “The mask of sanity”: manie sans delire (Philippe Pinel [1801], a.k.a. J. C. Prichard’s “moral insanity” [1835] → psychopathy)]

You have to take the extremes into account to reach the reality: Maarten Kleintjes, the National Manager of the Police Electronic Crime Laboratory. It is the via externa or extrema—the outside/outward/strange/foreign or outermost path; Kleintjes continues: "the truth will lie somewhere in the middle" (via media)—not necessarily: there is some truth in excess.

a "nervous splendour": Alexander Waugh, The House of Wittgenstein. A Family at War (Doubleday, 2009).

black hands: the day before the murders, Bain was rehearsing in the chorus of a university production of Oedipus Rex; a scene of the tragedy is sometimes performed with actors wearing black gloves.

“how sad, how sad”: Wittgenstein on Georg Trakl’s death (9 June 1914); see Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius 119.