A kind of solution
I
The writer was drinking himself to death. In his first flush of
freedom--he had come to Iowa from a land ruled by a military
dictatorship--he drowned himself in vodka, and when for the third
day running he was rushed to the emergency room with a blood alcohol
level that would have killed another man he was committed for
observation. The date was September 10, 2001. That evening, more
than eight hours after his last drink, the writer was still dead
drunk. The judge who signed his commitment order called the next
day, incredulous.
“You won’t believe it,” she said. “They have the TV on in the psych
ward, and your poor writer is trying to sober up among lunatics who
think they masterminded the attacks on the World Trade Center and
the Pentagon.”
In the International Writing Program concern for our colleague mixed
with a variety of reactions to the tragedy: shock, grief—and no
little satisfaction from some. Most, though, tried to make sense of
what they saw on television, taking notes and filing dispatches to
newspapers in their homelands. In the meantime the alcoholic writer
began a regimen of detoxification; upon his discharge from the
hospital a week later I escorted him to my car, unable to imagine
what he might have felt about traveling to America only to trade one
form of prison for another.
“At least you have something to write about,” I said finally.
He smiled. And perhaps he will turn his unique perspective on
September 11 into literature. I say perhaps because thus far it is
the poverty of literary insight that distinguishes the discourse
about the strange new world created by the terrorists. “Who has
words at the right moment?” asked Charlotte Bronte--a question that
plagues writers in the aftermath of 9/11. But as Samuel Beckett
reminds us, “words are all we have.”
This is especially true in light of the failure of our political
class to frame the tragedy in its largest historical context. We
look to our leaders to articulate the meaning of a national crisis
(think of John F. Kennedy’s fiery address at the Berlin Wall; of
Ronald Reagan’s speech after the explosion of the Challenger space
shuttle); to provide a narrative in which to imagine a future; to
rally us to our best selves. Nothing of the sort happened after
September 11. Quite the opposite. President George W. Bush’s
repeated assertions that American goodness, backed up by military
might, would rid the world of evildoers appealed to those who see
things in black-and-white terms. “I don’t see many shades of gray in
this world,” he declared in February 2002. “Either you are with us
or against us.” But life is infinitely more complicated. And the
president’s suggestion that we buy our way out of the recession was
hardly the stuff of greatness. His abdication of the responsibility
to speak to the heart of the matter will long haunt this nation.
In like manner, the ceremony marking the first anniversary of
September 11 at Ground Zero in New York City included no original
speeches, only recitations of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and FDR’s
“Four Freedoms” speech. Their words, it is true, shaped our history,
offering new visions of America, visions that cleave to the
foundational notion of this country as a shining city upon a hill.
But they were not adequate to our situation, which demanded new
insights and understanding: a vision for the future. Rooted in
particular historical circumstances, the speeches of Lincoln and FDR
transcended their times by appealing to what is best in our
character. What we needed was a similar summoning to a nobler idea
of ourselves.
Nor is this failure of spirit confined to our political leadership.
September 11 has created a small industry of books, few of which
rise to the level of literature. We say that everything has changed.
If so, then we must ask why these changes do not register in our
literature. No poet rose to the occasion with the vigor and
originality that, for example, Thomas Hardy showed in “The
Convergence of the Twain (Lines on the Loss of the Titanic)” or W.
H. Auden in “September 1, 1939.” Yet in the days after the attacks
on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon it was the charged
language of poetry to which many turned for solace and instruction.
“September 1, 1939” was often quoted, because the opening stanza,
set in New York City, uncannily described our own anguish:
I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-Second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.
Enduring works of literature transcend their historical moment. And
if it takes a novelist years to distill meaning from an event, poets
and literary journalists can capture its essence on the fly, as
Ryszard Kapuscinski demonstrates in Shah of Shahs, his account of
the Islamic Revolution in Iran. Likewise in Hiroshima John Hersey
tells the stories of seven survivors of the atomic blast to give a
sense of the suffering undergone by hundreds of thousands of
nameless men, women, and children. Stalin said that three people
killed in a traffic accident constitute a tragedy, whereas a million
victims of a pogrom are statistics. It is up to writers to redeem
the individual from the collective tragedy; to discover the mythic
underpinnings of what may seem unimaginable; to bear witness to loss
with such empathy and precision that we glimpse how to navigate our
way into the future. “Grief unites us,” William Matthews wrote in
his poem, “Why We Are Truly a Nation,” which dates from the 1960s,
“like the locked antlers of moose/ who die on their knees in pairs.”
Well chosen words may help us rise to our feet.
What we were left with, though, was the fog of television, with
overwrought anchors and commentators filling the void left by our
political and literary elites. Suffice to say their words vanished
without a trace on our consciousness, leaving only the hope that
eventually it will be possible to speak of September 11 as a
dividing line in American literature. Many writers are concerned
with the meaning of the word in the wake of the tragedy. A kind of
innocence has disappeared from our national discourse, as it has at
other grave moments in our history, notably during the Civil War,
when three solitary figures forged new ways to understand the
American experience. Abraham Lincoln, Emily Dickinson, Walt
Whitman--they did not flinch before the dark facts of their time. We
are the richer for their witness.
Dickinson’s poems, almost half of which date from the Civil War,
provide a map to the broken heart of a solitary woman--and of a
nation. All was torn asunder by the Confederate secession, a public
betrayal that perhaps echoed events in Dickinson’s affective life.
Yet she found at almost every turn “a formal feeling” for her grief,
which transcends its private origin. And it was in 1862, the pivotal
year of the war, that she vividly described the pain we felt after
9/11. That September, at the battle of Antietam, more Americans were
killed on our soil in one day than at any time in our history before
September 11, 2001. While neither side could claim victory
Confederate General Robert E. Lee was forced to abandon his Maryland
campaign; his retreat prompted Lincoln to issue his Emancipation
Proclamation, freeing the slaves--perhaps the noblest executive
decision in the history of this country.
1862 marked another emancipation: Dickinson completed, on average, a
poem a day. Hers was a “Soul at the White Heat,” as she wrote, which
traced, among other things, the hour of lead that fell again over
this land. Our hearts were stiffened by the terrorist attacks, and
we must hope our writers will discover ways to transfigure this
grief. Nor it there any way of gauging how we will respond to such a
wound. Dickinson understood better than most how loss causes people
to freeze to death, literally or figuratively, as she reveals in her
famous meditation:
After great pain, a formal feeling comes--
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs--
The stiff Heart questions was it He, that bore,
And Yesterday, or Centuries before?
The Feet, mechanical, go round--
Of Ground, or Air, or Ought--
A Wooden way
Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone--
This is the Hour of Lead--
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow--
First--Chill--then Stupor--then the letting go--
I wish to examine the prosodic means by which Dickinson reinforces
her insights into the nature of grief. The first three lines of the
opening quatrain, the only one composed entirely in iambic
pentameter, contain the same variation--a spondee in the sensitive
second foot. These pairs of stressed syllables--“great pain,” “sit
ceremonious,” “stiff heart”--nearly stop each line, as indeed the
nerves and heart clench in the face of great pain. (We may also note
in passing the sinister aspect introduced by the run of the
sibilants, as if to suggest evil is abroad.) Dickinson sets the
tradition of English poetry, two thirds of which is written in blank
verse, against the unassimilable fact of loss, spondee after
spondee. In the counterpoint between the rising iambic rhythms and
the stressed syllables Dickinson enacts the physical sensation of
grief being translated into form. The heart stops, and then it
begins to beat in a mechanical fashion.
But notice what the poet does in the next stanza, when the
ostensible subject is the body’s metronomic response to pain: she
drops the pentameter, the quatrain, and the rhyme scheme, even as
the iambic beat becomes relentlessly regular. The juxtaposition
between mechanical rhythm and stanzaic chaos thus articulates the
tension between formality and freedom in an original manner. This is
a life or death struggle for the wounded soul of a woman--and of a
nation. And the rhymed couplet with which the stanza closes offers
only the illusion of formal beauty: who can say whether the forces
of life or death will win this battle?
Now it is a standoff: “the Hour of Lead.” The final stanza regains
the quatrain, balancing two rhymed trimeters with a heroic couplet:
the folk tradition of ballads versus the neo-classical revival of
the previous century. Dickinson returns to the iambic pentameter
norm--“As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow”--only to stun the
reader in the last line (and I do not say this lightly), juxtaposing
two spondees--“First--Chill--then Stupor”--with a trimeter, as if to
stop the heart before offering the sweet release of death: “then the
letting go.” Why some survive such an ordeal is anyone’s guess. But
it is certain that the right words spoken at the right time may
help.
If we have yet to waken from our post-9/11 stupor, this may be
because our politicians and writers failed to underscore the mythic
dimension of the tragedy: to paint a recognizable future, in the way
that Lincoln used his Gettysburg Address to point Americans toward a
different sense of themselves. His speech, all 272 words of it,
delivered on November 19, 1863 at the dedication of the cemetery at
Gettysburg, where some fifty thousand American soldiers were killed
or wounded, stood in sharp contrast to the two-hour-long oration of
Edward Everett. Think of Everett as the nineteenth-century version
of a talking head recounting for a television audience what happened
on the battlefield. He strained for effect in his attempt to draw
meaning from the carnage: a forgettable exercise. What Lincoln
accomplished in the wink of an eye was nothing less than the
complete reorganization of these United States, as Garry Wills notes
in his study, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America,
into the United States, a singular nation that would become the most
powerful on earth.
“The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but
it can never forget what they did here,” Lincoln said of the fallen.
“It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the
unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly
advanced.” But the world would long remember Lincoln’s speech, which
called the American people to a new beginning. His assassination in
1865, which cut short his role in that rebirth, inspired Whitman’s
magnificent elegy, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” a
hymn to the leader whose work would remain unfinished. We know the
poet was visiting his mother when he heard the news from Washington.
The scholar Ed Folsom reports that “he got up from the breakfast
table, walked out into the dooryard, where lilacs were blooming that
April day, and, gripped by grief, he inhaled deeply, and the scent
of lilacs forever fused in his synesthetic memory with the news of
Lincoln’s death, so that from that moment on, spring, the season of
new beginnings, brought a sensory memory of death and grief, now
bound permanently with birth and spring.” Just as Lincoln uses the
carnage at Gettysburg to announce a new birth for this nation, and
Dickinson creates a new figure for resurrection to suggest how the
heart may be revived, so Whitman mingles birth and death to suggest
how they are intertwined:
When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d,
And the great star early droop'd in the western sky in the night,
I mourn'd, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.
Ever-returning spring! trinity sure to me you bring;
Lilac blooming perennial and drooping star in the west,
And thought of him I love.
I will confine my remarks about this poem to some reflections on the
song of the hermit thrush, which makes its first appearance in the
fourth section. The secretive bird is a figure for the poet, and by
the fourteenth section bird and bard merge in a death song. It is,
if you will, a call to our best selves from that which is generally
hidden from daily life: poetry. From the swamps, the recesses, comes
“the tallying chant” mingled with the perfume of the lilac bushes.
The poet counts his losses: the fallen president, “the debris of all
the slain soldiers of the war, his health (a legacy of his volunteer
work in the military hospitals), perhaps a comrade’s love. The poet
of democracy had learned a bitter lesson. “In this country, we have
our House of Representatives, and in our literature we have our
House of Representations,” Ed Folsom writes. “For Whitman, this
confluence of political and artistic representation seemed
natural--seemed, in fact, the very essence of democratic politics.
He believed that America’s imaginative literature had to take up
where its politics left off: when theories of representation began
to fail politically, as they certainly did during the years leading
up to the Civil War, then theories of imaginative representation
were the only hope to save democracy.”
Writers must discover new theories of imaginative representation for
the new world order created by the terrorists. We might begin by
asking, What if? What if George W. Bush had encouraged us to
conserve gasoline, for example, reducing our dependence on the oil
supplies of Saudi Arabia, which supplied most of the hijackers of
the doomed airplanes? Or if he had sought to establish new relations
with the Third World, where poverty contributes to ubiquitous
anti-Americanism? Or attempted to engage disputes ranging from the
Middle East to the Korean Peninsula? Some have noted that his
metaphor of a war on terror is inadequate for the circumstances in
which we now live. It is in fact the precision of language we most
miss. Such is the state of America today, when the dangers of
relying on an inarticulate president have become all too clear. And
it is in the language that our destiny is first mapped out. Lincoln,
Dickinson, and Whitman charted a country on the verge of becoming
the world power we inherited. If only Bush had used 9/11 to point us
toward a more open future. “With complete confidence and innocence,”
Octavio Paz writes, “Whitman can sing of democracy on the march
because the American utopia is confused with and is
indistinguishable from the American reality.
Whitman’s poetry is a great prophetic dream, but it is a dream
within another dream, a prophesy within another prophesy that is
even vaster and that nourishes it. And it dreams itself as concrete,
almost physical reality, with its men, its rivers, its cities, and
its mountains. That whole enormous mass of reality moves swiftly, as
if it had no weight; and, indeed, it lacks historical weight: it is
the future that is being incarnated. The reality Whitman sings is
utopian. And by this I do not mean that it is unreal or that it
exists only as idea, but that its essence, that which moves it,
justifies it, and gives direction to its march, gravity to its
movements, is the future. Dream within a dream, Whitman’s poetry is
realistic for this reason alone: its dream is the dream of reality
itself, which has no substance other than that of inventing itself,
dreaming itself. “When we dream that we dream,” Novalis says, “we
are about to waken.” Whitman never had consciousness that he was
dreaming and always considered himself a poet of reality. And he
was, but only insofar as the reality he sang was not something
given, but a substance shot through with the future. America dreams
itself in Whitman because America itself was dream, pure creation.
Before and after Whitman we have had other poetic dreams. All of
them--be the dreamer named Poe or Darío, Melville or Dickinson--are
really attempts to escape the American nightmare.
In the end the theme of every American writer is the future, a
version of which may be glimpsed in the words of Dickinson, Lincoln,
and Whitman. Consider how Dickinson balances it precariously above
the abyss--“Remembered, if outlived,/ As Freezing persons, recollect
the Snow.” And the unfinished work to which Lincoln summoned us from
a cemetery in Gettysburg. And the way in which “Lilac and star and
bird twined with the chant of [Whitman’s] soul,/ There in the
fragrant pines and the cedars dusk and dim.” Here was the promise of
America, easily forgotten after September 11. Hence the nightmare we
have foisted on the whole world.
II
What choice did we have? said the businessman. Tell me.
We were in the living room of a spacious house, in a gated community
in Connecticut, arguing about the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq. A
group of well-heeled men and women with an interest in foreign
affairs had assembled earlier in the evening to hear a presentation
by writers from Ireland and Poland, and after most of the guests
went home I fell into a bitter dispute with a soft-spoken man whose
support for the invasion of Iraq was unequivocal. November 2003: the
bloodiest month to date in the war. The escalating violence, which
would soon reveal to even the president’s admirers the shortcomings
of his policy, was impossible to ignore. Another helicopter had just
been shot down. Improvised explosive devices were killing and
maiming U.S. troops every day. The outline of a sophisticated
insurgency was taking shape. The word quagmire had returned to the
lexicon of foreign policy experts in this country and abroad.
Choice? I said. We had so many choices, so many issues to
address--global warming, the spread of AIDS, the decline of our
educational system, the budget deficit. We could have rebuilt
Afghanistan instead of turning it over to warlords. We could have
used our Special Forces to find Osama bin Laden instead of sending
them to Iraq. We could have engaged in a real war of ideas with the
Islamic fundamentalists instead of providing them with more
ammunition, and so on.
My words fell on deaf ears. And I remain haunted by his belief that
we had no choice but to wage a preventative war, which has not only
cost us blood and treasure but opened up a new front in the war on
terror and severely damaged the image of America as a beacon of
hope. For choice is a condition of freedom, and since 9/11 our
individual freedoms--our choices--have been curtailed. “Freedom is
not a philosophy,” Paz reminds us, “nor is it even an idea. It is a
movement of consciousness that leads us, at certain moments, to
utter one of two monosyllables: Yes or No. In their brevity, lasting
but an instant, like a flash of lightning, the contradictory
character of human nature stands revealed.” It is this movement of
consciousness that poetry enacts--a flash of insight streaking
across the page, revealing the divisions in our soul.
The contradictions in the American character have been laid bare by
9/11. If Bush’s real political agenda in invading Iraq was to
reorder the Middle East to guarantee a continuous flow of crude oil,
then the businessman was right: we had no choice, since we have not
developed alternative energy supplies. Yet choice is the essence of
freedom, which is what the Founding Fathers were keenest to
preserve; hence our system of checks and balances, which went awry
after 9/11. Power, Gramsci noted, means being able to set the
agenda. And Bush used the crisis to chart a course at odds with what
the majority of Americans imagined they had voted for in the 2000
election. Nor did the media challenge the Administration’s claims.
Democrats failed to uphold their obligation to mount an effective
opposition. And with the economy in a nose-dive many Americans were
too scared to imagine their leaders did not have their interests at
heart. It turns out that the Y2K fear was misplaced: the computers
survived the changing calendar; our civil liberties and standing in
the world did not. What astonishes is the scale of Bush’s hubris,
his disdain of international treaties and opinion, his failure to
maintain a “decent respect for the opinions of mankind,” in
Jefferson’s memorable phrase. It is too soon to measure all of the
consequences of such hubris, although the evidence presented thus
far in the court of world opinion is damning. And if the
foundational texts of Western thought--The Iliad, The Odyssey, the
Bible--are any guide, then we are in more trouble than we know.
None of which would have surprised Constantine Cavafy, the Greek
poet who discovered in the dynamics of historical change a powerful
literary motif. There is no better chronicler of the nexus between
personal, political, and literary experience. And if it is true that
9/11 catapulted us into a new realm of experience, which must be
described in a language adequate to our circumstances, then we might
read Cavafy for insight into the uncertainty that we now recognize
as a permanent feature of our lives.
He was born in Alexandria, in 1863, the ninth and last child of
prosperous emigrants from Constantinople. But with his father’s
death in 1870 the family’s fortunes declined, so his mother took him
and his brothers to London, where the mercantile firm of Cavafy and
Sons thrived. The boy thus entered literature through English
poets--Robert Browning’s monologues made a deep impression--and
indeed his first poems were written in English. His formal
education, such as it was, did not begin until his return to
Alexandria at the age of sixteen. He enrolled briefly in a
commercial school, where he was more interested in classics than
accounting, but when an outbreak of anti-Christian violence sparked
British bombardment of the city he and his mother fled to
Constantinople, where he gained a sense of the lost grandeur of
Byzantium--the last place on earth, according to Yeats, in which
“religious, aesthetic and practical life were one.”
Cavafy’s mother came from the Phanariot community, which wielded
considerable clerical power in the Ottoman era, and he took pride in
their efforts to keep alive the Great Idea of the Greeks--a New
Rome, a restored Byzantium. In his grandfather’s library he read
widely not only in literature, becoming fluent in ancient Greek,
Arabic, French, Italian, and Latin, but in Byzantine and Hellenic
history; after the dislocations of his childhood he discovered a
homeland in history and in his love for things Greek, a feeling
accentuated by his discourse with the ghosts of Alexandria, the
former capital of the Hellenic world, where in 1885 he settled for
good.
His was an uneventful life. He worked for thirty years as a clerk in
the Irrigation Service of the Ministry of Public Works and
speculated on the Egyptian stock exchange. He lived with his mother,
then his brother, and finally alone in a second-floor apartment, in
a rundown section of an Arab city that had long since lost its
luster. Nor did he rue his circumstances. “Where could I live
better?” he asked. “Below, the brothel caters for the flesh. And
there is the church which forgives sin. And there is the hospital
where we die.” He wrote about seventy poems a year, keeping only a
handful, which he published privately in a series of offprints and
broadsides for distribution to a select audience. Determined to
preserve his intellectual independence, he did not seek out the
literary limelight. “When the writer knows pretty well that only
very few volumes of his edition will be bought,” he noted, “he
obtains a great freedom in his creative work. The writer who has in
view the certainty, or at least the possibility of selling all his
edition, and perhaps subsequent editions, is sometimes influenced by
their future sale.... almost without meaning to, almost without
realizing--there will be moments when, knowing how the public thinks
and what it likes and what it will buy, he will make some little
sacrifices--he will phrase this bit differently, and leave that out.
And there is nothing more destructive for Art (I tremble at the mere
thought of it) than that this bit should be differently phrased or
that bit omitted.” Like Dickinson, he used his privacy, his artistic
freedom, to create poetry of universal significance, which did not
begin to find its worldwide audience until after he had died, of
throat cancer, on his seventieth birthday.
He described himself as a poet-historian; his sources were Greek,
Roman, and Byzantine histories; his muse was Eros. His frank
treatment of homosexual themes informed every poem--diadactic or
sensual, narrative or lyric--for no realm of human
experience--political, cultural, spiritual--is immune to the
caprices of desire, the fickleness of attention, the certainty of
betrayal. Guided by an image of a mythical Alexandria, in which
pagans and Christians contended for the hearts of the citizenry, he
searched for the patterns underlying historical events. In “Waiting
for the Barbarians,” dating from 1898, the poem in which he
discovered his distinctive voice and style--his mask--he explored a
situation, which bears an uncanny resemblance to our own
circumstances. Here it is in the translation of Edmund Keeley and
Philip Sherrard:
What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?
The barbarians are due here today.
Why isn’t anything happening in the senate?
Why do the senators sit there without legislating?
Because the barbarians are coming today.
What laws can the senators make now?
Once the barbarians are here, they’ll do the legislating.
Why did our emperor get up so early,
and why is he sitting at the city’s main gate
on his throne, in state, wearing the crown?
Because the barbarians are coming today
and the emperor is waiting to receive their leader.
He has even prepared a scroll to give him,
replete with titles, with imposing names.
Why have our two consuls and praetors come out today
wearing their embroidered, their scarlet togas?
Why have they put on bracelets with so many amethysts,
and rings sparkling with magnificent emeralds?
Why are they carrying elegant canes
beautifully worked in silver and gold?
Because the barbarians are coming today
and things like that dazzle the barbarians.
Why don’t our distinguished orators come forward as usual
to make their speeches, say what they have to say?
Because the barbarians are coming today
and they’re bored by rhetoric and public speaking.
Why this sudden restlessness, this confusion?
(How serious people’s faces have become.)
Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,
everyone going home so lost in thought?
Because night has fallen and the barbarians have not come.
And some who have just returned from the border say
there are no barbarians any longer.
And now, what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?
They were, those people, a kind of solution.
The title suggests the lassitude into which the citizens of this
imaginary city have fallen. Cavafy said “the emperor, the senators
and the orators are not necessarily Roman.” The vagueness of the
setting contributes to the timeless nature of the dialogue between
someone in the know and his questioner: think pundit and journalist.
Nor did Cavafy publish any other dialogues, although each of his
poems is in some sense in dialogue with a historical figure, an
absent lover, or himself. Unlike other early poems, “Waiting for the
Barbarians” is unrhymed, nevertheless obeying a strict syllabic
count, the questions written in fifteen-syllable lines, the answers
in twelve, the concluding couplet in thirteen.
Replace barbarian with terrorist, and you will see the analogy to
our current predicament. Barbarian means stutterer, one who cannot
speak Greek. But the barbarians of our world not only speak English,
the lingua franca, they are also adept at fitting into our
societies, whereas we are unable to understand their languages and
the doctrinaire form of Islam they preach, to say nothing of the
hatred that inspired Osama bin Laden to issue a fatwa against
American citizens--and then follow it up with such carnage.
But did we not once view the Soviet Bloc as barbarian? After World
War II the threat posed by the communists offered a kind of solution
to the problem of maintaining a social and political order. The
costs were high, even if the communists never arrived. Twelve years
after the Berlin Wall came down, we found a solution to the
uncertainty of the 1990s, when it was common in foreign policy
circles to note, somewhat wistfully, that the Cold War had enforced
a kind of discipline on the Great Powers: the threat of nuclear
annihilation caused the Soviet Union and the United States to fight
a series of proxy wars, in Vietnam and Afghanistan, in Africa and
Central America; with the end of the Cold War ethnic and tribal
conflicts spread across the globe. But another discipline is upon
us. When our president asserts that countries are either with us or
against us we recognize a pattern familiar to Cavafy. We have our
new barbarians.
III
Terror is the chief impediment of empathy. Consider the body’s
responses to fear: to flee, to lash out, to become paralyzed.
Americans experienced the full range of emotions associated with
terror on September 11, when a new paradigm began to take shape: a
political, social, and cultural framework whose parameters are only
now becoming clear. But this much we can say: fear afflicts our body
politic. And however much we may abhor Bush’s cynical use of this
fear to advance his political agenda, it is important to remember
the depth of its origins. After all, a majority of Americans believe
that Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11, because in the face of
terror we tend to think the worst of the other--German-Americans in
World War I, Japanese-Americans in World War II, left-leaning
intellectuals and artists during the Cold War, Arab-Americans now.
A friend, for example, was about to leave his brownstone in the West
Village to sign the papers for his severance package (he had just
lost his job), when the first plane hijacked by the Al Qaeda
terrorists sliced into the World Trade Center. My friend’s reaction
was swift: he made plans to escape with his family to Long Island,
resolving never to return. But as the days of his self-imposed exile
turned into weeks, despite the pleas of his wife and children and
the cajoling of his friends, his marriage began to all apart. One
night his wife called to ask me to talk to him. I told my friend he
could not allow the threat of another terrorist attack to govern his
life, invoking the courage of the Sarajevans I had met during the
siege of their city--the courage that among other things enabled
them to keep their city in the negotiations leading to the Dayton
Peace Accords. My friend insisted that my analogy was imperfect. But
analogy is integral to empathy, I argued, and terror blunts the
mind’s ability to find analogies.
Indeed we have adapted to the new dispensation of the war on terror:
the long waits at airport security; the color-coded threat levels
raised, it seems, whenever the Administration has bad news to
report; the knowledge that crimes are being committed in our
name--in torture chambers in the Middle East; in our occupation of
Iraq; in the prisons at Guantanamo and Abu Graib. No doubt about it:
we are frightened. And so we are less likely to put ourselves in
someone else’s shoes. If truth is the first casualty of war, empathy
is next. But a healthy culture depends upon truth telling and
empathy.
How to deepen our powers of empathy? A literary education is a good
place to start. Reading widely in our own and other literary
traditions allows us to inhabit vastly different imaginative spaces:
when a reader becomes the book, to paraphrase Wallace Stevens, he
becomes the other. And if this communion of spirits may be fostered
by education, it can as well be destroyed, as I learned in graduate
school. I was assisting in the teaching of a year-long course in the
history of Western literature, the readings of which began with
Gilgamesh and concluded with Kafka. My mentor was a charismatic
woman who was contemplating becoming a lesbian for what she called
political reasons. I had assumed that such a decision owed more to
biology than to politics, but I had learned not to argue with
her--her convictions were far sturdier than mine--and so we got
along until the day I found I could no longer hold my tongue.
Our friendship ended over a paper turned in by our favorite student,
an older woman whose wisdom was well known. She had fled a
polygamous marriage, saving herself and her children from the
renegade Mormon doctrine of blood atonement--that is, the taking of
another life before he or she has a chance to fall from grace--in an
ingenious fashion: she went to a singles bar every night for three
weeks straight, bringing home a different man until it became clear
to her husband and the community that there was no hope for her. She
brought to class, then, not only cunning, wit, and a hunger for
ideas, but also a literary flair, which made her papers a delight to
read until, inexplicably, she handed in a flowery essay that, in my
eyes, was incomprehensible. My mentor disagreed. If you had ever
undergone an abortion, she said, you would understand. I replied
that I had never been a king, but because I had read King Lear I
knew what a blind sovereign cut to the quick by his daughters must
feel. She gave the paper an A. I told the student she could do
better, and she agreed. My mentor and I drifted apart.
You might say our friendship dissolved over the question of empathy,
which is a function of what Keats called “Negative
Capabilities--that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties,
Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact &
reason.” Keats thought Shakespeare was the greatest bearer of this
quality, but each of us possesses the possibility of living it to
some degree or another, though it must be nourished. And indeed we
might describe our national policy in the wake of 9/11 as an
irritable reaching--though, alas, not always after fact or reason.
But one of the virtues of great literature is that it can instruct
us in uncertainty
For example, Eudora Welty’s short story, “Where Is the Voice coming
From?”, the genesis of which she describes in the preface to her
Collected Stories:
The hot August night when Medgar Evers, the local civil rights
leader, was shot from behind in Jackson, I thought, with
overwhelming directness: Whoever the murderer is, I know him: not
his identity, but his coming about, in this time and place. That is,
I ought to have learned by now, from here, what such a man, intent
on such a deed, had going on his mind. I wrote this story--my
fiction--in the first person: about that character’s point of view,
I felt, through my shock and revolt, I could make no mistake.
Welty wrote this story in a single sitting, on the night of the
shooting. Long preparation, steady practice, and close observation
of her own and of her neighbors made her a perfect instrument for
recording the interior dimensions of this tragedy. It makes for
uncomfortable reading--the assassin is anything but likable, but he
is at the same time all too human, all too familiar; the insight
that Welty offers into the workings of his mind and milieu tell us
something about who we are as a people:
On TV and in the paper, they don’t know but half of it. They know
who Roland Summers was without knowing who I am. His face was in
front of the public before I got rid of him, and after I got rid of
him there it is again--the same picture. And none of me. I ain’t
ever had one made. Not ever! The best that newspaper could do for me
was offer a five-hundred-dollar reward for finding out who I am.
Here is a barbed warning about the limits of what the media can
uncover. The true story of any historical event will be told, if at
all, by an imaginative writer courageous enough to dive into the
language and the depths of his or her soul to discover points of
correspondence with the Other. Finding out who he is, no matter how
base he might be: this is the writer’s task. “I have been told, both
in approval and in accusation, that I seem to love all my
characters,” Welty wrote. “What I do in writing of any character is
to try to enter into the mind, heart, and skin of a human being who
is not myself. Whether this happens to be a man or a woman, old or
young, with skin black or white, the primary challenge lies in
making the jump itself. It is the act of a writer’s imagination that
I set most high.” What we need now are writers who can imagine their
way into the Other. In fact at a seminar not long after September 11
a member of the intelligence community called for more training in
the synthetic imagination--the writer’s imagination, that is.
IV
A hooded man on a pedestal, with electrodes attached to his arms and
legs: this is the image by which the success or failure of the
American experiment will now be gauged. The war crimes committed by
our political leaders (they hold command responsibility for the
actions of the troops) are a direct result of their cynical
exploitation of 9/11. There is a connection between the failure of
our political elites to summon us to our noblest selves and our
collective guilt on display in the photographs from Abu Graib, the
legal reasoning at the Justice Department and Pentagon justifying
torture, the willful blindness in the face of reports on prison
abuses. In addition to the Administration’s moral and legal failings
there was the failure of our adversarial processes embodied by the
political opposition, the media, the courts, and the intellectual
community. It is true that protests against the war were organized,
that a handful of diplomats resigned in protest, that a few brave
voices were raised in Congress and the media. But in retrospect we
see that this was too little and too late. Indeed it is clear that
Bush and his neoconservative advisors seized 9/11 to pursue their
own designs, while the rest of us--the media, the courts, the
Democratic Party, writers and thinkers--slept.
Courage was what we needed--the kind of courage necessary to
confront the fear- and warmongering politicians who are always quick
to seize on a national emergency. Americans have some experience
with this: in 1947, Senator Arthur Vandenberg, a Republican from
Michigan, told Harry Truman he could get a $400 million military and
economic aid program to Greece and Turkey if he used the threat of
Soviet expansionism to “scare hell out of the country.” The
president thus created the Truman Doctrine, which described an
endless global battle between freedom and tyranny--barbarism. The
Cold War was on, with its loyalty oaths, proxy wars, and
extraordinary expenditures of blood and treasure. Not to mitigate
the threat posed by the Soviet Union, but to remember the costs to
our freedom and ideals. The Bush Administration employed the same
tactic in declaring an endless war on terror: a formula for keeping
the reins of power.
Not long ago, I took part in a panel discussion in Portland, Maine
on the Patriot Act and the strictures issuing from the Office of
Homeland Security. I spoke of the inability of writers and artists
to secure visas with which to enter this country. A historian
lamented the declining numbers of applications from foreign
students. A lawyer from the American Civil Liberties Union warned of
even greater threats to our freedom in pending legislation. There
was a palpable feeling of despair, which prompted a congressman to
say, “We will have to be brave for the next twenty years.” This is
where literature can help. Surely the pleasure we take in an
elaborate conceit reinforced by prosodic means, in the development
of a character far removed from our experience, in the machinations
of a plot, is conditioned by the truth of its telling. Literature
can fortify the soul, encouraging us to be brave in the face of
uncertainty and ambiguity--the grey areas that define so much of
human experience, and which, like freedom, are our birthright.
