by
Robert Hass
View all notes
[...] The history of this century has taught us that, however inevitable a revolution may be and however just, what follows in its wake is the settling of scores, the rebuilding of ruined economies, the countermoves of more powerful states, a tug-of-war between revolutionary idealism and human nature that gets decided as often as not in prisons. Reading Cardenal’s later poetry, one wants to turn again to the no less adamant but more reflective tones of another poet whose country has suffered from its proximity to powerful and jealous states; the Polish writer Zbigniew Herbert is less tempted by the idea of apocalyptic transformation and it makes his tone seem saner and more focused, in these lines, for example, from a recent book:
My defenseless country will admit you invader
and give you a plot of earth under a willow—and peace
so those who come after us will learn again
the most difficult art—the forgiveness of sins.
But it’s a little tricky for an American writer these days to lecture a Nicaraguan writer on the forgiveness of sins.
The main consequence of the war so far has been the death of a very large number of innocent Iraqi civilians and the flight from their country of two and a half million others who could afford to leave. The country is in such chaos that it’s impossible to get an even remotely accurate count of the casualties, but the most conservative estimate is one hundred thousand people, and the count may be as high as half a million. These are civilian casualties. A significant part of that number has been children. That means—inside a head made slightly demented by the violence that is invisible to us here in the United States—that the average length of these dead Iraqi bodies must be no more than four feet, and so, taking the median casualty estimates, that would mean that, if you laid out the dead in a straight line, head to toe, along Interstate 80 on a cold spring afternoon like this one, they would reach from San Francisco to somewhere between Truckee and Reno. If the higher estimates are accurate, possibly to Salt Lake City. Swaddled mostly in black, dusted with new snow.
wow
The truth is that we have no control for testing the proposition that literature or philosophy, or religion for that matter, has had any mitigating effect on the violence of human behavior. This is the only world we’ve had and it is an exceedingly violent one, made more violent in the last hundred years by the enormous inventiveness of human technology and the greater ability of nation states to mobilize vast populations for the purposes of war. We know that the human heart loves images of superior strength, loves especially the combination of superior physical strength with superior agility of mind and nobility or gracefulness of demeanor. It loves vengeance, though there is some hope in the fact that, through some scruple in our natures, it loves vengeance against those who have done harm to the innocent and the weak, and it constructs plots, just as nation-states construct ideological justifications for war, that allow for this moral gratification of the love of violence and vengeance. Would some better and more powerful act of imagination make the world any better than it has been? Is the world better than it would have been had there been no songs or stories that rebelled against the violence in our natures and mirrored it back to us in a way that might have made us, or some of us, hesitate? There isn’t a control for this experiment. We have no way of knowing.
What the poem does, in fact, is one of the things art has the power to do. It refreshes our sense of ordinary life, and—in this case—our sense that there are lives other than our own and that people with hopes and dreams and desires are going about them as we are going about ours. Boris Eichenbaum, the Russian formalist critic, has said that “the function of art is to make the grass grass and the stone stone, by freeing us from the automatism of perception.” It may be that the small power of the literary arts to make some contribution to resisting the violence of princes, and of the human heart that princes like George Bush symbolize, lies here.
on a poem by Ko Un in Ten Thousand Lives
Earlier that year, he had, after dropping out of the University of California, worked fourteen-hour days in a steam laundry. At eighteen he had shoveled coal in a power plant, sometimes on eighteen-hour shifts. At fifteen, when his father was injured and couldn’t work, he had put in twelve-hour days in a cannery at ten cents an hour. At that moment, in high summer, in the spruce scent of the air on a ridge above a fjordlike Alaskan bay, he must have felt that he had been transformed, even with the pack on his back, from a beast of burden into a much more splendid kind of animal. [...]
London was a romantic; it was his special gift as a writer to make life seem vivid and intense. He had had a dreary childhood and a difficult youth, and they filled him with a sense—which it is another of the gifts of his fiction to convey—that there were great things in the world and great things inside him, and that there was something wrong with a society that beat the sense of grandeur out of other people, or wore it away. To freeze one of those moments on the mountain is to see the immediate appeal of his work: life as a grand struggle, masculine, openhanded, and best attacked head-on. Out of this sensibility, quick, generous, and responsive, and out of his prodigal, half-formed gifts and immense determination he made real art and forged his huge success. [...]
how does he write like this!!
[...] London was the best-known American socialist of his time, and though he had run for mayor of Oakland on the Socialist ticket, and contributed financially to the party, and was about to publish a book called Revolution, he was coming under attack from his compatriots for his high living. He was particularly sensitive to criticism of Martin Eden, and he defended the book to the novelist Upton Sinclair: “Martin Eden is an individualist, I am a socialist. That is why I continue to live, and that is the reason why Martin Eden died.” Sinclair, writing about the book, noted that reviewers had not grasped London’s point, if that was his point: “It is easy to understand the befuddlement of critics; for he had shown such sympathy with the hard-driving individualist that it would hardly occur to anyone that the character was meant to be a warning and a reproach.”
It is true that there is no reproach in the novel; London had got too deep into his subject to be passing out moral judgments. There is, however, a warning, and it comes from Brissenden in the thirty-eighth chapter, when Martin is on the verge of literary success: “ ‘I’d like to see you a socialist before I’m gone. It will give you a sanction for your existence. It is the one thing that will save you in the time of disappointment that is coming to you.’ ”
Brissenden, it turns out, is exactly right. The time of disappointment comes and Martin can find no sanction for his existence in his individualism. London is careful to underline this again on shipboard. Finding he has no use for the other people in first class—he knows exactly why their shirts look so white and crisp—and finding that he hardly recognizes the world of the crew, he stumbles onto an intellectually inclined quartermaster who tries to prod him “with socialist propaganda,” but at this point Martin is too far gone.
The writing in these last pages, London’s rendering of Martin’s sickness with the bright white light of existence, is brilliant, the numbness of it truly terrible: “He slept much. After breakfast he sought out his deck chair with a magazine he never finished. The printed pages tired him. He puzzled that men found so much to write about, and, puzzling, dozed in his chair. When the gong awoke him for luncheon, he was irritated that he must awaken. There was no satisfaction in being awake.” It is like the freezing numbness of his chilling late story “To Build a Fire.” He wrote about this sickness also in John Barleycorn: “I had read too much positive science”—he means Spencer—“and lived too much positive science,” and he attributed his condition to “the savage interpretation of biological fact.”
the titular quote is relevant to N
[...] the modernist aesthetic: go in fear of general ideas, Pound had said, the natural object is always an adequate symbol of the idea or the inward state. There is much to be said for this view: it is a way of bringing the minimum of conceptual baggage to the fresh encounter with reality. What was death to Stevens? A flock of pigeons that made ambiguous undulations as they went downward to darkness on extended wings. What was the secret principle of order in things to Ezra Pound? A rose in the steel dust. What was the paradise, tucked in memory or hidden just behind misery, to T. S. Eliot? Sunlight and laughter in a garden. These images have immense and memorable evocative power, and they have the permanent sphinxlike and unparaphrasable quality of all powerful metaphors. One feels in them the imagination in the twentieth century pounding on the wall of what it cannot know. [...]
[...] We have lived in a catastrophic time. The redundancy of violence and suffering, the sheer immensity of the danger, always threatens to wither the imagination, to make us turn back to the purely personal, as if it were somehow more real because the mind can, at least, compass it, whereas the effort to think about the fate of the planet, about what man is that he has done to himself all the terrible things that he has in this century, comes to us mostly as dark and private musings. And it is just this that Jeffers sought in the verse of his short poems, an art to speak those musings largely, to claim for poetry the clarity and largeness of mind needed to compass the madness.
From his point of view, to be seen always in political terms was particularly ironic because his argument with Marxism, indeed with the modern world, was that it had pinned the wrong kind of hope on politics. He had been, as he records in his autobiography, attracted to Marxism as a young man not so much because of its millenarian dream, but because it was based on the idea that the world was made not out of freedom, but out of necessity and power. In the end, this view of the world, though it had the look of frank realism, seemed to a mind like his, steeped in both Christianity and Polish Romanticism, servile, and its promise of some realm of absolute justice seemed a failure of the religious imagination. Or, to say it another way, it valued becoming more than it valued being. He believed that justice was a continuous struggle in human societies, not an absolute that the world was evolving toward. And therefore he didn’t think it was the end of history that mattered or its processes, but its individual moments. It was being, the very fact of the existence of things, that always seemed to him to be mysterious, to be the place where the meaning of existence—mute, perhaps, specific beyond the power of language, singular, not quite graspable—lay.
interesting
[...] In the twentieth century terrorism became, largely through the innovations of aerial bombardment by airplane and guided missile, the principal means by which states waged war. Hiroshima is, in that way, the century’s hinge. It was a straightforward terrorist attack on the civilian population of two Japanese cities, designed to break the will to fight of the Japanese government. In that one way it is not different in kind from the stateless terrorism practiced by al-Qaeda or the insurgent Sunni rebellion in Iraq. [...]