When her breathing slows, and then turns ever so erratic,
I break into my lover’s dreams to steal whatever sleep I can …. See
how her belly begins to show! My arms barely encircle her from behind
as she banks her Yamaha 450 through the radioactive wasteland of our town.
After 3 days on the road, we return to find everything we’ve ever built or grown—
the people we loved—piled into mountains of debris they’ll say equal 40 years of trash.
Women unaware that their nipples and areolas glow faintly green in the half-dark
kneel in mud giving suck to babies who retch up everything they swallow.
Countless times her rear tire blows, and she swerves into the path
of the same oncoming relief truck, always empty of supplies,
but not once have we tried to make each other wake up.

After making love on the futon, I notice faint scars
starting at her underarms and running down her sides
like an old map of tides surrounding the island of her flesh,
and ask if what she let slip about having been abused is really true.
She squeaks out a high-pitched laugh, says Only by you! and closes her eyes again,
Truth be told, I often see dreams like that inside her troubled dreams, but in them
I take the shape of an advancing wall of water, and despite her cries, I cannot stop!

It’s not hard to imagine her as a child, for I know we must have drunk from similar cups
in kindergarten, hanging from a string by the sink, or upturned on a faucet. We shared
every disease with the others in the school, for if nothing else, at least we learned that
we are one. And as we grew, you can bet everyone at her dinner table stuck chopsticks
into a common nabe pot of whatever fit her mother’s daily budget: vegetables and fish,
chicken, the cheaper sorts of meat, boiled together in a broth made of kombu seaweed,
katsuobushi dried bonito flakes, shoyu, mirin, miso, sake; and of course, fat udon noodles
we kids fought over at the end. Now we breathe radiation escaping from the incinerated
wreckage with everybody else. What they burn in the air burns in our bones, yet they cart
debris away to prefectural landfills throughout Japan. The government simply will not let us
suffer alone. But still we don’t sleep well. And if truth be told, our dreams should not be told.

They told us we needed more and more—
More cars, more “house,” more lovers, more money.
And we followed like rats on a treadmill
Cascading through a labyrinth.

We could not remember the unpronounceable names
Of battlefields, special ops, psy ops—the droned lands.
They told us we killed far more of their fathers.
And we rubbed that balm like salt in our wounds.

They cloaked themselves in our gory flag.
They went to our games, ate hot dogs… cheered!
Our warriors shone in their feral eyes.
They consoled us and wept with us, dribbling lies.

They told us we needed more and more,
Then shipped our livelihoods elsewhere.
We could no longer tell friends from foes—
Kids in hoodies were met by assassins.

Was there one thing to point to, one hard fact
That explained all the rest?
If we could say—“It was something ineluctable—
a tumorous growth—something we couldn’t help. …”

If we could say such things we would have found it
Easier to blame the standby gods.
But we had been sold a bilge of particulars
While gorging ourselves on freedom fries.

If only we could say, “It was something else—
Not John and Paul and Helen and Mary;
Not Mickey Rooney and Jimmy Stewart;
Not the nobility we saw on our screens.”

But we could not even remember our names,
As we wandered down odd corridors, looking
For lost keys to doors that sang like refuges
While the bombs fell and children glowed like candles.

Or how about a poem that will explode
In the face of the corrupt, even if it kills
The poet as he’s writing it. Swallow this.

As ship lists and drones fire, we
Don’t need poetry as earworm,
But as tasseled cushion for ass
Of Goldman Sachs CEO, to blow
Up his rottenness, we demand

Poetry waterboarded onto the lying,
Smug and top-shelf mug of the Prez,
At a White House soiree, and beamed
On well-starved PBS, as foreclosed
Citizens cheer while chewing
Leftover Chef-Boy-a-Poem.

Funded by the maker of Prozac and Cialis,
American poetry puts you to sleep with a boner.
I mean, shit, you can’t make shit like this up,
So it’s high time for a John Brown poetry to surge
From the flooded basement of our cranium, as
Real John Browns sally forth to retake the real,
Rout nonsense and reclaim our definition.

*****

To think is to act, now, so,
Like any foreign nation, you
Can also be preempted from
Your future crimes. If you don’t
Believe me, just ask the FBI
Agent you’re lying next to,
Under or above. He or she
Can kill you in the dark, in silence,
And that’s no Middle Eastern joke.

Well, then, I’m a thought criminal,
A terrorist, since I fantasize always
About neutralizing the bad guys.
Soon as I close my eyes, I see
Skyscrapers being imploded
And freefalling into their huge
Criminal footprints and scattering
Fraudulent investments and mortgages.

I fancy myself stepping over corpses
Of tax-dodging and looting CEOs,
War profiteers and propagandists,
The ones who keep feeding us lanky dogs
Dryhumping homing soldiers, but don’t show
Those who are killed, maimed or tortured
By these same guys and gals next door.

Dumped from the imperial meat grinder,
They’ll become your police or panhandle
From neocons and libtards, even occupiers,
And though a terrorist, I’ll give them a buck.
“Man, you’ve been had!” If anything, I wish
I was a better fighter, so I could join other fighters
To combat real terrorists, with their real weapons.

Dense but thinly veiled
Transparent but flowing like cream
Medicine fashioned from steel
Surgeons with dirty tools
Incisions made at the jugular

Homes with buried roofs
Children with broken toys
Mothers with husbands jailed
Lovers separated at birth
Followers with no one to lead

Nation with flag
Flag without nation
Waiting in line
Naked but wearing a coat
Turned back without an explanation

Terror sips from a carafe
Garrisons gather with no one to fight
Lungs labor to breathe
Enemies say they can be trusted
Friends are gathered on Facebook

Kin was once rock
But now is mere rubble
Stones are gathered
Thrown by the arms of skinny children
On dirty streets littered with tanks

Once asked to be chosen
Only to be denied
Rip my skin with a bullet
Release the pin that secures this mortal coil
If Hell is a place for love to die

Father is dead
Mother just sits
Brother has disappeared
Sister has found another way
I am left alone

Death and shambled dreams
Life and recurring nightmares
Stench of the victims
Fragrance of killers
Suited and armored to feast

In New Orleans, two guys sit behind typewriters on a sidewalk in the exceedingly charming neighborhood of Marigny. Inspired by Jazz, no doubt, they will instantaneously write a poem on “your topic,” and, get this, at “your price.” Go ahead and try them, but don’t go easy now. Demand that they write a poem on Grimm’s law, gimcrackery, the Dust Bowl, viridity or the amazing life and death of Ioan Petru Culianu, for example, and pay them well, of course.

When the Reverend says one, he means the same poem each time, but sometimes not even that in its entirety, as when he forgot the final, killer stanza to Baudelaire’s “To The Reader.” After some nudging from me, however, Friendly finally belted out, with flecks of spittle spraying my poor face:

Boredom! He smokes his hookah, while he dreams
Of gibbets, weeping tears he cannot smother.
You know this dainty monster, too, it seems —
Hypocrite reader! — You! — My twin! — My brother!

Drifting around for the last four years, she has traveled as far north as Alaska, and as far south as New Mexico. In Montana, she slept outside in -20 degrees. She was staying with Occupy Boston until the police evicted their encampment from Dewey Square.

She has investigated the Transcendentalists and found them half-assed.

“If you want to be an animal, then Thoreau ain’t shit,” I said.

“Yes, Thoreau ain’t shit.”

As we all know, Providence is home to excellent Brown University, an ivory Watts Tower that mostly benefits folks parachuted in from divers brown stones, cul-de-sacs and walled and moated communities. That is, they ain’t quite germaine to Providence itself, with its million Dunkin’ Donuts and a few excellent Cambodian eateries. So here’s the punchline: Brown pays only 2 million bucks of city tax yearly when it should cough up 19, which is exactly the deficit of corn syrup and trans fat-mainlining Providence. Ah, but Brown has an excellent writing program!

Opening a Brown door to go outside, I nearly slammed into a white bearded and ushanka wearing character, so I shouted my standard greeting, “Yo, let’s go for a beer!” But this Russian caricature dude was not impressed. Though he seemed crazy, he probably thought I was crazy. It turned out he was the take-no-prisoner Keith Waldrop. Just so you know now, Keith doesn’t bullshit, and he has stopped going to poetry readings or lectures. He has enough poems in his head to last several millenia, so he has to use what little time he has left to hunker down and turn each one over, to examine each from all sides, to decide whether it belongs in the Poetry Garage or the Poetry Junk Yard.

After I admitted that I was more or less a writer, he said that he too wrote. He was a poet, to be more specific, “I’ve been writing since I was four!”

“Do you have any poem in your head you can write down for me?”

“Yes! In fact, I do. I’ll write it down for you right now.” And he immediately went at it.

Done, he motioned for the bartender to come over so he could declaim his poetry to her. She listenly patiently, though without much comprehension, even if there was no Norteno music in the background, yet at the end, she beamed in relief and shouted, “That’s beautiful!” Before scramming away.

As he handed his poem to me, he explained how he managed to compose it, “I wrote this after my first wet dream. Yes, my very first, when I was already in my 30′s! I dreamt that I was back in Vietnam, and I was in a firefight, and it was one of those terrible firefights when you couldn’t even think, when your mind went blank because you were so confused and terrified. My mind went blank, and I couldn’t think at all, but suddenly the noises stopped, and I was in this hooch, and it was completely silent, and in walked six or seven Vietnamese women. You know, when I first got to Vietnam, I couldn’t tell the women apart. The men, I could figure out, but the women all looked the same to me. I was sleeping with this one girl, and I thought I was in love with her, but then I couldn’t tell if it was her I saw on the streets. Is that her? Is that her? Anyway, here I was in this dream, and in walked these Vietnamese women, and they were all beautiful, but I couldn’t tell them apart, so I had to look at their legs. Suddenly, I could tell which woman was for me, because she had black legs!”

This vet was black, by the way, but as I started to comment how ironic it was that he couldn’t tell Vietnamese apart, when racist whites, and Asians too, would say that they can’t tell one black from another, he stopped me with volcanic irritation, “You have no rights to judge my feelings! This is my soul! My creativity! You’re judging my art! You have no rights to judge my art!”

And with that, our conversation ended, but I still have his poem here. Like most, the chance of it being even slightly good or readable is very slim, but who am I to say? Nearly all of our poems are barely read now, much less in the future.

Throughout history, it has been the inaction of those who could have acted, the indifference of those who should have known better, the silence of the voice of justice when it mattered most, that has made it possible for evil to triumph.
– Haile Selassie

Have our Jewish sisters and brothers forgotten their humiliation? Have they forgotten the collective punishment, the home demolitions, in their own history so soon? Have they turned their backs on their profound and noble religious traditions? Have they forgotten that God cares deeply about the downtrodden?
– Bishop Desmond Tutu

These two cautionary admonitions capture the thrust of Günter Grass’ electrifying poem, “What Must Be Said,” that has brought an avalanche of invective – some scurrilous, some vituperative, some even personal vilification – against the man who warns the people of the world as well as the Jewish people of the dangers inherent in the actions of the Zionist controlled government of the State of Israel. Such condemnations avoid direct rebuttal of Grass’ pointed cries of despair as he contemplates continued indifference to the slow yet calculated genocide that exists in Israel’s occupation of Palestine reverting instead to derogatory innuendo, ignorance of conditions prevalent in the occupied territories, ignorance of those determined to destroy Israel, and personal guilt as a German. There is no reflection on the worst sin human kind can inflict on their fellow human beings, the silence of indifference to the plight of the Palestinians or to the potential danger facing the people of the mid-east should Israel pre-emptively strike Iran.

The title of his poem, “What Must Be Said,” echoes the prophets of old, cries of those weeping in the wilderness to heed the obvious, to hear the hypocrisy that masks the reality of a nation that cries for peace as it stealthily steals more land, that demands dismantling of Iran’s nuclear plants as it declares its right to Dimona and untold weapons of mass destruction, that denounces with all brazen duplicity, indeed silences those who criticize the state of Israel while they are free to attack them as anti-Semitic.

“Why silence so long,” Grass asks of himself and answers, as must we all, that we are “slaves to an oppressive lie,” what cannot be said without condemnation because Israel has the “right” to demand and defend what it will. Is it wrong to criticize the obvious? Is it wrong to bare truth when silence once before begot a holocaust? Is it wrong for the German people to mark what they have learned through decades of reflection and reparation and not reveal what they have lived and learned? Is it wrong to speak when devastation threatens, when arrogance buries truth, when the weak have no voice, when the unknown consequence of brutal, raw, preemptive power is imminent?

I would have Günter Grass speak for me, my children and grandchildren, and all others who could suffer yet another World War, by noting the obvious that has been silenced so long:

• a state provided with the fourth greatest military machine in the world to defend less than 6 million people,
• a nation, the only nation in the mid-east with weapons of mass destruction,
• a nation that refuses to sign the mid-east nuclear non-proliferation agreement,
• a nation that has demonstrated its willingness to invade its neighbors in Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Iraq, and drools to bomb Iran,
• a nation that occupies a land provided for it by the same United Nations that gave Israel license to declare itself a nation,
• a nation that damns Iran for proclaiming that it will “wipe Israel off the map,” when in fact it never made such a declaration yet innocently hides its own declaration in the Likud Party Platform that the state it professes to want peace with, Palestine, shall never have a state west of the Jordan,
• a nation that is of such demonstrable threat to world peace that if it is not condemned would be a blot on all who remain silenced and thereby complicit in its crimes, and for such inaction, such indifference we must accept responsibility and condemnation; let the indignant ring their bells of anger and hatred, truth will prevail.

Who better to speak than a citizen of a country that supplies Israel with nuclear submarines capable of terrorizing its neighbors if not the world, submarines provided as reparation to a people destroyed so they can become the destroyer. “Why silence so long?” because “this must be said” with strength, conviction, integrity and honesty, and without personal fear or trepidation because the silence has been broken by a voice that resounds throughout the world in righteous thunder against the greatest danger the world now knows, an Israel that can act with impunity to crush whomever they determine to be their enemy.

Let me close this defense of Günter Grass with a story told by Professor Michael Klein years after he had escaped death at Auschwitz. Klein’s brief narrative is titled “Breaking Silence.” It captures what I believe is the real essence of Günter Grass’ plea, both in time and shame. The story reflects on Klein’s close friend, Salamon Abshalom, who had attempted escape and was to suffer death as a consequence. The story is a parable that parallels our time; what if voices had told of the Jewish plight before the trains took them to the death camps; maybe Salamon Abshalom would still be alive.

“My friend Salamon Abshalom was let out. He was barely able to walk; his hands were tied behind his back. An SS guard took him to the back of the camp yard. … He was led to the gallows and made to climb onto what looked like a stepladder. The noose was tied around his neck.

We stood paralyzed, in bewildered despair. How could the Heavens allow this to happen on this holy Yom Kippur evening? Did the Germans set up the execution specifically for Yom Kippur to humiliate the God of Israel and His people? The silence of the Heavens screamed out in our hearts and in our souls. The desecration of the God of Israel, of the people of Israel, of Yom Kippur, and the humiliation of man created in the image of God proceeded in silence as the German hangman, the Camp’s SS commander, stood over Salamon Abshalom.

Suddenly, as if from nowhere, a powerful, high pitched voice rang out over the camp yard. It sent chills down our spines, as we heard the cry of “Sh’ma Yisrael…”, Hear O Israel”, as Salamon Abshalom declaimed the eternal proclamation of the Jewish people’s belief in one God….

With his prayer of Sh’ma Yisrael arising from his last breath, he raised all of us standing Zaehlappell to the highest spiritual level. Even as his life was extinguished by the brutal murderer to whom nothing was holy, he still proclaimed the eternity of the Jewish People, in defiance of evil, in defiance of the Germans, in defiance of the silence of humanity, and in defiance of the silence of the Heavens. Salamon Abshalom proclaimed the Godliness of the Jewish People even at a time when God seemed to be totally absent.

I slowly calmed my emotions and tried to analyze my thoughts. The Germans murdered Salamon Abshalom, but I was guilty having been silent in spite of the promise we made to each other in the camps that we will tell the world of what happened. I had kept Salamon Abshalom’s memory a secret for all these years.”

Silence sacrifices the innocent because it allows continuation of slaughter; silence rests in the soul as it acidifies into self-shame; silence speaks no language, offers no aid, but ensures that time will extinguish both hope and guilt. Silence is the voice of the coward and the accomplice. Silence must be extinguished.

Oh girl, my love, you’ll wait for me
Until I’m done with fighting?
And I’ll be back one eventide
When candles you’re a-lighting.

Waiting is a bitter time,
And hopes, they keep retreating.
And he who left so valiantly
Was not who came to meeting.

Oh mother, wheel me through the door,
For I’ve no legs for walking.
I cannot tell you of my war
For I’ve no tongue for talking.

Oh mother, I would sing a song
But I’ve no lungs for singing.
What have I done, what have I done?
Oh see the grief I’m bringing!

Oh girl, my love, I’d hold you close
But I’ve no arms for holding,
And oh, I’d fold you to my breast
But I’ve no hands for folding.

I hear the pity in your voice,
And I’ve no eyes for crying.
I’ve nothing left but memories,
My killing, people dying.

I’d buy you flowers and a ring,
But I’ve no hands for giving.
Oh leave me here and let me die
For I’ve no heart for living.

© Lesley Docksey 21/03/12

What was the inspiration behind this poem?  I feel so strongly that, if we could only make people face what war really does, the damage it causes, they would be more prepared to join us in campaigning to stop war.  As it is, the public is encouraged to feel insecure; to support efforts to combat ‘terrorists’; to believe that every soldier that dies is a ‘hero’.  And the politicians (and, of course, big business) try to keep any images or information about the appalling damage out of view, because they know how outraged people would be once they had been brave enough to look at that damage.

Like all the major news stations in thrall to the powers that be, the BBC won’t air any graphic war footage because ‘it offends public taste’.  I ask you – when was war ever tasteful?  So, until people like me get listened to, until the public recognises the death and destruction we are responsible for when we send our armies off on yet another military adventure, I guess I’m in the business of offending public taste.

Like many professors, I am critical of the increasingly corporate nature of universities. The conservative/neoliberal project of turning public schools into educational factories is also gathering steam in higher education, and there is much organizing work necessary just to protect what little space for critical thinking still exists.

But the longer I teach, the more I appreciate the privileges that come with the job, and the more fun I have. So, when I recently had to write a “statement of teaching philosophy,” I tried to reflect that gratitude and pleasure.

Statement of Teaching Philosophy: Pay attention, be astonished, tell about it

After years of research, I have developed a three-stage teaching method that breaks new ground in pedagogical theory: Stage 1: Pay attention. Stage 2: Be astonished. Stage 3: Tell about it.

The first thing to say about this sophisticated advance in our understanding of university teaching is that I stole it, from Mary Oliver’s poem “Sometimes.”

If it appears I’m trying to poke fun at university professors’ self-indulgent tendency toward pomposity, I am. Since I am a university professor who occasionally can be self-indulgent and pompous, I have standing to poke fun. Frankly, we don’t poke fun at ourselves enough. That’s part of my teaching philosophy: Poke fun at myself, as often as possible, especially in front of students.

In this regard, poets perform an important service for professors. If we professors are ever tempted to claim that we have had an original insight into the human condition, we should pause and remember this: There’s at least one poet, and likely dozens, who had the insight long before we did and who expressed it far more eloquently than we could ever hope.

I don’t teach poetry, but I often read poetry to my class. That’s part of my teaching philosophy, to remind students that whatever the subject, poets have something important to say to us. I read to my students even though I have had no voice training and am not particularly good at reciting poetry. That’s part of my teaching philosophy too. I think it’s healthy for students to see professors stumble. When every word we utter in class is precise and polished, it can create distance between professor and student. Students are too easily impressed by us, and they can come to believe we are our performances. Better that they see we are human beings, struggling and stumbling, so that intellectual work doesn’t appear to be something only specialists can do. Our job isn’t to be smart but to help students understand that they can be smart too.

So, I read to my class, from Mary Oliver and Wendell Berry, from Marge Piercy and Faiz Ahmed Faiz. I play songs, too, though I’m sensible enough not to sing in class.

Back to Oliver. Those three recommendations comprise her “instructions for living a life.” They also are serviceable instructions for teaching. I try to pay attention, not only to the scholarship in my field but to the world around me, which means I try to get out in the world beyond the university as often as possible. I am constantly astonished by the human capacity for both depravity and love, and I spend considerable time trying to figure out these paradoxes. I tell about it as often as possible, as a teacher, public speaker, and writer.

After 20 years of teaching at the University of Texas at Austin, I have written numerous statements about my teaching philosophy. Each exercise is an opportunity for me to challenge myself. The somewhat unorthodox style of this essay comes not from a lack of respect for the assignment but a desire to challenge myself in a new way. This might be because, after 20 years, I have a sense that I’m a better teacher than ever, but at the same time I’m less sure why that might be the case.

Here’s one plausible answer to the question of why my teaching might be better today: I’m more comfortable with ambiguity than when I was younger. As we age, we have a choice. We can conclude that we’re right in our assertions about the world and proceed based on that assumption. Or, we can conclude that we’re right and proceed based on the assumption that we’re missing something.

I have spent considerable time studying the role of news media in our culture, politics, and economy. I am confident that the assertions I make about that institution and those systems are compelling. I’m pretty sure that I’m right, and I argue strenuously that those assertions are the best way to understand journalism and society. And I also wonder about that.

Time for another poet. Faiz Ahmed Faiz concludes his poem “The City from Here”:

There are flames dancing in the farthest corners,
throwing their shadows on a group of mourners.
Or are they lighting up a feast of poetry and wine?

From here you cannot tell, as you cannot tell
whether the color clinging to those distant doors and walls
is that of roses or of blood.

I read that poem to my journalism students as a reminder that when we look, we look from one perspective. “When you look at the city from here,” from any one place, it can be easy to confuse roses and blood. Since we are always looking from somewhere, caution and humility are important. I read that poem to remind students that their point of view is a point of view. I read that poem to remind myself as well.

With that winding introduction, here’s a concise statement of my teaching philosophy: I have the best job in the world. I get paid a salary that allows me to live comfortably and give back to the community. To earn this salary, I am asked to spend my time thinking, reading, writing, and talking, all things I enjoy doing even when not being paid. On occasion, I have to go to a boring meeting or file a stupid report, which can at times be annoying. But, all in all, this is a really good gig. The least I can do is pay attention, be astonished, and tell about it with as much joy and passion as possible. When I do that, I think I’m a pretty good teacher, and I think I do that most every day I walk into the classroom.

But I’m not 100 percent sure I’m as good as I think. When I look out at my students and see roses, maybe that’s just how the city looks from the lectern. Perhaps I simply don’t see the blood.

Time for a closing metaphor, this time borrowed from Wendell Berry’s poem, “To Know the Dark”:

To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.

We are the best teachers when we aren’t afraid of the dark. When I began teaching, I went into the dark with the biggest flashlight I could find. That light allowed me to see many things, but the intensity of the beam obscured other things, in the shadows. That light allowed me to feel smart, but these days I am less reassured by being smart. The older I get, the more I realize that being smart isn’t going to get us all the way home.

So, these days I carry a smaller flashlight, and I turn it off as often as I can muster the courage. My best teaching is when I go dark.

The ladybug goes back and forth, back and forth
across the thin-rimmed screen.
She doesn’t know she goes back and forth
across the lip of the laptop’s screen.

I’ve already killed a score or more—
a minor infestation.
As soon as the warm days come along–
millions of them breeding!
How do they get into my home…
and why does she seem delirious?

When I was a kid, we’d cup them in palms—
something delicate…, traipsing…, tickling. …
(Fireflies, too, were good in our hands
and magic and mystic at nightfall.)

All of that’s gone now–
back and forth, back and forth in our dreams.

I wish I could tell this amiable being
the futility of her journeying.
How short her life… with that carapace–
that pretty bead enclosing wings. …

To what earthly purpose
should we be so methodical?

Should I let her live?  Should I play God?
What does she seek?  A mate?  A home?

Ladybug, ladybug, fly away home—
into a child’s hand in a land forlorn,
into some globed, elder’s hands.

• Writer and humanist Garda Ghista, editor of World Prout Assembly,  succumbed to breast cancer in Germany. She was also the founder of Hearts Healing Hunger, feeding thousands of poor people in India.

Gone…gone…all gone…all gone, all gone so terribly wrong.

There is no good, no peace, no justice, no love, no fairness…
No striving for good,
No striving for peace,
No striving for justice,
No striving for love,
No striving for fairness,
There is no compassion, no remorse, no tenderness, no mercy…
No striving for compassion,
No striving for remorse,
No striving for tenderness,
No striving for mercy,
No freedom from fear, no freedom from hunger, no freedom from want…
No striving to provide freedom from fear,
No striving to provide freedom from hunger,
…or freedom from want.

There is no “shining city upon a hill”,
no “workers paradise”,
no “invisible hand”,
no place to hide.
Alas! There are no magic solutions…
no mantras…no easy way out…
There are no “renewable” resources…is no “sustainable” development …
no end to war & destruction…

There is nothing left but this dying Earth & the
barren paths leading to dried-out dreams, for
no heart lifts another’s:
There is no heart in this world anymore.

This the wise now see, &
thus, lamenting over the state of our world, saddened Samantabhadra left, muttering only one thing for us to say, one thing to remember, for all of us, for all time:

Gone…gone…all gone…all gone, all gone so terribly wrong.

Meanwhile, in the economic and military sphere, the drum beat continues essentially the same as it ever did. There is no doubt who won the battles of the Sixties in those arenas: big business and the Pentagon. Even though union membership is down drastically from its heyday years of the 1960s, a concerted drive to destroy the unions that remain has kicked into high gear. While governments and big business work together to disempower the remaining unions, the demagogues among them work overtime in their attempts to tie every problem the common man and woman has to those workers that dare to fight for their union. Instead of talking honestly about the failures of neoliberalism, right wing corporate shills denounce school teachers and nurses for demanding a decent wage while simultaneously privatizing whatever services they can. Unemployment remains high, especially among black men, who have only known full employment when they were forced to work as slaves. Indeed, the only place where most African-American men are working is in the network of prisons across the USA, where they work for minimal wages while reaping profits for Wall Street corporations that have the taxpayers pay the bills those prisons rack up. It can be reasonably argued that US prisons are the historical successors to those plantations where many of today’s prisoners’ ancestors worked.

September 13, 1971 is a day I will never forget. It was my sixteenth birthday, but that fact serves only as a marker for the unforgettable events of that historical moment. On September 8, 1971 several hundred men at Attica State prison in New York took over a part of the prison. This act was the direct result of a scuffle that occurred in what was known as D Yard. In truth, though, it was the culmination of a months-long campaign for prison reforms in Attica and other prisons in the New York system. It can actually be argued that the campaign in New York was part of a larger campaign that was occurring across the United States. This upsurge in the prison struggle had been fueled by other movements in the US and also by a growing awareness of the role prisons play in the oppression of disenfranchised groups in a society. The assassination of Black Panther George Jackson barely a month before the uprising at Attica served as a vicious reminder of how far the State would go to maintain that oppression.

Back to the story of September 13, 1971. As I sat at the dinner table that evening I simmered with anger. That morning Governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York had ordered an assault on Attica which resulted in the deaths of 39 men, mostly prisoners but also including nine hostages. This massacre took place after four days of negotiations orchestrated by the prisoners and conducted by a group of outside observers selected by the prisoners. Suffice it to say, the birthday celebration was muted, a cloud of death hanging over the dining room. I could only imagine how the families of the dead men felt. The primary official representing the state of New York was Correctional Services Commissioner Russell G. Oswald, a liberal within the prison administration. The group of observers was composed of almost two dozen men and included radical attorney William Kunstler, New York State Senator John Dunne, New York City councilman Herman Badillo, members of the Young Lords, Louis Farrakhan, and New York Times writer Tom Wicker.

Almost four years later Wicker would publish an account of the uprising titled A Time to Die. This account is a testament of the times. Wicker was an unabashed liberal when that word defined a certain political and cultural mindset that included support for civil rights, civil liberties, and the consideration that radical and revolutionary leftists not only made some valid points but that they were often right when it came to analyzing the nature of race and class in the United States. His book on Attica stands as one of the best pieces of journalism to come out of the period known as the Sixties. Fortunately, it was recently republished in a paperback edition by Haymarket Books of Chicago. Written in the third person — like much of Norman Mailer’s best journalism — Wicker describes the events that took place in Attica after he arrived there sometime during the night of September 8, 1971. His chronicle reflects the genuine concern for the lives of the prisoners and the hostages and is witness to his growing disbelief that there can ever be a peaceful resolution to the situation. That awareness is accompanied by his acknowledgement that the blame for this does not fall on the prisoners but on those in the New York government apparatus that cannot or will not see the men of Attica as human beings. The tension inside the prison and between and within the various groups involved forces Wicker to reflect on his life growing up in a union anti-segregationist family in the apartheid US South. This personal history and the contrast between the prisoners desire to be treated like humans and the bureaucrats’ determination to deny that desire causes Wicker to forsake his journalistic objectivity in favor of the inmates. In what is certainly one of his finest journalistic moments, after hearing Rockefeller tell him that granting amnesty to the prisoners would undermine the basic tenets of our society, Wicker writes:

Wicker had to stop himself from laughing–not with amusement– at this astounding irony. In a country where so many wealthy or well-represented lawbreakers could go free, where the killers at Kent State and Jackson State were not even prosecuted, where minorities (blacks and Mexican-Americans, for two good examples) suffered from openly prejudiced law in whole regions, where the poor and disadvantaged of all races usually felt the whole weight of the police, the courts, the prisons–in that country, the “equal application of the laws” was to be upheld in the case of the Attica Brothers!

If the Sixties were about freedom, and I believe that they were, then the men in Attica were ready to die for theirs. And many did. There were others in associated milieus that fought for theirs and for men like the Attica Brothers. Poet, writer, counterculture mischief-maker and rock musician Ed Sanders was one of those. His recently released biography Fug You: An Informal History of the Peace Eye Bookstore, the Fuck You Press, the Fugs, and Counterculture in the Lower East Side is a look at that battle. Sanders could be described as a member of the group of ramblers, mystics, poets, and plain old lunatics that formed a bridge between the Beatnik and hippie/freak culture. Like Neal Cassady, his age and refusal to go along with the dominant culture of the grey-flannel suit led him to places that existed on the fringes of US society, especially white US society. In the search to disengage from the mainstream culture, the men and women involved often went out of their way to offend. Given the Puritan confusion and hypocrisy about all things sexual, it was in that arena that artists and poets often played in when they wished to push the limits outward. William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg — two men who make occasional appearances in Sanders’ jerry-built memoir — knew this territory well. Indeed, by the very fact of their homosexuality, they were already outside of society (like Patti Smith sings in her tune “Rock and Roll Nigger”).

Sanders is the author of one of the best true crime books ever written in the United States. That book, titled The Family, is about Charles Manson and his group of twisted souls. Fug You is primarily about the decade before Sanders published that book. It was a decade that was full of activity for Sanders. He published one of the best known mimeographed poetry and art journals of the period. Like the photocopied zines of the 1980s and 1990s, mimeo journals were the samizdat of the art and poetry countercultures of the period. Sanders journal, known as Fuck You, published Burroughs, Ginsberg and the poets Charles Olson and Robert Creeley, among others. His magazine gained him invites to parties with the burgeoning literary and artistic elite of 1960s New York. This access in turn gave him access to patrons and a ready set of defenders whenever the obscenity police came down on his magazine, as they did somewhat frequently.

All of this, however, was but a prelude to Sanders best known (and most popular) endeavor: the creation of the rock and roll band The Fugs. I gave their first album a few listens while reading this book and am still amazed not only by the fact that they got a recording contract but that they actually broke the Billboard Top 100 a couple times. On top of that, The Fugs played on bills featuring some of the biggest bands of the period. The music The Fugs created was a mixture of straight blues, some rock and roll, a little Indian influence and just plain freakin’ noise. The lyrics were a combination of beat poetry, antiwar visions, visionary hopes, sexist nonsense and just plain babble. Like I said, it’s hard to remember that The Fugs were actually somewhat popular. That fact alone is testament itself to how much the cultural boundaries were being stretched and redefined. As for that sexism, let me clarify.

Sexism was an unfortunate part of the freedom defined by the Sixties. Not because many men were more sexist than many men are now, but because their sexism had never been challenged. The sexual repression that had ruled US popular culture to that point was being broken down. Given the generally sexist nature of the culture, that sexual freedom may have opened up minds, bodies and souls, but it did little to end the objectification of the female person. That task would fall on the feminist movement that rose from the cultural revolution of which Ed Sanders writes about in Fug You.

One could argue that, unlike the sexism of today’s media, which bases itself on the complete commodification of the body while also putting a price tag on the emotion of love, it can be argued that the sexism of the Beats and hippies was a genuine attempt to create a world of Eros referred to in Herbert Marcuse’s classic text Eros and Civilization which visualized a society “based on a fundamentally different experience of being, a fundamentally different relation between man and nature, and fundamentally different existential relations.”

There was a genuine joy in that revolution. It would soon be tempered by the repression from the State, various religious figures and institutions and the military. Sanders memoir captures all of that. He writes snippets of remembrances that together tell a good part of the story. The Living Theatre putting on their play The Brig; the authorities shutting them down. The Human Be-Ins and the attempt to bust Allen Ginsberg for marijuana. The Yippies desire to host a festival of life and the police riot that was Chicago 1968. Sanders book covers the late fifties to 1970. Wicker’s covers four days in 1971. The men in Attica, however, were there for crimes that happened during the same period that Sanders book takes place. Their denouement was a violent end to the Sixties in a much more cataclysmic way than the Altamont concert portrayed in the film Gimme Shelter, or the police murders at Kent and Jackson State. These two books represent elements of the zeitgeist of the Sixties. They also hold both possibilities and warnings for our future.

The first time I fell in love, really fell in love, it was not with a girl or a woman. It was with a smattering of words here and there on a page. A printed page.

It presaged what love would be like.

It said love is a jigsaw sunset and you are the piece that holds the sun.

It said the best gesture of my brain is less than the flutter of your eyelids which whisper we are made for each other.

It took my breath away and then gave it back, deeper and more meaningful. I wanted to take in as much of it as I could.

While other kids were dreaming about throwing or catching the winning touchdown pass or chasing after the boy who threw or caught the winning touchdown pass, I discovered trunkless legs of stone in a faraway desert, wandered the stately pleasure-dome of Kubla Khan and pondered fears of what would happen if I ceased to be. My eyes widened and the narrows of obviousness rapidly became too confining.

I never idolized Luke Skywalker or Dr. J. I wanted to be Poe. I wanted to be Keats or Shelley or Yeats. I wanted to speak to people in a way that made them conscious of breathing.

Today air intake is just an involuntary reflex. Consciousness of it is something we attempt to force on our kids in school or college, but it doesn’t stick. And perhaps it was always so.

It’s been over two hundred years since Wordsworth noted that devoting our lives to getting and spending lays waste to our spirits. And we’re still mostly just getting and spending.

There’s not a business department in the land that will tell you that breathing is more important than getting and spending. Especially someone else’s breathing.

Society pays no praise or wages for the sullen art I loved because it taught me to love and breathe lovingly. And I know I have become a boring anachronism.

But I feel compelled to resist. I fear the reduction of our culture to raps and tweets and texts. The ironic truth about I-Touches, I-Pads and I-Phones is that more people are communicating, but less is being said. The gadgets truncate our thought processes and abridge cognition. They comprise a strain of expedience that might be useful in an immediate tense, but will likely be detrimental in the longer sense.

This is no time for intellectual slang. Look around.

The ceremony of innocence is being drowned. The best lack conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity.

The mob may be incited or mollified by a text or tweet, but it will not be moved in a meaningful direction. That requires elucidation and crafted cogence.

Shelley may have overshot the mark when he said that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, but even if it isn’t true, it should be.

The world is so much with us that we fail to grasp the importance of the moment we live in and exist oblivious to the repercussions.

We need to be more conscious of our breathing.

We must become more mindful of our interconnectedness with everything and everyone around us. There’s no hope for us as a single party, cause, country, religion, ethnicity or species. Our only hope lies in collective conscience and broad concert.

Instead of getting and spending we need to do more watching and listening and thinking.

Instead of ceding conviction to brainwashed miscreants and manipulative scoundrels, we need to speak out and rise up, inspired and informed, and therefore indomitable.

We don’t need more pundits or politicians or profiteers. We don’t need unlimited texts or more folks following us on Twitter.

We need more eloquence and profundity.

We need more poets.

Say that you have trained them well:
They are the oiled machinations of war,
performing as expected.
Refrain from saying “professionals,”
and the usual nonsense about “surgical strikes.”
They were never doctors and nurses
in starched, white linens.

The best heroes are dead ones—
mortified and mortared.
They neither complain nor contradict.
They don’t re-live “friendly fire” incidents,
the sonofabitch sargeant-sadist,
nor the rapist in their midst.
They don’t see again
the faces of traumatized children.
Their bones stretch to attention under the sod.

The man and woman who will kill and injure
because some fool tells them to
are just little spin-off fools.
No act born of ignorance is heroic.
Heroes are sensible, not imbeciles.
Heroes dispel myths; they neither create
nor perpetuate them.

The fully manifested hero,
aware of his power and dignity,
is more than human, is humane.

Heroes don’t talk about heroes.
They need no confetti showered in their faces.
They question; they learn; they challenge; they act
according to their own honed principles:
What is truth? for example;
what is honor?

Part 1. The Vision

Hai-ya ya-ya-ya-ya, Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya,
Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya, Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya. …
Hai-ya ya-ya-ya-ya, Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya,
Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya, Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya. …

            (to be chanted until the Spirit is with one)

Where the horses dance like mad on Paha Sapa;
Where the mountains flow like rivers in the sun,
Turning watery golden under the reddening sky;
Where the clouds assume a human, spectral form,
Flowering with faces of the still unborn:
There the Grandfathers of our people called me,
Smiling behind their wild cloud beards.
Their eyes were holes where the sky entered in,
And their hands were the ashes of hands.
Opening their mouths, hawks soared from them,
Fluttering, turning in the glistening air.
A reed they smoked from bade me have no fear.
To each the reed was handed as a friend.

Then the Grandfathers bade me follow.
They grew young before me like boys.
And we hooted and shouted and rode on the wind,
Our hair like black fire behind us.
The hooves of our ponies kissed the sweet prairie grass,
And the air all around us rumbled with storm.
As far as eyes saw, the bison stampeded.
“Hoka-hey!” cried the Grandfathers.
Locusts of arrows rained on the prairie.
“Hoka-hey!” cried the women.
Red meat hung in the cottonwood branches.

Over the Greasy Grass we rode,
Over the tipis of nations:
The fires of the tribes lit up the hills,
The tipis of Minneconjous flapped in the wind.

Oglala and Shyela, Hunkpapa and Lakota,
Santee and Yanktonai camped by the icy stream.
The stars burned bright in the hair of the Great Father.
The blue river ran swiftly past the tribes.

All night the Bear Men dance round the fires,
All night their shadows dance on the tipis
Where the children dream; white smoke drifts in the sky.

Morning, red sun peeks through grey clouds.
Higher and higher, rising in the air,
The horses neigh wildly, the Grandfathers shout,
And the women dance round and round and round, clapping.
Hundreds of bluecoats bloom in their blood
Like hundreds of violets scattered on the hills.

All this I saw before my springs were ten.
And after, many times, flew with the spirits
To the other world, shedding the skin of shadows.
The people showed me honor with their eyes.
Great feasts we had, and battles,
With many victories over our enemies,
The rumbling thunder-beings making the bad ones crazy.

Then we were the first men of the Earth:
The faces of our children shone with morning;
Summer and winter the world was rich with heroes.
But now, all’s past; the hoop of the world lies broken.
Whirlwind and hailstone pummel the prairie.
Hungering dogs howl in the bitter air.
The wandering spirits hide.

Hai-ya ya-ya-ya-ya, Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya,
Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya, Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya. …
Hai-ya ya-ya-ya-ya, Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya,
Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya, Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya. …

            (let the silence linger)

Part 2. The Hope

Where are you now, Tashtunka Witco?
The sacred buffalo wallows in his grave.
Washita maggots swarm on the prairies.
Where are you now, Tashtunka Witco?
Tongueless carcasses rot in the red sun.
Human vermin murder holy land.

Now let us moan, my brothers!
The long-wailing coyotes will not out-grieve us.
The prairie dogs will look at us in pity.
All over the Earth the beasts will tell our story.
Gather now in the long grass, ghosts of my people.
Let your heart-felt cries rend heaven!
The Great Spirit weeps and culls us to His bosom.
We must leave this Earth we loved.
Never shall we walk these hills again.

Where are you now, Tashtunka Witco?
The clouds blot out the sun; the morning wanes.
The prairie flowers die while still in bud;
The cries of tortured bison scorch the air.

You saw your children hunted down like dogs,
Your women butchered, whittled into bone.
You could not bear the fire-watered eyes
Of braves who rode against the Long Hair foe.
You walked into the woods and lived alone.

You whom the Spirit loved as His own son,
Whose eyes, they say, held fire in their core,
Who saw the horses dancing in the clouds,
Who danced above the rattling Gatling guns–
Now you are gone; no more will you walk before us,
And the long night of our land comes on.

Hai-ya ya-ya-ya-ya, Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya,
Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya, Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya. …
Hai-ya ya-ya-ya-ya, Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya,
Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya, Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya. …

Part 3. The Sabers

The bluecoat sabers come! The thunderous drum
Of horses beats the plains!
The wagon guns are coughing at the hills!
Look! It is just meat here which had a name.
The lips that kissed a lover’s kiss the flies.
The innocent die with music,
Cruel music of the Gatling guns,
While snow shuts closed forever mouths that sang to God.

O, Sun that endures forever, men must die!
O, Earth that endures forever, men must die!
Great Spirit, spread Your wings above us,
Hover, Falcon, over Your lost children.

The snow falls in the valley of our graves.
Bones stiffen; dumb mouths sing with wind.
The long night of our land comes on.

Where are you now, Tashtunka Witco?
At night, in the disemboweled bodies of horses,
Of bison, you slept in howling caves
While bluecoats fell with the snow.

Never would you be free again.
Never would you walk above the clouds.
Staring at embers with your brittle eyes,
You saw the bison skeletons stampede.
Dancing, you fell; dreaming, you could not rise.
At last, your own tears froze you to the ground.

O, Sun that endures forever, men must die!
O, Earth that endures forever, men must die!
The innocent die with music, cruel music,
And the long night of our land comes on.

Where are you now, Tashtunka Witco?
Cuffed and shackled, a beast with human eyes–
They shoved you to the prison door, they beat you down.
You watched them throw raw beef
To chiefs who ate off floors.

The vision gnawed; you reeled and cried;
You danced and groaned;
The hot steel flashed inside of you;
You fell like empty sackcloth to the ground.

Which of them knew you, warrior, spirit–
Raging with politics, God, greed and guns?
Which of them saw the poet inside you,
Brutal and lusting, with their teeth full of gold?
The old chiefs wept, and sang,
And shook their heads, remembering, when told.
The sky fell down and cracked the shoulders of the young.

Hai-ya ya-ya-ya-ya, Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya,
Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya, Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya. …
Hai-ya ya-ya-ya-ya, Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya,
Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya, Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya. …

Part 4. The Song

A man who lived beneath the hot sun’s thumb
Said that if we danced the rains would come
And white men would grow small and drown.
In every tribe we heard the throbbing drum
And saw men dance until their feet were numb,
And heard the crackle of the white man’s gun.

Now let us make the long march home, my brothers.
The river is frozen with the blood of our warriors.
Our chiefs are slain, our daughters have the eyes
Of old women, our sons have forgotten who we were.

While the twilight comes, pull down the tipi poles!
Let the ponies step quietly
Over the puddles of the moonlit snow.
Let the infants make no crying in their nested sleep.
Only the prairie wind will be talking.
Let each one linger in his thoughts.

Great Spirit of the Wind and Waters,
Thunder and roses dwell within Your arms!
We have heard the prairie groan beneath the iron rail.
We have seen the engine streak the clear blue sky.
Buffalo is gone, and, now, we, too, must go.

Let the prairie dogs trace our footsteps.
Never again will Earth be young for us,
Never again hold out her warm, green arms.
Never again will Sky throw back his head
And laugh until the stars are shaken down.
Men’s lives are warm breath mingled with the cold.
Men’s lives are footsteps in the snow.

Now let us make the long march home, my brothers.
Never shall we find rest among these mountains.
Our Great Grandmother waits in the Valley of Skulls.
Only she will embrace us hereafter.
Never shall we roam from her again.
With her only shall we find peace.

Now brothers, do not weep;
Your tears will never melt the snow.
Now ponies, step quietly through this dark land.
The branches of the saplings hold the moon
As in a spider’s silvery web.
Our Grandfather’s chant to us beyond this snow.
Listen… listen… listen… listen. …
See where the moon spills from the trees on them?
O, they are white upon the whiteness of the snow.

Hai-ya ya-ya-ya-ya, Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya,
Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya, Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya. …
Hai-ya ya-ya-ya-ya, Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya,
Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya, Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya. …

(“The Song of the Hoop” won the Stephen Vincent Benet Narrative Poem Prize in 1972. It was published in Poet Lore in 1973.)

We, on the other hand, are full of “life!”
We eat pizza and watch television.
Water magically appears at our fingers.
Our skin is bathed in emollients.
Our babies are full-throated and fat.
Our bodies are soft, and shaped like gourds.
We drive everywhere in S.U.V.’s.
We vote for politicians who despise us.
We are proud of our democracy.

The people of Somalia vote with their feet.
They trudge the hot sands, looking for water.
The soles of their feet are hard as tires.
They know nothing of Global Warming,
Population over-shoot, Earth’s carrying capacity.
Their carrying capacity
Is a baby on each raw hip.

The poor among us are deliberately poor.
Anyone with gumption can make a million.
Our hard times will pass and we’ll get back to normal:
Proms and Christmases, first kisses,
Change we can believe in, reality TV.
We’ll die and we’ll kill for inalienable rights:
Happy Meals, water at our fingers;
Our right to be oblivious; our right to
Life, liberty and a perennial mirage.

It’s a nice distinction often adduced
To show a finely-calibrated mind
(He’d taught himself Euclid’s geometry);

Still, one wonders if in those dark moods
The 16^th President was prone to suffer—
If he wondered whether there was any side at all;
If it didn’t boil down to
Fighting over semantic differences—
“Property rights” in a land appropriated
From people who never thought they owned the land.

Wage slaves in the North, Black slaves in the South
And the bulwark of the Idea
Pulsing madly West and South,
After the gold at Sutter’s Mill,
After Caribbean sugar,
Both sides seeking to enforce their will
On “savages,” “redskins,” “heathen,” “darkies.”

This is not to argue
There’s no right or wrong;
Beyond those moral apperceptions
That make us either this or that,
We find a universe of constant flux
Under a palette of exploding stars.

God, then, so far beyond
“Our poor powers to add or detract,”
Even the word “ineffable” won’t do
(Implying we might get there some day!).

Dante evoked the descent into the underworld to intimate the understanding that darkness is an aspect of human nature and that self-awareness arrives only after an exploration of the hidden, self-censored regions of one’s psyche. Only after passing through the inner most circle of the frozen hellscape does it become possible for Dante to look upward and gaze upon Beatrice’s splendor among the spheres of Heaven.
 

His Journey began, lost in a dark woods, with his path blocked by a hungry she-wolf and fierce lion. Then, led there by the pagan poet, Virgil, the adamantine gates of Hell (posting that famous sign regarding hope forever abandoned) slammed shut behind him. But the poet’s descent deep into the unsavory aspects of his nature made possible those glimpses of beatific light.
 

You, darkness, that I come from
I love you more than all the fires
that fence in the world, 
for the fire makes a circle of light for everyone
and then no one outside learns of you.
 
But the darkness pulls in everything — 
shapes and fires, animals and myself, 
how easily it gathers them! — 
powers and people –
 
and it is possible a great presence is moving near me
 
I have faith in night
 
– Rainer Maria Rilke

 
Otherwise, as is the case with the Puritan/Calvinist imagination, an individual risks becoming purity-obsessed and light-intoxicated i.e., lacking in the will and ability to see the dark side of their nature; hence, one is prone to project one’s own motives on the actions of others.
 
Possessed by this state of mind, an individual is capable of inflicting a great amount of damage on his own psyche. Witness: the raging, lower order demons, inhabiting their own personal hellscapes, as channeled by the likes of Bachmann, Palin, and the Reverend Robertson.
 
Yet, rationalistic devices such as reductionist reasoning and humanistic psychology have proven useless in breaching the high walls of delusion bulwarking fundamentalist, free-floating crazy.
 
Why? Reductionism is a bi-product of the western Puritan/Calvinist tradition, and as such is prone to the pathologies inherent in the cosmology…wherein there exists: an habitual winnowing down of perception to controllable, exploitable bits; the dismissing of all things (the veracity of imagination, the emanations of nature and the souls of animals) that do not serve narrowed agendas (which are defining characteristics of its scion — the corporate state — and those within its institutions who have internalized its raison d’être).
 
Both Fundamentalist and reductionist mindsets are cemented in certitude. In fact, each is the shadow side of the other; hence, hyper-rationalists and religious literalists are locked in contemptuous embrace. Both evince, with their obsession with the other, a longing for rapprochement with their missing half, yet their encounters become a courtship dance of animus and antagonism, whereby their mutual yearning for union is expressed as a compulsion to transform the other.
 
Therefore, the rationalist is driven to proffer balms of superstition-purging logic, as, in turn, the religious true believer frets over the doomed-to-eternal-damnation, mortal soul of the salvation-bereft rationalist. Yet both causation-clutching logicians and credulous lambs of the lord share this trait: both have banished from their respective belief system the appropriation of empathetic imagination and a poetic approach to mystery.
 
Accordingly, the ideal use of poetic insight, intellectual rigor, and quicksilver wit is to deploy these tools (at times, weapons) of the mind — in the manner the hubris-hating gods intended — to confront bullies, rednecks, liars, prigs and hypocrites (including our own self-serving casuistry), to disarm (or, at least, annoy) the brutal, conniving and witless, and, in general, paraphrasing Whitman, “to cheer up slaves and to horrify despots.”
 
Yet, today, if a poet were to merge his body with the body of America, instead of discovering a Body Electric, he would find himself endowed with the hulking, putrefying corpse of a shambling zombie. Accordingly, he must tear a rotting arm from the monster and beat his own laughing corpse with it. Creating a movable autopsy, a Book Of The Dead for a dying empire.
 
Worse, in the world beyond U.S. self-reference, the earth’s oceans are dying — as, on a personal level, Fukushima’s isotopes penetrate our bones like parasitic beetles boring into the trunks of dying trees
 
And this is not simply a view of the world. In fact, this is the state of the world.
 
Don’t defend the indefensible — the soul-defying banality of the present system. The neo-liberal superstate is unsustainable and will bring on its own demise.
 
Instead, like a mourner in a New Orleans funeral march, dance with the dread involved. The music of sorrow is more real than the magical thinking required to believe an insane system is salvageable. Don’t stand, back pressed to the wall, frozen in rationalization and equivocation…Exalt in the unfurling mystery of it all.
 
Crackpot realists demand solutions and Christian Fundamentalist pray for finality. I demur. I stand in awe of the ragged glory immanent in sublime futility.

“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.”
– Samuel Beckett

I suspect this attitude arrives from the southerner/Native American collision of genes in me. One’s broken places allow the spirit in. No need to fix the problem, for the problem is the solution. No call for satanic caulk to seal the cracks in one’s soul that reveal one’s character.
 
And why is this important, particularly, at a time when our opponents are unflagging in their certitude? Because even when our reason to fight has merit, and nuance is banished, the larger truth that life itself contains paradox and is comprised of ambiguity remains. Thus, fascist fantasies of infallibility are toppled and the misguided trudge toward the mirage of paradise is waylaid…perhaps leveling a measure of humanizing grace.
 
“None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.”
– Goethe

The New Critics were right to bemoan the flaccid criticism in newspapers and women’s mags, but, as sometimes happens with rebels, they went overboard: throwing out baby with the bath-water and lopping off too many heads.

I reflected on these ideas as I read Morris Berman’s first book of poems.  Counting Blessings is a volume of 44 pages with some excellent poems.  Try as I might, feasting on heaping dishes of Structuralism and Deconstructionism, I cannot read Berman’s initiatory dance with the Muse… and quite forget his impressive background, his intellectual creds, who the man is and what he has done.

I know Berman principally through his book, Dark Ages America.  Published in 2006, it’s a rueful song about the closing of the American mind and heart.  It hurts because it’s the story of lost love—the lost love of a culture, of what might have been.  Sometimes, it’s even funny—the way George Carlin or Richard Pryor or Lenny Bruce could be funny—making you cry and laugh at life’s beautiful-tragic poignancies.

But Berman’s not just a witty heart-yanker.  He’s an acute observor and astute commentator.  In 2000, Berman’s The Twilight of American Culture was named a “Notable Book” by the New York Times Book Review.  He has been a Professor of Sociology at Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. and a Professor in Humanities at the Tecnologico de Monterrey, Mexico City.  Counting Blessings was written after he moved to a small Mexican town a few years back.

His themes are exile, isolation, alienation and reconstitution.  I don’t mean “reconciliation” by the last because there are some things to which we can never quite reconcile: the death of loved ones; getting old—and getting too old; the loss of a culture which nourished even as it destroyed.  So the book is about “reconstituting” oneself, becoming a new person in one’s old skin, acclimating to a very different world in Mexico while remembering—reconstituting—the past:

By what miracle did I shed the old life
the life of autistic hostility
and emerge, reborn, in a new place, a new time?

Thus Berman inquires of himself—and the Universe—in the first poem, “Identity.”

His eye for detail and close observation (and his penchant for irony) are nicely measured in “Last Rites”:

A complicated, delicate insect
crawling along the edge of a pot in my garden
delicate feelers, large green eyes
absorbed in what it was doing.
I can do that, once in a while:
three seconds every month, perhaps.

In “Light,” this hard-headed social historian recalls his mother’s vision of “a burning bush… just like in the bible.”  And, laying his cards on the table, this exemplary rationalist reveals:

I recall a number of incidents like that in my own life,
some more ‘cosmic’ than others.

And,

… around age sixty, perhaps a little before,
I saw a pillar of fire—again, as in the bible
and I began to weep.
This time it stuck:
I see it more or less every day now.
Exodus says it guided the Jews through the desert,
but I’m not looking for the Promised Land.
Oh no—
wandering in the desert is the Promised Land.

That’s a fine last line: a bit of cognitive dissonance serving the lie to the Corporate State that bids us tweet back perfect answers to complex questions at the end of the workday—which, more often these days, never seems to end.  It’s also a line and a poem likely to drive the psychiatrists and the pharmaceuticalists stark mad.  In fact, it turns our whole get-it-do-it-now culture on its noggin.  Acceptance… waiting… wandering. …

At his best, in his conversational style, Berman’s insights can be sharp, startling and true:

Letting go of love
when you have no choice
is a little like dying without morphine.
And then you realize—though you knew it before, of course—
that the closeness was not about sex
but about being able to take care of someone
without a thought for yourself.

Of course, first-book poets, especially one of Berman’s intellectual stature, may be allowed some latitude to stretch their muscles and to fall.  Ultimately, poets are judged by their best; Keats’ revision of “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” for example, falls short of his original (and everyone but Keats seems to have agreed on that).  So, in truth, sometimes, Berman’s “conversation” sounds flat:

The pain of knowing what life could be like
and not having it
is a difficult one to endure.

‘Everything in moderation,’ said the ancient Greeks.

Or,

The death instinct hovers over the United States,’
wrote some journalist a few years back.
It was a bad book with one good idea.
and I think: How did this happen?

Poetry wants the “best words in the best order” in Coleridge’s phrase.  Bald statements like this one need some poetic flourish, some juice:

It’s no use, finally;
We simply have to find a different way to live.

All in all, there is wisdom in Berman’s first collection and much that touches us.  I hope to read the poems of this astute sextagenerian expat for decades to come.   Many of us want to put this sad, violent, hyped-up, exploited and exploiting culture behind us.  Berman is one of those who has pointed, and is pointing, a way:

Hard to get up, get ready for the Creation,
when you know what the next few decades are going to be like.
Not any of us have a choice.
Me, I had to be extracted with forceps.
And yet, I’m in no hurry to return…

There’s so much sweetness in a single day
a single woman
a single hummingbird
a single fountain pen
a single poem.

chatter all day, The Mozlems are coming;
they’ve dropped their drivel about fighting

them there. While our troops fought in Iraq
holding the ‘terrorists’ at the gates, back

home, greater troubles were brewing.
Radical Mozlems were actively scheming

to impose an Islamo-fascist theocracy
on the United States. Our great democracy

confronts an existential threat from within.
Let us act fast – good Republicans raise a din –

Moslems inside the US are working openly
to force sharia-law upon us. Act quickly,

harangue the pundits – or lose this great country
to heathens. Now’s not the time for an energy

plan, overhaul Medicare, fix the infrastructure,
or trim the deficit. We face greater dangers

from the enemy within: The Mozlems are coming.
It’s women in burqa, no gambling, no drinking,

nor driving for women. Americans get cracking
‘cause your country is calling. The Mozlems are coming.

They exploit feigned loyalty to recruit supporters
Spreading their poison through corrupt reporters
They excuse hatred as defense for survival
Then brutalize the innocent who may rival

Their basis is an evil which lusts for power
Men’s rights and possessions it must devour
It evolves into forces which imitate good
While fooling the masses, just like Hollywood

Often historically, it’s been exposed and defeated
But, alas! Its villainy is oft repeated
It resurfaces with diverse profile and prism
It now creeps back in the form of Zionism

Zionism – pilfered holy name of the Bible
Founded by those claiming Semitic tribal
Their ethnicity is really Aryan race
They’ve duped true Hebrews into shameful disgrace

Zionism – equipped with agenda and charter
Sustain the false prophet, slay the sainted martyr
Manipulate the infrastructure discreetly
Banks and Law, Schools and Media completely

Zionism – calculating and resolute
Breeding destruction, merciless and absolute
Execute the children along with their mother
Perpetrate the crime and accuse another

Zionism – insane, vain, and sinister
Sly enough to engage the Christian minister
Redefining God’s Word to champion its lies
Wake up, people! Open your hearts and your eyes!