Another paradox: such commitment to the theme, such a profound sense of creating from within the hell they depict— and such detachment or nonattachment. Toshi Maruki accepts despair, and at the same time says, “If we all must live in hell, perhaps in time people will begin to understand this reality... and if each person understands, we will be able to stop war.” And Iri Maruki: “If people happen to learn something from the painting, that is wonderful; if they don’t, that is all right too.” Perhaps no Western artist is sincerely capable of such disclaimers. Yet part of the secret of any engaged work that has depth and lasting power resides in something not altogether dissimilar: not a detachment exactly, but an intense concern for the formal properties of the work which is not diminished or overshadowed by passionate commitment to content.
A few years ago I saw an exhibition of antinuclear paintings. Some had an obscure or an oblique relation to the theme; some mimicked the ugliness of their subject with a kind of frenzy, and from these it was easy to turn away unmoved. But one stood out: a medium-sized circular painting that showed the stone framework of what had been a stained glass window. Through the aperture, the glass all gone, was visible a sunset sky, deeply flushed—and below it a desolate, empty, ravaged stretch of ground, extending to the horizon, where no living thing remained. An evocation of tragic, utter silence. The power of its beauty, the power of its message, were indissoluble. I believe I shall never forget it.
Like that painting, the Marukis’ lifework demonstrates that the engaged art which can effectively fulfill its didactic potential is art which sacrifices no aesthetic values to make its point.
To maintain an equilibrium between the unflinching memorialization of what human beings are capable of doing, in all its terrifying ghastliness, and the beauty of line, form, and color, is not to subvert a didactic engagement with something alien to its purpose, even though I have called it a paradoxical achievement; nor is such beauty a mere sugar coating to help us down the vile pill, for it is impotent unless fused with its content. It is not a sugar coating—yet without it no one would consent, or indeed be able, to look for long or repeatedly at images that rub our noses in such content.
We humans cannot absorb the bitter truths of our own history, the revelation of our destructive potential, except through the mediation of art (the manifestation of our other, our constructive, potential). Presented raw, the facts are rejected: perhaps not by the intellect, which accommodates them as statistics, but by the emotions—which hold the key to conscience and resolve. We numb ourselves, evading the vile taste, the stench. But whether neutralized into statistics or encountered head-on without an artist-guide (as if Dante wandered through Hell without a Vergil), the facts poison us unless we can find a way both to acknowledge their reality with our whole selves and, accepting it, muster the will to transcend it.
Only such an acknowledgment of our past, our complicit present, our possible (many say probable) future, such a coming to consciousness, can further the assumption of responsibility that could (that must) prevent that unthinkable/thinkable future, and instead, swerve us off and away from our doom-bound road.
* * *
In 1988 the Massachusetts College of Art gave Honorary Degrees to the Marukis, who created the Hiroshima and Nagasaki Murals and have gone on to depict a number of other outstanding crimes of our lifetime. A number of writers and visual artists were honored by an opportunity to contribute to an illustrated catalogue for the exhibition which accompanied their visit.
Poetry, Prophecy, Survival
(early 1980s)
IF A WRITER’S SUBJECT matter frequently includes issues that are prominent in the history of his or her own time—if he or she engages, as is virtually inevitable once such issues enter the work at all, on one side or the other of a controversy—the English-speaking public will demand that that writer account for so doing, and justify the presence of the political in the literary. I said English-speaking because this is much less true in some other cultures—the Hispanic or the Slavic for example. And I should also qualify writer by saying especially one whose main work is in poetry.
Political subject matter is looked upon either as an intruder into the realm of poetry, or as a matter that requires special discussion every time it occurs, and can’t just be taken for granted like any other subject. So the poet is challenged to respond to many questions, ranging from the hostile (which may elicit defense or a shrug of disregard) to the genuinely, and sometimes profoundly, enquiring; and these last reach the artistic conscience and cause the poet to search for authentic personal responses. One such stimulating question I received in the mail was this one:
What relation has the poetry of joy, proclamation, affirmation, to politics?
I would answer:
A poetry of anguish, a poetry of anger, of rage, a poetry that, from literal or deeply imagined experience, depicts and denounces perennial injustice and cruelty in their current forms, and in our peculiar time warns of the unprecedented perils that confront us, can be truly a high poetry, as well wrought as any other. It has the obvious functions of raising consciousness and articulating emotions for people who have not the gift of expression. But we need also the poetry of praise, of love for the world, the vision of the potential for good even in our species which has so messed up the rest of creation, so fouled its own nest. If we lose the sense of contrast, of the opposites to all the grime and gore, the torture, the banality of the computerized apocalypse, we lose the reason for trying to work for redemptive change. Not as an escape—not instead of but as well as developing our consciousness of what Man is doing to the world and how we as individuals are implicated—we need more than ever before to contemplate daily (and to make, if we are so fortunate as to be capable of it) works of praise, works that by power of imagination put us in mind—re-mind us—of all that makes the earth’s survival, and our own lives, worth struggling for. To imagine goodness and beauty, to point them out as we perceive them in art, nature, or our fellows, and to create works that celebrate them—are essential incentives to finding a route out of our apparent impasse. A passionate love of life must be quickened if we are to find the energy to stop the accelerating tumble (like a fallen man rolling over and over down a mountain) towards annihilation. To sing awe—to breathe out praise and celebration—is as fundamental an impulse as to lament.
Yet, while nature (albeit defiled and threatened) and art, past and present, inspire us (put fresh air in our lungs to keep us alive), we must demand of ourselves and our contemporaries an acknowledgement of the political iniquities among which we, nevertheless, at times sing out in joy; and then we must do what each of us finds possible in behalf of justice, mercy, survival and change. As William Morris said, “I am tired of the fine art of unhappiness.”
The same correspondent asked,
What is the relation between affiction and imagination?
And I answered that:
Affliction is more apt to suffocate the imagination than to stimulate it. The action of imagination, if unsmothered, is to lift the crushed mind out from under the weight of affliction. The intellect by itself may point out the source of suffering; but the imagination illuminates it; by that light it becomes more comprehensible. It becomes a discrete entity, separate from the self. This is what I meant when I wrote that
To speak of sorrow*
works upon it
moves it from its
crouched place barring
the way to and from the soul’s hall—
Crass, complacent obliviousness to suffering obviously does not coexist with imagination—the insensitively cheerful are uncreative. But that does not mean that neurosis is the sine qua non for the operation of creative imagination. Neurosis saps energy while the creative imagination, itself not languid, demands energy in those it inhabits. Imagination is not anesthetic.
But is it all a cop-out, a facile bugging of tbe personal life? my correspondent said.
No, I replied. Though imagination’s
wings can lift the individual out of private pits of gloom, it is a creative function, producing new forms and transforming existing ones; and these come into being in the world, autonomous objects available to others, and capable of transforming them. It is when that transformative power is denied by a certain evasive and deliberate detachment that a cop-out occurs. There is a kind of wilful ignorance not so much of the facts of history but of their moral and physical implications. And sometimes there is a kind of contempt for action, an attitude that attributes superiority to detached observation or deliberate disregard as contrasted with political participation, especially other than verbal participation.
More and more, in this time of ultimate choices, ultimate choice, the spectacle of poets blithely detached from concern with anything so mundane as day to day political action (and even in individuals prone to private gloom, such unconcern appears blithe!) is one which detracts from the validity and impact of their poems. It is a detachment which trivializes their own work.
A poetry articulating the dreads and horrors of our time is necessary in order to make readers understand what is happening, really understand it, not just know about it but feel it: and should be accompanied by a willingness on the part of those who write it to take additional action towards stopping the great miseries which they record. The extent and nature of action to be undertaken by artists and intellectuals (or anyone else) is, of course, a matter for the individual conscience; it can’t be prescribed. But just to tell the tale and walk away isn’t enough.
And a poetry of praise is equally necessary, that we not be overcome by despair but have the constant incentive of envisioned positive possibility—and because praise is an irresistible impulse of the soul. But again, that profound impulse—the radiant joy, the awe of gratitude—is trivialized if its manifestations do not in some way acknowledge their context of icy shadows. It is not (I believe) a question of any poet being morally obliged to write politically engaged poems. A sense of moral obligation has never and can never be the source of art even though it may be one of its factors. It is a question of that context being palpable in the work although perhaps never named, never made explicit.
But, came the next question, still wanting a fuller justification:
What of the facts of genocide, oppression, conflict? Is creativity in tbe arts a way out cf bistory?—A collective cop-out, f not a personal one—an evasion?
On the contrary, I think the arts are—among other things — a way into history. Intellect informs, but emotion—feeling— will not respond (especially to facts about events too distant or too vast to be experienced directly through the senses) unless imagination gives us the vision of them, presents (makes present) the unwitnessed, gives flesh to the abstract.
The responses this series of questions evoked in me have sometimes been paralleled by being asked to speak on the subject of poetry and prophecy. Prophecy is a word often associated with poetry, and there was a time when I felt the association was hyperbolic, because I was thinking too exclusively of the predictive sense of the word prophecy.
However, if we look at the Old Testament prophets—and certainly in western culture they are the basic model—we see that whether or not we take them to be gifted with foreknowledge (foreknowledge either taken to be intuitive, ecstatic and visionary, or to be the conclusions of rational ethical observations), they have without question other roles too: they warn of the effects and consequences of evildoing and foolishness; they upbraid the people for wrong or stupid behavior; and they take a powerful stand against corrupt and oppressive rulers. A Catholic Biblical scholar has listed four types of prophetic utterance— Threat, Promise, Reproach, and Admonition. Promise and admonition would include, no doubt, both the ecstatic vision of a desirable future and the less reproachful, more pleading voice that urges the people toward virtue. Above all, I would add, the prophets provide words of witness.
It seems to me that poetry is rarely if ever the expression of psychic precognition of events, but frequently partakes of those five types of utterance. Threat often takes the form of imprecation and bitter satire if directed towards a power structure, or, if directed towards the people, of warning—while reproach also takes the form of lament (in fact lamentation is an additional prophetic mode of utterance). So it can be said that poets often share the prophet’s stance in these ways, though not all poets are prophets, and probably no poets, as poets, have occult knowledge of future events.
And what about prophets, are they necessarily poets? Perhaps not, strictly speaking: yet it is clear that whatever their messages—admonitions, reproaches, warnings, or promises and visions of a better life, “a new heaven and a new earth”— what they had to say had to be said powerfully, with imagination and linguistic resourcefulness, if it were to get across to the people. So to some extent they bad to be poets, or at least persons whose eloquence and oratory could survive being written down, so that it could reach further and be pondered. The deepest listening, the ear of imagination, rejects all that merely says, that fails to sing in some way. And this brings one to a very important factor which is shared by poets and prophets: prophetic utterance, like poetic utterance, transforms experience and moves the receiver to new attitudes. The kinds of experience—the recognitions or revelations—out of which both prophecy and poetry emerge, are such as to stir the prophet or poet to speech that may exceed their own known capacities: they are “inspired,” they breathe in revelation and breathe out new words; and by so doing they transfer over to the listener or reader a parallel experience, a parallel intensity, which impels that person into new attitudes and new actions. Of course, this doesn’t necessarily happen instantly. Some listeners are impervious, others are changed so subtly by a poem or by a prophet’s words that a long time elapses between cause and effect. But fist or slow, if the prophecy or the poem is the mysterious genuine article and the receiver’s sensibility is open to it, some change does take place, I am convinced. It is for this reason that I’ve always felt poetry and the other arts had a potential for contributing to social change no matter how remote from political, social, current or ethical issues they may seem to be. They don’t bring about change in themselves, but they can contribute to it simply by stimulating the imagination and thus making empathy and compassion more possible, at least.
But we live in an unprecedented time, a time when as we all know the fate of the Earth itself lies in the balance as never before; when day by day powerful forces all over the globe are tipping that balance further towards extinction. And this country, the USA, is playing a major part in that suicidal and globicidal insanity. In this dangerous, extraordinary time we can’t, I feel, rely solely on the subtle and delicate possibilities of change implicit in the giving and receiving of all art; we also need direct images in our art that will waken, warn, stir their hearers to action; images that will both appall and empower. All of us feel sometimes that it is already too late; but this feeling alternates with the powerful creative energy, the will to live and to preserve life, we all carry in us somewhere. Just because—prophets, poets, or listeners, readers—we are not (or are very seldom and then unreliably) oracular, we do not know that the worst is bound to happen; and that suspension in not knowing, bleak though it is, is the source of hope. And hope also calls for witness, for the articulation poetic art (call it prophecy if you will) can give it. We make poems, as the Inuit poet Orpingalik said, “when ordinary speech no longer suffices.” And William Carlos Williams wrote that
It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.
Hugh Kenner, in a lecture, beautifully defined what poets seek if they really are poets) as “the power to make things as moving as the things they have been moved by.” That is to say, they don’t necessarily seek to describe or evoke what they’ve been moved by, though sometimes they may; but do necessarily seek to make, out of language, things tha
t will embody equivalent or similar qualities. Such things will elicit related responses in others.
What many people don’t recognize is that poets write poems from the same impulse that others read them. People turn to poems (if they are aware poetry exists) for some kind of illumination, for revelations that help them to survive, to survive in spirit not only in body. These revelations are usually not of the unheard-of but of what lies around us unseen or forgotten. Or they illuminate what we feel but don’t know we fed until it is articulated. It has been said that the personal is political. I’m not always sure what that means, but I know that to me the obverse is often true, and it is when I feel the political/social issues personally that I’m moved to write of them, in just the same spirit of quest, of talking to mysdf in quest of revelation or illumination, that is a motivating force for more obviously “personal” poems.
It is when this impulse of personal necessity informs the political that the poems—once they have come into autonomous aesthetic being—become stepping-stones in one’s slow pilgrimage, or small Virgils leading the soul’s Dante around the spiral of hell and paradise. And if they can so function for the writer, then they have a chance ofdoing so for the reader. The writer is given a voice to articulate what many others feel but can’t say (yet he or she would only be pompous and patronizing if at the time of writing the work did not seem entirely personal).
The separation between poetry of political content and all other poetry is an artificial one. Poets who are conscious and concerned about the world around them may quite naturally sometimes write poems arising from that awareness, just as they may write about anything else that impinges upon and affects their being. It is rare that a writer will consistently confine him or herself to a single topic. While it is quite true that a great deal of verse written on political themes is not truly poetry, or, if it is poetry, is flawed in comparison with poems on other themes by the same writers, this in no way implies that those themes are beyond the proper reach of poetic art. There is, in fact, an underlying arrogance in the condemnation of “engaged” poetry as an illegitimate, essentially anti-literary endeavor: who dare fix the limits of any art? To have devised the dome was difficult, to paint the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling might have appeared impossible until it was done. Great difficulties do not invalidate any endeavor. In the case of “political poetry,” the more it is shoved into confinement as a special, separate category, the harder it is to create—for it must have all the virtues, including all the lyricism, of any other poetry, and this is often forgotten when writers themselves accept that artificial isolation and exclude the political from the lyrical and the lyrical from the political. But the greatest impediment of all to the creation of truly poetic poetry dealing with political themes is a lack of what I will call “full internalization of need.” Robert Frost knew what he was talking about when he said, “No tears for the writer, no tears for the reader; no surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.”
New and Selected Essays Page 14