1. A column by a friend of mine, "I
am against this war." It appears in the September 25th edition
of the Charlotte Observer. The friend, Marvin Lindsay, is pastor of
John Calvin Presbyterian Church in Salisbury, NC. He writes for the
Observer once a month.
2. Martin Arnold's November 1st "Making
Books" column from the New York Times. This column is titled "Poetic
History of the Heart."
3. A book another friend said she thought
I'd like to take a look at, Artists Confronting the Inconceivable. Here
is the second paragraph of the "Foreword": "In remembrance
of Kristallnacht and the events of the Holocaust, the American Interfaith
Institute invited glass artists to create work that would illustrate
ravages of prejudice and hate. Over 1000 entries were received from
artists in 28 nations." The book reproduces the 97 award-winning
entries.
4. Several poems responding to the
events of September 11, though I'll only note "A Little Walk"
by David Bottoms, which appeared in the September 23rd Atlanta Journal
Constitution.
What do I make of these things I have (among others)
accumulated since the World Trade Centers attack on September 11? This
assumes I am able to make anything of them.
First, it is possible for a Presbyterian to make
a cogent case against responding to violence with violence. Marvin Lindsay
beings by proposing quite modestly that there be "no hostilities
for 40 days." He also proposes that in those 40 days, we fast and
pray and weep and think. But he has already, by September 25th, done
a fair amount of thinking. And he has concluded that while "the
God I met in Jesus Christ calls me to suffer for him, and even die for
him, I am not sure he calls me to kill for him. He taught his followers
to love their enemies, and he practiced what he preached." I am
pleased to be Marvin's friend, and I like knowing what he thinks about
these things, whether I think along the same lines or not. I am also
glad that he has gone against the tendency of most of the media during
the past two months: he hasn't told me what I think.
That is not to say that it isn't the business of
journalism to try to discover what people are thinking. That is part
of Martin Arnold's purpose in his column. He notes that poems by W.H.
Auden ("Sept. 1, 1939") and by William Butler Yeats ("Easter
1960") were "e-mailed and posted on the Internet throughout
the world ... after Sept. 11." A random search doesn't' show me
that many Internet postings of either, but we'll take Arnold's word
for it for the moment. (We'll assume that he doesn't take his own experience
for everyone else's.) I'm more interested, anyway, in his larger argument,
that "poetry is ... a worthwhile tool to help decipher emotions."
Perhaps, then, it is poets who will ultimately help us understand what
is happening to us since the disaster of that devastating Tuesday.
I would like to think that is the case, but I'm
not enormously hopeful that it is. Here, I am confronted by what artists
actually make when they confront the inconceivable. And I am not impressed
by the glass artists' response to Kristallnacht and the Holocaust some
fifty years later. Perhaps, they had had too long to think about it,
but more likely the enormousness and the enormity of the events are
still (and probably forever) too much to put into order. For that is
what art does, whether it is visual or lyrical: it puts into order.
A painter begins with a canvas of a certain size and shape, for example.
Even if a poet does not begin with a form, he or she must evolve one.
But there may be chaos so great that we cannot order it.
But, perhaps, we can make a beginning -- if we
begin modestly. I have not read thousands of poems responding to September
11th, but of the few I have read, almost all have tried in one way or
another to take on too much of it. And it is too big, and too dreadful,
to begin to describe. I've talked with David Bottoms about his little
poem, "A Little Walk," so I know he isn't at all pleased with
it. "It's not a very good poem," he said more than once in
our conversation. Still, it seems to me, it does the right thing. It
doesn't say anything about airplanes or explosions. There is nothing
about the shrieking wrench of steel, the deafening explosion of 110
stories falling, the feelings of a city or a nation.
Instead the poem imagines the poet and his daughter
on a twilight walk up their street where "in the dwindling light
/ small American flags bloom from gates and mailboxes." The next
several lines focus on the daughter, who is "letting her hair grow,
and diligently keeping a journal," but without words for what is
happening around her. There are almost no words between father and daughter,
the only sounds "a few crickets cranking up in the shrubbery, the
whine" of a faraway motorbike. By the time they have gotten to
the end of the street, the little light has become dark, only pricked
by "our old sidekick, the north star, dim over the cul de sac
-- / silent; but there."
There it ends.
Here this ends. I had hoped, when I began, to make
an argument about war or words, but though I have spent more than a
little time in the past two months reading just war theory and poetry,
I find I cannot. In my house, at least, it remains a time of -- and
for -- modest confusion.
