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1.
Regarding the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, one woman interviewed
on television remarked, "I've been reminded of how fragile, and sacred,
life is. I realize now how important it is to be good." When asked to
specify what she meant by good, the interviewee couldn't do so.
Adyakkilakkama, a 13th century woman poet from India, wouldn't have
been comfortable with such vagueness. She insisted that our sense of the
sacred isn't distinguishable from the specific actions that are impelled
into existence by that sense. In fact, she proclaimed, there is no sacred
sense at all unless it is incarnated in some type of "doing." Unimpressed
by claims of spirituality that weren't evidenced in a willingness to participate
in a life-long rough and tumble engagement with the world, she wrote
Remember:
the real meaning
of the saint's speech
emerges
only through action.
Devotion with no action
gets you no place -
it's like trying to use
a piece of straw
to hold up a wall
that's all of a sudden
collapsing.
2.
On Sept. 13, two days after the terrorist attack, a man of European
heritage attended a meeting. Of the 8 people there, one of them was a
woman he knew. She was from India. During the course of the meeting,
the subject of the terrorist attacks came up. Having heard the night before
on television that Osama Bin Laden may have been involved, the man now
said angrily, "All foreigners should be killed for this."
"What?" the woman replied. "So you want to do to them what you call
them uncivilized for doing to you?" She was the only immigrant in the
room. And one of only two women.
The fellow responded, "Well, they started it."
Tartly, the woman snapped, "I don't care who started it, you're wrong,
because if you keep talking like that soon people will start killing foreigners,
including me, in the street."
The man answered, "But I don't mean you when I talk about foreigners.
You're not a foreigner; we all know you."
If anything, this made the woman angrier. "What you just said is
the fucking stupidest thing of all," she told him, losing her temper.
"I or somebody else won't get killed just as long as we personally know
you, but if we happen not to know you then we get our asses kicked! Great!
You're not supposed to respect people's rights only if you know them. You're
supposed to respect their rights even if you don't."
The woman was correct. The man with whom she argued was capable of
feeling solidarity with the New York and Washington D.C. dead and their
families, but not with a wider range of people. In spite of the fact that
immigrants and people of color were included in the terrorist death tolls,
this man primarily viewed the U.S.'s plight as one of us against them,
with the "them" representing darker skinned people from certain parts of
the globe, as well as their immigrant "allies" here.
This man, and other people like him, consider themselves respecters
of life. One of the proofs they give of this respect is the sadness they
feel about the victims of the terrorist attacks. But this sadness is not
a pure or simple sadness. It is a sadness with a political dimension.
It is an emotion that announces "I am a good American" as much as it reflects
a feeling of loss.
Except for the families and friends of the killed and wounded, most
of us simply will not grieve for the dead and injured the way we would
grieve for our own family members and friends. This is understandable
and there is nothing wrong with it. But we should understand what it means.
What it means is that our talk about "tragedy" and the "grief we feel"
is highly symbolic. It has little to do with the personal grief that most
of us have experienced at one time or another, the kind felt this week
by the friends and loved ones of the dead and injured. The grief the rest
of us feel in the attacks' aftermath, although real to us, is a more general
kind of grief, a form of nationalistic self-definition in a situation in
which we don't know what else to do, other than unite through shared feelings.
3.
In the wake of the terrorist attacks, the country is shaken by emotion.
Some people respond to this by suggesting that we must now have no bickering
among ourselves, that it is time for the ultimate unity of group sadness,
that "stridency" and "debate" aren't what we need, but rather a unified
decorum of grief. To question this so-called decorum is to risk being
called self-centered, someone who doesn't feel the appropriate respect,
even reverence, for the group's grief.
At a time like this, it's easier to give into mass emotion than it
is to try to think clearly about what's going on. Not surprisingly, the
first thing that happens when mass emotion becomes our guideline for how
to behave is that we start resenting the dissenters, the ones who say,
"Wait a minute. Shouldn't we stop for a while and analyze the situation?"
But mass emotion wants no analysis. It wants the self-congratulation,
the self-righteousness, of its collective grief. It does not want to be
disturbed. It wants to establish itself as the only allowable etiquette
of the moment. It wants power.
4.
Unlike most nations in the world, the U.S. has never been invaded.
Therefore, the terrorist attack has a special meaning for us. Startled
and confused, we wonder: How could this happen? We've been fortunate.
In the past, we've been able to consider our soil safe.
But we only have to look at our history to realize how possible such
an attack was. In fact, a close examination of our history shows us that
the continent was once before the victim of an even larger scale, more
violent invasion. Armies, mercenaries and land-grabbers piled onto the
continent from Europe, killed most of the indigenous inhabitants and terroristically
took over the land. That we in turn would one day suffer a terroristic
attack wasn't a physical impossibility; after all, the continent wasn't
in the past and isn't now immune to outside penetration.
Of course, this analysis doesn't mean the Sept. 11 terrorist attack
was justified. It just places our anger at that attack into context.
And in fact, the details given above are quite relevant. The historian,
Arnold Toynbee, once said that only a country like the United States, which
had stolen all its land from other peoples (the native tribes), could think
it was a good idea to take the Palestinians' land and create Israel out
of it in partial recompense for crimes that were committed, not in the
middle east, but in Europe.
Since the Palestinian question stands at the center of many U.S differences
with the Islamic world, Toynbee's remarks are not foolish. They should
be meditated upon.
5.
In his poem "An Eye, Open," Paul Celan (1920-1970), both of whose
parents died in a concentration camp and who himself was compelled to do
road labor in Moldavia during WWII, says -
Aching depth of the eyeball:
the lid
does not stand in its way, the lash
does not count what goes in.
This eyeball about which Celan writes is the enemy of our current
Mass Emotionists. They view it as a thing to be hated, to be stomped to
jelly beneath their feet. To see with a focus in which nothing is allowed
to stand in the way of clarity, this is a sin to the Mass Emotionist.
With the same rage that the white supremacist Aryan Nation member feels
toward the black and the Jew, the Mass Emotionist loathes Celan's open
eye, the unprotected eye ("the lid / does not stand in its way, the lash/
does not count what goes in") that risks its health in order to see.
Clarity of seeing, of thought, is bad. "Go to the back of the class,"
the Mass Emotionist teacher says. "You are not one of us. You are not
well-behaved."
And so the isolation begins. The isolators think of themselves as
pure and nice and very sensitive. "We are isolating the deviants for their
own good, as well as for the group's good" the isolators say.
6.
In the "Instead of a Preface" section to her poem "Requiem," the Russian
writer Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966) spoke about what it was like to stand
in line day after day outside the Leningrad prison where her son was locked
up during the Stalin years.
The section reads as follows:
"In the terrible years of the Yezhov terror, I spent seventeen months
in the prison lines of Leningrad. Once someone ‘recognized' me. Then
a woman with bluish lips standing behind me, who, of course, had never
heard of me called by name before, woke up from the stupor to which everyone
had succumbed and whispered in my ear (everyone spoke in whispers there):
‘Can you describe this?' And I answered, ‘Yes, I can.' Then something
that looked like a smile passed over what had once been her face."
Some U.S. writers naively like to think they are brave like Akhmatova--
this woman who described what wasn't supposed to be described, this poet
expelled from the Soviet writers union because of her poetry and attitudes.
But many of these writers are self-deluded.
Unlike Akhmatova who did not fit in with her own time's conventional
mass emotions and who challenged those emotions in her own way, our current
mass emotionalists wouldn't challenge the status quo, even a status quo
flea, unless the flea was in chains. Such writers, although they take great
pride in their sensitivity and so-called intelligence, will do nothing
to jeopardize their safe position within the herd.
They want the poetry world to be a playground sandbox in which fathers
and mothers stand over their children, making sure that the children follow
the rules for "nice" talk. This pleasant or "correct" way of talking is
the new language (a language that prioritizes "nice" fantasy over
"bad" reality and so-called good manners over probing interrogation) the
taste-makers want poets and others to adopt.
Anyone who loves poetry, or clarity, or decency rejects such an approach.
Language is one of the swords referred to symbolically when Jesus, the
Christian holy man, proclaimed, "I have come not to bring peace, but a
sword."
The sword of clarity. The sword of focus. Of speaking out against
the mass emotionists who thrive on the sale of cheap emotion during difficult
times.
7.
When all the bodies are finally counted in the wake of the Sept. 11
terrorist attacks on NYC and D.C., the death toll will be in the thousands.
It's impossible to know this and not grieve for the dead, the injured,
and families and friends left behind. As a nation we won't recover quickly
from this tragedy. The question is: Will we recover at all?
According to the president, Colin Powell and other cabinet members
and government officials, we are preparing to strike back at the terrorist
acts' orchestrators. This is not surprising. But who are we planning
to strike back at? And are we certain they're the correct targets? And
additionally, are there things we should know as a nation before striking
back? We certainly need to know more than that members of Congress, most
of whom we usually view cynically, are capable of singing America the Beautiful
together on the Capitol steps. A public relations event like this - one
designed to remind us that we having nothing to fear since Congressional
members are "democracy's leaders" - is not a good reason to do anything,
let alone go to war.
Of course, we don't have to wait for a formal military operation to
be launched against Afghanistan or Iraq (or whatever other country we choose
to punish) in order for the nation's retaliation to begin. It has already
begun.
* Gunfire shattered windows in an Islamic Center in Dallas.
* In a Chicago suburb hundreds of angry predominantly white citizens marched
on an Arab neighborhood in an effort to "punish" terrorists. Police arrested
protest leaders in order to protect Arab Americans from violence.
* Across the country, numerous incidents have been reported of "Arab-looking"
taxi drivers pulled from their cabs and beaten up.
* On Long Island in New York, an enraged man attempted to run over a Palestinian
woman in a parking lot. This was one of scores of incidents nation-wide
involving the harassment of Muslim women who were identified as such because
of their veils.
* In a Philadelphia suburb, an off-duty Philadelphia police officer pulled
his gun on a Palestinian clerk in a 7 & Eleven and threatened him with
racial slurs in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks.
Some people say that such incidents aren't important because they
pale in comparison to the number of dead and wounded from the terrorist
attacks. Such people themselves have a terrorist mentality: they would
sacrifice the innocent because of an event or issue that they claim is
"more important" than crimes against certain individuals.
At a time like this we must be wary of those who would preach love
of country above all else. Such claims too often entail secret agendas
for targeting "outsiders" who for decades have been viewed as
"unsanitary" or "backward" or "dark" or "barbaric" or simply not trustworthy
by the majority community. Those discriminated against in such a manner
are of course just as clean, forward, civilized and trustworthy as anyone
else, sometimes more so because their wider variety of experiences as immigrants
and/or outcastes has given them a reverence for life that many U.S. citizens,
especially those who are white and better off, have lost as a result of
having grown too used to possessing a more commodities-saturated lifestyle
than most of the world's citizens.
8.
This is a time to stand up and be counted. It's relatively easy to
say "I grieve." It's more difficult, in a society which has traditionally
displayed little respect for Muslims, to stand in solidarity with those
very Muslims. And this is exactly what we should do. Poets, who like
to consider themselves language experts, should reject the easy emotionalism
of saying what's popular and instead use their communication skills to
show respect for the Islamic way of life and an open-mindedness toward
other, non-U.S. ways of looking at the world and global conflicts.
Such understanding, more than any missiles, will diminish terrorism
long-term.
I'll end these notes with an excerpt from a poem, section 7 of
"Qur'anic Meditations." The section is a meditation on Sura 19, verses
15-25:
I can't think straight,
but I'm saved because of this:
I never saw a mutilated piece
of human flesh I wouldn't kiss
or a torturer whose skull I wouldn't crease
with a blunt instrument if I had to.
Believe me, jihad's not a war cry
but a dance life-celebrators do
to show nightmares their defiance.
Today, each dancer is like a pregnant woman,
who, fatigued by movement and mirth,
finally falls to the ground in labor, cursing heaven.
In response, Allah feeds her dates as she gives birth.
The next thing we know, here's Jesus,
then the rest of us and the placenta.
Mary eats another date, sniffs some fetal mucous,
then dozes off, while studying the evening sky, a rare magenta.
The palm tree beneath which she sleeps,
and the stream washing stones near her ankles,
and the boulder upon which the lizard creeps,
all are here, in the oasis.
Soon it's night.
The desert breeze is gentle.
Tonight, at least, we'll know no harm.
Newborns, we sleep in our mother's arms.
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