Buddhadasa Bhikkhu

Letter to Zanmi Lasante__Haiti

Dear Partners in Health,

I admire and respect your efforts in Haiti during the recent earthquake tragedy as well as your health care projects prior to the cataclysm. However, the message you sent to me under your letterhead featuring Dr. Paul Farmer's address to the U.S. senate was disappointing. Though I'm not a citizen of Haiti nor an expert on Haitian politics, the country's present government seems corrupt and in need of an overhaul, as any reading of Haitian history over the last 10 years will elucidate. Dr. Farmer doesn't mention this in his U.N. address. The deprivations of Haiti don't all stem from freak acts of nature, but are largely caused by systemic inequalities in the power structure of what should be a paradise in the Caribbean. Dr. Farmers suggestions seem vaguely to kowtow to the United Nations and the United States (as well as other industrialized nations) in hopes of opening new financial and policy networks similar to the policies which were in place prior to the earthquake. An unfortunate direction, I would think, considering that the paradigm used won't protect the people of Haiti from the international business and governmental interests bent on exploiting Haiti for its own profit and ends. Dr. Farmer acknowledges Bill Clinton as a prospective partner in his plans for Haiti. I would remind you that Clinton did more damage to the people of the undeveloped nations in our hemisphere than any single individual alive. His international policies enacted while President of the U.S. (NAFTA among them) has stifled the lives of millions upon millions of people in Mexico, Central America and elsewhere. Dr. Farmer and Partners in Health (Zanmi Lasante) are swimming with sharks, which spells grave troubles ahead for the average Haitian citizen.

Economics is not my specialty, but the class inequalities of consumer capitalism which the United Nation and the United States uphold are far more dangerous than even your recent earthquake. Someone should ask the people of Haiti which avenues of future economic and cultural design they're most desirous of following rather than bureaucrats and celebrities speaking in their interest. The modern world has many examples of foreign business and governmental interests (even many NGOs) failing the people while providing great profit to those who acquire contracts and drive policy. I would have Dr. Farmer first ask the United States aid contingent of military personnel in Haiti to remove their arms, dismantle the "Green Zone" surrounding the airport of Port au Prince, and investigate the corruption of Haiti's current government. I would wisely fear the business interests of the world sharpening their metaphorical knife and fork as they enter Haiti with soldiers and antibiotics.

I again applaud the service which Partners in Health has provided to the people of Haiti, but I voice grave fears of foreign interests preying on a weak and greedy government, plunging the average Haitian into a future of even worse economic servility and loss of human rights.

Please pardon my "soapbox" sermonizing, but the stakes are high and the sharks are most certainly circling. Dr. Farmer seems to be unaware of, or in league with, those same interests which most alarm me.

In Solidarity,
Dennis Dorney

Poison Idea__1983__Elvis is on the back

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A Kiss On The Head__Marina Tsvetayeva__Poem

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A Kiss On The Head



A kiss on the head---wipes away misery.
I kiss your head.

A kiss on the eyes---takes away sleeplessness.
I kiss your eyes.

A kiss on the lips---quenches the deepest thirst.
I kiss your lips.

A kiss on the head---wipes away memory.
I kiss your head.


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(A Kiss On The Head is from Selected Poems of Marina Tsvetayeva, translated by Elaine Feinstein, E.P. Dutton, 1986. The image above is a Shunga woodcut print from 1820 by Hokusai titled Dream of the Fisherman's Wife).

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Morituri__Bernhard Wicki

So, I’m in bed this morning, a few days after watching an old VHS of Morituri, and can’t seem to get it out of my head. It’s a film from the mid-Sixties directed by a Bernhard Wicki, a German actor/director who’s probably best known for Die Brucke (1959). The evening I watched it in my apartment I wasn’t particularly impressed, except perhaps by the black and white cinematography of Conrad Hall, and the solid performances. So why this morning does it play over and over inside the broken down movie theater behind my eyes? And why, in this era of immediate forgetfulness can I still see the handsome profile of Marlon Brando in a white linen suit playing the coerced Nazi saboteur, smug in his personal isolation? I doubt that his performance in Morituri is to be found in anyone’s top ten Brando vehicles—so why this cinematic hangover on my part, where scenes sneak back into my consciousness unexpectedly, like an alcoholic’s memories of his most recent bender? This is not to say that the film was a bad one, but it didn’t seem like anything terribly original or poignant either. Nothing I would still be ruminating over days later.

Perhaps part of my acknowledged fascination was in the story, which at first glimpse seemed a rather ordinary World War II genre film mixed with equal parts Hitchcock-like thriller--that is, a rather formulaic espionage model. My opinion has changed though, but more on that later. In keeping with Hollywood’s menu for war movie success, Morituri does boast a very good cast including: Marlon Brando, Yul Brynner, Janet Margolin, Trevor Howard, Hans Christian Blech, Martin Benrath, and even the quintessential nerdy coward, Wally Cox. All are talented, all dedicated to their roles. One may quibble that Brando’s fey German accent seemed to come and go throughout the movie, or that Janet Margolin (the film’s only woman) falters at convincingly symbolizing the horrors of the holocaust, and indeed the history of all Jews—a chore too vast for any single character or actor. Though, even if her part was far too multi-faceted for a mere 15 minutes of screen time, she was the very soul of the movie, and the camera loved her face. It once again makes one realize what a loss American movies sustained when directors and casting directors began to overlook her abilities by the mid-1970’s, relegating her to episodic television until her early death. Then there’s Yul Brynner, an actor who I have previously pigeonholed as something of an industry hack. He’s one of those vaguely exotic actors who can fake ethnic roles, and he enjoyed a good career by playing the Cossack warrior, or Siamese King, or brooding Russian, or Egyptian Pharoah; his physical appearance and vocal bravado sometimes seemed more important than any insight into characters or their range of quiet emotion. But I was wrong. Recently watching him in The Sound and the Fury (Martin Ritt, 1959), I was captivated by his conflicted character’s interior confusion and secrecy, while outwardly delivering authoritarian bombast. Though paired with the formidable Joanne Woodward as a lead, Brynner paced himself into a cathartic unfolding by movie’s end. So too in Morituri, working with the heralded Brando, Yul Brynner interprets Captain Mueller (in a very strong performance) as yet another psychically antagonized personality, this time he's a captain of a freighter carrying an important cargo bound from Tokyo to Europe and, once there, the Nazi war effort. In addition to the aforementioned, the Darmstadt-born actor Hans Christian Blech was charismatically engaging as an anti-Nazi engine room worker named Donkeyman. This working class hero focused upon ending the reign of Third Reich power, represented in the form of Brando’s SS undercover officer, Robert Crain. Blech as Donkeyman is a very interesting actor, with facial scars actually carried back from WWII battles on the Russian front. Though he performed in a many roles in his homeland, he was rarely seen by American audiences. The entire cast proved well-chosen by Wicki, each one capable and seeming to feed off the performances of one another.



Perhaps here I should present a short distillation of the story: as mentioned Yul Brynner is Mueller, German captain of a freighter commissioned in Tokyo with bringing a load of raw rubber to aid the German war effort. He doesn’t seem to mind the cargo, but braces at the German navy hand-picking his crew with political prisoners they hope to arrest once the ship lands in German occupied territory. Meanwhile we find Brando's Robert Crain as a German deserter living the good life in India, hoping to live through the war undetected. His personal neutrality and anti-war stance is flipped by Trevor Howard, a British Intelligence Officer who threatens to arrest Brando and turn him over to the Gestapo if he doesn’t agree to sail upon the aforementioned freighter as a spy posing as a SS officer. Using his demolition skills, the plan is to dismantle the scuttling charges on-board ship, helping effect the waylaying of the precious cargo by American naval ships on the High Seas. The German freighter’s officer staff is composed of pro-Nazis whereas the crew is comprised mainly of political dissidents. About three reels into the film an American ship is sunk by a German U-Boat, and when their surviving passengers and crew are transferred as prisoners onto Yul Brynner’s ship for transport to Germany, the captain’s political disinterest is put to the test. One of the prisoners is a female German Jew named Ester, played adroitly by Janet Margolin. Ester had been previously imprisoned and tortured by the Gestapo in Germany; and so now finds herself, once again, captured by her German nemesis and along with the other American prisoners is heading back aboard the ship to certain gestapo interrogation and a concentration camp. Her disdain is boundless and her sense of doom is palpable to all, rendering her fearless and capable of anything. Her plight convinces both Brando’s spy and Brenner’s ship captain to reassess their disenfranchised view of the war’s issues and combine forces to thwart the Nazis (typical Hollywood jingoism). Give or take a few subplots, that’s the main thread of Morituri’s story. Nothing we haven’t seen before, or will see again, but snappy and filled with digressive detours into moral questionings without rote answers, or any answers. In addition, the jaundiced view of mankind seen in political settings looks equally dismal for Axis or Allies; an uncommon focus, but probably a truer one from which to observe the grand experiment of war.

However, none of this gives any indication why the film remains interesting to me, or why it’s shallow political ideology should impress me. If the cast and cinematography are the most laudatory ingredients of Morituri, it would appear that the screenplay itself gives it its anemic palor. Certainly a lackluster story/screenplay can ruin a production, or at least hamstring the other factors into that status we may refer to as “a noble failure.” But I’m not so sure the screenplay is bad at all, just the contrary. It was written by Daniel Taradash as an adaptation from a novel by Werner Jorg Luddecke. Taradash’s professional track record as a screenwriter is very accomplished indeed. Some of his other efforts include Golden Boy (Mamoulian 1939), Knock On Any Door (Nicholas Ray, 1949), the weird and wonderful Rancho Notorious (Fritz Lang, 1952), From Here to Eternity (Fred Zinnemann, 1953) for which he won an Oscar, Picnic (Joshua Logan, 1955), Castle Keep (Sydney Pollack, 1969), and many others. Of course a history of adapting novels into good movies doesn’t mean that he couldn't have bombed on Morituri, but it did make me look again before casting any aspersions onto Taradash for this film’s seeming weaknesses. No, upon rethinking it, the screenplay’s episodes, its pacing, its dialogue, its unity were all a solid bulwark upon which a good movie can be carried. And in addition, beneath the outward appearance of a fairly typical jingoistic war movie, lurks the film’s contrary philosophy—not an anti-war movie as once might expect from participants like Bernhard Wicki and Marlon Brando, but instead a thinking person’s war movie. And that is not common.



How to illustrate what I mean by a “thinking person’s war movie?” For lack of a better method, I’d like to introduce some of those scenes which keep coming back to me as I lie in bed. Here’s one: an introductory scene where Yul Brynner's captain Mueller exits a cab in a busy Tokyo street in 1942 and enters the German consulate. Nothing earth-shattering I suppose, a downtown street scene with a locale title naming the city and date. Brynner is obviously upset and hurried as he rushes from his cab into a nondescript, though modern, building to confront the German government. Oddly, out of all the Hollywood war movies I can think of, none showed a wartime Tokyo street scene, and certainly none showed Tokyo in 1942 with Westerners walking the streets, unhampered by irate citizens or military. Of course the Germans retained diplomatic ties with Japan during the war, and so it stands to reason that Japan may have had a few Germans in residence. But merely the image of a non-Asian in Tokyo seems to fly in the face of all that I, as an American, had seen in films or learned at school. Hollywood as an arm of American foreign policy nearly always showed Americans at war in a good light, and our enemies as diabolical monsters. Even in 1965, 20 years after the armistice, that fundamental view was still adhered to. We were also led to believe that Japanese citizens were racists, hating all Euro-centric peoples, especially white Americans—a useful guise to mask our own Asian racism. And so, merely to view an opening street shot of European civilians acting perfectly normal, and being treated quite decently in downtown Tokyo in the middle of WWII came as a shock. Of course Brynner's Captain Mueller works in and out of ports all over the world. Shipping is certainly an international occupation, even in wartime. Many countries refuse to take sides in a conflict, their independence being good for peace also good for commerce. And so it isn’t too large a leap to see that this world of international commerce (business), retains its primary focus on profit even in wartime, whether in combatant countries or neutrals. The one constant is business and its profitability. Of course this can be shipping, but also investments, financial trading, stockpiling natural resources and selling to the highest bidder regardless of political affiliation. Curious for me to begin watching a war movie, and I’m already thinking along these lines.

Not long afterward, we see another street scene, but this time the locale title informs us that we’re in India, 1942. Trevor Howard is paying a call on an effete playboy, Brando, in his Indian home surrounded by modern German art (Nazis considered it decadent), and tasteful, ancient Hindu sculptures. We find him dressed in fine western clothes and listening to Mozart on his record player. We learn that Brando's character is named Robert Crain, and had deserted the German army after being trained as a demolition expert. Though movies certainly have shown deserters many times, Brando is neither ruled by cowardice, nor anti-Nazi feelings, he’s merely interested in protecting his privilege at all costs. Before the war, he was never a jack-booted brown-shirt fighting communists in the streets, or rounding up Jews into trucks. Instead, we find in Brando an educated, art-loving, handsome, self-contained citizen of modernity and rational thought. His ideology knows no politics, nor great populations of like-minded volk. He’s an individual who has no allegiance to National Socialism nor Democratic Republicanism. He hates no one, but neither does he feel linked to anyone. Oddly, the Japanese writer Jun’ichiro Tanizaki wrote about similar people prior to WWII, most closely perhaps in Some Prefer Nettles, 1929. However Tanizaki’s central characters weren’t artistic Germans, but Japanese moderns who at that time included many western influences into their lives and ethos. Brando’s character is in exile from stupidity, from chaos, from injustice—he’s in flight from all those traits humans seem condemned to repeat. In most ways, he’s enviable in his thinking and his isolation, but there are larger issues at play in the world, and in this movie. Soon, he’s caught by the powers he seeks to avoid, in this case British Army Intelligence, then black-mailed into working for them against the German military, to which he once belonged.

Brando's Robert Crain is an eccentric, not unlike Camus’ Stranger, with the obvious and large difference that Brando can enjoy himself and doesn’t feel hounded by a sourceless anxiety. Brando’s character has set himself up to be a witness and a judge rather than a participant in war or communal life itself. But he’s dragged from that fortunate perch down into the mire of society, the masses who must dance to a fiddle played by those who control economic and political power. In today’s world, there are those who seem to follow Robert Crain's example. I think of Christopher Hitchens and those neo-cons who divorce themselves from the population at large, but seek to use abilities at their disposal to protect their solitary privilege, to amass distinction for themselves and friends, increase influence and wealth, and encourage the protection of a higher order. I think of those who would find wit more important than shelter for the homeless, personal art collections more important than simple protections for those millions of investors who find their retirement accounts ravaged by Wall Street oligarchs. I think of personal aggrandizement as redemptive theory. Now did Morituri bring me these ideas, or were they merely whirling around my brain and punctuated by the characters in Bernhard Wicki’s movie? Probably both.



As the film proceeds, there is a sequence when Janet Margolin’s character Ester relates the tortures and degradations she was forced to undergo at the hands of Gestapo agents. They were depraved, violent and in the case of her brother, lethal. In this film, Janet Margolin is a walking shade, a cipher roaming the world looking for her familial dead so that she can lie down with them forever. She had been damaged beyond repair, yet had the bad manners to still be alive as proof of a wicked world, a complex and dangerous species. We're in the maw of Greek tragedy here. Morituri doesn’t merely blame the Nazi’s, since we watch Americans (on board as prisoners) sexually raping her in exchange for their participation in a scheme to assault the ship’s officers. Her face shows no effect whatsoever, no pain, no remorse, no feeling at all. Those are luxuries which are no longer possible in a world where “the blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned.” Janet Margolin wasn’t only a Jew representing all Jews; nor one Jew merely representing one integer in the Holocaust’s millions. Janet Margolin was representing all victims, past and future, Jews and non-Jews. And her pathetic story was the only cause sufficiently serious to change the beliefs of both Robert Crain's egalitarian self-love, and Captain Mueller's fusion with responsibility—be it for family (love for his son) or Fatherland. Americans depicted in this film weren’t heroic, Germans certainly weren’t either, nor Japanese, nor British. Each organized faction merely contributed to a larger immanence of brutality, no matter the flag. Refusal to enter conflict, or personal passivism wasn’t an option either, since power’s darkest debasements must be opposed in the face of its combined savagery. Or else . . . what? Perhaps something coded in our genetic make-up provides that answer, certainly something older than written history. Are we monsters and angels? Either or none?

At the denouement, humans in the unlikely costumes of Robert Crain and Captain Mueller finally remembered their humanity and acted accordingly, though not in time to save Ester's fragile life. Both become willing to accept even the possibility of the gestapo's draconian punishments for the treason of respecting their neighbor, perhaps loving their neighbor. The ending shots don’t exhibit the two main protagonists together in some composition of union or brotherhood. Instead they inhabit two separate parts of the floundering ship. Miracles of communion between erstwhile enemies isn’t the film’s easy answer. The questions posed are personal, solitary questions we are encouraged to ask themselves without aid of community or cant. Not bad for a 1965 war/spy movie . . . with Wally Cox.

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Monday__Primo Levi__Poem

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Monday


Is anything sadder than a train
That leaves when it’s supposed to,
That has only one voice,
Only one route?
There’s nothing sadder.

Except perhaps a cart horse,
Shut between two shafts
And unable even to look sideways.
Its whole life is walking.

And a man? Isn’t a man sad?
If he lives in solitude a long time,
If he believes time has run its course,
A man is a sad thing too.


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(Monday is from Primo Levi's Collected Poems, translated by Brian Swann and Ruth Tenzer Feldman, Faber and Faber, UK, 1988. The photograph is pilfered from Flickr. It's a photo taken by Murfomurf late at night from a moving car, through a dirty window).

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Woodpecker__A Film by Alex Karpovsky

http://www.woodpeckerfilm.com/

(You'll have to drag and drop the link. My link connection function is broken. Sorry)

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Where Un-Making Reigns__Adrienne Rich

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My heart is moved by all I cannot save:
so much has been destroyed

I have to cast my lot with those
who age after age, perversely,

with no extraordinary power,
reconstitute the world.

A passion to make, and make again
where such un-making reigns. --Adrienne Rich


Recently, a friend sent me a letter in which she included the above excerpt from an Adrienne Rich poem. A beautiful sentiment on the face of it, but something struck me as problematic, or too pat in the well-wrought lines. Like a bumper sticker or a slogan, the reader is too quickly and too easily let off the hook. Rich is working in the broadest of strokes, embarking on nothing less than reconstituting the world. Big job. She mentions that others in history have taken on similar tasks, people common as herself. She makes it sound a little like doing a load of laundry, but a rather big and important load. The problem is, through all this reconstituting of the world, nothing has been resolved, nor changed. I for one am tired of empty phrases, even eloquent ones.

Zen master Dogen in the Mountains and River Sutra wrote that "the blue mountains are constantly walking... He who doubts their walking does not understand his own walking." Just why this quote placed itself in my mind as the successor to Adrienne Rich's profound lines (of which she has many), I don't know. Maybe I just like the idea that the blue mountains are constantly walking and will be doing so long after we're gone--individually and as a species. Sometimes I worry that a very negative arrogance accompanies all of us who believe it is our duty or within our ability to reconstitute the world; those of us who share this passion to make, and make again where such un-making reigns. Yes, it's important to make, to create, to will something alive, especially in a landscape of entropy, but only if it has value. Otherwise we merely manufacture more un-needed stuff, egocentric detritus--be it idealogical, artistic or consumerist. For my nickel, the world has had too much making, with not nearly enough gravitas behind such making. We may find that within our constructs we create our own tyranny of ideology, offering actions which are not fundamentally different than those we might oppose. In the rush to produce some testament of existence, we sorrowfully plant one more thoughtless flag. Sorry that this sounds so pompous on my part, but until one "understands his [sic] own walking," there's little constructive worth that's afforded to our actions, since we're trying to make decisions from a very limited or erroneous set of impersonal options. My interpretation sounds lifted from Socrates’ dictum, know thyself, and I suppose it is.

In the quotation above, Adrienne Rich seems a reluctant member whose desire to join is born solely out of frustration at what has been lost, or hope for some better solution, and isn't that call to action truly the same rationale we always use when entering the fray, any fray? I'm perhaps most impressed that Adrienne Rich is willing to cast her lot with a group whose aims are admirable (though certainly grandiose), but whose position is necessarily perverse in it's opposition to popular thinking, or opposition to the era's accepted ethos. Literature is filled with these stories, the righteous of small means fighting the seemingly impervious tyrant (even the metaphorical tyrant of inaction), and eventually, after much suffering, snatching victory. But, history is different than literature. David slew Goliath, but immediately dove into a miasma of monarchical extremes and abuses, so that his reconstituted world became almost identical to the world before his revolt, except the players had shifted. More recently we saw it in the Bolshevik Revolution's mission change from one of investing power in the people, to bestowing power to a small political core and eventually a single despot. During the interim since we human beings stopped being hunters and gatherers, not very long ago--10,000 years is a conservative number--it's been one power base overturning the next, be it military, economic, or philosophical. The common fact seems to be that human beings have no idea what it means to be human beings, leaving each of us open to manipulation and governance by any mad ideologue, or house painter, or oligarch with the focused will to power. We don't merely need to make, be it art or revolution; but to discover. We have more than enough already, and though Rich's poem may rue impoverishment by things lost, we have enormous resources left in both aesthetic and pragmatic worlds. No, instead of reloading more new themes to replace those jettisoned into history, I say we learn to integrate that which surrounds us, even now, raw concepts and paradigms that will work, will provide, will grow truthfully. Though it may require a more fearless way of looking at the world, my hunch lately is that it isn't the world which needs reconstituting, but our assessment of ourselves and our duty to this world and its possibilities. It is we who must change, we who must become accountable for ourselves and our relationship with other humans, as well as our intercourse with the natural order as a whole.

My fear, when hearing quotes concerning fighting the good fight, be it politically progressive or conversely conservative, is that we're falling into one of history's oft-mentioned traps. As soon as acknowledgment is won, or the message is promulgated, be it by poem, court decision or a Genghis Khan-styled pogram, the victorious are left with that most addictive drug we call influence. History shows us many instances of leaders wielding power, but rarely shows us leaders sharing power among all constituents in a form that these same constituents will be able to flourish within. I suppose it's so rare they could be called utopias: often merely literary devices, or small social experiments of dubious distinction. We seem ignorant, even with our much vaunted intellectual accumulations, of just what role human beings should play on our planet, or the universe. My personal belief is that we're monsters one and all, no matter the placard we carry or the army we command. Look at us, 7,000,000,000 monsters each desiring an unlimited sufficiency of those products we hold valuable above all others, be it simply a bowl of soup or a mansion in a gated community, our appetites seem to know only more. We're all idea junkies, dominated by genetically disposed addictions to our own brain functions. We humans pride ourselves on the size of our brains, the quotidian assessments of our brains, the shiny things cognition offers. The myth of Narcissus is merely the need to reflect upon ourselves endlessly, a Rube Goldberg machine of mental mirrors chugging endlessly and reflecting only more mirrors. We only view others as a reflection of ourselves; if they don't act the way we believe they should act (our way) they're pronounced inherently misguided and must be changed, since to leave them unchanged presents a threat to our own convictions about ourselves. By manipulating this simple premise, humans can be motivated to physically bully, enslave, imprison, torture, kill, enact genocides, always feeling logically correct (often legally correct) and morally responsible. We're certainly making, but I for one wish we weren't.

I'm getting far afield here, but my basic thrust is this: we're using the wrong tools to effect change. Humans will not change using traditional definitions of intelligence as the sole arbiter of actions, either in preconception or antecedent judgments. The tool is flawed, our short history proves as much. Of course it sounds heretical and preposterous, but then again those are mental constructs themselves. The Vedas of ancient India divide life into three temporal possibilities: Dreaming sleep; Dreamless sleep; and Waking. Our brains are active in each, but to different degrees. Intuition, artistic inspiration, and thoughts unfettered by logic (or its weird moral assignments) are each equally as old as human history. They were once more revered, and in some cultures continue as an influence, though certainly modified by a modernism of thought. Gandhi meditated as well as marched. Gandhi also refused the mantle of power once the political struggle against the British had ended. He invented a new script of political action based on non-violence and reliant upon a healthy cynicism toward traditional power. He was actually able to effect personal and social change, real change (at least for a time). Gandhi was not perfect, but then again he was no monster. He integrated physical work (i.e. weaving), non-logical brain processing (meditation), logical brain processing (reading, writing, conversation), exercise (walking or yoga) and a desire to understand himself, what it means to be a human being on planet earth. Not merely content to populate his ideas within the world so as to reflect an undisciplined image of himself, Gandhi chose a vigorous regimen of personal inquiry and balance. The world being what it is, it seems fitting that he was murdered. But, what we seem to forget was that he was murdered by someone exactly like ourselves, a monster.

To return to Adrienne Rich's quote, which is extraordinary in its insight and its dedication, I can only wish I were as selfless and filled with conviction. However, I also believe that her mission is pointless unless it can evince actual change, not illusory change. The battle isn’t fought with beauty, nor in protesters filling the streets, nor in gender caucus groups, nor in well-meaning articles published in periodicals or internet blogs, not even in revolutionaries armed and prepared to fight violence with violence. Instead, the actual battleground is within each individual. The battle is fought where there are no leaders, no antagonists to rail against, no comrades, no enemies. The battle is an interior revolution wherein we can disarm logic and useless intellectual arguments in favor of some greater and more humane discipline, and I certainly don’t mean any religious interpretation. Until we’ve changed ourselves, it’s mere idiocy to believe that we will alter any larger scheme or popular endeavor, except in name only. I’m afraid that the sentiment Adrienne Rich offers, heartfelt as it appears will never benefit the course of justice, equality, and peace, just as it has historically failed to do for the last 10,000 years. Until we wage insurrection against the monsters inhabiting ourselves, there’s no hope for metamorphosis of any social order, or civilization. Sure, we can lop off a few heads from our most egregiously diabolical leaders, or transform a few laws, or build a few monuments upon which to carve aphorisms in granite, but we’ll basically be in the same place. The human race will be destroying one another, maiming the planet’s ecosystems, using our protean resources to place power and privilege in the hands of a few at the dire consequence of the 7 Billion and growing. I encourage anyone who would be moved by Ms Rich’s quotation to refuse payment on that percentage of federal income tax which is currently used to conduct policies you believe are counter to humane practices: military budgets; federal protection of private financial interests; the prison industry; economic aid packages to foreign countries who conduct inhuman practices. Imagine if each of us actually acted with responsibility, facing legal punishment, financial backlash, estrangement by friends and colleagues, instead of merely talking like know-it-alls at the water cooler. Perhaps Adrienne Rich had such commitments in mind when she wrote of a passion to make, and make again where such an un-making reigns, I can't say. The slippery interpretations of metaphor and vague poetics are intentionally difficult to nail down, just look at how some interpret what they call holy scripture. Sadly, we Americans cower in our own leisure and point the finger at politicians for our problems. Most of us are never even uncomfortable, much less about to go hungry. We confuse anxiety with reality. No, I’m afraid readers of Adrienne Rich are not going to reconstitute the world in any valuable sense. We’ll all still vote either Democrat or Republican and feel that we’ve made a difference, pat ourselves on the back, flip on the television set and watch our favorite global media conglomerate’s comedy program.

About now, I'm sure you might like to yank away my soap box. But hey, I’m one of you too, a fellow coward. Let’s not pretend we’re anything else, nor crow about our ability to change things, to make things. We in the United States are a selfish lot, rather stupid, and embarrassing to the world at large--but above all we're dangerous. Perhaps we should practice restraint on our reconstituting of the world, perhaps we should learn to breathe deeply, reflect, and grow quiet; but even more importantly we should allow everyone else the same opportunity to breathe, even in Iraq, even Afghanistan, even, even, even. I'm reminded of lines from Eliot's Ash Wednesday: Teach us to care and not to care, teach us to sit still. And though I'm tempted to suggest that we begin a journey of discovery into ourselves, it would smack of hubris. I have no ideas which can help you, and I doubt that you have any which will aid me. In that we're equal, and we can call that a beginning.


(The above image is a mixed media painting by Greg Gossel. The excerpted poem at the start of my installment above is from Natural Resources, a poem included in Adreinne Rich's book The Dream of a Common Language--Norton, 1978).

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4 Days Until Christmas

A Tommy Hilfiger Duvet Cover ?

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