ABlog

There’s an echo of Whitman in the way that Rukeyser manages to bridge the experience of centuries, and also in the eerie rhetorical stance of posthumous survey. But for Rukeyser, it is the active response to “these wars” that becomes the occasion for “setting up signals across vast distances.” Thus the poem acknowledges that we have entered a fundamentally new situation; in the first “century of world wars” and the similar ones to follow, survival means doing the work of survival: “to construct peace,” to consider “a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined values.”

Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel Ceremony, first published in the late 1970’s, tells the story of Tayo, a young American Indian man who returns to Laguna Pueblo in a shattered state following service in World War II. The novel is about his healing process but, rather than focusing on individual psychology as one might expect in an American novel about post-traumatic stress disorder, Ceremony frames Tayo’s story in a sacred and mythic dimension of oral narrative, incorporating creation stories and other “time immemorial stories” from Laguna and Navajo tradition. The novel is really about the same thing as Rukeyser’s poem: how to use the imagination as a resource to construct survival in the face of humanity’s enormous penchant for destruction. Drawing on the imagined reality of her Native American past, in which genocidal assaults on human beings intertwined (and still do) with violence to the natural world--Ceremony tightly connects war, environmental disaster, racism, and nuclear peril.

The novel’s approach to framing a protagonist’s experience inside mythic narratives allows Silko to touch on the imagined reality of a single fate for the entire human species without committing the artistic and historical sins of a false universalism. Tayo’s story of sickness and healing can comment on our collective peril precisely because it is imagined as specific to a particular character, a particular and beloved physical setting, and the particular imagery and rhythms of Laguna Pueblo and Navajo sacred texts. The novel’s temporal dimension is similarly multi-layered, in that it’s simultaneously located in a determinate historical time and in what we might call the “universal time” of myth. This latter is the time in which—so long as human beings take the trouble to “remember the story”—past, present, and future exist simultaneously.

I recently completed a novel called The Company of Cannibals in which I was finally able to take on, as a creative “object,” my lifelong concern with futurelessness. The novel features a group of people who are obsessed with the fate of the earth. At their center is Paula Schweike, a poet turned secular prophet who gives public performances in which she burns her own journals. Paula’s disciples face a terrible choice when, in protest against the seemingly terminal condition of the planet, she commits suicide, instructing her nearest and dearest to ingest her remains. In order to tell this story, I found it necessary to construct my own version of the temporal shifts that become point of view shifts in the works I’ve been discussing here. So we get versions of Paula’s tale in the pedantic, chilly voice of a historian looking back from a distance of hundreds of years in the future; in the mythic voice of a quasi-scriptural retelling; in the vernacular voice of collective retrospect; and in the form of contemporary documents, including journals, composed by participants in the drama. I found that I had to construct some version of a future—even though one very partially, disjointedly glimpsed—to make the peril of our own present seem sufficiently real. Paula’s methods may be questionable but her concern cannot be argued with because we have the voice of the Redactor telling us that there really was a Universal Crash, which humanity just barely survived. Even more importantly, constructing an imagined future, however grim, let me, the author, out of the supermax prison of “presentist” thinking in which we all live. It freed me from the cultural tyranny that Guy Debord diagnosed in The Society of the Spectacle when he said that only that which “appears” is deemed to have substance or worth.

I want to leave you with a couple of broad ideas and one question. The first idea is that past, present, and future are completely interdependent. Appearances notwithstanding, they simply can’t be de-linked. To lose the future is to lose the past, and once that happens, we’re standing upon a dangerously thin, ultimately untenable and even illusory slice of present time. It follows that we as writers face the crucial task of reweaving the links between temporal dimensions.

The second idea is that there’s something in our identities as writers that requires the reasonably secure prospect of a future audience. Very few of us, I think, write solely for the present. So much of what we do is by way of putting messages in bottles; if we lose confidence that someone will be there to retrieve them, we might as well pack it in right now.

Finally, and it’s too big a subject to go into adequately here, I want to acknowledge that the imagination cannot be commanded. One can’t productively sit down and determine to write a book that will make a difference to the future of the world. And yet I want to reaffirm that writers have a collective responsibility to help the world come to grips with its very real jeopardy—and then to access the so far “unimagined values” that can help us keep on keeping on.

The question I’ll leave you with is the title of these remarks, and it’s sort of a Zen riddle: Does a planet have a point of view?

posted by ablation  # 15:49