Something “more” than politics–
Patricia’s poem
“Listen
after I have set the table
folded the scottowel into napkins cooked
this delicious eggplant stuffed with bulghur wheat
then baked the whole thing under careful
covering of mozzarella cheese
and
said my grace
don’t you bring Anita Bryant/Richard
Pryor/the Justices of the Supreme Court/don’t
you bring any of those people in here
to spoil my digestive processes
and ruin
my dinner
You hear?”
June Jordan wrote this poem in the late 1970s. If you substitute different names for Anita Bryant (singer and anti-Gay/lesbian spokeswoman) and Richard Pryor, it expresses what I have felt many times in the last six months. Miroslav Volf wrote, “Politics touches everything, but politics isn’t everything, not by a long shot.”
There is something more than politics–what is this “more”?
The more–family, faith, religion, personal integrity, the recovery of loved ones from cancer, art, cookouts in the backyard, the Cubs, the Packers–we all can names places in our lives that are “more” than politics–even though they may well be touched by politics.
In these comments, I’m focusing on art. When his novel, Underground Railroad, received the National Book Award, Colson Whitehead responded, with his eye on the current political situation, “Be Kind to everyone, make art, and fight the power.”
Why should we make art? The poet, Joy Harjo, gave an answer to this question when she bestowed the National Book Award for poetry: “Poetry carries the spirit of the people and is necessary at the doorways of transition and transformation.”
The words of George Steiner have stuck in my mind: Journalists insist the present moment has the most urgent claim on us–it is the hub of our universe; for artists, to the contrary, it is the longer view that counts, and the deeper view.
The politics of the day is mean and cheap. June Jordan’s Patricia has worked carefully and lovingly to prepare the meal for her guests–and she wants to contrast sharply with “mean and cheap.” Her mozzarella and eggplant transcends politics, and she means for her guests to share that transcendence–at the same time, the poem opens up other possibilities for transcending politics.
Consider Pablo Picasso’s painting, “Guernica” (see above). Rooted in a current event, it probes deeply to portray the bombing of the Basque town of Guernica by the Nazi German Air Force in April 1937. Picasso cries out that bombing was the rending of creation. And not just bombing that town, but also Srebinica in 1995 and Aleppo from 2012 until the present and Palmyra in 2016–all war, in other words. The list of “Guernicas” is endless.
Even the best journalistic treatment cannot convey the depth and breadth of Picasso’s painting. Wilfred Owen did the same in his poems from World War I. In “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori” (“it is sweet and right to die for your country”–in other words, it is a wonderful and great honor to fight and die for your country), written in 1917, he foreshadows the bombing of Guernica in his description of a soldier dying of a mustard gas attack:
“If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.”
Dripping with irony and sarcasm, Owen calls irrevocably into question the “old lie.” The journalist’s task is to report the soldier’s suffering and death in vivid terms, as TV news brought the Vietnam casualties to our dinner tables in the ’60s and ’70s. The artist’s message is a different one: war is a violation of the created order, and smoothing it over as noble sacrifice is a lie. This is not a condemnation of the soldiers who fight and die, but of the societies and their leaders who send soldiers into war.
It’s not a matter of escaping politics, but nourishing the deep places of our lives. I have tried to cultivate these deep places in my own life. I visit friends in our second-floor rehab unit. I read newspapers, but watch little TV news. I bought a small volume of Christian Wiman’s poems, “Once in the West,” and found these wonderful lines:
“Too many elegies elevating sadness
to a kind of sad religion:
one wants in the end just once to befriend
one’s own loneliness,
to make of the ache of inwardness–
something,
music maybe. . .”
Make the decision now to befriend the deep places of your life and make them into music. Share your music with us.
(c) Phil Hefner. March 7, 2017
Footprints
30 AprTwo companion poems
Footprints
“You leave no footprints. No one is watching you, but you’re part of history.” Lt. Bill Lee–Marine guard at JFK grave at Arlington Cemetery.
City streets,
throngs walking–
some with canes,
joggers,
soldiers in military stride,
shuffling homeless,
stylish gal, stiletto heels,
button down suit,
uniformed nurses and nuns.
Step by step,
each one puts a foot down.
Track those footsteps,
count them—
beyond counting,
naming them even more
unlikely.
But those who passed
were there,
their steps
as real as if they were
cast in bronze.
They pass by
caught for a moment
then gone—
but each one knows they were there,
however history
unfolds,
is written down,
or explained.
They hear the word:
“You are that history.”
Footprints-2
Potawatomi and Kickapoo,
Illiniwek and Miami walked their paths
around the swampy, marshy swaths
bordering the lake; Chicago
not even in the realm of dreams.
Paths left by the Ice Age sheets
served them as streets,
ridges raised above the streams,
else they’d have to slog through the muck.
Today those same trails carry us.
We pave over where they have trod. In car and bus,
and diesel powered eighteen wheeler truck,
we roar along their trails; now they
bear our names: Ogden Street, Milwaukee
Avenue. But though their prints we’ll never see,
they’re here, their history is ours, still today.
(c) Phil Hefner 30 April 2018