Sep

11

We Must Love One Another Or Die.

Posted by Christopher Waldrop

September 11, 2007 |

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.
-from September 1, 1939 by W.H. Auden

Six years ago, also on a Tuesday, a terrible, tragic event happened. We’ve been told, perhaps so many times we’ve come to believe it, that the world changed on that day. In fact nothing changed. If after the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center we were unaware of terrorism it was wilful ignorance. And perhaps we’ve never considered the bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City an act of terrorism because it wasn’t carried out by religious fanatics from another country but by people who would be ignored by racial profiling. Certainly there are a lot of politicians who would like us to think that way.

On that day I sat on the steps of a building in the middle of a college campus and read W.H. Auden’s poem September 1, 1939, a poem about a very different kind of terrorism, the state-sponsored and internationally approved invasion of Czechoslovakia by Germany under Hitler. On that day I was primarily hoping our government would respond intelligently, and, in the face of such barbarism, compassionately. I was hoping that an event so horrible would bring out the best not only in the United States but countries around the world. More than anything else, though, I turned to poetry to give me reassurance. I’m not sure what reassurance I wanted; Auden’s poem was written just before World War II, and did nothing to stop or lessen it. As he himself said in another poem, “Poetry makes nothing happen.” I think what I wanted, in the midst of screaming, crying, of people I work with calling family members in New York and elsewhere on cell phones, hoping desperately to hear their voices, was silence, a space to think about what had happened and was about to happen. I hoped politicians were also seeking, however briefly, a silence of their own, although, as we’ve seen, what some politicians want and what’s actually needed in a crisis are often two opposite things. Following the horrors of World War II, in a speech titled The Struggle For Human Rights, delivered September 28th, 1948, in Paris, France, Eleanor Roosevelt said, “Politically men must be free to discuss and to arrive at as many facts as possible…because when there is only one political party, too many things can be subordinated to the interests of that one party and it becomes a tyrant and not an instrument of democratic government. ” Criticizing or even questioning our leaders, we were told, was unpatriotic. Samuel Johnson said, “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” On September 11th, 2001, it became the first refuge of scoundrels at the highest levels of our government, the very same people who were supposed to serve us, the very same people who had failed us, and who would continue to do so. Too many politicians treated tragedy as an opportunity for their own selfish ends. Instead of toning down the rhetoric they ratcheted it up; instead of talking about compassion they talked about vengeance. Any dissension was silenced by loud and angry calls for unity. Replacing one dictatorship with another, accepting torture, giving up the freedom to criticize or even question, abandoning our Constitution and trusting our government to operate in total secrecy are not acceptable options, because they mean ceasing to be the people we are, and yet these have been presented to us as the only ways to achieve victory in a never-ending war.

On September 11th, 2001, I did something else besides read Auden’s poem. For some time my favorite web site, one I checked at least three or four times a day, had been Mobylives, a weblog of daily news stories about everything related to books: writing, writers, literary history, book reviews, book festivals, and publishing. That day editor Dennis Loy Johnson had started putting up links and brief descriptions of the day’s news articles as usual, then put up a disturbing message: he could see and smell smoke from his office and he would not be putting up any more articles that day. Kicking myself for not doing anything sooner, I sent him a brief message to say I was glad to hear he was all right. In the interests of full disclosure I must say I’ve corresponded quite a bit with Mr. Johnson, both before and after September 11th, 2001. I wrote two articles, Googlization And You and Googling Libraries, for Mobylives, and did a couple of interviews for Mobylives Radio. Although I’ve never met him personally I consider Mr. Johnson a friend. He believes, I think, that writers, like politicians, should be held to a high standard of honesty and integrity, and many of his articles emphasize that. Even though history is full of jerks and liars who also happened to be great artists, I think he’s right. As arbiters and speakers of truth artists have a responsibility to be honest. Even heroes have feet of clay, but that doesn’t excuse them.

In September 2002 Dennis Johnson and Valerie Merians edited a volume of poems titled Poetry After 9/11, published by Melville House Publishing. The poems are by contemporary poets, including Pulitzer Prize winner Stephen Dunn, Anna Rabinowitz, Molly Peacock, and Brooklyn Poet Laureate Ken Siegelman. I have a copy and have to admit that I still haven’t read it all the way through. I find it too difficult, but, at the rate of one poem every six months or so, I think I will eventually get through it. On September 3rd, 2002, Dennis Johnson wrote an article simply titled, “Why”, that quoted in full Stephen Dunn’s villanelle from the book, and which addressed the question, Why poetry? Following the events of September 11th, 2001, a lot of people asked, “Why did this happen?” but very few seemed to want to hear difficult, complex answers. For Johnson and others, like myself, the most urgent questions seemed to be the ones we asked of ourselves: why is it important to go on, why is it important that we remain unchanged, why is it important that now, more than ever, we demand honesty and integrity of our leaders and of ourselves?

Why is it so important? Being able to send a brief message to Mr. Johnson and getting a reply from him a short time later emphasized the power of technology to link us, and it made me think that we are already linked, we always have been, and that technology is only a way of expressing it, of reminding us of the links that exist between people. Technology has the power to dehumanize us, to remove us from acts of violence. Press a button and a million people ten thousand miles away can die. And yet technology has a power so much greater than that. Press a button and you can reach out to someone you call a friend even if you’ve never stood next to them. I turn back to Auden and the final words of his great poem:

Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.


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