This post is a little longer than usual. Actually maybe a lot longer. But, last weekend, I had the great good fortune to give the opening talk for the Atheneum retreat. The Atheneum is a year-long master writing course through The Attic Institute here in Portland. It gives a small group of writers from all three creative genres a chance to focus on their writing for a year and to create a community of fellow travelers. So, this is what I told them last weekend, and it is my Memorial Day Weekend offering to all of you here. Have a good weekend. Write well
May 17, 2013
One could argue that the written word has hit a high water mark, that it has never been more alive than it is today. In 2009, The Guardian newspaper estimated that many educated Westerners would see an average of 490,000 words per day. 490,000 words. To put that in perspective, War and Peace is 460,000 words. So by sheer quantity, we are actually consuming—or maybe I should say inhaling—more words than we would have thought possible even 20 years ago.
But, despite all that, a day doesn’t go by when we don’t hear about the decline of reading, the death of books, or the demise of another gritty and beloved little bookstore. In 2009, the NEA reported that only 8 percent of Americans read any poetry during the previous year. And that was down from 12 percent six years earlier. In fact, in that study, only half of adults reported reading any literature at all during the previous year.
So, with all these words combined with a kind flaccid national attachment to literature, the territory that we writers think of as our own—the territory of left brain, the emotions, the dark underworld of the subconscious—it turns out that that territory been taken over by marketers and campaign consultants. In fact there is an entire field of marketing called “neuromarketing,” which is designed to tap into what they call the “old brain,” the reptile brain. These neuromarketers openly advocate “the need to focus first on appealing to the buyer’s emotions and unconscious needs.” And as you may have noticed in the last election, politicians are no better. Drew Westen, an Emory psychologist and campaign advisor has said: “In politics, when reason and emotion collide, emotion invariably wins. Although the marketplace of ideas is a great place to shop for policies, the marketplace that matters most in American politics is the marketplace of emotions.” And even worse, Westen said: “[T]he skillful use of fear is unmatched in leading to enthusiasm for one candidate and causing voters to turn away from another.”
One of the most interesting examples of the market takeover the unconscious comes from a lawsuit between Steve Jobs and the Beatles during the early days of the Apple Empire. The Beatles sued Apple arguing that it had infringed their copyright by using the image and the name “apple.” And Apple—if you can believe this—settled for $26.5 million dollars. And for what? Essentially for the use of a metaphor. A metaphor—the apple. When was the last time any one of us got paid anywhere near that amount for one of our brilliant metaphors? But the allusion to the apple—with its connection to temptation and desire and even Americana—was worth multiple millions of dollars. Apparently, metaphors sell.
So where does that leave us? As gigantic corporations brawl over how best to tap into our unconscious, where do we fit as writers and artists? In his brilliant little book, Democracy, Culture and the Voice of Poetry, former poet laureate Robert Pinsky argues that poetry plays an essential role in destabilizing mass culture. As he characterizes it, mass culture creates a tremendous collective anxiety: “We are simultaneously afraid of constraints making us so much like one another that we will lose something vital in our human nature, and also in fear of becoming so fluently different, so much divided into alien and brutally competitive fragments, gangs or fabricated nationalisms, that we cannot survive”
He argues—predictably maybe—that poetry is an antidote to both the obliteration and the alienation caused by the dominance of mass culture. As he puts it, “something deep in poetry operates at the borderland of body and mind, sound and word: double-region of the subtle knot that Donne says makes us man.” And here’s the kicker from Pinsky: “The social world in poetry, according to this paradigm, is neither told about nor presented: it is, precisely, invoked: brought into being by the voice. Incantation, rather than the presentation of telling or ritual.”
It’s the invocation of the world, that beckoning, that can inoculate us from homogenizing uniformity or violent fragmentation. So, there is hope in that, right? Our work – poetry and fiction and creative non-fiction—is one of the few places the unconscious is actually coaxed out into the open. It is the borderlands between dark and light, death and life, the unconscious and the conscious, the inner life and the outer world. By keeping the unconscious hidden away and but well-fed with marketing and manipulation, it becomes unpredictable and dangerous. It surfaces in wars and political conventions and overindulgence in junk food.
And by this lofty characterization of our work—setting the unconscious free—I don’t mean that everything we do must be hard or even all that serious. But I do mean that making poems or short stories or essays is not cynical. We may well be speaking one reptile brain to another, but we are not doing it to try to gain a vote or sell a breakfast bar. As Jung said about his Red Book: “In this book I have devoted considerable space to my subjective view of the world, which, however, is not a product of rational thinking. It is rather a vision such as will come to one who undertakes, deliberately, with half-closed eyes and somewhat closed ears, to seek and hear the form and voice of being. If our impressions are too distinct, we are held to the hour and minute of the present and have no way of knowing how our ancestral psyches listen to and understand the present—in other words, how our unconscious is responding to it.”
So like Jung, we are using the written word to call forth what is genuine but buried to create communion, to create community—one confused and fragile human with another. We are using words and images and metaphors to illuminate rather than to distract. In that way, writing, as we practice it, is deeply subversive. And absolutely essential.
And, by the way, we are also committing a kind of cultural—and maybe literal—blasphemy, in our efforts to recreate the material world. We take experience that could be reported directly and –in the words of Emily Dickinson, we tell it slant. We subject experience to high heat and centrifugal force and return it to the world more concentrated, more distilled and somehow truer than the experience itself. I will never forget the first time I read Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. I was a teenager—bored, restless, too quick to judge and equally quick to announce my opinion. But for once, I was stopped in my tracks. I could not believe that you could do that with a novel.
Have you read it? Remember now, Orlando starts as a 16-year old boy in 1608. He cavorts with Elizabeth the First, falls in love with another woman, writes poems, the usual. Somewhere in about the third chapter, he falls asleep. He wakes up a woman. She marries a sea captain, entertains Alexander Pope, and publishes a poem in 1928 that he/she started in 1608. Ummm. . .speaking of subversive. Blasphemous. It is a novel that upends every assumption we make about time, identity, memory.
Here is a passage from the book. It takes place shortly after Orlando becomes a woman. She is wandering about and falls in with a band of gypsies. It both embodies and reveals the struggle with transformation and with language:
But Orlando had contracted in England some of the customs or diseases (whatever you choose to consider them) which cannot, it seems, be expelled. One evening, when they were all sitting round the camp fire and the sunset was blazing over the Thessalian hills, Orlando exclaimed:
‘How good to eat!’
(The gipsies have no word for ‘beautiful’. This is the nearest.)
All the young men and women burst out laughing uproariously. The sky good to eat, indeed! The elders, however, who had seen more of foreigners than they had, became suspicious. They noticed that Orlando often sat for whole hours doing nothing whatever, except look here and then there; they would come upon her on some hill-top staring straight in front of her, no matter whether the goats were grazing or straying. They began to suspect that she had other beliefs than their own, and the older men and women thought it probable that she had fallen into the clutches of the vilest and cruellest among all the Gods, which is Nature. Nor were they far wrong. The English disease, a love of Nature, was inborn in her, and here, where Nature was so much larger and more powerful than in England, she fell into its hands as she had never done before. The malady is too well known, and has been, alas, too often described to need describing afresh, save very briefly. There were mountains; there were valleys; there were streams. She climbed the mountains; roamed the valleys; sat on the banks of the streams. She likened the hills to ramparts, to the breasts of doves, and the flanks of kine. She compared the flowers to enamel and the turf to Turkey rugs worn thin. Trees were withered hags, and sheep were gray boulders. Everything, in fact, was something else. She found the tarn on the mountain-top and almost threw herself in to seek the wisdom she thought lay hid there; and when, from the mountain-top, she beheld far off, across the Sea of Marmara, the plains of Greece, and made out (her eyes were admirable) the Acropolis with a white streak or two, which must, she thought, be the Parthenon, her soul expanded with her eyeballs, and she prayed that she might share the majesty of the hills, know the serenity of the plains, etc. etc., as all such believers do. Then, looking down, the red hyacinth, the purple iris wrought her to cry out in ecstasy at the goodness, the beauty of nature; raising her eyes again, she beheld the eagle soaring, and imagined its raptures and made them her own. Returning home, she saluted each star, each peak, and each watch-fire as if they signalled to her alone; and at last, when she flung herself upon her mat in the gipsies’ tent, she could not help bursting out again, How good to eat! How good to eat! (For it is a curious fact that though human beings have such imperfect means of communication, that they can only say ‘good to eat’ when they mean ‘beautiful’ and the other way about, they will yet endure ridicule and misunderstanding rather than keep any experience to themselves.)
. . . .
She began to think, was Nature beautiful or cruel; and then she asked herself what this beauty was; whether it was in things themselves, or only in herself; so she went on to the nature of reality, which led her to truth, which in its turn led to Love, Friendship, Poetry (as in the days on the high mound at home); which meditations, since she could impart no word of them, made her long, as she had never longed before, for pen and ink.
‘Oh! if only I could write!’ she cried (for she had the odd conceit of those who write that words written are shared). She had no ink; and but little paper. But she made ink from berries and wine; and finding a few margins and blank spaces in the manuscript of ‘The Oak Tree’, managed by writing a kind of shorthand, to describe the scenery in a long, blank version poem, and to carry on a dialog with herself about this Beauty and Truth concisely enough. This kept her extremely happy for hours on end. But the gipsies became suspicious. First, they noticed that she was less adept than before at milking and cheese-making; next, she often hesitated before replying; and once a gipsy boy who had been asleep, woke in a terror feeling her eyes upon him. Sometimes this constraint would be felt by the whole tribe, numbering some dozens of grown men and women. It sprang from the sense they had (and their senses are very sharp and much in advance of their vocabulary) that whatever they were doing crumbled like ashes in their hands. An old woman making a basket, a boy skinning a sheep, would be singing or crooning contentedly at their work, when Orlando would come into the camp, fling herself down by the fire and gaze into the flames. She need not even look at them, and yet they felt, here is someone who doubts; (we make a rough-and-ready translation from the gipsy language) here is someone who does not do the thing for the sake of doing; nor looks for looking’s sake; here is someone who believes neither in sheep-skin nor basket; but sees (here they looked apprehensively about the tent) something else. Then a vague but most unpleasant feeling would begin to work in the boy and in the old woman. They broke their withys; they cut their fingers. A great rage filled them. They wished Orlando would leave the tent and never come near them again. Yet she was of a cheerful and willing disposition, they owned; and one of her pearls was enough to buy the finest herd of goats in Broussa.
That is what Pinsky is talking about. The power of poetry—and here fiction—to invoke a way of being that is so singular that it outfoxes the corporations and the politicians and network news.
But that is not without its own risks. And here I mean for us to be a little self-critical. Because we writers are bunkered behind the sandbags, hiding out on the fringes of the unconscious, we tend to stay in the deeply personal, in the singular. And there we start to risk the kind of fragmentation Pinsky talks about. We are so fearful of the obliteration by the masses that we opt for the fragmentation of the singular. We choose Dickinson and ignore Whitman. Because we are embattled, we stay in the entirely individual and let the marketers and the political strategists have the civic space, the public sphere.
And here I am talking mostly about poets, but not entirely. And by pointing this out, I do not mean to implicate anyone or actually even say what anyone “should” write. But rather, I am wondering aloud about the possibilities. I am wondering what would happen if we brought that same devotion and bravery to the public sphere. If we walked out into Pioneer Square with our heightened consciousness of frailty and beauty and grit. If we brought our names for the unnameable into a more civic space.
By civic space, I don’t not mean only political, though, that arena could surely benefit by our participation. When I say civic, I actually mean our shared space, the space where we encounter strangers and animals and unexplainable cruelties and beauty. I wonder what would happen if we were to pull out our Bunsen burner and centrifuge and transform into art that which is not merely private but also that which is shared.
I know why we might not, why it seems daunting or unseemly or risky. We don’t want to produce propaganda or jump into the mix with those who manipulate the unconscious for a living. We don’t want to risk the obliteration Pinsky warned us about. No.
But, what would be possible if we put a toe in the water? If we brought our own metaphors to the public square instead of having to rely on the ones purchased by Steve Jobs or Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon. (Amazon. How did they get to control that metaphor?) Anyway, take a look at this profoundly civic poem by the wonderful Irish poet, Seamus Heaney:
From the Republic of Conscience
I.
When I landed in the republic of conscience
it was so noiseless when the engines stopped
I could hear a curlew high above the runway.
At immigration, the clerk was an old man
who produced a wallet from his homespun coat
and showed me a photograph of my grandfather.
The woman in customs asked me to declare
the words of our traditional cures and charms
to heal dumbness and avert the evil eye.
No porters. No interpreter. No taxi.
You carried your own burden and very soon
your symptoms of creeping privilege disappeared.
II.
Fog is a dreaded omen there but lightning
spells universal good and parents hang
swaddled infants in trees during thunderstorms.
Salt is their precious mineral. And seashells
are held to the ear during births and funerals.
The base of all inks and pigments is seawater.
Their sacred symbol is a stylized boat.
The sail is an ear, the mast a sloping pen,
the hull a mouth-shape, the keel an open eye.
At their inauguration, public leaders
must swear to uphold unwritten law and weep
to atone for their presumption to hold office –
and to affirm their faith that all life sprang
from salt in tears which the sky-god wept
after he dreamt his solitude was endless.
III.
I came back from that frugal republic
with my two arms the one length, the customs
woman having insisted my allowance was myself.
The old man rose and gazed into my face
and said that was official recognition
that I was now a dual citizen.
He therefore desired me when I got home
to consider myself a representative
and to speak on their behalf in my own tongue.
Their embassies, he said, were everywhere
but operated independently
and no ambassador would ever be relieved.
Read it again. It’s all invocation, none of it a telling, and it brings the unconscious right up onto the landing strip. It demonstrates the subversive power of poems, the mix of moral and political and sensual. And we need look no further than last month to be reminded about that power. In March, an Iranian poet was arrested and detained. He’s not been heard from since. Last December, A Qatari poet was sentenced to life for publishing work that was characterized as an attempt to destabilize the country. Earlier last year, Chinese poet Zhu Yufu was sentenced to seven years for writing and publishing this poem on the internet:
IT’S TIME
(By Zhu Yufu, translated by A. E. Clark and reprinted with permission)
It’s time, people of China! It’s time.
The Square belongs to everyone.
With your own two feet
It’s time to head to the Square and make your choice.
It’s time, people of China! It’s time.
A song belongs to everyone.
From your own throat
It’s time to voice the song in your heart.
It’s time, people of China! It’s time.
China belongs to everyone.
Of your own will
It’s time to choose what China shall be.
Seven years for that. Every six months PEN International releases a case list of writers who have been arrested or sentenced to prison or killed. Each time, there are literally hundreds of journalists and writers and poets listed. So, that puts it into perspective, doesn’t it? Writing is subversive. Art is dangerous. But despite the recent kerfuffle between the Justice Department and the AP, we live in the freest country in the world for writers. Or at least one of the freest.
But anyway, each time I look at that PEN list, I think Wendy, you need to put a sock in it. You need to stop complaining about too little time, too little money, too many obligations, too many excuses really. Because whatever has brought us to this point, whether it is to get back at our parents or to tell a burning story or because of a bolt of lightning in the dark, we are here now. You are here now. You are here with a pen in your hand and—in this world—barrels of ink at your disposal. You have the education, the talent, the pluck, and now the community of fellow travelers to give you the strength to transform experience into art. And Lord knows, you—we all—had better do it. Because I don’t know who else will.
Look I know it is easy to become overwhelmed, awash in self-doubt or distracted by work and family and the NBA finals. But really, we can’t afford that luxury. In fact, we can’t afford you that luxury. While Kellogg and Karl Rove are burning the midnight oil, we can’t be doubting ourselves, our projects, the power of our art. No. We need to bring it into the light. You need to bring it into the world. So, we are with you. This community. We are beside you and behind you and next to you, we are pulling for you and goading you along. As Salman Rushdie said: “A [writer’s] work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.” Let’s go do that.
