Peace, Poetry, and Negation

Transcription

1 Peace, Poetry, and Negation Robert Pinsky Azalea: Journal of Korean Literature & Culture, Volume 1, 2007, pp (Article) Published by University of Hawai'i Press DOI: For additional information about this article No institutional affiliation (14 Jul :34 GMT)

2 Peace, Poetry, and Negation Korea From the Outside Robert Pinsky ABuddhist foundation in Korea invited poets from around the world to gather for a conference on peace in the summer of The undertaking seemed less quixotic and more practical after I learned a little about the figure from whom the Manhae Foundation takes its name. In Manhae (born Han Yong-un), Koreans can celebrate a great modernist poet who is also a central figure in Korean religion, culture, and politics. An American poet reads with some astonishment that Manhae, a monk and religious reformer who profoundly influenced Buddhist thought and practice, was also a coauthor of the Korean Declaration of Independence. Accomplishments comparable to those of Thomas Jefferson, Walt Whitman, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, achieved by someone born in 1879 (the same year as the American businessman-poet Wallace Stevens). This unusual, comprehensive centrality of Manhae may tempt even Western poets to feel some tiny glint of reflected glory. It also intimidates us: what can one offer in the context of such an imposing model? At that gathering in Seoul, where poets from around the world were invited to think about the somewhat vague ideal of peace, the challenge was perhaps the more poignant for The original form of this essay was presented at the Paektamsa Temple, South Korea, in 2005, and published in RARITAN (Summer 2006). 395

3 Azalea Peace, Po e t r y, a n d Negation: Ro b e r t Pinsky those of us representing languages that have had no Manhae, no single figure who so thoroughly included the worlds of art and practical politics. That occasion, and the writing of Manhae, inspired the questions I will try to consider here. On a grand scale, what is the place of poetry in the needy world, where a deficiency of peace for much of the population means hunger, violence, and disease? On an immediate, personal scale, what might be the social or religious or political place of the next poem one writes, in relation to the formidable accomplishment of Manhae in a language and culture we can only begin to understand? In the context of such questions, and the diffidence they inspire, it is a great relief to turn toward Manhae s poems. These poems present not the political rhetoric of triumph, but intricacies of doubt; and not the religious rhetoric of peace achieved, but peace as the goal of struggle; not salvation, but longing. Far from separating individual psychology from politics or religion, the poems seem determined to blur, or even wipe away, any such distinctions. And it appears to be a poetry that attacks its own means, that sometimes creates an image or a metaphor only to tear at the creation. Here is Francisca Cho s translation of the poem Cuckoo : The cuckoo cries its heart out. It cries and when it can cry no more, It cries blood. The bitterness of parting is not yours alone. I cannot cry even though I want to. I m not a cuckoo, and that bitterness can t be helped either. The heartless cuckoo: I have nowhere to return, and yet it cries, Better turn back, better turn back. Regret, exile, discomfort: these feelings, whether they are understood as personal, erotic, historical, or all of the above, here dramatize themselves by how the poem expels its own notions: 396

4 I m not a cuckoo, I have nowhere to return, I cannot cry. These negatives are like the legend of the bird that grieves till it emits not a voice, but blood. I haven t seen your heart, says the refrain of a poem called Your Heart. Don t, says the refrain of First Kiss. It s not for nothing that I love you, says Love s Reasons. Even a poem of devotion has the refrain Don t Doubt : If you doubt me, then your error of doubt / and my fault of sorrow will cancel each other. There are negatives, too, in a poem called Don t Go : That s not the light of compassion from Buddha s brow; it s the flash from a demon s eyes / That s not the goddess of love who binds body and mind, and tosses herself into love s ocean, caring nothing for crowns, glory or death; / It s the smile of the knife. The refrain of Don t Go is Turn around don t go to that place. I hate it. Ah yes, the negative! It cheers me up, and in a certain way it is near the heart of poetry itself. Through negation poetry implicitly says to politics, no, you are not all there is, there is also the human body; and to the human body, no, you are not all there is, there is also spiritual yearning; and to spiritual yearning, no, you are not all there is, there is also sexual pleasure; and to sexual pleasure, no, you are not all there is, there is also politics. The art says no to all, and includes all. Unruly, it welcomes conflict, paradox, and negation. This may be what the Yiddish poet Zische Landau had in mind who said, long ago, that whatever Yiddish poetry might be it would not be merely the Rhyme Department of the Jewish Labor Movement. That is, poetry does not merely put particular feelings and ideas into language, but creates an experience that reminds us of something beyond any particular feelings and ideas: always beyond, always in process, always headed somewhere new. In the old Soviet days of Eastern Europe, a Polish poet has said, the most ambitious poet was the State: it wanted to control all the metaphors. Poetry, to the contrary, wants every metaphor to remain open. 397

5 Azalea Peace, Po e t r y, a n d Negation: Ro b e r t Pinsky I am angry at my country s government much of the time, often in relation to this very notion of peace. When I try to think of how that anger is related to poetry in general, or to my poetry in particular, it is helpful for me to think of my task as reopening and questioning metaphors. Not to be an expert in foreign policy, but rather in the contradictions and reversals of language. In this light, one wonders if Manhae s reputation for writing poems that can be read as erotic or nationalistic, psychological or political, personal or communal, represents not a taste for allegory or some delight in poetry s hidden or multiple meanings, but rather the embodiment of poetry s quality of inclusion: not that a love affair is a secret code for patriotism, but that poetry is peculiarly able to understand how the human soul enacts both. Great rhetoric may talk as though there is only politics. Great erotic passion may talk as though there is only eros. Poetry, in contrast with these, somehow acknowledges or implies the All or, if that sounds too misty, it checks the box All of the Above. Less confident of settled knowledge than any language purely of love or purely of politics or purely of psychology, poetry is more confident in its inclusive, sweeping ambition. It excludes nothing. Irritably, it looks beyond everything. The poet in English who is often presented as having successfully included political reality in his work is William Butler Yeats, Manhae s senior by only nine years and, like Manhae, associated with the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore. The refrain of Yeats s poem Easter 1916 combines the all-including terms utterly and all with the negative paradox of beauty that is terrible: All is changed, changed utterly: / A terrible beauty is born. The poem touches on the disparate realms of social class (the poet on the way to his club, unlike the conspirators coming from counter or desk ), poetic ambition ( rode our winged horse and might have won fame in the end ), personal affections ( some who are near my heart ), and includes even a natural scene along a stream where hens to moorcocks call and birds... range / from cloud to tumbling cloud. 398

6 Peace is certainly one of the subjects raised by this Irish poem about a violent, doomed uprising. Yet also somewhat strange, precisely in its quality of peace, is Yeats s comparison for his own poem about that violent, unsettling Post Office takeover: To murmur name upon name, As a mother names her child When sleep at last has come On limbs that had run wild. He likens his arrangement of names into poetry I write it out in a verse, / MacDonagh and MacBride / And Connolly and Pearse to the way a mother murmurs the name of her child after the child has fallen asleep. The anger and sexual jealousy that makes him call one of these a drunken, vainglorious lout ; the confessed social snobbery that contrasts counter or desk with Around the fire at the club ; the violent deaths and executions of the event itself; the pragmatic political calculation of whether England may keep faith none of this is transcended by the incantation of peace, the calm and maternal sound of a name: not transcended, but included. The beauty a poem, or a child, or a historic act of rebellion is born, and it is also terrible. This peculiar embrace of the beautiful with the terrible, peace not avoiding violence and struggle and terror, not rising above them but somehow including them, seems to me one of the central, if mysterious, gestures of art. If it were not so unsettling and contradictory, I would call it familiar. It associates opposites: in Yeats s lines, Peace and Wildness, but maybe more accurately Peace and Struggle, perhaps even Peace and Conflict. Gerard Manley Hopkins says of peace, having in mind Christ as a dove, and exploiting brood as a word that indicates both hatching the young and a kind of strained, dark meditation: And when Peace here does house / He comes with work to do, he does not come to coo, / 399

7 He comes to brood and sit. Emily Dickinson seems to say that the harbor of Peace is an illusion, but then reasserts its promise: Azalea Peace, Po e t r y, a n d Negation: Ro b e r t Pinsky I many times thought Peace had come When Peace was far away As Wrecked Men deem they sight the Land At Centre of the Sea And struggle slacker but to prove As hopelessly as I How many the fictitious Shores Before the Harbor be How many the fictitious Shores : the infinite, manifold possibilities of imagination. This vision of multiplied wreckage and struggle articulates the opposite or absence of peace, just as Yeats s evocation of a mother who names her sleeping child is the opposite or negation of the objective violence and subjective passion that are the subject of his poem. I perceive a similar process of opposition and stress in Manhae s poem Come. This remarkable poem begins with images of peace: Come in to my garden, the flowers are blooming there. Should anyone chase you, hide in the blossoms. I ll turn into a butterfly and light upon the ones you hide among. Then your pursuer won t find you. Come, please come. It s time. Come in to my arms, my breast is soft there. Though I m soft as water, I m a golden sword and an iron shield to protect you. The sweet peacefulness of these early stanzas includes the refrain: Come, please come. It s time. But the concluding stanza 400

8 transforms the meaning of that refrain: Come in to my death, my death is always ready for you. Should anyone chase you, stand behind my death. In death, emptiness and omnipotence are one. Love s death is at once infinite, everlasting. In death, battleship and fortress become dust. In death, the strong and the weak are companions. Then your pursuer won t catch you. Come, please come. It s time. This resolution in the absolute of death is in a way conventional (the poem was apparently inspired by Tagore s The Gardener, 12 as Francisca Cho suggests in her note) and in another way unexpected and radical. In his poem Reading Tagore s Poem Gardenisto, Manhae writes, You re a song of hope within despair, sung while picking fallen flowers for a garland. But in another, similar transformation he rejects or criticizes that sweet image of hope in a faded garland: You say the scent of death is sweet, but you can t kiss the lips of dry bones. / Don t spread a web of golden song over that grave, but plant a bloodstained banner. Restlessness, not stasis. Conflict, not repose. Or rather, conflict when repose is expected and repose when conflict is expected. The artist, above all, wants to bring something new into the world: art, if saying so is not too circular, aspires to creation. There is the slogan that the artist speaks truth to power. Yes, and we can hope not only the artist does that; we would truly despair if we thought only poets were capable of speaking truth to power. Eminently, governors and magistrates should speak truth to power. Art has its own way of speaking. In the week of the poets conference in Korea on the subject of peace, the Irish Republican Army officially renounced violence. The coincidence brings to mind another poem by Yeats: 401

9 On Being Asked for a War Poem Azalea Peace, Po e t r y, a n d Negation: Ro b e r t Pinsky I think it better that in times like these A poet s mouth be silent, for in truth We have no gift to set a statesman right; He has had enough of meddling who can please A young girl in the indolence of her youth, Or an old man upon a winter s night. The author of Easter 1916 and Meditation in Time of Civil War says We have no gift to set a statesman right. I remember trying to say this poem by memory once, on a hike up a mountain, and I could not recall one of the words: He has had enough of something who can please / A young girl in the indolence of her youth, / Or an old man upon a winter s night. He has had enough of glory who can please? He has had enough of striving who can please? On that mountain trail in California s Trinity Alps, I could not wait to get down to a bookstore and check. What I learned is that Yeats s actual word, meddling, was tougher, meaner, more irritable than my glory and striving. That pugnacious note, and the reservations an Irish poet might have about the English war cause, together qualify the line We have no gift to set a statesman right. To some extent, the line means that art does more than set a statesman right about this policy or that. By pleasing, by waking up, art may question the very terms of peace and war. A terrible beauty is beyond or above meddling. All politicians after all say they are for peace. And so they may be on their terms, as Adolf Hitler was. The poet may choose to demonstrate that peace is as unexpected, as many-sided, and as rooted in conflict, as those poems of Manhae s that say in death, the strong and the weak are companions. The savagery in the word I could not call up meddling for 402

10 me embodies how passionate and angry Yeats s refusal to write a war poem is, though cloaked in the manners of modest calm: the young girl in the indolence of youth, the old man, the winter night, the pleasing. As in the poems of Manhae, erotic energy, the time of year, and the domestic or individual scale of indolence and old age have an intricate figurative and literal relationship with the other idea of meddling and setting a statesman right. But as the context of an international conference on peace reminded me in new ways, I am an American, and, poet or not, that fact puts me in a special relation to the concept of peace. In this time of immense American power, military and economic, in the wake of an American invasion of Iraq, removing a government there, bombing and occupying in the name of peace, do I not have particular, urgent responsibilities? Nor is war the only opposite to peace: starvation, corruption, disease... all these global contraries of peace are national matters for my country, because of our massive power. Possibly because that political, economic, and military power is so immense, it is sometimes said that contemporary American poets are slow to speak about causes like peace. This criticism is amazing to me. In 2003, shortly before the invasion of Iraq, Laura Bush planned a reception for poets at the White House. The event was finally canceled not because of the many refusals to attend, but because of plans to present a petition against the planned invasion, with thousands of signatures of poets. The Web site Poets Against the War calls itself (this is a little embarrassing, I concede) the largest poetry anthology ever published. It now contains twenty thousand poems. At the moment of that planned White House reception, American poets in large numbers demonstrated that they could have set a statesman right : mistrust of the grounds for mounting a precipitate, catastrophic invasion turns out to have been a justified mistrust. But quantity is not quality. Are there American poems that serve the ideal of peace in a way worthy of comparison to Manhae s 403

11 Azalea Peace, Po e t r y, a n d Negation: Ro b e r t Pinsky incorporation of the negative, his inclusion of the erotic? I think at once of Allen Ginsberg ending his Cold War poem America with a precisely disarming declaration of his sexuality and his patriotism, in the cause of peace. After his hilarious parody of xenophobia and paranoid Red-baiting, he concludes his poem with a mockery of himself, mockery of conventional categories and terms, of the standards for military service laughing at everything but his quite sincere, wholehearted, and unironic willingness to serve his country: It s true I don t want to join the Army or turn lathes in precision parts factories, I m nearsighted and psychopathic anyway. America I m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel. This poem is exhilarating and penetrating because it does not omit parts of life in order to serve a political rhetoric: the conflicts in Ginsberg s heart are not apart from the world but a manifestation and epitome of the world. He is patriotic, and contrary. And here is Robert Lowell, in the last stanza of Waking Early Sunday Morning, using the word peace with the saddest irony imaginable: Pity the planet, all joy gone from this sweet, volcanic cone; peace to our children when they fall in small war on the heels of small war until the end of time to police the earth, a ghost orbiting forever lost in our monotonous sublime. This anger of 1967 expresses itself not in rant or posturing but in an even, mournful meditation on the ghostly, joyless and 404

12 contradictory sublime: negative, as well as monotonous. Lowell s lines and Ginsberg s meditative or manic are efforts to attain peace by almost physical means: a modern, poetic equivalent of the chanted magical charms that might be at the anthropological roots of our art. The animal, fearful or needy, vocalizes to create an audible artifact that might bring the peace it craves: an incantation, that does not so much describe the world as it is at any moment as it tries to bring about by words the world as it potentially, maybe essentially, can be. One could hardly find a more apt expression of this aim than the poem Incantation, by the late Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz. Here is my own translation: Human reason is beautiful and invincible. No bars, no barbed wire, no pulping of books, No sentence of banishment can prevail against it. It establishes the universal ideas in language, And guides our hand so we write Truth and Justice With capital letters, lie and oppression with small. It puts what should be above things as they are, It is an enemy of despair and a friend of hope. It does not know Jew from Greek or slave from master, Giving us the estate of the world to manage. It saves austere and transparent phrases From the filthy discord of tortured words. It says that everything is new under the sun, Opens the congealed fist of the past. Beautiful and very young are Philo Sophia And poetry, her ally in the service of the good. As late as yesterday Nature celebrated their birth, The news was brought to the mountains by a unicorn and an echo, Their friendship will be glorious, their time has no limit, Their enemies have delivered themselves to destruction. 405