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Poetry, Empire and Catastrophe: A Letter to American Poets and Artist

by David Watson

When I learned on September 11 that the World Trade Center and the Pentagon had been attacked, I was preparing to teach one of Guillaume Apollinaire's calligrammes, or concrete poems, "Little Car," to my high school English class. The poem relates his traveling in France in a motorcar as troops were being mobilized on the eve of the First World War, a war in which he would fight, and receive wounds that would later kill him. I was grateful later for the poem's sense of uneasy excitement, of retrospective foreboding and "looming angry giants." Its announcement that "Whole populations were rapidly rushing toward earthshaking encounters," that "The dead were trembling anxiously in their dark dwellings," shimmered uncannily after the September attacks.

As the twentieth century gathered its energies along with great armies about to clash, Apollinaire commented, "We said our farewells to an entire epoch." One inevitably felt the same sensation of disquiet, of nostalgia and farewell, on September 11. The next morning I wrote in my journal, "We have most certainly entered a new era ... The whole country is reeling ...." I, too, seemed to be saying my farewell to some previous life.

I didn't take Apollinaire to my class that day. I took Wislawa Szymborksa's luminous "The Century's Decline" instead. Her characteristically wise and bittersweet lament describes the mess left toward the end of last century. It "was going to improve on the others," she writes. "It will never prove it now...." War, injustice and hunger were to have been abolished, of course, but things have not turned out that way:

Anyone who planned to enjoy the world is now faced with a hopeless task....

But a focused light can leave background in shadow. And so I worry: how to mourn and honor people wantonly slaughtered for the political ends of implacable madmen, which poetry can and must do, without succumbing to an unreflective, ahistorical bathos, a kind of imperial narcissism? The carnage was horrific, the ruthless single-mindedness of the suicide bombers disturbing; but I believe the United States is also administered by madmen, though their madness is more bureaucratic, impersonal, and superficially rational. In this war, "civilization" purports to be in conflict with "barbarians." But this civilization has been, and continues to be, a pretty horrendous affair. I do not wish to participate in denial and self-delusion.

The day of the attacks, many people gathered around television sets to watch the news-a media experience that, both in the content of the images and the experience of watching with a group, offered a sense of community. This intense focus on the suffering in New York, simultaneously compassionate and voyeuristic, persuaded people that they were witnesses, rather than mere spectators, of someone else's misfortune. The disaster-movie thrill of the destruction did not nullify the empathy; simply hearing the victims' individual stories was heart-rending. Nevertheless, I found myself wondering how Americans might have responded had they been shown such detailed exposure to the miseries of the people this country brutalized and killed in Central America over decades, when they were being told lies about "communist subversion," or--as with the genocide against the Guatemalan Indians--they were told nothing. Would they have demanded a just peace in Central America, as many of us were trying to do in the 1980s, or switched the channel?

Thus, paradoxically--since the work of the arts is to gather and thread the particular to universals--a focus by artists on the particulars of the September 11 cataclysm risks becoming the estheticization of American disaster and suffering in a world where the disasters and suffering of others are not only daily affairs, but in fact essential consequences of imperial economic plunder and military domination from which American elites, and to some lesser degree the majority of people of the advanced industrial world of the West, benefit. The widespread (and assiduously manipulated) social and historical amnesia prior to September 11 and afterward should suggest to us that our claims to innocence, justice and reason are deeply flawed. I would hope that September 11 might remind us of the immense, institutionalized global suffering from which we Americans have been largely immune, and which it has long been our social and historical responsibility to address, and to work to eradicate; but with the subsequent crusade for "infinite justice," and the patriotic frenzy and growing clampdown on liberties that have followed, I am not optimistic.

Life was hardly normal for people around the world before September 11; people have been dying in droves for a long time, some of it even documented fleetingly on television, and it should hardly be controversial (though it seems to be increasingly dangerous) to recall that a very large portion of the dying has been perpetrated by the United States government, either directly or through proxies. During the Vietnam War Martin Luther King, Jr. declared the United States "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world," and that has changed little. US arms industries and markets surpass those of all other countries combined. No other state has its soldiers, ships and air forces patrolling every continent; no military machine comes even remotely close to having bombed so many countries throughout the century. And is it necessary to list the governments overthrown by the CIA throughout the twentieth century, and the human toll that was paid by people from Chile to Indonesia to the Congo to Iran?

One recent vivid example of our relative lack of innocence will suffice to make my point. Since the Persian Gulf War, in which several hundred thousand Iraqi civilians and soldiers were massacred by an army so superior that it suffered only minor, self-inflicted ("friendly-fire") casualties, a war US pilots called "a turkey shoot," a million or more people have died from preventable diseases brought on or aggravated by the hunger, lack of medicine and clean water imposed by the postwar sanctions against Iraq. Clearly, sanctions are a complicated shadow theater in which the United States, the Iraqi dictatorship, and the oil sheiks of the Gulf all profit in different ways. This cynicism should come as no surprise; Hussein was a US ally and trading partner even when he was crushing dissent, attacking his neighbors and gassing his own people in the 1980s. When on the May 12, 1996 broadcast of 60 Minutes reporter Lesley Stahl asked then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright if the suffering caused by sanctions, including the death by illness and hunger of about a half a million children, was "worth the price," Albright replied, "I think this is a very hard choice, but the price ... we think the price is worth it." Albright's morality of ends and means was identical to that of the September 11 highjackers, except that the number of victims caused by those "sanctions of mass destruction" was vastly greater.

People also die because of business of usual. Worldwide, a billion people are malnourished, a quarter of them children. On September 11, assuming that annual deaths were evenly spread, more than thirty thousand children died of starvation or hunger-related diseases in the so-called developing world. Might Americans learn something from reflecting on the fact that though we are only six percent of the world's population, we consume forty percent of its resources? Might the dizzying economic globalization of everything, and subsequent deleterious effects on the living conditions of the world's poor, have anything to do with widespread resentment against the US? Does a US foreign policy that supports and arms Israel in the face of manifest brutality in the occupied territories of Palestine and dozens of ineffectual UN resolutions condemning the occupation, or the fact of the monstrous sanctions against the people of Iraq, or the fact of US support for corrupt and repressive regimes in the middle east like the Saudi monarchy help in any way to explain why the bin Ladens of the world can recruit young men to kill themselves and us in a jihad? Is there no relationship between the profound injustices this empire has unleashed, or ignored, or to which it has actively contributed, and the nihilism of the enemies that such injustice spawns?

These are massacres no one in this country hovers around televisions to observe. People wonder instead why anyone would hate us, when, as their president assures them, we are so good. But when we consider the immense amount of violence this empire has unleashed on so many countries, one wonders why such violence didn't happen sooner, why Guatemalan Indians or Salvadoran or Vietnamese peasants--all killed in the hundreds of thousands, even in the millions--didn't attempt such acts in revenge for the genocide this country and its clients dealt out to them.

The events of September and afterward are depressing. I am deeply pessimistic, uncertain about where they will lead, other than downward. I am unsure about how to live in a time of imperial catastrophe, but I believe that poets and artists, people whose devotion to art should make them loyal not to the cold, cold monster of the state but to life, should be, by avocation and by inclination, anti-imperialist. I don't mean the old leninist style of anti-imperialism, either; there have been many empires since ancient Mesopotamia, and there can be many styles of resistance. I inherit my anti-imperialism from the ancient Greek philosopher Diogenes, who, when told by Alexander the Great, the most powerful man in the known world, that he would grant him any wish, told the emperor to move aside, since he was standing in the way of his light. As poets and artists we have to learn to live, and to document the life of the spirit, both from within and against the empire, pushing the emperor out of our way to let the light--and the darkness--in.

Diogenes said: "A man keeps and feeds a lion. The lion owns a man." Every empire comes to this. The same insight is echoed in one of the shrewdest and most prescient literary works of the nineteenth century, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, when Victor Frankenstein's monster, which has escaped the power of the young scientist and has started to run amok, declares to him: "You are my creator, but I am your master." Tragic reversal is faced eventually by every empire, and our looking directly at it will serve us better in the long run than any callous, self-pitying, and disproportionate concentration on American suffering.

In the present circumstances, the wizards at the US Central Intelligence Agency (just think of that term!), trying to get their feeble mental grasp on the monsters they themselves played a major role in conjuring in one of their satanic mills--these other murderous madmen who now wreak havoc on the so-called homeland--call this phenomenon "blowback." This term does recognize the inevitable tragic revenge, the feedback loop of imperial arrogance, with its wanton, hallucinatorily destructive power. This nemesis did what no previous enemy has been able to do--it smashed them in their citadel, the Pentagon, Murder Central, where the genocide against the Vietnamese was organized, where the "turkey shoot" in Iraq was overseen. That is where planners have mapped contingency plans for the invasion of every single country on earth, even so-called friends (as someone notoriously quipped, empires have no friends, only interests), where they plan not only the Third World War but even the Fourth, in which submarines will surface to nuke the ruins of World War Three.

And of course, that is where, at least from the other four sides of their damaged citadel, the most powerful empire in history now continues the devastation of one of history's saddest, most wretched places, where their exploding cluster bombs scatter thousands more active mines in a country that has been described as the most mined place on earth, where the mere threat of attack sent tens of thousands of people into flight, and likely caused countless deaths from hunger and exposure. That is where they scattered packets of mass-manufactured food utterly inadequate in quantity and completely inappropriate for malnourished people, particularly children. Indeed, they dropped the food over mined areas where one might die chasing the illusive manna from the cruel and capricious gods in the air. Since the United States purposely targeted the civilian infrastructure, particularly the water treatment plants, of Iraq (thus unleashing a kind of biological war against the population), and considered the resultant mass death "worth the price," one can only assume that the food drops were done not out of magnanimity but to reassure a domestic public that to its credit, was at least initially queasy about the next wave of victims, despite what opinion polls claimed.

Blowback: I read in the September 24 issue of The New Yorker that the FBI director and his staff were meeting when the World Trade Center was hit in New York. According to reporter David Remnick, "The FBI, like many other agencies in Washington, had repeatedly reviewed scenarios of grand-scale attacks involving weapons of mass destruction. But this was not in anyone's plans or imagination." When a plane hit the Pentagon and another was reported high-jacked, destination unknown, an FBI official said, "There was a feeling of helplessness. We were all waiting to see what was going to happen." That's what the rest of us were doing, of course; so much for their "intelligence." Whatever the immediate outcome of this particular imperial adventure, we should expect more blowback.

This is an example of how domination inevitably turns into impotence. The imperial Death Star can unleash its panoply of megatechnic might, but it cannot stop the gremlins from infecting and undermining the machinery because international industrial-capitalism is too ubiquitous, too porous, too vast to monitor or control.

The highjackers commandeered history with box knives, a bit of technical training (provided by the wondrous free market to anyone with the money to pay), a few airplane schedules, and the daring of the essentially primitive warrior who fought at Troy. A skyscraper and a jet plane--two quintessential representations of modern mass technology, but also archetypal Trojan Horses to carry the perverse revenge of desperate men--were turned into an enormous fuel-bomb. The burning, collapsed skyscraper itself has now become a technological problem--a smaller, and chemically toxic, disaster, whether they simply leave it where it is or salvage it. Lower Manhattan is still permeated with some hideous, and undoubtedly toxic, chemical smell. The revenge continues--the revenge of our complex chemical way of life. And yet the crackpot realists of "Homeland Defense" tell us that a vast fabric of complicated, hazardous, industrial interdependency--every nuclear power plant, chemical factory and other megatechnic-industrial complex--can be protected.

Capitalism moved more populations around than any previous cataclysm in human history, uprooting whole peoples, annihilating others. Now this turmoil and dynamism--what its publicists tell us makes capitalism great--has taken on its own momentum, and the guardians of the temple can only fumble and struggle with the consequences, like Captain Ahab with his ship.

The ship once seemed to encompass the whole of history itself, but now it has begun to shrink dramatically, to look like other empires: brutal, ponderous, brittle, unimaginative and inevitably impermanent. It will sink, one way or the other, like all imperial civilizations that have come before. No one knows what lies in those depths. That is in fact the definition of catastrophe, both etymologically and in the classic tragedy: a turning downward, the horizon beyond which we cannot see. What is coming, as the official told the reporter, is "not in anyone's plans or imagination." We are all now at least potential collateral damage. That is what changed for Americans, heretofore largely immune from the ongoing catastrophe, on September 11.

The war in Afghanistan and the wars likely to follow, so representative of the myriad wars that have gone on and on at the end of the last millennium and the beginning of this, all the terrible, wasteful, devastating traumas to human beings, to their cultures and histories, and to the natural world that sustains us, make clear that we are indeed in some new and terrible epoch. In the end this empire is destined like the rest to lie half-buried in the rubble of history like Shelley's Ozymandias in the desert.

What follows, whether it comes to an end in one way, or the other, will depend in some obscure way on all of us, though on no one of us. The American empire cannot and should not survive, but America might. This requires our learning to bear witness to the world's suffering, not only to the suffering of Americans, and not only when the television commands us to. It means learning about the causes of such suffering and working to eliminate them--committing ourselves to a vision of peace with justice with the potential to build bridges to those desperate people in the poor shantytowns and slums of the imperial peripheries presently being recruited by the evil enemies of an evil empire. It means continuing to live with ambivalence, with uncertainty, while struggling, paradoxically, with the whole of our being to defend the fragile forces of life.

For poets, it does not mean writing a barren political poetry, though, to his great credit, when Robert Bly was asked long afterward about the dubious quality of some of the antiwar poetry he wrote and published against the war in Vietnam, he replied that he had not written or published enough. And sometimes, if not always, the best poetic strategy is to leave our desks and attend to life. We could start by organizing poetry read-outs and art expositions against the war. At very least, whether at our desks or studios or away from them, we might resist doing anything that legitimates the imperial machine.

Whole populations are again rapidly rushing toward earthshaking encounters, the dead trembling anxiously in their dark dwellings. We are destined to be poets of catastrophe one way or the other. Let us consider not the one way, but the other.

November 2001

The essay above will be published this summer in an anthology titled September 11, 2001: American Writers Respond (from Etruscan Press, edited by poet William Heyen). Posted to our website with permission.