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The Row Boat"Had we but world enough, and time..." *
Taking Account5/11/2006 10:56:18For the last week or so I've been pouring myself into learning about the last five years that I've mostly ignored - the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the aftermath of the terrorist attacks, the mythologies that we have been building up the whole time... Pretty much realizing that these are some of the defining stories for our generation and they are stories that need to be told in as many ways as possible. I'm investigating ways to tell, ways more prophetic than polemical. A big guide for all this is Walt Whitman, whose poems and prose accounts of the Civil War, particularly with the soldiers in the hospital, are so moving and so awake. The words read like they were written yesterday, as if in resistance to what is being said and done now. He answers the infection of polemic and propoganda into language with cogent insistences on minutae and blindness to the existence of power. The portrait he paints of the President, especially, who for so many people would be bathed in power, is instead bathed in humanness and gentleness; what power the man possesses Whitman insists comes entirely by the decision of the people, from their power rather than from his own - a movingly hagiographic trope. "Strange and hard that paradox true I give, Objects gross and the unseen soul are one." (A Song for Occupations 5) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - |
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