Reckonings: a journal of justice, hope and history

Muriel Rukeyser

I suppose it could be said that we live in the second century of world wars, if we stretch that term to include the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the "wars on terror" in which the United States has been engaged since 2001. Were she still living, I suspect Muriel Rukeyser would agree. Certainly what she wrote in a poem written during the Vietnam War and simply called "Poem" applies to those wars as deeply and as troublingly as it does to World Wars I and II. 

Of those recent and ongoing wars in the greater Middle East, political scientist Andrew Bacevich writes, "What does the United States hope to achieve....? To pacify the region? To remake it in our image? To drain its stocks of petroleum? Or just keeping the lid on? However you define the war's aims, things have not gone well, which... suggests that, in some form, it will continue for some time to come."

That likelihood surely brings to mind the madness Muriel Rukeyser describes in "Poem," and draws us powerfully into her compelling determination to construct peace, in and among ourselves if not in the world at large:

Slowly I would get to pen and paper,

Make my poems for others unseen and unborn.

In the day I would be reminded of those men and women,

Brave, setting up signals across vast distances,

Considering a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined values.

As the lights darkened, as the lights of night brightened,

We would try to imagine them, try to find each other,

To construct peace, to make love, to reconcile

Waking with sleeping, ourselves with each other,

Ourselves with ourselves. We would try by any means

To reach the limits of ourselves, to reach beyond ourselves,

To let go the means, to wake.

Muriel Rukeyser was a poet of intimacy and political protest, and made no
line of separation between the two. Adrienne Rich wrote of Rukeyser, "[Her] poetry is unequalled in the twentieth-century United States in its range of reference, its generosity of vision, and its energy. She pushes us, readers, writers, and participants in the life of our time, to enlarge our sense of what poetry is about in the world, and of the place of feelings and memory in politics.... Rukeyser was one of the great integrators, seeing the fragmentary world of modernity not as irretrievably broken, but in need of societal and emotional repair."

William Meredith wrote of Rukeyser in an interview for The Paris Review: "She was the first poet that I knew personally. I knew her when I was still an undergraduate. She was a very amazing human being and any traces of honesty in my life come from having seen how beautifully honest she was in administering her life and her poetry without any separation—you couldn't get a knife between the two things with her. The real influence was her human model of what a poet could be."

Poem

By Muriel Rukeyser

 

I lived in the first century of world wars.

Most mornings I would be more or less insane,

The newspapers would arrive with their careless stories,

The news would pour out of various devices

Interrupted by attempts to sell products to the unseen.

I would call my friends on other devices;

They would be more or less mad for similar reasons.

Slowly I would get to pen and paper,

Make my poems for others unseen and unborn.

In the day I would be reminded of those men and women,

Brave, setting up signals across vast distances,

Considering a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined values.

As the lights darkened, as the lights of night brightened,

We would try to imagine them, try to find each other,

To construct peace, to make love, to reconcile

Waking with sleeping, ourselves with each other,

Ourselves with ourselves. We would try by any means

To reach the limits of ourselves, to reach beyond ourselves,

To let go the means, to wake.

I lived in the first century of these wars.

Empathy

Empathy has long fascinated me: the act of entering into the mind and heart, the body and soul, of another, caring her care insofar as one can, coming to feel and know at least part of another's life as if it were one's own. The path of empathy, as Rebecca Solnit reminds us, is both emotional and imaginative, telling part of another's story and part of our own. Solnit, in her most recent book, The Faraway Nearby (2013), reflects on the domain of empathy:

To hear is to let the sound wander all the way through the labyrinth of your ear; to listen is to travel the other way to meet it. It’s not passive but active, this listening. It’s as though you retell each story, translate it into the language particular to you, fit it into your cosmology so you can understand and respond, and thereby it becomes part of you. The word empathy originally meant feeling into, and to empathize is to reach out to meet the data that comes through the labyrinths of the senses. To enter into, we say, as though another person’s life was also a place you could travel to.

Kindness, compassion, generosity, are often talked about as though they’re purely emotional virtues, but they are also and maybe first of all imaginative ones. You see someone get hurt — maybe they get insulted or they’re just very tired — and you feel for them. You take the information your senses deliver and interpret it, often in terms of your own experience, until it becomes vivid to you. Or you work harder and study them to imagine the events you don’t witness, the suffering that is not on the surface.

It’s easier to imagine the experience of people most like you and nearest you -- your best friend, the person who just slipped on the ice. Through imagination and representations -- films, printed stories, second-hand accounts -- you travel into the lives of people far away. This imaginative entering into is best at the particular, since you can imagine being the starving child but not the region of a million starving people. Sometimes, though, one person’s story becomes the point of entry to larger territories.

This identification is almost instinctual in many circumstances. Even some animals do it; babies cry in sympathy with each other, or in distress at the sound of distress. But to cry because someone cries or desire because someone desires is not quite to care about someone else. There are people whose response to the suffering of others is to become upset and demand consolation themselves.

Empathy means that you travel out of yourself a little or expand. Recognizing the reality of another's existence is the imaginative leap that is the birth of empathy, a word invented by a psychologist interested in visual art. The word is only slightly more than a century old, though the words sympathy, kindness, pity, compassion, fellow-feeling, and others covered the same general ground before Edward Titchener coined it in 1909. It was a translation of the German word Einfuhlung, or feeling into, as though the feeling itself reached out.

The root word is path, from the Greek word for passion or suffering, from which we also derive pathos and pathology and sympathy. It’s a coincidence that empathy is built from a homonym for the Old English path, as in a trail.... Empathy is a journey you travel, if you pay attention, if you care, if you desire to do so. Up close you witness suffering directly, though even then you may need words to know that this person has terrible pains in her joints or that one recently lost his home. Suffering far away reaches you through art, through images, recordings, and narratives; the information travels toward you and you meet it halfway, if you meet it....

[I]n the dark we find ourselves and each other, if we reach out, if we keep going, if we listen, if we go deeper.

 

Memory and Wisdom

Michael Meade is a storyteller whose website, Mosaic Voices, is a rich resource. His article below, "Where Have All The Wise Men Gone?," is a reflection on the deeper sense of memory and its loss:

"Those who continue to grow as they grow older are able to develop long-term vision where most become blinded by near-term needs and common neediness. Growing older happens to everyone, but growing wiser happens to those who awaken to a greater sense of meaning and purpose in life."

 ___________________________

 

Where Have All The Wise Men Gone?

by Michael Meade

12 September 2011

Huffingtonpost.com

We live in a time of great forgetting. It’s not just that people live longer and short-term memory loss becomes inevitable over time. We reach for a familiar name, but it is temporarily out of our reach. Having parked a car so many times, we forget exactly where we parked it this time. We enter a room only to forget why we crossed that threshold and what we were looking for.

There is no tragedy, no great loss in that. Some forgetfulness is natural, just as eyesight weakens over time. Yet nature, in its wisdom, may see the whole thing differently. After 40 or 50 years a person has seen enough of this world and the point may no longer be just looking at life or observing what is going on. After enough time has passed, the issue is not the simple loss of sight, for the point has become the need to develop a genuine vision for life.

The loss of common sight might serve to precipitate deeper insights about life and about death, another event that nature requires. As we “grow older,” we are supposed also to grow deeper and thereby become wiser. Those who continue to grow as they grow older are able to develop long-term vision where most become blinded by near-term needs and common neediness. Growing older happens to everyone, but growing wiser happens to those who awaken to a greater sense of meaning and purpose in life.

The inevitable loss of short-term memory that accompanies aging is not intended to be a complete loss. Losing one’s immediate grip on certain details can be related to gaining a greater grasp of the long-term issues that affect both culture and nature. The first kind of forgetting misplaces things in the moment, but the great forgetting involves a loss of memory regarding the gift of life itself and a lack of living wisdom that helps make both individual and collective life meaningful. In traditional cultures, the elders are expected to remember the essential things that everyone else keeps forgetting. 

After “growing up,” a person is supposed to grow down and become rooted deeper in the ground of being, like an old tree that draws from ever deeper resources. In traditional cultures, the elders were considered to be a valuable resource without whose guidance the whole society could lose its way. Yet in modern life, instead of people growing “older and wiser,” people can simply grow older and older.

People can live longer and longer without becoming any wiser for it. When there is no genuine growth in growing older, aging can become all about loss. The longer people live the more of life they seem to lose. Instead of developing wise and seasoned “elders” who can help others find meaningful ways to live, modern societies are in danger of producing “olders” who blindly seek ways to hold onto life at any cost.

This can be seen as the problem of the olders vs. the elders. Traditionally, elders carry a greater vision of life because they develop insight into their own lives. The elders are those who found threads of purpose and meaning amidst the illusions and delusions of life. Amidst the inevitable troubles of life, the bubble of the “closed ego” bursts and a deeper, wiser self is born. Such psychological maturity involves a shift from a self-centered life to one of genuine meaning and of greater service to others.

Yet, in a culture where older folks are in the majority and people tend to live longer and longer, there seems to be an increase of fear as well as a loss of wisdom about life and about death. There seems to be a lack of knowing elders who can recall essential things in midst of the great crises troubling both nature and culture. What is the point of living longer if it doesn’t mean becoming wiser and being more able to serve something beyond one’s little-self?

Aging can involve various levels of memory loss. Alzheimer’s disease is a tragic condition for individuals and for entire families. I am not wishing pain or suffering on anyone; however, there is something of a psychological ailment involved, a sense that more and more people are falling out of the story of life even before the end is in sight.

Can the increasing loss of memory be a collective symptom trying to call attention to the deeper issues of sustaining culture and helping nature? Is it possible that the real social security crisis is about recollecting the deeper reasons for living one’s life, rather than simply collecting compensation for surviving it? Can life itself be trying to provoke an effort at recalling the deep memories and imagination that form the true inheritance of human kind?

An old idea suggests that the only ones more idealistic than young people are the elders. It’s not that the elders naively believe that the great ideals of humanity, peace and justice, healing and compassion, are simply attainable. Rather, the idea is that without a commitment to such ideals a culture simply collapses into political infighting and economic warfare. The gridlock in the nation’s capital may be an increasing national shame, but the grid lock on American imagination may be a greater tragedy in the making.

While the political parties fight over who might be the “adult in the room,” there is a desperate need for elders in communities throughout the country. Whereas the ’60s were characterized by change brought on by a youth revolution, the current morass may only be changed by an elder awakening. The revolution waiting to happen in this country may involve an awakening to the necessity of the role that elders can play in the great crises facing both culture and nature.

Issues like poverty and joblessness, climate change and sustainability require long-term visions combined with self-sacrifice and genuine courage. Elders are not elected, so the short-term thinking characteristic of ideological politics and winning elections can be superseded. Since the elder part of us accepts the inevitability of death, decisions that truly serve the future become more possible.

Genuine wisdom relaxes hostility, settles common fears and makes inner balance and longer vision more possible. When older folks fail to recommit to the great ideals that sustain the deepest values of human life, they tend to feel more fearful and anxious while also becoming more cynical and self-involved. When older folks act with genuine courage and vision, young people feel encouraged to find and follow their dreams.

Another old idea suggests that a culture falls apart when the dreams of its youth are rejected and the visions of its elders are neglected. This country is moving closer to the kind of lack of vision and lack of wisdom that precipitates such a fall.

 

Michael Meade, D.H.L. is a storyteller something like Robert Bly, based in Seattle, the founder of Mosaic Multicultural Foundation (http://www.mosaicvoices.org/).

 

"Why then do we not despair?" Anna Akhmatova

Everything is plundered, betrayed, sold,
Death's great black wing scrapes the air,
Misery gnaws to the bone.
Why then do we not despair?

 

By day, from the surrounding woods,
cherries blow summer into town;
at night the deep transparent skies
glitter with new galaxies.

 

And the miraculous comes so close
to the ruined, dirty houses --
something not known to anyone at all,
but wild in our breast for centuries.

 

~ Anna Akhmatova ~

 

 

A portrait of Anna Akhmatova in 1922, by Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin

Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966) is perhaps the best known of modern Russian poets. Isaiah Berlin once wrote of her, "The widespread worship of her memory in the Soviet Union today, both as an artist and as an unsurrendering human being, has, so far as I know, no parallel. The legend of her life and unyielding passive resistance to what she regarded as unworthy of her country and herself, transformed her into a figure [...] not merely in Russian literature, but in Russian history in [the Twentieth] century."

After visiting Akhmatova in 1945 at her home in Russia, Berlin wrote, "A stately, grey-haired lady, a white shawl draped about her shoulders, slowly rose to greet us. Anna Akhmatova was immensely dignified, with unhurried gestures, a noble head, beautiful, somewhat severe features, and an expression of immense sadness.^"

Translator and essayist as well as poet, Akhmatova's best-known poems are her epic, "Poem without a hero," composed over 20 years, and "Requium," a lyrical witness to the impact of Soviet terror on the people of Russia.

 

 

Lot's Wife

 

And the just man trailed God’s

shining agent,

over a black mountain, in his

giant track,

while a restless voice kept

harrying his woman:

“It’s not too late, you can still look back

 

at the red towers of your native Sodom,

the square where once you sang, the spinning-shed,

at the empty windows set in the tall house,

where sons and daughters blessed your marriage-bed.”

 

A single glance: a sudden dart of pain

stitching her eyes before she made a sound . . .

Her body flaked into transparent salt,

and her swift legs rooted to the ground.

 

Who will grieve for this woman?  Does she not seem

too insignificant for our concern?

Yet in my heart I never will deny her,

who suffered death because she chose to turn.

 

From Poems of Akhmatova, by Anna Akhmatova and translated by Stanley Kunitz and Max Hayward. Published by Little, Brown & Co. © 1973 by Stanley Kunitz and Max Hayward. - See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15867#sthash.jheQg3p0.dpuf

From Poems of Akhmatova, translated by Stanley Kunitz and Max Hayward.

Lot's Wife

  by Anna Akhmatova
translated by Max Hayward and Stanley Kunitz

And the just man trailed God's shining agent,
over a black mountain, in his giant track,
while a restless voice kept harrying his woman:
"It's not too late, you can still look back

at the red towers of your native Sodom,
the square where once you sang, the spinning-shed,
at the empty windows set in the tall house
where sons and daughters blessed your marriage-bed."

A single glance: a sudden dart of pain
stitching her eyes before she made a sound . . .
Her body flaked into transparent salt,
and her swift legs rooted to the ground.

Who will grieve for this woman? Does she not seem
too insignificant for our concern?
Yet in my heart I never will deny her,
who suffered death because she chose to turn.

- See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15867#sthash.jheQg3p0.dpuf

Lot's Wife

  by Anna Akhmatova
translated by Max Hayward and Stanley Kunitz

And the just man trailed God's shining agent,
over a black mountain, in his giant track,
while a restless voice kept harrying his woman:
"It's not too late, you can still look back

at the red towers of your native Sodom,
the square where once you sang, the spinning-shed,
at the empty windows set in the tall house
where sons and daughters blessed your marriage-bed."

A single glance: a sudden dart of pain
stitching her eyes before she made a sound . . .
Her body flaked into transparent salt,
and her swift legs rooted to the ground.

Who will grieve for this woman? Does she not seem
too insignificant for our concern?
Yet in my heart I never will deny her,
who suffered death because she chose to turn.

- See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15867#sthash.jheQg3p0.dpuf

Lot's Wife

  by Anna Akhmatova
translated by Max Hayward and Stanley Kunitz

And the just man trailed God's shining agent,
over a black mountain, in his giant track,
while a restless voice kept harrying his woman:
"It's not too late, you can still look back

at the red towers of your native Sodom,
the square where once you sang, the spinning-shed,
at the empty windows set in the tall house
where sons and daughters blessed your marriage-bed."

A single glance: a sudden dart of pain
stitching her eyes before she made a sound . . .
Her body flaked into transparent salt,
and her swift legs rooted to the ground.

Who will grieve for this woman? Does she not seem
too insignificant for our concern?
Yet in my heart I never will deny her,
who suffered death because she chose to turn.

- See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15867#sthash.jheQg3p0.dpuf

Lot's Wife

  by Anna Akhmatova
translated by Max Hayward and Stanley Kunitz

And the just man trailed God's shining agent,
over a black mountain, in his giant track,
while a restless voice kept harrying his woman:
"It's not too late, you can still look back

at the red towers of your native Sodom,
the square where once you sang, the spinning-shed,
at the empty windows set in the tall house
where sons and daughters blessed your marriage-bed."

A single glance: a sudden dart of pain
stitching her eyes before she made a sound . . .
Her body flaked into transparent salt,
and her swift legs rooted to the ground.

Who will grieve for this woman? Does she not seem
too insignificant for our concern?
Yet in my heart I never will deny her,
who suffered death because she chose to turn.

- See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15867#sthash.jheQg3p0.dpuf

Lot's Wife

  by Anna Akhmatova
translated by Max Hayward and Stanley Kunitz

And the just man trailed God's shining agent,
over a black mountain, in his giant track,
while a restless voice kept harrying his woman:
"It's not too late, you can still look back

at the red towers of your native Sodom,
the square where once you sang, the spinning-shed,
at the empty windows set in the tall house
where sons and daughters blessed your marriage-bed."

A single glance: a sudden dart of pain
stitching her eyes before she made a sound . . .
Her body flaked into transparent salt,
and her swift legs rooted to the ground.

Who will grieve for this woman? Does she not seem
too insignificant for our concern?
Yet in my heart I never will deny her,
who suffered death because she chose to turn.

- See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15867#sthash.jheQg3p0.dpuf