Here is the last of it. I have loads more posts to put up, but I have to galavant off to my next stint in the wilderhood, so I will post when I get back…

But this is not what we hear from politicians, or pragmatists for that matter. Both groups will mock the power of religion and poetry. They will defend the circumstantial revolution; they will ask the poets and the prophets to give up their silly words and sacred arguments for the sake of an advancing policy. 

 

I must break out of the omniscient narrator to say it—to say what I believe most of all: Never let someone convince you that there is a difference between speaking and acting, and that speaking loses. Speaking is the fundamental act. Speaking is acting. It is acting because it changes people’s hearts, and a changed heart cannot bear to sit still. But it is also an action in itself, because real speaking contends with the real. Real speaking realizes that it cannot say everything, and in so doing somehow says so much more than the systems that try to say everything. Actions are only as good as the context they act in; speaking expands the context to include the sacred. The world is not changed by people who wheedle and whine on the Senate floor. Those people are quite literally public servants, servants to public opinion. The world is changed by people who have made their lives into bells for their words to ring through, people who say words like no, yes, never, always, equality. It is and always has been the movement—the collection of people who spoke real words—that informed the dreary advance of law, and it was always the words that saved the law from failing the people. This kind of verbal courage is rare in public, but happens every day in private, as people—free to talk to other people—speak with fervor.

 

Robert Haas:

 

Civic courage is a more complicated matter. 

Of itself it shines out undefiled. 

It neither lies its way into office, nor mistakes 

The interests of Roman oil for Roman honor. 

The kind of courage death can’t claim

Doesn’t go very far in politics. 

If you are going to speak truth in public places

You may as well take wing from the earth.

 

It isn’t just that you can’t tell the truth in politics; it is that politics boasts a built-in cynicism. In the last month alone, I have been told at least forty-six times that what I hope for most of all—peace, equality, good thinking, deliberate action—will never happen because people are weak, self-interested, irrational. All these adjectives are catalogued under the great canopy of human nature: It is human nature, for example, to be selfish and cruel and myopic. It follows that my political revolution will never happen, particularly the revolution of words. Because people just don’t care about that. Because most people are stupid and will never care. That is what people tell me. I see this cynicism as a problem, not with people but with the limits we have placed on politics, particularly the decision to speak a stunted legalese with an economic accent. I believe that the way we speak to people determines their so-called nature and, by hindering the ethical revolution of the throat, we have made people into reflections of our small words.

 

So people tell me that other people will not do great things, that I must do what I can and die. What is the point, they wonder, of all this pointless talking? I answer that religion and poetry are the great examples of what people will do if they are given beautiful words. Yes, they can do great damage—start wars, fall into their own brand of hypocrisy. But the dirty miracle happens when the same businessman who argues for the primacy of self-interest comes home and does his home teaching without expecting anything in return. People are as great as the words that are given them. And many choose not to be great. But that isn’t because words are pointless or people are unredeemable; it is precisely because we have stopped imploring people to be affected by the power of words—have stopped teaching them to be sensitive to their power. The gospel fixation on repentance can hardly be just an ode to perpetual guilt; it is the profound realization that ideas can only truly affect the broken-hearted mind. 

 

Apathy—even apathy of the many—is also no reason to stop defending what is real, and what is real is that we are alive and capable of hurting each other. And that we shouldn’t. We need poets to chronicle this mystery and we need speakers to convince people to dwell on the plane of the poets and prophets. That is politics, and it happens every time we speak with an unconstricted throat.

 

So we must have good readers, good speakers. Not because they are smarter than other people and can dig at esoteric, but because they have the patience and the love to understand what the world is wanting to say. Good readers are capable of bearing the goodly revolution, rather than constricting it to Adrienne Rich’s dogmatism or formula—remembering that at the bottom of every political imbroglio is an act of bad reading, an overly-professional, overly-literalist, overly-unambiguous act of reading the world.

 

And what can help us to be good readers? This is where people start to get squeamish, where they start to say: “Not everyone is as smart as you wish. Some people just aren’t capable of that.” This kind of response is exactly why I should restate my definition of good reading. It isn’t an academic thing, nor is it intellectual. It is the act of seeing the world in a way that can allow us to be as humble and helpful and committed as we can—an act that makes us incapable of the propaganda that limits our compassion and influence. This is the place, again, where religion can help us most. Christ’s commandment to love the neighbor is not just a call to compassion. If we let it be, it is the key to a good reading of the world. 

 

If all systems are capable of slumping into Politics—in other words, a preference for one group over another that is bolstered by ideology and propaganda—then a truly ethical system must have some method of always  blowing itself apart, of outstripping itself and radicalizing itself every moment. The commandment to love the neighbor is that radicalizing idea. By committing a person at all moments to both herself and each individual person around her, the commandment makes sure that no reading of the world could support a self-proving agenda. In other words, the commandment to love the neighbor gives its disciples a radical commitment both to themselves (integrity) and to every single person—not as a group, but as distinct individuals who require changing and personal compassion. The commandment to love each individual neighbor as yourself makes every situation extenuating, and makes each response reliant on a Spirit outside of the codes and systems and rules that govern ideological action. When this happens, we cannot read people as groups. Even more importantly, however, we open ourselves to all truth. We stop reading with the intent to prove our beliefs and read with sacredness, seeking all the ways in which we can bless and preserve that sacredness.

 

In other words, radical equality means that no one is more equal than another. I am literally as equal as someone is equal to me. This demands a joint revolution that is really a restoration: radical equality demands radical forgiveness but it also demands radical action. Radical equality cannot allow one person to be more important than another, including the idea that the person being loved is fundamentally more important than the person who is loving them. Because of this, a person committed to radical equality will never accept the facile inside-outside-the-system arguments that are frequently designed to keep the power structures the same or justify cynicism. I should not forego my radical commitment to someone being tortured or disappeared in Argentina because I have a friend who is sad because she didn’t get into grad school. I am radically committed to both people and I cannot rest. Yes, I must frequently choose between them, but not fundamentally. The real beginning of Politics is to prefer one kind of person over another, and to continue to prefer one of them in the name of realism. At that precise moment politics moves away from being real at all, and begins to justify the things it should be fighting against. After that it is just news—the dreary, dismal reporting we talked of earlier, the breakdown of the words that would commit us to radical equality. 

 

William Carlos Williams:

 

It’s tough to get news from a poem, but men die every day for lack of what is found there.

 

News, however ‘practical’ and ‘realistic,’ is incapable of giving people those things that the so-called superfluous arts—poetry, religion—can. Unlike news and politics—which entrench and perpetually demarcate what is ‘realistic’—religion and poetry are powerful because they invoke the impossible as their object while recognizing that it is impossible. Poetry realizes that giving words to everything is impossible, but tries anyway. This knowledge tempers its arrogance, and gives it more beautiful words than anyone who assumed that they could say everything. Religion asks people for perfection, knowing it is impossible, and the people—pursuing the impossible that they know to be impossible—end up being more subtly perfect than they would have been otherwise. 

 

People need the impossible to be real. The impossible—that which is realer than the so-called real, the perfect expression of the Real—is capable of making unreal people real in a technically unachievable pursuit. And this is the best kind of cynicism: knowing something is impossible and pursuing it anyway, certain that impossibility is a gift. 

 

Poetry and religion tell us this: That we have to get back to a place where images and words have power rather than status, where they can move us rather than move with us, from house to house, in boxes. Images and words aren’t things among things, ideas to be exchanged. In fact, the chief sign that ideas and words have stopped affecting us is that use them like money, trading them, unexamined, for status. If we can, through the law of love, cultivate a great and sacred respect for words, we will not be wasting our time. We will be teaching ourselves to live close to a great holiness, and to be able to feel its loss. Filled with that holiness, we will fight like poets against its destruction, armed with nothing but a beautiful idea that includes everyone inside of it. We will not lapse into flat reading, ideology, smug or rote routine. We will live to bless everyone, and the desire to bless will smash through all attempts to house it. We will, in other words, be ready for the long conversation.

 

Adam Zagajewski:

 

A conversation continued through the years includes hours of anxiety, anger, even hatred, but also compassion, deep feeling. Only love and time, when reconciled, permit us to see other beings in their enigmatic, complex essence, unfolding slowly and certainly, like a new settlement in a valley or among green hills. 

I want to take you on a poetic tour of my thoughts this last month, to explain my growing conviction that politics desperately needs poets and prophets to avoid collapsing on itself. I will start with the Adrienne Rich quote and move from there:

“What’s pushing the grammar and syntax, the sounds, the images—is it the constriction of literalism, fundamentalism, professionalism—a stunted language? Or is it the great muscle of metaphor, drawing strength from resemblance in difference? The great muscle of the unconstricted throat? I’d like to suggest this: If there’s a line to be drawn, it’s not so much between secularism and belief as between  those for whom language has metaphoric density and those for whom it is merely formulaic–to be used for repression, manipulation, empty certitudes to ensure obedience. And such a line can also be drawn between ideologically obedient hack verse and an engaged poetics that endures the weight of the unknown, the untracked, the unrealized, along with its urgencies for and against.”

Here, in four gorgeous sentences, Rich captures a running problem and subdues its flailing limbs in turn. She understands, first, that most kinds of political engagement fosters—in its commitment to circumstance rather than language—the very problems it is trying to ameliorate. By privileging the specific problem or the system over the principle for arguing against it, Politics falls into a constricted language of dogma or efficiency and—even if it succeeds in solving something—does not create people who can solve for the same problems in the future. The language will be used repressively, manipulatively, coercively; even if it is used in the name of a good cause, it will fail the good cause by denying people the right to decide for themselves that it is good. Besides that, Rich suggests, the language of Political engagement is a language once-removed. The real language is a language moved by human urgency that, in its respect for that urgency, bears it amidst ambiguity, argument, and the circumstances that pull in every direction. The real language of poetry and religion sees the world as sacred. When that sacredness is violated, poets and prophets come ready to fight, not with punches, but with urgent words that fundamentally respect both the individual and the everybody—language that is radically committed to the one and the many at the same time, language that is tutored by that precise and radical commitment to both, language that will speak its urgency while realizing the thousand million perspectives that bring different urgencies to the reading. Poems and poets, prophecies and prophets all recognize urgency as our best response to the violation of the sacred. But, as Rich says, it must not abdicate its ambiguity and radical commitment to the flat, political language of political utility. It must attend to all difference to find the similarities capable of converting people to each other.

And this is not all. Rich is also saying that the whole revolution—the protection of the sacred—depends on good readers, people who are radically committed and feeling enough to keep a sense of urgency without collapsing their world.

The great risk taken by religion and poetry—the risk that politics is unwilling to take—is to speak in a language that can only be heard by the people who are sensitive enough to be affected by it. A prophet, for instance, cannot see the utility of demoting his language to achieve a certain goal (say, to get someone to stop smoking or to be peaceful and kind) because the sacredness created by the language is the goal itself. The goal, to put it in such crass terms, is to create a sacred world that would compel its inhabitants to evaluate everything in their lives in terms of that sacredness, not to achieve a piecemeal victory here or there. The consequence of this commitment to sacredness is vulnerability; it is the willingness to speak in a language that can be dismissed and mocked by everyone who has not voluntarily become meek, awe-struck and grateful enough to be moved by the sacred. It is a decision made knowingly, and what it knows is this: that its presence will only be appreciated by those who are sensitive enough to feel its loss. (Indeed, all of religion and poetry operate in this way. For instance, it is decidedly untrue to say that people without the gospel are necessarily unhappy—or that people who drink are not good or people who kill must be full of guilt. The fact is that our happiness and guilt is determined by our sensitivity. If we are not compelled by an initial feeling of sacredness, our decision to do or not do something is moot; if we are not moved by a holy desire, our doing something will bring us nothing but circumstantial perks and our not doing will bring us no more sorrow than lacing our shoes. Both are dead without sacredness; doing and not doing will amount to the same nothing.)

Prophets choose to speak in a way that could only reach the people who had decided to be tender, to care and exist at an acute enough level that words could change their worlds. Poets do this, too, and that is why we need so desperately to grow the world of people who care about poetry. The smallness of that group is not a preference, it is a sickness. It is a sign of what we value and what words can speak to us: flat, constricted words that see speaking as a formula. We need the words that can change hearts and then our hearts can expand our constricted throats. Religion and poetry have the power to speak with unrestricted throats, to speak humanly about human things, to find sacredness amidst real difference and to call people to that great sacredness in a way that politics can’t.

Rich also quotes Muriel Rukeyser, who says that poetry can be “an exchange of energy, which, in changing consciousness, can effect change in existing conditions.” Most people would laugh at this. Poetry change the world? Ha! But there is one thing about poetry: it works for itself. You can’t work for a poet, you can only be a poet, and that is no accident. Once a person works for someone else, she has power but also a constricted throat. A poet must work for himself in order to say all the brave words that he could not say working for someone else, all the words that would be forced to take a back seat to any particular agenda. Because of this, poetry is free to say the words that cannot be said elsewhere, to dwell in the holiness and never move beyond it. But it isn’t just poets who are poets. After all, I do not mean ‘poet’ in the sense of a vocation but, rather, as a way of seeing the world. To be a poet is to be a seer, and to be a seer is to practice politics as a human activity tied to the sacred experiences that motivated it. Where Politics fails, politics succeeds wildly—capable of saying the things that Politics forfeits in its move toward systems and power. The politics of individuals can, by speaking an effulgent poetry, talk about humans in the language of the humane, and this—not votes, not laws, not sixty in the Senate—is the first and ultimately only thing that can change our hearts enough to change our world.

Prophesy and poetry, religion and rhetoric: all have great power because all speak to the individual in urgency and sacredness, hoping not for his compromises and circumstances but for his conversion, his transformation into a new way of seeing. And, since religion is predicated on radical equality, it speaks to the individual without dividing him from an obligation to all creatures; it consecrates the individual’s actions by directing them toward the whole creation. It does not break down at the edge of families or nations or ideologies, but bursts through them with the swiftness of a person intent on blessing the whole world.

I believe in the politics of the individual body, the most basic body politic. And I believe in the larger body politic only if it is composed of a thousand brave political bodies—or, in other words, people who have chosen to speak with unconstricted throats—to see speaking as the fundamental act. I believe in the ideas that make people free to work and live for themselves, not in the selfish sense but in the most effulgent sense—to act in their own name in the name of others. I believe, finally, that all this is a religious or poetic way of seeing the world: one that gains urgency out of a sense of sacredness but does not flatten words to push circumstances over the point itself.