Politics

Gassed!

By Linh Dinh

To follow up on Reginald Shepherd’s post about technophilia in the artistic avant-garde: it’s true that technological advances and artistic innovations went hand in hand through much of the twentieth century, especially its first half, as mankind went through a dizzying series of unprecedented changes affecting every aspect of life. The machine age was also the age of oil, a cheap and flexible source of energy that gave us vain, sometimes eloquent bipeds fantastic, nearly God-like power. Suddenly we could zoom through life, dive deep into the ocean, be fixated by a screen, any screen, endure the same songs over and over, generate and store unspeakable images on our hard drives or fly to Paris to give a poetry reading.
Every scientific and technological invention had to trigger an equivalent social and artistic shift. Poetry could not be the same after the appearance of the pill or ipod. We marvelled at, envied machines, as if we had a choice to remain entirely human. But this lunge forward has also provoked a mostly instinctive, only-half-conscious revulsion and a looking back to previous centuries or millennia for meanings and dignity–caves or ruins inserted here. This sad, outraged yearning could blossom in both a Pol Pot and a Clayton Eshleman.
I’d say that the best avant-garde artists and writers are those who reflect their moment in history while simultaneously rebelling against it. Only lackeys celebrate the status quo. “If there’s a single tear on the face of a single child, I protest,” to quote Simone Weil from memory. Sometimes this bipolar condition can hatch a poem that’s half great, half awful, with progress chasing down myth and trampling it. I translate Pablo Neruda:

Ode to the Sea
Here on the island
the sea
and so much sea
overflowing,
relentless,
it says yes, then no,
then no, no, no,
then yes, in blue,
in foam, with gallops,
it says no, again no.
It cannot stay still,
my name is sea, it repeats
while slamming against rocks
but unable to convince rocks,
then
with seven green tongues
of seven green dogs,
of seven green tigers,
of seven green seas,
it smothers rocks, kisses rocks,
drenches rocks
and slamming its chest,
repeats its name.
O sea, you declare yourself,
O comrade ocean,
don’t waste time and water,
don’t beat yourself up,
help us,
we are lowly
fishermen,
men of the shore,
we’re cold and hungry
and you’re the enemy,
don’t slam so hard,
don’t scream like that,
open your green trunk
and give all of us
on our hands
your silver gifts:
fish every day.
Here in each house,
we all crave it
whether it’s of silver,
crystal or moonlight,
spawn for the poor
kitchens on earth.
Don’t hoard it,
you miser,
coldly rushing like
wet lightning
beneath your waves.
Come, now,
open yourself
and leave it
near our hands,
help us, ocean,
deep green father,
end one day
our earthly poverty.
Let us
harvest your lives’
endless plantation,
your wheat and eggs,
your oxes, your metals,
the wet splendor
and submerged fruits.
Father sea, we know already
what you are called, all
the seagulls circulate
your name on the beaches:
now, behave yourself,
don’t shake you mane,
don’t threaten anyone,
don’t smash against the sky
your beautiful teeth,
ignore for a moment
your glorious history,
give to every man,
to every
woman and to every child,
a fish large or small
every day.
Go out to every street
in the world
and distribute fish
and then
scream,
scream
so all the working poor
could hear you,
so they could say,
sticking their heads
into the mine:
“Here comes the old man sea
to distribute fish.”
And they’ll go back down
into the darkness,
smiling, and on the streets
and in the forests,
men and the earth
will smile
an oceanic smile.
But
if you don’t want it,
if you don’t care for it,
then wait,
wait for us,
we must worry, first
we must try to solve
and straighten out
human affairs,
the biggest problems first,
then all the others,
and then
we’ll enter you,
we’ll chop the waves
with a knife made of fire,
on an electric horse
leaping over foam,
singing
we’ll sink
until we touch the bottom
of your guts,
an atomic thread
will guard your shank,
we’ll plant
in your deep garden
trees
of cement and steel,
we’ll tie
your hands and feet,
on your skin man will walk,
spitting,
yanking in bunches,
building armatures,
mounting and taming you
to dominate your spirit.
All this will occur
when us men
have straightened out
our problem,
the big,
the big problem.
We’ll slowly
solve everything:
we’ll force you, sea,
we’ll force you, earth
perform miracles,
because in our very selves,
in the struggle,
is fish, is bread,
is the miracle.
(1954)

Maybe it’s only wishful thinking but it appears that the growth machine, humming in high gear for more than a century and exhausting the entire planet, is finally winding down. With peak oil upon us, the system is forced to teeter and contract. The poetry world will also become more localized and provincial. In his prediction for 2008, Dale Smith conjectured just a tad too early:

There will be fewer opportunities for readings outside of immediate community spaces. Depletions of oil and the contractions this will produce will extend to poets too. AWP (with a lot of other academic conferences) will become increasingly difficult to support with professional attendance as the price of jet fuel (and the inconvenience of flight) increases.

After a visit to the Soviet Union in 1919, journalist Lincoln Steffens infamously proclaimed, “I have seen the future, and it works.” A few days ago, I also got a glimpse of what’s next and it definitely did not work. I was one of the privileged, cursed passengers at Heathrow’s Terminal 5, at 230,000 square feet the largest free-standing structure in Europe and as vast as 50 soccer pitches. Opened to much fanfare last Thursday, T-5 quickly became a Metropolis hell of cancelled and delayed flights, with a mountain of misplaced luggage, at the latest, unspinnable admission 28,000 pieces, including my backpack with its laptop and two jars of of pâté bought in Paris, disallowed onboard since each exceeded 100 ml of liquid, jell or paste, a Kafkaesque Homeland Security prohibition adopted by the U.K. Returning to America, further flying woes awaited me. My Delta flight from Salt Lake City to Missoula was cancelled after much confusion and time wasted at the airport, so I began this post at 4AM in a so-called business center at a Marriot Hotel. Flying was fun while it lasted, I suppose. It’s time we kiss the earth.

Posted in Group Blog, Politics on Tuesday, April 1st, 2008 by Linh Dinh.