Dissonance and Dissidence
The news is full of disaster, nearly all of it self-inflicted. Beirut has been leveled by criminal negligence and the United States lies prostrate under Covid for pretty much the exact same reason. Our atmosphere has been supercharged with carbon that will deal greater and yet greater calamities to us until the very structure of our civilization begins to fray. Yet where I sit in our sunroom the morning is cool and beautiful and quiet. It’s too much for one body to hold.
It’s the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing. In a New York Times article, Anne I. Harrington writes about Claude Eatherly, the only member of the Air Force team that executed the attack to have publicly expressed remorse. Harrington invokes the anti-nuclear activist (and Hannah Arendt’s first husband) Günther Anders’ concept of “the Promethean gap” between what our civilization is capable of and the inability of any one person to bear responsibility for it. The concept rhymes with Arendt’s “banality of evil,” which she claimed arose from the refusal of Eichmann and other Holocaust perpetrators to stop and think about what they were doing. I return, as I have so often, to Shelley:
“We want the creative faculty to imagine that which we know; we want the generous impulse to act that which we imagine; we want the poetry of life; our calculations have outrun conception; we have eaten more than we can digest. The cultivation of those sciences which have enlarged the limits of the empire of man over the external world, has, for want of the poetical faculty, proportionally circumscribed those of the internal world; and man, having enslaved the elements, remains himself a slave. ”
Here we have another husband-and-wife team: as Arendt proved to be a more popular and controversial figure than her ex-husband, Percy Shelley has been overmatched in the popular imagination by his wife Mary, whose novel Frankenstein;, or, The Modern Prometheus remains the most vivid structure of feeling for capitalist modernity’s subjugation of the individual to a vast and unaccountable “empire of man,” paradoxically in the name of individual assertion and the right to property. The Creature of Victor Frankenstein—far more eloquent in the novel than the grunting behemoth of the Universal monster movies—achieves “the poetry of life” by recognizing his enslavement and the refusal of others, even and especially his own creator, to recognize his humanity.
We seem to be incapable of rising above ourselves, of grasping the poetry of life, except in the face of a terrifying Other, who appears to us as Frankenstein’s Creature, a figure of esoteric or jigsawed features of humanity that, like the thoughts of the “genius” that in Emerson’s “Self-Reliance”, “come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.” This echoes the Creature’s description of his infant powers of expression before he learns to speak: “Sometimes I wished to express my sensations in my own mode, but the uncouth and inarticulate sounds which broke from me frightened me into silence again.” It seems in this historical moment that we too lack the language to express our sensations, and that far too many of us, in the face of horrors, have allowed ourselves to be frightened into silence.
On this blue sunshine morning with its soft airs, I struggle to retain the ability to feel in the face of all that numbs us—our collective creation that functions through a sinisterly disavowed collectivity. The cult of American individualism, with which I am infected, just as I am infected by racism and by all the other evils that come of thinking oneself exceptional, does not oppose or resist collective action—it is collective action of a malignant kind that yields up the most significant decisions to a faceless or imaginary authority. That authority oppresses the individual (who may resent that oppression or fall into conspiracy theories) because he refuses to see himself represented by it. Frankenstein and his Monster are mirror images of each other, one flesh, like father and son or Cain and Abel. But the father in this case refuses to take even Abrahamic responsibility for sacrificing his Isaac; the left hand does not know what the knife hand is doing. The blood of our brother cries out to us from the ground. It is our own blood.
Robert Duncan said that “Responsibility is to retain the ability to respond.” He said this in part to justify his refusal to respond as an activist to the horrors of the Vietnam War, accusing his interlocutor Denise Levertov of following into the same war-logic as the war’s proponents in her opposition to it. Duncan was short-sighted and cruel, though sincere enough in his attempt to live out Blake’s dictum, “Opposition is true friendship.” But in essence he was rehashing the claim of another visionary poet living a political struggle, W.B. Yeats, who said, in a sentence from his essay “Anima Hominis” that I sooner or later share with all my students, “We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.” For Yeats, the poet is in pursuit of something he calls “The other self, the anti-self or the antithetical self, as one may choose to name it, [that] comes but to those who are no longer deceived, whose passion is reality.” That passion follows not the path of certainty assumed by rhetoricians but that of negative capability as described by John Keats in a famous letter: ““capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” The refusal to calculate, of irritable reaching, enables the poet to make sympathetic contact with the anti-self, in a parenthesis from conventional morality. The “poetical character,” as Keats put it in another of his letters, has no character in the conventional sense: “It has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen…. A Poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no Identity - he is continually in for - and filling some other Body.”
The libertarian American refuses the task of “filling some other Body,” won’t act to protect others or even himself by wearing a mask to deflect contagion, won’t imagine that he has any responsibilities to those others who lack “identity” with him. In our history, most of the positive, organized, collective actions to fight monsters have required a monster upon which we’ve projected our imperial impulses: the South in the Civil War, the Axis Powers in World War II. It takes a powerful “they” to coalesce Americans into an “us,” which is why “the invisible enemy” has failed to overcome the partisanship that is the immediate cause of our plight. The “near enemy”—feminists, BIPOC, Democrats, etc.—has taken precedence over the “far enemy,” even though it’s the far enemy that infects our lungs, that has shattered our economy and shuttered our schools. How much more incapable are we of mobilizing against climate change, a monster of our own creation that we compulsively disavow?
In 1849 an American poet spent a night in jail for refusing to pay a tax that he could have easily afforded, because he refused to pay or be part of a “government which is the slave’s government also.” Thoreau is misremembered as a privileged Harvard boy whose writings have proved enabling to a million libertarian narcissists (I’m not going to link to it, but a libertarian think tank recently published an article comparing Elon Musk’s refusal to shut down the Tesla production line in the face of Covid restrictions to Thoreau’s “Civii Disobedience”—the real title of which, btw, is “Resistance to Civil Government”). But I think of his willingness to go to jail as a poetic act in Keats’ sense, a willingness, if only for one night, to “fill in for some other Body”—the body of the slave, or the body of a soldier poised to lose his life in an imperialist war. He did not propose to speak for these others, but he placed himself affectively in their position. It is as if Victor Frankenstein had chosen to experience the exile to which he had condemned his Creature, if only for a time. It was an exercise of the poetic faculty—of the quarrel with oneself—that not incidentally resulted, after the fact, in one of the finest pieces of political rhetoric that this country has ever produced, and the model for something finer and more consequential, Dr. Martin Luther King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.”
“What are poets for in a destitute time?”—so asked the problematic yet inescapable Martin Heidegger, one of the subjects of my forthcoming (I swear!) book Hannah and the Master. The other subject, and the book’s heroine, is Hannah Arendt and her struggle to think and feel a place for the displaced person she was as a German Jew fundamentally from birth. Arendt’s work is flawed—she bore an acute blindness to American racism—but she too did the poetico-political work of imagining American individuality not as some kind of invulnerable and exceptional fortress but as a human condition that had to be struggled for. “Apparently,” she wrote tartly in the 1943 essay “We Refugees,” “nobody wants to know that contemporary history has created a new kind of human beings—the kind that are put in concentration camps by their foes and in internment camps by their friends.” We are all this new kind of human beings—there is nothing really new here. What is potentially new, in Arendt’s sense of natality, is our response.
For now, while I write this, I stand in, uncomfortably and fully in, this body that is in a comfortable apartment in a seemingly untraumatized part of the world—and I apprehend in the body of constricted breath, the panicked body, the fight-or-flight body of the people of Beirut, of people hooked up to ventilators, of parents who have been separated from children who have been interned in undisclosed locations. Not for a moment do I confuse my privileged condition with theirs. But I have a duty to imagine the lives of others as that which supports and cohabitates with my own.
Out of cognitive dissonance, dissidence—my hope for change, for this time.