Fully Human in Inhumane Times

I fell off writing here because I reached a point where I could no longer live on news reports alone.  My soul needed a different way to be in these dangerous times.  Plus, anyone who is likely to read this blog has probably already seen all the reports and opinion articles I have, so there's no point in simply passing them along again here.

What I realized I need now is art.  Poetry, music, beauty.  Not as a distraction from the reality around us, but as a way to be in it that isn't soul-destroying.  A way to be fully human in inhumane times.

A couple of days after coming to that realization, a book jumped off the shelf of a bookstore into my hands:  Poetry of Witness:  The Tradition in English, 1500–2001, edited by Carolyn Forché and Duncan Wu.  It's a heavy tome, with some 600 pages of poetry.  And a brilliant introduction by Wu and Forché.

Duncan Wu:

For poetry of witness, as Forché defines it, … has always been the means by which the imagination has articulated its response to war, imprisonment, oppression, and enslavement.  … [O]f all genres, poetry is best suited to the task.  We refer to its ability to accommodate the sublime, the ineffable, that of which we cannot speak. (p. 3)

And Carolyn Forché:

In the poetry of witness, the poem makes present to us the experience of the other, the poem is the experience, rather than a symbolic representation.  When we read the poem as witness, we are marked by it and become ourselves witnesses to what it has made present before us.  Language incises the page, wounding it with testimonial presence, and the reader is marked by encounter with that presence.  Witness begets witness.  The text we read becomes a living archive.  (p. 26)

Instead of filling this blog with news articles and op-ed pieces and pictures of horror, I'm going to fill it with poetry, and photos and music that might not relate directly to the poems but are a moment of beauty in themselves.

To begin:

Oh sacred hunger of ambitious minds

And important desire of men to reign,

Whom neither dread of God, that devils binds,

Nor laws of men, that commonweals contain,

Nor bands of nature, that wild beasts restrain,

Can keep from outrage and from doing wrong,

Where they may hope a kingdom to obtain.

No faith so firm, no trust can be so strong,

No love so lasting then, that may endure long.

~ Sir Edmund Spenser, excerpt from The Faerie Queene  (c. 1596)