Unlike in previous, more or less normal times, the devil right now is not in the details.
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I have a confession to make: I haven’t listened to NPR since the election. In the car, I just put in my thumb drive full of classical music, some early Dylan, Nina Simone, Josh Ritter, Joan Baez. If nothing else, it makes me a safer driver.
And no, I’ve not forgotten or forsaken my work as a journalist. But a journalist whose warnings — dire warnings — have neither prevented nor forestalled this sickening veer, this flailing fall. Would there be any difference at all, I wonder, if I had just spent the last two decades playing chess, or piano?
And you? Aren’t there days when you’ve heard all you can stand about how bad it is? The daily contours of the depravity, latest manifestation of unbounded evil wedded to seemingly unchecked power? The exhortations to resist, defy, do something mighty or clever to steer the ship off the deadly shoals?
Torn between the heightened dual demands of citizenship and self-care, I’ve set up DOME — my Department of Mental Efficiency — and equipped it with a semiotic chainsaw. I’ve taken to filtering my news, and even commentary, intake down to the bare minimum.
Because unlike in previous, more or less normal times, the devil now is emphatically not in the details.
We know what is afoot — in fact, somewhere deep down, we knew it before its heavy boot found our necks. And we know where it is headed: History and human nature tell us.
The route of this march has been mapped. We will do all we can to alter it, divert it, stop it, and either we will or we won’t succeed. That is all to come, inescapable. We’ll wake up to it every morning.
Yes, we need to be informed — of the disappearances, self-dealing, lies and machinations, crackups and crackdowns, the cruelty, criminality, damage and destruction, and the counteroffensives, skirmishes and battles won and lost: the progress of the march.
But we must guard ourselves against taking the forest tree by tree and thus losing our way through. In a most profound sense, we already are informed. We know what is essential for us to know. We know where those now in power plan to take us.
We should not forget that. We must not let events — and their clutter — make us forget or doubt what we know. We’d rather the deluge not be real — but our rathering doesn’t matter: It is. We know the meaning of this moment, and what it demands, and will continue to demand, of us.
That is why millions will fill the streets today, defiant, in the planned “Hands Off” demonstrations — my family and friends and I among them, and I hope you and yours as well.
I turned to poetry to express some of this in a way that I hope will resonate. My first poem warns against normalization; the second against illusion; the last against rationalization.
That’s a lot of warning. I guess I’m hung up, of late, on warnings unheeded.
Villanelle
But think before you tango with the night
How still they sleep who one night slept too long:
Be sure you wind the pink alarm clock tight.
The morning is new power and new light,
A new perspective, positive and strong:
But think before you tango with the night
How morning shall set everything to right,
How sunrise shall obliterate the wrong:
Be sure you wind the pink alarm clock tight
Enough to wake you from the blessed white
And shrill to shriek out over morning’s song:
But think before you tango with the night
How morning may cut in, smooth and polite,
Without disturbing you and you’ll sleep on
If you don’t wind the pink alarm clock tight.
Go sweetly sleep and may your dreams delight:
The minutes and the hours move along.
But think before you tango with the night:
Be sure you wound the pink alarm clock tight.
Ad Astra
So we all headed off to the stars.
Of course, some would falter,
Some would put on bursts of speed,
Only to slip, out of kilter,
Lose their grip, drop their load,
Be buried in need, or trampled
In the scramble up the road.
It depends on many things:
Where you start from, your footwear, your will,
What each day brings, whom you exceed.
None shall arrive, but all,
Having been, having been,
Shall know, when they are old, that they have seen
The stars, painted high, faint, and cold.
I Told You
(Response to a friend’s Petrarchian sonnet advising me that “In our surrender, we will find trust, / Our place in a reality far larger…”)
I told you this shit was coming,
You said Oh it won’t be so bad,
He’s a clown, there are guardrails.
Now the shit is here, on us, all around us;
It oozes up between my toes, with overpowering stench.
Every day, more; every hour, worse:
Dictatorship, new empire, carve the world.
You want me to waste time
Drawing you diagrams?
Now you say Well it is worse than I thought,
But it’s actually good, a gateway:
Surrender, trust; all will be well; I wish I could help you
See that. Thanks. I’m too busy fighting a war
To find rhymes, to study my Petrarch.
