To the extent that we think about themes in contemporary writing (assuming themes even exist outside high school English classes) one of the most familiar themes to trouble the contemporary reader’s brain is alienation. There is social alienation reflected in accounts of loneliness and atomisation. There is existential alienation reflected in accounts of absurdity and loss of meaning. But we have given less thought to temporal alienation. Maybe the reason for our neglect is that we are too busy, caught up in the accelerating rush of faster processor speeds and the neoliberal idolatry of market efficiencies which betrays an “audacity with no time … to atone for our lives”. The idea of pausing to think about something seems so yesterday.
In her latest volume of poetry, Present Tense, Anna Rabinowitz faces squarely the matter of temporal alienation. Even the title deserves our pause. At first glance, it looks like a simple reference to simple grammar. We often write and think and speak in present tense. It is the mode of everyday commerce. But we readily see the double entendre, accentuated by the fact that the cover’s text is distorted: the present is tense. I interpret this (and the whole book for that matter) in two ways, one personal, the other, political.
Personal: the present is tense. Unless we have some cognitive deficit or psychosis, we do our living in present time, and that fact alone bears within it the seeds of dread. This dread is the lingering trauma of consciousness, “reality as a triumph of open wounds.” But I would contend that it is a violence inflicted on us not, as some experts claim, in the moment of childbirth, but in the subsequent gift of language; it is in the acquisition of language that we discover ourselves as subjects alienated from the world we inhabit. Every time we read, it’s like picking at a scab. We relive the violence of that first alienating trauma when we discovered how words impose a distance between us and our world.
Political: the present is tense. The present age is dominated by feelings of dread. We fear difference, change, infectious diseases, same-sex marriage, government, violent crime, atheists, earthquakes, terrorists, tsunamis, climate change, asteroids, drug cartels, pesticides, TNC’s, GMO’s, NGO’s, Somali pirates, copyright pirates, bottled water. In the political context, we experience the anxiety of temporal alienation as a collective forgetfulness. We deny our history, or we remember only the convenient bits. That allows us to live like there’s no tomorrow, consuming, invading, dominating, destroying.
Our personal encounter with present tenseness can be expressed in innocuous terms: we say that language mediates experience to us. Mediation is a polite term that makes us feel comfortable. But when we describe our political encounters with present tenseness, polite terms disappear. Things get nastier when we roam in packs. Maybe the kindest term we can apply to ourselves is “denial.” As political creatures, we create a buffer between consciousness and experience which is called denial. Maybe a more accurate term is “lying.”
Poetry is one of the few tools we have to confront these distortions and to effect a kind of redemption for our language. My use of the word “redemption” is deliberate. Rabinowitz draws heavily upon the judeo-christian religious tradition which imagines an historical trajectory that launches itself from out of the deep and ends at the end of time itself with the apocalypse—the revelation of cosmic truths. Apocalypsis is the answer to the limitations of a language (logos) which both mediates and lies. Midway between Genesis and Revelation, there is the incursion of the eternal in human history. Call it Christ. Call it grace. Call it redemption. Call it whatever you like. It comes down to a single simple meaning: all our arrogant scrabbling within history must face its answer outside of history.
In a way, Present Tense is a sequel to Rabinowitz’s previous collection, The Wanton Sublime. There, the religious myth lurking in the background was the story of the annunciation, the declaration to Mary that she had conceived the Son of God. In that collection, the focus was upon anticipation; in this, the focus is upon disappointment. The writers of the Gospel stories believed that, following the death of Jesus, he would return to them in a prophetic fulfillment of history; and, most importantly, they believed it would happen in their generation. It didn’t. The promised peace ended for many in violent death. That tale of disappointment lurks in the background of Present Tense. The myths may have changed. Instead of the Pax Romana, we have the Pax Americana. Instead of an historical arc leading to apocalypsis, we have cherished tales of moral and technological progress leading to mastery of our world. Nevertheless, the disappointment today is as palpable as it was 2,000 years ago. The myth of the Pax Americana came crashing down on 9/11. And the tales of progress are indistinguishable from those insidious lies called advertising.
But Present Tense is not really an exercise in the deconstruction of Christian mythology or in demystification. It is more an expression of atonement, or at least of a desire to walk that path. In this age, it is problematic to be a conscientious American. By virtue of citizenship, Rabinowitz shares in the national grief of 9/11, but is likewise complicit in the atrocities her country has visited upon the rest of the world as it vents its rage. Atonement begins with confession. The first matter for confession is the bare fact of complicity. In “Anna Speaks,” Rabinowitz imagines a time when “Anna” threw a knife at her brother. She can’t remember why she did it, “Just that I was mad as hell, / The blade gleamed on the table, / And he was there.” Who is her brother? She doesn’t say. Maybe he lives in Iraq. In an analogous scenario, she imagines a conversation between Freud and Einstein which opens with Freud posing the puzzle: “Is there any way of delivering mankind from the menace of war?” As a member of the Manhattan Project, how did Einstein live with his complicity in the atrocities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Do just war rationales from WW II have any bearing on America’s conduct today? Did they even work in 1945?
A confession of complicity naturally prompts the question: complicity in what? How about violence? There are the “Notes: Coercive Counterintelligence Interrogation of Resistant Sources” and an “Addendum” to the Notes which draw upon two declassified CIA manuals offering instructions on interrogation techniques that were in use even during the Bush administration. It is written in the second person, addressed to us, as if we are students learning the finer points of this curious art. The manual tells us that “Speedy onset of anxiety is of great benefit to you in fulfilling your mission.” In the present age, we all experience a speedy onset of anxiety. It is the affliction of our age. We all are subject to such interrogation techniques—the inducement of anxiety to produce a desired response; whenever we watch TV ads or pass billboards that remind us of all our physical infirmities, from yellow teeth to unmanageable hair to leaky bladders, we feel an urge to run to the store and spend money. The “Note” concludes: “You are in the service of your country. / You are helping to make the world a better place.” How much longer this volume would have been if, at the time of its writing, Rabinowitz had access to the Wikileaks cables!
Or how about the acrostic on “A Rose By Any Other Name” which opens: “A war by any other name would smell as / Rank as Desert Storm … “? While violence can be overt and physical, some of the worst violence we do is with our words. There is the blunt force trauma of name-calling, or its more subtle cousin, the euphemism:
Annihilate all terrorists in the plot, injecting Democracy
Nearer The Front Lines where nouns still wade about, before
Yardsticks pummel our brains with questions about the MeasureOf Naming.
Language is deployed nearer the front lines. As we have already observed, torture is merely “interrogation”. This freedom we bring at the end of a gun is called “Democracy.” And destruction is reduced to “consumption” while dissent is elevated to “terror.”
But perhaps the greatest violence in language is not found in the manipulation of meaning, but in its decontextualization or what I called, at the outset, temporal alienation. We deny words their provenance as the first step in suppressing the stories they would otherwise form. In Present Tense, this crops up from time to time as a lament: “If only we could costume memories. But our headmasters refuse to learn from old clothes.” And again: “Even the defunct deserves a place in the commotion of the soul.” Or again: “Testimony is a cryptic relic deformed by the violence of authority.” A similar lament prompted Howard Zinn to offer an account of America which honours the stories of its underclass rather than the stories of those in authority. And it is a lament which has acquired greater urgency as factions on the far right seek to impose revisionist histories on everything from fossil records to founding fathers.
Let me close with an irony offered in the voice of Chief Seattle in “Chief Seattle Speaks”:
Your religion
Was written on tablets of stone
By the iron finger of an angry God
Lest you forget
In contrast, the traditions and dreams which guided Chief Seattle’s people were “written in the hearts of our people.” The irony is that tablets of stone have failed to prevent us from forgetting. Although a volume of poetry is a far cry from a tablet of stone, there is the temptation on the part of readers to treat its contents as neatly contained artifacts which they can relegate to a forgotten shelf. Resist that temptation. These are words which deserve to be written on your hearts.