I sat there with an 8 ounce beer glass in the semi-dark in a long room cluttered with those often set apart from the herd, either because of their alcoholism—which is a symptom (not a disease)—or their antagonisms, worn down but not altogether defeated—a moot point. In an old man bar there are no expectations. There’s a lot of civility. Nobody bothers you—that’s an unspoken rule. Everyone is there for the same self-contradictory reason: to be left alone with other people. And they are there to feel good—and that’s where the alcohol comes in.

It was a bright sunny California afternoon in Burlingame—a rich town but this bar is surprisingly seedy. Inside was dark and smelled of beer and cardboard. A few barstools down a grizzled man sat hunched over a tumbler. He had long stringy black hair and a beard, wore a loose fitting shirt. Pushing under his shirt, above his belt, his kidney was swollen like a thick steak.

I’d been at the Menlo Park VA, volunteering as a recreational therapist assistant, which meant I dealt blackjack to the Vets on Friday after lunch. I loved the vets, and the VA was a great hospital if you could get in, which a lot of people can’t or don’t want to.

“You serve?” I ask.

“Vietnam,” he says.

“Where abouts?”

“Cú Chi.”

Cú Chi meant tunnels, and there was a well-known book about the tunnel rats, as they were called, a book that captured how horrible it was to crawl into a dark hole and face unimaginable booby traps or an inhuman enemy (they’re always inhuman)—you led with your head, no possibility of protecting your eyes, your mouth, or your throat—or sometimes, even worse, you were lowered down, your balls leading the way. Not every war story is true, and people claim a lot that can’t be supported by facts. A lot of people say they were tunnel rats because everyone can understand how terrifying that was—it meant you faced fear, that you were probably and (more importantly) legitimately fucked up, which also meant your troubles were understandable—and everyone wants that, a clear cause to their incredibly screwed effect—an explanation for their lives, an explanation, if tacit, as to why on earth they were alcoholizing themselves to death in an old man bar when sunny California lay just outside the swinging door. I didn’t necessarily believe him about being a tunnel rat, but I didn’t disbelieve him either. Cú Chi was shorthand, like so many things were short hand—a way to tell a story he couldn’t necessarily tell.

And maybe he was a tunnel rat. Who knows? At Menlo a lot of guy had done outrageous things. One of the guys was the first to escape from a Nazi prison camp. He was a little guy, and he dressed up as a Hitler youth and rode away on a bicycle. When he came back to the States and gave talks about it. He liked to be wheeled out into the garden to look at the rhododendrons. Another guy flew helicopters in Vietnam. He had a purple heart with two clusters on it—all received for the same action—flying into fire to get guys out, being wounded and flying in again. He kept flying in. Wheeling him to the bank in the main building one day, he turned and, apropos of nothing, said, “I could tell you things.” Looking at his eyes that moment, I believed it. And there were other guys, wounded in trainings, stateside, or doing something without any heroism attached, operating a forklift. One guy had lost both his legs that way and had a thyroid problem to boot—he never left his wheelchair and weighed about 300 lbs. This guy they called the commander, even though he’d never seen any action. There was another guy who had been raped by other U.S. soldiers and then beaten—that was in Japan in peacetime. He was in the PTSD wing. He managed to pass the VA’s very stringent PTSD criteria. He’d tried to commit suicide.

Most people don’t pass their tests or even want to. The VA is a nightmare of red tape and a lot of worse off guys live on the outside—protecting their autonomy and paranoia, banking on their own toughness as they collect checks or panhandle, sit on corners or in old man bars. I don’t blame them—smart in its way.

And I don’t question a guy’s veracity by asking specific questions. His swollen kidney tells me enough. I buy him what he’s drinking, pro quo, for this story: I was up in the hill country. I was working then with the CIA. I was teaching the farmers how to grow potatoes. We’d used Agent Orange there and they had nothing left. They were starving. So I went village to village and we flew in potatoes and we had to fly in buckets of dirt too. All their dirt was poisoned. Nothing could grow there. I showed them how to do it—cutting up the potato with a knife and putting the pieces into the buckets of dirt. They had no idea what I was doing. They’d never seen a fucking potato before.

The irony wasn’t lost on him, and that’s a hard thing to be left with.

**

painting by Drake Deknatel, 1943-2005

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Sam Green’s filmography includes the Academy Award nominated The Weather Underground, The Rainbow Man/John 3:16, Lot 63 Grave C, N-Judah 5:30, Pie Fight ’69, The Fabulous Stains, and Behind the Movie (directed with Sarah Jacobson). He is currently working on Utopia in Four Movements.  One section of that project, “Utopia, Part 3: the World’s Largest Shopping Mall,” recently screened at Sundance and will also screen at the San Francisco Film Festival Saturday April 25 and Sunday May 3 in a series of shorts titled: Foreign Territories The complete work in progress, Utopia in Four Movements, will screen at Light Industry in Brooklyn on June 7th.

Rumpus: Hey Sam, I propose we do an interview over email over the course of a few weeks, month, sort of like a long distance chess game. Don’t worry about responses. I’ll handle editing and making me look like a genius—I mean you.

Green: The interview sounds good, although I may have to insert an appropriate number of ‘umms’ and ‘ahhs’ and ‘you knows’.

Rumpus: No problem. I’ll just edit them out. So, you’re going to Sundance. What are you doing there?

Green: I have two short films showing. The first is called “Utopia, Part 3: The World’s Largest Shopping Mall.” It’s a short documentary about the South China Mall, twice as large as the previous record holder, the Mall of America in Minnesota—fucking enormous and totally over the top with a replica of the Arc de Triumph, a network of Amsterdam canals, and even a section modeled on San Francisco. The mall was intended as a celebration of consumerism and Vegas-like spectacle, yet three years after it was built, it’s still completely empty. It’s a big flop.

Rumpus: What interests you about the mall?

Green: This is actually a part of the larger film I’m doing on utopia and the utopian impulse. I liked the material and it seems timely, so I cut a short piece using it. I was going to call it “The World’s Largest Metaphor for Market Capitalism,” but that seemed a bit heavy handed.

Rumpus: But not off the mark, as we now see. What’s the other piece you’re showing?

Green: The other piece is called “Clear Glasses.” A few years ago I got a pair of old glasses in the mail from Mark Rudd, who was in the Weather Underground and in my documentary on the group. He sent them to me as a present. This was the pair of glasses he wore when he turned himself in 1977. I recognized them from news footage of the event. This piece is kind of a poem about the glasses, which I really love.

Rumpus: Tell me more about this “Sundance.” I’ve never made that scene, (or any scene). Is it really a writhing snake pit of sex and deal making like we all think?

Green: I guess in the transcript of this interview you can write (one week pause here while subject snorted lots of coke, hobnobbed intensely, experienced momentary glimpses of the beauty and magic of cinema, and stumbled thru the snowy streets of park city, Utah). Where were we?

Rumpus: Sam, that was the question—what does go on at Sundance anyway? And can anyone go? Is it like what happens in Sundance stays in Sundance, because it is just too arty or because it is just what we’d expect, lap dances by Andy Warhol look-alikes?

Green: It’s a strange place. There are a few different scenes that co-exist. I’ve been a bunch of times and the very first time I was there, I had an epiphany that has stuck w/ me. It was 1997, and I’d made a kooky 40-minute long documentary about the Rainbow Man and sent it off to Sundance because that’s what I thought you were supposed to do w/ a movie, and they wanted to show it, which was a surprise and great. So, I flew to Salt Lake City and got one of those shuttles to Park City, which is about an hour away. In the shuttle were about 8 people, almost all of them strangers, and as we drove, people started to talk. After a while the conversation kind of gelled, everyone in the shuttle participating, except for me. At a certain point in the conversation, it became clear that everyone knew Ralph Macchio and they all had great things to say about him. “Ralph is a great guy” “I love that guy!” “He’s the best.” It was at that moment that I realized that there was something going on there that I was not a part of. Later on at the festival, as I walked around Park City putting up 8 1/2 by 11 Kinko’s fliers for my movie and noticed all the huge 4 color posters for films, I was again struck by the fact that this was a part of the movie world that I somehow wasn’t in.

Rumpus: So was that the dichotomy, those who know Ralph Macchio and those who don’t?

Green: I’m an art movie guy from San Francisco. I don’t really have anything in common w/ the LA movie biz. Or even the NYC movie biz. I’m pretty able to tune those people out.

Despite the fact that that’s the majority of people at a place like Sundance, still there are a fair number of people whose work I like and respect who make the scene. So those are the people I hang out with.

Rumpus: Who are they? What kind of films do they make?

Green: When I was there a few weeks ago, I had a good time with my friends who did the Yes Men movie, a pal named Natalia Almada who made a great doc film called El General about her great grand-father who was president of Mexico in the 1920s, another friend

Alex Rivera who made an amazing science fiction film called Sleep Dealer that will be coming out soon. Also, another person I was really happy to see is Laura Poitras who is a great vérité documentary filmmaker—she’s making a movie right now on Salim Hamdan, which should be super interesting. I also really like many of the programmers and the staff of the festival. I really enjoy people, so running around and seeing a lot of folks I like is a great pleasure for me. Also, there is a fair amount of drugs and alcohol, which I also like.

Rumpus: So, going back a little, you initially went to Sundance with Rainbow Man. That was your first big documentary. What were you doing before that?

Green: Before Rainbow Man? Wow. That’s a big question. I spent my twenties kind of casting about. I had gone to art school, but it didn’t feel right—the art world seemed too disconnected from the rest of the world. So, I stumbled into journalism and randomly got a job doing radio news for WEMU in Ypsilanti, Michigan—my beat was the Ypsilanti City Council. I loved it. Later I moved to NYC and did random jobs. After a few years, I moved to the Bay Area and studied journalism at Berkeley. Had gone in wanting to be a newspaperman but took a video class and totally dug it. The teacher was a guy named Marlon Riggs—a great documentarian who has since passed away. His work made a huge impression on me—he combined a rigorous journalistic approach w/ an experimental film sensibility. Through other students, I got turned on to a whole world of avant-garde film and experimental documentary—stuff I never knew existed. That was a turning point for me. Documentary combined things I liked: a certain engagement w/ the world, a creative interpretation of one’s experiences and sensibility, collaboration, and an intensely social activity.

It’s funny how people stumble into things, and at the time it always seems very coincidental and random. Looking back, I can see a certain logic and fatedness about how I ended where I am.

Rumpus: What draws you to subjects? I mean, they’re a bit diverse: Rainbow Man, Glasses, The Weather Underground, Meredith Hunter, and Utopias.

Green: Probably some kind of visceral smitten-ness w/ an image or a story or a moment. It’s strange—it’s almost like falling in love in that it’s sudden and lasting, but it’s obviously a different feeling.

Rumpus: Can you give an example? How about with the Weather Underground?

Green: With the WU, the inspiration came one day when I was sitting in the Library of Congress doing research for another project. I was waiting for some books to come up and so I started looking up random things in the LOC collection. I had always known something about the WU, and my interest had been piqued: how could you not like glamorous young hippies going underground and trying to overthrow the US government and somehow getting away w/ it. So I was sitting there typing random things into the LOC database, seeing what would come up, and w/ the Weather Underground, there was an entry for a Senate report on the group that had been published in the late 70s and was several hundred pages long. So I requested the book. It came up a few minutes later, and I began thumbing through it. At a certain point, there were several pages of mugshots of the members of the WU, and I just sat there transfixed. The images were so striking.

Rumpus: What was striking?

Green: When you think of the 60s, you generally think of nice smiling hippies, long hair, tie-dye, peace signs. These Weatherpeople were definitely not that. These Weatherpeople looked really HARD. It was jarring. But at the same time, being a middle class white kid myself, I could glimpse traces of the middle class white kids that they were and at the same time were trying to transcend. The images really got under my skin. I put them at the beginning of the film, and they still get me.

Rumpus: So is it image first over narrative, I guess over “idea?”

Green: At some point, I worked as a video editor for the History Channel, and I did one on the Lincoln assassination. It was awful, but in the film, I used some photos of the other Lincoln conspirators—the people who helped Booth—who were hanged at a prison a little bit after the assassination. Before they were hung, someone photographed these people and the photos are unbelievably powerful. There’s something so raw about them, but they are also really beautiful portraits—they almost look like high fashion photos. Have you ever seen those photos? Anyway, the point I’m making is that for myself, images can be haunting, particularly when they represent that kind of dualism—that, for me, creates a tension that resonates, but, over idea? I’m not sure it’s necessary to make that distinction.

Rumpus: It seems to be that image is often such a strong communicator even though that communication is inarticulate—perhaps because it isn’t.

Green: I think that images do arrest one on a much more visceral and emotional level than intellectual. Hell, the smartest communicators in town, advertisers, figured that one out a while ago. It’s so interesting to see TV ads from the 50s and 60s, because they were still trying to logically convince viewers of things: “Tide will get your clothes 70 percent cleaner than Bounty.” The ads are super wooden. At a certain point, someone realized, “Hell, this doesn’t need to make any sense—in fact, the less sense it makes the better. What’s important here is to connect feelings with the product or brand. To do that, we need to communicate in a completely visceral, non-intellectual and non-rational manner.” Coke is It—what the hell does that mean? Anyway, I’m starting to rant—I think you get the point.

Rumpus: You hate ad people—are they documentarians gone bad?

Green: Ad people really have to know their shit. They gotta be good. Or they get fired. So they have lots of incentives to figure out how people operate, how they react to images and sound. It just breaks my heart that so many smart and creative people dedicate so much time and effort to selling us useless shit and making us feel bad. I don’t hate them. Someone should make up a word for the feeling ad people give you.

Rumpus: I love Lot 63, Grave C. It’s such a character piece, it seems to me, with the funeral director, Mr. Wilkes, but obviously the genesis is Meredith Hunter. What drew you to Hunter?

Green: I had come across his name a lot in reading about the 1960s. Altamont, for many people, was the end of “the 60s” and Meredith Hunter was sort of at the center of that symbolism. I never came across anything about him other than his name, age and the fact that he was African-American, and, of course, that he was killed by the Hell’s Angles during a Rolling Stones’ set. Out of curiosity, I started to do research on him and poke around. The only detail I could dig up was the fact that he was buried in a cemetery in Vallejo. I drove out there one day just to see the grave.

Rumpus: What was that like?

Green: Mr. Wilkes, had never heard of Meredith Hunter before, so he consulted an old filing cabinet and came up with the grave’s location: Garden of Terrace Lawn, lot 63, grave c. He offered to walk me and my friend out there—otherwise, he said, we’d never find it. After traversing the cemetery, when we finally got to Meredith Hunter’s grave—I don’t want to spoil the movie by saying too much, but it did confirm my sense that although Meredith Hunter lives on as a symbol, as an individual, he’s been pretty much forgotten. In death, he’s never had the dignity of his own identity.

Rumpus: So that seems very different than talking about image. That’s an idea of dignity and identity. What does connect your diverse subjects?

Green: There was the image of the grave, but I guess I’d say each of the films I’ve made has been inspired by some concrete moment of feeling—sparked usually by an image or a story or a situation. My work definitely comes out of emotions that usually don’t make complete sense to me at the time but somehow linger. Often making the film is a way to get a clearer understanding of that phenomenon. Usually by the time I’m done w/ the film, I understand what it was that drew me in the first place.

Rumpus: Is it possible to say, and here I’m just thinking of your sense of connection with Weather Underground suburban white kids or Meredith Hunter who disappears into the background of history—maybe like documentarians in general—could your films really be about you?

Green: “Hell yeah!” It always cracks me up to see documentary filmmakers and the subjects they choose. It says so much about the maker him or herself. So, I’ll cop to it. Yes, definitely, I can look at my movies and see a lot of myself running through them. (I’m not always crazy about that, but that’s a different conversation). Documentary filmmakers are generally shy people. I am. We use other people to say things for us that we, on some level, would like to say ourselves. I am not judgmental about this, and I’m not saying this in a cynical manner. It’s just the way things are. I think that you can use people to say things that you would want to say yourself, and still be accurate and fair and there’s nothing morally or ethically suspect about it.

Rumpus: Like interviewing. So what about Rainbow Man?

Green: With The Rainbow Man, I definitely saw some of myself in that character: the profound need he had for affirmation; his hunger for it; his consuming search for something to make his life meaningful. The Weather Underground people too. Although I related to them in different ways. It’s probably true w/ most artists though—you can see them in the work, even if it isn’t overtly autobiographical.

Rumpus: Archival footage seems to take a prominent role in your films—obviously in Rainbow Man, lot 63, and The Weather Underground, all historical pieces but it is also there in the overall effect of N-Judah 5:30, which seems to be shot in 8mm—and they often seem to stand up, sometimes jarring or poignant in their juxtaposition with modern footage. Could you talk about that?

Green: I’m super into archival footage, and sometimes really fall in love w/ stuff. It may sound weird, but it’s true. You know that feeling when you see the face of someone you love—sometimes it can fill you w/ a kind of boundless joy—a pleasure that’s almost too much, like getting tickled or something like that. Anyway, I sometimes have those feelings for certain pieces of footage; I love them.

Rumpus: So you’ve been working on this long documentary about Utopias. Do you ever feel moments of insecurity when you’re involved in something so monumental and time consuming and can’t turn back?

Green: Of course! The only way to deal with insecurity is to keep working, and I’ve been working in a disciplined way lately, which makes me happy. I’m editing three hours every morning. (and other stuff the rest of the day). I finished a rough-cut of my utopia movie and am looking at it and figuring out how to fill some holes and/or develop certain ideas. One thing I’m wrestling w/ at the moment is trying to figure out a way to evoke the exuberance of utopia at one or more points in the film. A friend of mine who is very good w/ feedback pointed out to me recently that the film doesn’t really do that at this point—that is such an important piece of this. Why is the utopian impulse such an attractive thing? Why has it inspired so much (both good and bad)? So I’m trying to figure out how to do that. . . . perhaps finding a letter from someone in the throes of the Russian revolution (early on, before things went awry) articulating a certain hope and imagination. Horace Greeley writing something about the utopian settlement he was involved with . . .

Rumpus: It seems to me that Utopias are not altogether unlike the aspiration of art itself. Is this about you again? Aren’t you too looking to make a better world?

Green: It’s a bit hard to talk about all of this. It’s hard to say, “Yes, I’m looking to make a better world.” I don’t know why exactly. For a long time, I was unable to cop to the A-word at all. I would not say that I was an artist. Perhaps it’s the weird low self esteem mishigas of someone of the generation I belong to. I was cleaning up my office recently and found a newspaper I had saved—an obit for David Foster Wallace in the NY Times. There was a paragraph I’d circled: “In response to a question about what being an American was like for him at the end of the 20th century, he told the online magazine Salon in 1996 that there was something sad about it, but not as a reaction to the news or current events. ‘It’s more like a stomach level sadness,” he said. ‘I see it in myself and my friends in different ways. It manifests itself as a kind of lostness.’” That really resonated w/ me. Obviously, DFW had his own issues, but I think he gets at something keen there. I think that w/ a lot of my work, and especially this utopia project, I am trying to find away out of that feeling. Not escaping into banality or a kind of Pollyannaish worldview, but figuring out some way to be clear-eyed about the world and all of its tragedy and fleetingness but at the same time be able to access joy and beauty and hope. Utopia is an intersection of all of that that I really like. I do think that utopia and the utopian impulse both involve the imagination and a certain amount of creativity—sometimes joy and exuberance as well. Art obviously, can be very tied up in these same things.

Rumpus: I do want to ask what you thought of all that Bill Ayers/Weather Underground b.s. thrown down by the GOP. The guilt by association with Obama was ridiculous, but what do you think about Ayers—once a terrorist always a terrorist?

Green: Me and my pal Bill Siegel made the documentary about the Weather Underground together and during the course of that project we filmed a number of interviews w/ Bill Ayers. Since that time, he’s become a good friend of ours. We took him and Bernardine Dohrn, his wife, with us to the Academy Awards in 2004. So it was hard to see all that and not feel terrible for the person at the center of it. After his long-ago association with the Weather Underground, Bill has gone to become a widely known and respected education expert. He’s a distinguished professor at the University of Illinois and has written more than 10 books. To have all of his work, and what he’s about, so publicly misrepresented was extremely painful for him. Not to mention the fact that he received such a torrent of death threats that the University has had to provide him with a bodyguard.

All of this was compounded by the fact that Bill had to remain silent. He made the decision that there was no way to engage with the media and win. Anything he might have said publicly would only add fuel to the fire, and give the “issue” more of a life. There really was nothing, or at least nothing significant, at the heart of the Ayers-Obama connection, so it had to run out of steam at some point.

Rumpus: You must have had some attention yourself, with the nomination in 2004—obviously you were now something of an expert on the WU.

Green: Starting when this “issue” first surfaced in the MSM during one of the Democratic debates, we were bombarded by media requests (no pun intended), but felt that for strategic and political reasons it was best to stay silent. It wasn’t an easy decision—any filmmaker wants their work out there, and this in some ways would have been a great opportunity to promote the movie.

Rumpus: Is there anything you take away? I mean, it seems like such a ridiculous historical glitch, something that you yourself might appreciate 40 years from now.

Green: Not really a glitch, I don’t think. That kind of political bear-baiting is all too common, but as depressing as the whole Bill Ayers thing was, I am hopeful about one thing, and that is that it didn’t work. It already seems like a long time ago. Bill was able to pop off a lot after the election (it was incredible to hear the phrase “US imperialism ” dropped on Good Morning America). Bill Siegel and I hung out w/ him a few weeks ago in Chicago, and he seemed in good spirits. He spoke at St. Mary’s College around here recently and there were 500 people there. In his opening remarks he said, “Had it not been for the recent presidential campaign, there would be 22 of you here.” So he’s got a sense of humor about the whole thing.

Anyway, let me know how you wanna proceed with the interview. I was hoping we could go back and forth for another six months or a year. Are you gonna be out here anytime? I heard you guys might be heading for Oregon? Hope the canoeing is going well.

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Robert Hass, Bush’s War, and the death of a father

illustration by Marianne Goldin

criminals with priests’ black benedictions
came by sky to kill children
and in the streets the blood of the children
ran simply, like children’s blood.

—Pablo Neruda, from “I am explaining a few things.”

In the waiting room, reading Robert Hass’s, Time and Materials (2007) I began thinking of Hass, the gray haired man, an intelligent and sensitive man—that is the impression I have from the poems (and the jacket photo)—and trailed off to memories of my father, because that is how my thinking goes sometimes, not disciplined, but loose and gangly, and maybe because they both seemed like good men, cut from similar cloth, having all the right intentions, maybe because there comes a time when a son must reconcile with his father. My father did his post-doctoral work on the West Coast, at Berkeley, several years before Hass would go to Stanford to pursue literature. My father became a scientist—a biochemist and chemist, and later worked with computers, early on when computers filled rooms and then later when he carried one, as he said, “powerful enough to run a small nation,” from his office at Cornell Medical to his apartment building across the street, intern housing where he lived all his life—because he believed that science would change the world.

My father prided himself on his philosophical detachment and empiricism. He also was alcoholic, and at his bar stool at Finnegan’s Wake on 73rd and 1st Avenue, he would brag that his corner was the “liberal corner,” while drinking his “RudyMary” (more horseradish, more Tabasco). His bar buddies were a tide of conservatism and he was the bulwark—their drunken companionship always more potent than politics. When we’d meet there and take a table in a corner to eat bangers and mash, he might say, When I become president of the world. . . and there would be this or that or some other thing, how science would solve all our problems. And he was right. Damn right! His world would be a better place. But my father’s liberalism—while it always made sense, was always so reasonable—never changed anyone’s mind in that bar or anywhere else. When he died, I went into that bar and had a Guinness in my father’s honor—my wake in Finnegan’s Wake. What his bar buddies said of him: “Your dad never said a bad word about anybody.” My father believed that everyone, all at once, might suddenly and in concert see the truth of reason.

Hass, a decent and intelligent man, a man privileged and aesthetically self-satisfied, also wants to do good. In Time and Materials, he sometimes pointedly turns away from image making, abandoning the poetic acts of attention, which compress time and enrich life, in order to address a world of generalities, and tries to make sense of a world that seems to have gone mad.

Hass challenges the reader even in the title of “A Poem,” a poem which itself is prosaic, generalized, abstract; it relays fact and figures, tells us, for example, that “In the first twenty years of the twentieth century 90 percent of war deaths were the deaths of combatants. In the last twenty years of the twentieth century 90 percent of war deaths were deaths of civilians.” There is no music in this language, and I guess Hass’s point is there shouldn’t always be music. A clue, earlier in the collection, Hass writes, “It is good sometimes for poetry to disenchant us.” Charm, poetry, beauty in language are a masquerade, a complicity in the face of serious issues—war, death, the wresting of life from the innocent, done in our name, and in the name of what we believe in.

In “Bush’s War,” Hass writes

Or the raw white of the exposed bones
In the bodies of their men or their children
Are being given the gift of freedom
Which is the virtue of the injured us.
It is hard to say which is worse, the moral
Sloth of it or the intellectual disgrace.

Hass draws our attention to good sense, pointing out our ridiculous and faulty reasoning. And I say, yes, we do have “moral sloth.” We have “intellectual disgrace.” I agree—very much so. You are right! I see his good sense and I see his good intentions, but, like my father’s pronouncements from his corner in Finnegan’s Wake, I see the impotence of the act. Reason is not longer a convincing argument. We don’t live in an age of reason.

In “The Second Coming,” Yeats, wrote that the best “lacked conviction while the worst were full of passionate intensity.” WWI, “the war to end all war” was anarchy “loosed upon the world.” And wasn’t Yeats right? Didn’t he hit the nail right on the head? Dead in 1939, Yeats could not have foreseen history as it unfolded, and what a history. His nail-square-on-the-head poem, one of the best, most incisive anti-war poems of all time, yielded nothing, no change in the future, no end of war—same today as it was in 1917, if not worse.

Advertising is the new poetry; mnemonic, it bombards us with the antithesis of reason. It plays upon our fears, hints at our impotence, threatens us with social exile, even as it advances its most incongruous message: products will make us happy. Let’s face it, we’ve returned to magical thinking. Reason doesn’t reign. We feel powerful when we sheepishly follow the herd. We make war for peace. We acquire debt to build wealth. We strive to be forever young. We drop smart bombs and depend on military intelligence. All along, our material impotence wrestles with the oxymoronic promise of materialistic happiness. The hawk is a handsaw. Unreason is the status quo.

In the early Greek Dionysian mystery rites, priests used poetry—metered language, easier to remember—to help a fearful populace traverse the unknowable underworld. Through empiricism and deduction, people understood that they would die, but wanting to deny reason, they created priests who would assure them that they would not. The priests recited incantations that would allow acolytes to walk a right path in the land of death, answer the gods correctly, and pass through to an everlasting life-after-death. By manipulating people’s fear of death, the priests solidified power, but it was the people who originated that power, elevating priests and designating potentates—for order, for safety, out of fear. If they paid the priest, in death they might continue to prosper. They would retain an egotistical identity in this hierarchical afterlife—a place where some got in and some didn’t. Along with false security, the people bought irrationality.

These mystery rites rose along with consciousness, from the ether, organically, and were an ingenious economic model. Irate customers never asked for their money back—couldn’t. And those who could afford a little extra dinero had their poetic, after-life directions hammered out on gold and buried with them. The gold, valuable because it wouldn’t tarnish over time, could be read even by the long dead—an after-life cheat sheet.* The elite could bank on one sure thing: people fear death. Those who could afford it willingly handed over their money and their reason in order to participate in the orgiastic rituals meant to simulate death, the Bacchanalia. And from accounts, this was a damn good time. Our modern consumacopia doesn’t seem nearly as much fun.

This universal fear of death and the establishment of a hierarchy based upon divisive notions of “us” (those who will live forever) and “them” (those who will not) has been the model for sustaining the high priests’ power always—for the Greeks, for the Romans, and now.

In “State of the Planet,” Hass draws our likeness to that of Rome, hoping perhaps for some necessary historical perspective:

They drained the marshes around Rome. Your people,
You know, were the ones who taught the world to love
Vast fields of grain, the power and the order of the green,
Then golden rows of it, spooled out almost endlessly.
Your poets, those in the generation after you,
Were the ones who praised the packed seed heads
And the vineyards and the olive groves and called them
“Smiling” fields. In the years since, we’ve gotten
Even better at relentless simplification, but it’s taken
Until our time for it to crowd out, savagely, the rest
Of life. No use to rail against our curiosity and greed.
They keep us awake. And are, for all their fury
And urgency, compatible with intelligent restraint.

He is right again—very massively right. His equation of agricultural plenty and the narrowing of mind is dead on, and the pursuit of “relentless simplification,” and the cooption of “intelligent restraint,” yes, right again. And that it was “love” not hate that led us here. He is right, but what good can it possibly do when reason itself falls short in an unreasonable world. In “Bush’s War,” Hass, wonders, “Is it that we like kissing and bombing together?” Perhaps—the juvenile psychology of sex in a graveyard—but Hass seems unable to grasp our oxymoronic quality. Caught in his world of reason, he cannot see that life and death are not distinct, and to talk of one without the other is a disjuncture, a lie of ourselves. What I mean is, we’re scared stupid. What I mean is, he doesn’t see we’re nuts.

Under the heading, “Horace: Three Imitations,” Hass writes in Odes, 3-2,

And say with a shudder: Pray God our boy
Doesn’t stir up that Roman animal
Whom a cruel rage for blood would drive
Straight to the middle of any slaughter
It is sweet, and fit, to die for one’s country,

The thing I want to tell Hass is, we know we are that cruel Roman animal. We know. We know the irony of “dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.” We know Horace advanced war like a propagandist. We know Wilfred Owen borrowed the line to illumine the fallacy of patriotism. We see that Hass alludes to them both—a line that contains its own contradiction—but what Hass does not see is the line’s implication of a grander, kaleidoscopic impotence of his own anti-war sentiment. The modernists knew—and Hass is one—that sense from a single perspective is at best subjective. Perspective is power. So, the cubist, to fracture power, to challenge fascism, fractured perspective, but look long and hard at a cubist painting and consider its oxymoronic quality. In the end, we view it from a single perspective, right? Now consider this failure in a masterpiece like Guernica. Guernica leaves us with a conflicted message: war might be horrible but power (Picasso’s, the art’s, the viewer’s) is good. The failure of Guernica is also Hass’s failure because antiwar poetry (and art) is always a failure—to call it a beautiful failure or a necessary one does not mitigate that failure. Keats thought beauty was truth, but we know that truth is perspective. Instead it seems that beauty is power and power beauty. How do you disparage the advancement of power in a line rendered powerfully? Confused, we remain unconvinced. Is war bad? It feels good to kick ass, right? Are cigarettes bad? They make us feel good. Should we not drink quite so much? I might just beat that hangover if I just keep at it, and isn’t that something? We are just not reasonable. We have internalized a state of oxymoronic imbalance, one of contradiction and roiling blood and heart and a thousand inarticulate tongues we don’t speak. But our problem is not nature.

Deadly interspecies conflict is rare in the natural world, even among predators. Tigers don’t kill each other. Lions don’t. Bears don’t. Posture, yes. Butt heads and horns and rear up, but kill, no—male bears do kill their young. Maybe that is something to think about—the male bear killing its young. It wouldn’t be too far off the mark to say it is all about sex, and that human violence is about sex, and that this is predominantly a masculine issue. In this men are the same as other species of male animals. We posture, fluff our mane, drive our Hummers, spit on the sidewalk—we vie for power to secure sex. Sure, our feelings of social powerlessness flame our fantasies of aggression. Still, we politely wait on line at the bank. We do not often kill each other. Killing is an expression of grave natural imbalance. But we, like the good soldier, accept the unreasonableness we are inundated with. We learn over and over again how inadequate we are without x and that we can kill y without compunction. There is zero sense to it. Both are blatantly false constructs. But this is what we believe, because being human means living in a state of unreality, divorced from nature. This is our sole identifying trait, and is it any wonder that we act so ruthlessly to keep our delusions alive even as they act against our own self-interest, against our own species and ourselves? We must not behave like animals. If only we did.

I never understood anything of my father’s science. I know he co-wrote a paper on “Electron Microscopy of the negatively stained and unstained fibrinogen”—whatever that is. I know he died thinking science would solve all of the world’s problems. He’ll be disappointed, I think—at least as long as Yeats, as long as Owens and Hass, as long as all those who believe in poetry or science, in reason and clarity—as long as all of these good men with their best intentions. He believed in science even though he saw the physics of Hiroshima, the chemistry of napalm, saw his beloved computers guide missiles in Iraq, witnessed, toward the end, laser-targeting systems and killer drones, called Predators. He would sit at Finnegan’s with his “RudyMary,” watch the news, and tell his pals what he would do, if he were President, how the world could be a better place, reasonable and just. Science, he’d say, could take care of the details—not in some far distant time, but now, right now, if we wanted it to—disease, hunger, material suffering of all kinds. There’d be zero population growth, if not negative population grown, euthanasia, and people could work less, 3 days a week, he thought, have more time to pursue the arts and cultivate their spirituality, and everyone would leave each other alone. Wasn’t that what we were striving for, greater equality and justice for everyone? When I was there, he told me these things too. And I weighed: science and poetry, science and poetry. He thought our capacity to understand a world outside of ourselves, to pursue a right path, this was what made us human. I thought, if only we truly felt each other as ourselves. My father died in time of war.

History has always moved in two contradictory trajectories: one advancing exploitative self-interest and the other egalitarianism. Our genetic impulse, according to the “selfish gene,” is one of genetic persistence and our complex social organization is a mating hierarchy. Our world is not unlike other complex social organisms—bees, ants (think of the worker and queen) herd animals or predatory dogs—the individual in large part subsumed by the advancement of the whole, a dispensable part sacrificed without compunction in service of the larger collective organism, whose impulses and destiny are not comprehensible to the individual parts. We might rile against this, but so we are—accomplice to some destiny driven by our genes and beyond our comprehension. And in the big picture we know species surge and decline. We are part of a larger system. In general, for us, so far, so good. It’s been surge. Though we’d very much like to last, in the end, that won’t be possible.

For all our momentary and individual charms, for all our intellectual good sense, as a species we are a social organism directed by base instincts, exacerbated and amplified by a larger dynamic organism, all the more pernicious for not being organic. This larger system functions at the insistence of sun and rain, in the movement of the planets, in the dissipation of the universe. It is not rational. Nor is it irrational. Its impulse reflects the individual impulse even as it drives that impulse. Both the social organism and the individual organism want to survive, only the social organism lacks a consciousness and a conscience. Perhaps it is economy. Perhaps it is something else. We are its cells and digestive enzymes. Other than that, it is just like us. It wants. It has the urge to surge. Stupid and afraid, it is a rudimentary organism driven by the same impulses that will inevitably destroy it. Born out of instinct and evolving a conscious intellect, individually we can imagine our own death—we believe this makes us unique in the animal world, but this is not so—our brief moment of flux, the force of life towards death, is the same bloom of life in everything—animate and inanimate, an impulse thrust upon us in the wake of an expanding universe—in a mystery of physics.

And isn’t this also the originating impulse of poetry? Our own poetry—not so different than the bird’s song or the patterns of wood worms under bark, the textures of igneous rock, helping us negotiate our commingled desire for life and fear of death—developing in us and gaining force along with our use of language, our consciousness. It is overwhelming—the bittersweet irrationality of our temporariness. It simply shouldn’t be, but it is.

To think of life as precious is commonplace, but that is what I do believe—the time of it, the verb of being, each beat of it, second and millisecond, more valuable than cars or houses. There is no greater crime against another than taking that time away. I am sickened by it, sickened by the people who engage in death for their profit, to advance their self-interest—even though they might pursue their aims out of fear, because they love the color of grass in fall, like me, want to live, and fear death. I cannot abide them.

War and poetry negotiate the same path, but war is the antithesis of poetry. War cheapens life—boys or girls, women and men, in the factory, in a field, at a wedding, drawing, considering dreams, ambitious for possibility, filled with jealousy and sometimes despair—obliterating our precious time. War is logistically efficient and reductively statistical. War is fought on the allure of the “higher good.” In poetry, the act of attention is the compression of time, the most valuable thing we have. For poetry, the “higher good” is the enemy.

Just before the spring of the Bush War, I saw my father for the last time. I was on my way to Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris to live for a year and write. He’d already had a lung removed and suffered a stroke, which left his speech impaired. He shuffled along, trouble with his left side. A lifetime of smoking and drinking undid him. I think my father knew he would not see me again. He died in the first summer of that war.

That last time I saw him, we went down the elevator to have a cigarette together out on the patio of his building, overlooking York Avenue and the hospital where he would eventually die. He told me he was going to quit smoking and drinking too. I thought that was crazy. Keep smoking, I thought. It’s too late to change now. Let’s get a drink. I was going to Paris afterall. I was going to sit in cafes and drink strong coffee or sip Pernod and smoke my brains out. We finished our cigarettes and he lit another one, an Ultra-light, but I had to go. I told him so. I had a lot to do. Then he told me something he’d never said before. He told me he loved me.

It is hard to know what your liberal father means when he says he loves you out on the slate patio in front of the building he’s lived in for thirty-five years, my liberal father who wanted to abolish inheritance, wanted to give his money to the Native American College Fund and to the NAACP. Now, if I think about it, I think that liberal love is a dispersed and ethical love—for humanity, for equality, for social justice. It hopes for the future against its better judgment. It is reasonable. This was the love he was talking about, because how else could it have waited so long. I understand. Yes, I understand. Liberal love, because of its unstable, slightly volatile nature, drives us just so toward alcoholism, smoking, and other forms of hedonistic death. Liberal love, idealized and platonic, is not a ferocious thing that moves the blood. Measured and proportional, it verges on the misanthropic—because human beings, when we really look at them, are a bit more despicable than kind. Yes, liberal love is reasonable, intelligent, a tad self-conscious, it weighs and balances and makes sense. So, it is hard to know what to think, when, at the last minute, he says something like that.

My father’s love, even in the last moment we would ever see each other, was not the selfish passion of those ignorant, morally slothful fathers, Bush and Bush, of Cheneys who shoot their friends and friends who apologize for it, of those who know about loyalty, about a tribe that devours its young—other people’s young. My father’s love could never be like that. Profoundly ethical, he would never suggest anyone die for something he would not die for himself, let alone sacrifice a generation for a piece of pie. But his liberal love finally was no better for the world, because like the world, love is not reasonable.

Of course, now I think I should have turned back, hugged him, or come up with something to say. But I didn’t. I was confused—not the first time or the last time for that. I walked away. Not the last time for that either. And later when I thought about it, I didn’t think about love. Instead I thought about him trying to quit smoking. How ridiculous. Even at the end, he wanted to live. I thought, there’s no telling what we will think or do once we stare into the mystery.

I am afraid of death, but I’m also afraid to see the world a no better place—no “higher good” ever achieved. I am afraid like Hass and my father and all the liberal fathers before me, afraid of the inherent hopelessness of humankind. I am afraid. I feel the loss of myself everyday. In our modern age, modern “good” health, forbids this consideration, but I am sad that I am dying and can’t be happy about it, all that I’ll miss, and that may be the only true thing I have—this inexhaustible sadness for myself, and everyone, that I’ll miss the birds who also lose what is joyful only in its loss, that I’ll miss my family, that I’ll miss the woman outside her mosque, the man in the shade of a tree in the Zócalo with his little dog, a boy and his Coke. I wish I’d done more for my friends, and loved more—Zondie and our dog, and rabbits, and rocks, and worms, bears and tigers, and in Zondie, that second heartbeat, ours, inexplicable, that pounds 163 beats a minute.

**

* For more on these poetic cheat-sheets, see, Cole, Susan G., “Landscapes of Dionysos and Elysian Fields,” Greek Mysteries: The Archaeology and Ritual of Ancient Greek Secret Cults, edited by Michael B. Cosmopoulos. Routledge, London and New York: 2003 (193-217).

See Also: The Rumpus Interview With Malcolm Gladwell

Robert Hass illustration originally for the poetry foundation

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