I am sometimes accused by bloggers, and often gently told by friends, that I am inclined to view life, and particularly life in Guyana, through a glass not darkly but beautifully rose-coloured. Some of these same friends also wonder why I write often about death. Of course, glorying in life’s wonders and at the same time understanding their fundamental impermanence are not mutually exclusive. Knowing that something you possess by the purest of chances will one day disappear, immensely increases its value in the meantime. In the great lottery win which any life represents you might as well enjoy it to the full and not groan and gloom what a burden such wealth is or why isn’t it more.
But I sometimes think, as I look around the world by virtue of instant television coverage or reading the articles and books of outstanding reporters on the infinite variety of horrors Nature indiscriminately inflicts on mankind and mankind very discriminately inflicts on itself – I think how easily we might succumb to unending feelings of despair.
I am often saved by poetry from deep gloom of thought, thinking of Lorna Goodison’s sad but calming lines “Some of my worst wounds/have healed into poems” or Marianne Moore’s poem ‘In Distrust of Merits’ appropriate to our times so filled with division and hatred and cruelty:
. . . The world’s an orphans’ home. Shall
we never have peace without sorrow?
without pleas of the dying for
help that won’t come? O
quiet form upon the dust, I cannot
look and yet I must. If these great patient
dyings – all these agonies
and wound-bearings and bloodshed –
can teach us how to live, these
dyings were not wasted.
There is, however, a strongly held view, which I respect, that claims no salvation of the spirit can be found in poetry or indeed any other man-made explanation or plea when it comes to certain terrible examples of man’s inhumanity to man at its most atrocious. The philosopher Theodor Adorno, for instance, said that writing poetry after what the death camp Auschwitz had revealed would be “barbaric”; “After the Holocaust, no poetry.” Better to remain speechless. Better to be silent.
I respect the view but do not agree. The effort must be made. Perhaps in such cases of ultimate atrocity the only effort that has validity is the effort made by the participant sufferers. Perhaps the only artist – poet, painter, dramatist, reporter – who can attempt to depict life in the pit and torment of earthly hells is he or she who was there to feel, touch, taste, hear, smell and endured without quite succumbing and escaped forever cauterized. I think of Elei Wiesel’s terrifying book Night, for instance, or Primo Levi’s descriptions of hell close up written with limpid, frightening starkness. Goya’s nightmare group of paintings Disasters of War or his ‘Black Paintings,’ verging on madness, would also qualify.
This is a poem by Dan Pagis, a Jew who was there in the death train, in the bottomlessly evil camp, unimaginably tortured but survived:
Written in Pencil in the Sealed Railway-Car.
here in this carload
i am eve
with abel my son
if you see my older son
cain son of man
tell him that i
Only a handful of words, hardly a poem you might say. But I cannot forget it. As one writer describes it: “a poem that chokes itself in the middle of its utterance. As if swallowing the gas.”
