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Number
289
January February March
A Twenty-First
Century "Guide for the
Perplexed
DAVID
SHADDOCK
Copyright
© 2002 Poetry Flash
MINDING THE DARKNESS: A Poem for the Year
2000, by Peter Dale Scott, New Directions, New
York, New York, 2000, 254 pages, $21.95
paper.
Having busted a few undergraduate teeth on
Yeats's A Vision, with its theory that
history moves in thousand year cycles, I was
prepared to look for some significance in the end
of the century and the turning of the millennium.
When nothing happened but fireworks, banal
speeches, and putative computer bugs, I decided to
write it off as a complete non-event, a mere
artifice of the Roman Calendar. But the events of
September 11, 2001, have forced me to
reconsider.
Yeats believed that the millennia alternate in
dominion between East and West, which to him meant
an alternation between collective consciousness and
free will. Does the terrorists' fury announce the
turning away from our emphasis on individual rights
toward a time when our group identity will
dominate? If so, is there hope for some progress
out of this dialectic, or will history endlessly
repeat itself? Lacking the metaphysical sources
that gave Yeats his vision, we can only wonder.
But---at the end of a century that began with high
hopes for the improvement of almost everything,
lapsed into a blood bath of unheard proportions,
and ended with the very fabric of life on the
planet in ecological peril---this certainly is a
time for reflecting on the trajectory of our
civilization.
It is to this task of examination, and
self-examination, that Peter Dale Scott lends his
poetic talents in the magnificent book-length
Minding the Darkness: A Poem for the Year
2000. This work, published a year before the
terrorist attack, is the last part of
Seculum, a trilogy of book-length poems
which includes Coming to Jakarta and
Listening to the Candle. For those of us who
approached the turn of the century wary of the
"passionate intensity" of the revolutionary left
but also fed up with the relativism and nihilism of
those who "lack all conviction," this poem is tonic
indeed.
At a primary level, the darkness referred to in
the title is the dark legacy of violence and
oppression woven inextricably through human
history. The poem is informed by "…the hope /
that through understanding // of the darkness
around us / we can move towards freedom" (II.viii).
But the word minding in the title also
invokes Scott's practice of Buddhist mindfulness
meditation, and darkness comes to invoke yin, the
void or female principle.
One thing that immediately strikes the reader
who opens Minding the Darkness is the
contrast between two seemingly opposite poetic
voices: the poet's unadorned vulnerability and
confusion on the one hand, and the astounding scope
of his erudition and breadth of subject matter (the
bibliography of sources cited in the poem runs
twenty-five pages) on the other. Scott is
simultaneously a sage and a novice. As it turns
out, this is just one of the many contradictions
and dichotomies that run through the work. The
interplay of these "antinomies" (as Scott calls
them in his Afterword): light and dark, good and
evil, lyric and epic, masculine and feminine,
personal and political, activism and contemplation,
reason and intuition, is central to the poem's
conception and to the Buddhist-influenced
sensibility that underlies that conception.
Scott's Buddhism helps steer his long poem on a
middle path between the traditional endpoints of
Western thought: the acceptance of faith and
humility, on the one hand, or the heroic, and
ultimately tragic, search for individual
salvation--- "the heroic pursuit of knowledge /
that led Odysseus to drowning" (I.iii)---on the
other. Scott seems to take as a given Pound's
tragic realization at the end of the Cantos (a work
to which Minding the Darkness---with its
vast scope of references, long passages of economic
theory, and moments of startling lyricism---bears
more than a passing resemblance) that he cannot
make it all cohere. Rather than try to resolve
these antinomies in a final synthesis or act of
faith, or grieve for some unattainable paradise,
the poet simply lets them be, since flux and
contradiction are part of the inherent nature of
the world. The Buddhist themes are most purely
evident in three "retreat poems" interposed between
longer sections, which blend self-examination with
haiku-like moments of perception:
What lasts?
the streak
of the brown dipper
flying up the streambed
already gone
The poem begins with a personal (as well as
collective) disaster---the Oakland Hills firestorm
of 1991, in which the poet's home and all of his
possessions---"Could this be all our books? /
the stove? the refrigerator? // the two sets of
china?" (I.i., emphasis in original)---along
with "my best political files" (I.ii.) are
destroyed. In telling details that reveal Scott's
psychological astuteness, we see it is not only the
physical loss, but also other people's lack of
empathy that is devastating. The poet---driven from
the Faculty Club by an insensitive colleague's
political denunciation---seeks solace feeding some
trusting birds by Strawberry Creek and wonders
"Why is it so much harder // to gain the
understanding / of friends?" (I.ii, emphasis in
original).
The "unaccustomed" vulnerability brought on by
the loss of all his possessions opens into one of
the main themes of the poem: a compassionate,
Buddhist-informed examination of the poet's life as
he confronts his childhood, the transitory nature
of love, his retirement from teaching, and, at age
seventy, mortality. In one poignant passage, the
poet, finding himself unable to lift a
half-submerged canoe out of the water, realizes how
much courage it took for his wife, Ronna, to marry
an older man.
Unlike Pound, brought low in the prison camp at
Pisa, Scott starts low. The poem moves outward from
the poet's vulnerability, as if in concentric
circles, to engage the central issues of our time.
As the poem zooms out to scan all of human history,
it reveals the breadth of the poet's scholarship.
To take a randomly chosen example, in discussing
the possibility of another age of enlightenment,
Scott seamlessly gathers up super string theory,
Poe's "Eureka," The Iliad and the
Odyssey, a New Yorker article on
Rwanda, Kabballa, the alchemy of John Dee and
Robert Fludd, Elizabethan poetics, and the origin
of Descartes's insights. But always the tone is
questioning, personal, free of bombast.
Scott has juggled three careers: poet, left-wing
investigative journalist, and university professor.
The contradictions between these endeavors is one
of the themes that run through the poem. In part
III, section xii, he asks:
but if we write poetry
how not to misrepresent
the great conspiracy
of organized denial
we call civilization?
To write or teach poetry is a cultural act, an
act that leads the historian/journalist in Scott to
question the role of art and culture in a world
increasingly run by ruthless capitalists,
undercover agents and drug smugglers:
…you could lay prize-winning volumes
of poetry from here to Walnut Creek
and in how many of them
could you find the seminal words
DFS or debt exposure
or even CIA?
At least at this point in the poem, the poet
acknowledges that he remains "split-minded."
But Scott is not an academic or purely
confessional poet, content to live with the irony
of his internal contradictions. He writes that
"…we are adrift / in an ocean of
non-commitment" (IV.ii) and he is not about to be
one more rudderless poet. He demands more of
himself, and announces this demand at the beginning
of Part IV: "And now for something a bit more
serious."
The penultimate section of the book confronts
"the simplest truth / the rich are getting
richer / the poor poorer" (IV.i,
emphasis in original). Scott announces that this
section will be "a poem that looks at / the eye in
the triangle // above the blunted pyramid" on U.S.
currency, symbol of "our current faith / … and
its temple the Federal Reserve." (IV.i.). Scott's
analysis of the U.S. role in the new world order
focuses on the most undemocratic of our
institutions, the Federal Reserve Bank and the CIA,
and their hidden complicity with the illegal drug
trade.
Although I am in sympathy with the need for what
Ed Sanders calls "investigative poetry," I found
much of the economic theory and analysis of recent
history in this section dry. What saves it for me
is when Scott turns his reflective gaze back on his
own participation in the New Left, especially its
excess of revolutionary rhetoric ("revolution as
social lobotomy") symbolized by the death of friend
and prison lawyer Faye Stender at the hands of a
former inmate, and the New Left's disrespect for
the basic institutions of democracy, including the
seminal thinking of Adams and Jefferson, who Scott
cites as guiding thinkers. Here Scott movingly
evokes the activist's dilemma: how to confront the
range of injustice and abuse without becoming
hardened with hatred or vitiated by despair:
It is easy to hate our enemies
who exploit us and pollute our atmosphere
But one must come to see
that there is no "other"
It is greed hatred and delusion
that we need to overcome
(IV.v, emphasis in original)
The last section of the poem, like the last
movement of a symphony, recapitulates the twin
themes of personal vulnerability and a
confrontation with history. The first subsection is
an extended love poem to his wife, Ronna, who
…taught me to listen
to the emotions which rest on my heart
like the hushed mists
hanging over this dark September lake
(V.i.)
At age seventy, theirs is inevitably "a love
facing death." Here Scott finds consolation in the
central Buddhist teaching
of the First Noble Truth
love opening hearts to joy
opens them also to pain
the unloved never experience
for which they are not to be envied
(emphasis in original)
The second subsection of Part V opens with a
dream of the poet standing naked and terrified of
the height on a fire escape, a dream which, upon
waking, he comes to see as symbolic of his fear
that his "inadequacy / as the poem begins to finish
/ getting nowhere final" (V.ii.) lies exposed.
Nonetheless, the poet moves tentatively toward some
resolution between the personal and the political,
asserting that "inner and outer enlightenment /
depend on each other // both of them lost / when
they are not dialogical." In a statement
that foreshadows the terrorist attacks, Scott
describes our present moment of "…secular
capitalism / and its mimetic offspring /secular
communism // facing the theocratic
alternative / of shariah and
jihad" (emphasis in original). As if
speaking to all who are traumatized by the violence
unleashed by that clash, Scott asserts that
as the fullness of noon
is the beginning of nightfall
so darkness of experience
is the beginning of insight
(V.iii.)
The core of this insight is the affirmation of a
path of the heart. Scott turns to the Kaballah of
his wife's Jewish tradition to express the
necessary shift from din, the archetype of
judgment, to chesed, the archetype of
loving-kindness. Both our personal grief and our
grief for the fate of all mankind lead us to
compassion, and compassion leads us to a middle
path between our lofty ideals ("the mind in
heaven") and our earthbound reality, where joy is
transient and grief inevitable. "…May
everyone // experience such breathing /
moments" Scott writes of dancing naked with
his wife on a moonlit balcony overlooking Lake
Como. And then: "…this / now // already gone."
It is a kind of lyric blessing on our lives, hemmed
in as they are by history and our own
mortality.
In my practice as a psychotherapist, I was
struck by the dislocation my patients felt as the
events of September 11, 2001, shattered their
personal worlds of joy and sorrow. "How can l
continue to talk about my problems at a time like
this?" they seemed to be asking. I recommend
Minding the Darkness to all who struggle to
make sense of our lives, lived as they are in the
twin universes of selfhood and history.
David Shaddock's After Blake won the
Ruah Power of Poetry Prize for a chapbook of
spiritual poems. His most recent non-fiction books
are From Impasse to Intimacy and
Contexts and Connections. He practices
psychotherapy in Oakland.
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