Outside one of Paris’s terrorist explosions
Monday
Seeking to articulate a response to the horrors in Paris while knowing that words will invariably come up short, I turned to a W. H. Auden poem that many quoted following the 9-11 attacks. Although Auden later disavowed “September 1, 1939” as “trash”—more on that later—it shows us a great poet grappling with evil unleashed upon the world. In that struggle we may find a model for our own wrestling.
September 1, 1939 saw Hitler’s invasion of Poland, which propelled France and England into World War II. Auden examines how America engaged in self deception, and we in 2015 can look at our own “clever hopes” about the Middle East, especially the hope that we could turn Iraq into a stable democracy by overthrowing Saddam. Instead, we enabled the rise of ISIS.
To say that the past 12 years have functioned as a “low dishonest decade” is an understatement. We can relate to Auden’s “waves of anger and fear/ Circulat[ing] over the bright and darkened lands of the earth” and to “the unmentionable odor of death.” The poem begins with the poet surveying the situation from a seedy bar in Manhattan:
I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odor of death
Offends the September night.
Auden then proffers various theories, both sophisticated and popular, that account for the rise of Linz-born Hitler, and he quotes Thucydides about the way that dictators can triumph over democracy. He notes that what happened in ancient Greece is happening again in 1939, and we ourselves in 2015 need to be on the lookout for hysterical media personalities and politicians who will drive us us to irrational responses (“the enlightenment driven away”):
Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.
Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analyzed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.
In the next stanzas, Auden refers to American isolationism and America’s belief that it is exceptional (“blind skyscrapers use/ Their full height to proclaim/ The strength of Collective man”). Americans also resort to light and music to keep from facing up to their underlying feelings of dread (“The lights must never go out,/The music must always play”). In our present case, I think we also deal with dread by scapegoating our political enemies, lashing out angrily, rather than facing up to our own contributions to the problem, from which we could learn something important (“imperialism’s face/ And the international wrong” stare at us “out of the mirror”):
Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism’s face
And the international wrong.
Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.
While Auden goes on to decry the “windiest militant trash” that our “Important Persons” shout, he then notes that such rhetoric, bad as it is, is not as “crude as our wish.” That wish is our narcissistic desire to be loved alone. We don’t truly care for others—“universal love”–but only for ourselves. That is the “error bred in the bone/Of each woman and each man” and what led to the bitter break-up between two famous ballet dancers. Politicians must cater to our narcissism if they wish to remain in power:
The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.
Who is to awaken us? We can’t rely on the common people, who have their daily routines, and we can’t rely on our leaders, who play out their customary roles. We must therefore look to our poets:
From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
‘I will be true to the wife,
I’ll concentrate more on my work,’
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the dead,
Who can speak for the dumb?
Poets can reach the dead and speak for the dumb because they call us out for our evasions (“the folded lie). Poets can remind us of the monumental choice before us: “We must love one another or die.”
Although Auden would later disavow this line because of how easily it can be turned into a truism, I find myself agreeing with it. Our only hope lies is reaching out to others:
All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.
Auden’s last image is of poems dotting the night like flashes of Morse code. Even if we lie in stupor—and certainly we can feel stupefied by the wild political harangues we hear constantly—the “Just” everywhere are sending out “ironic points of light.” (I assume Auden calls them ironic because they sometimes seem to do no more than accentuate the darkness.) The poet, although composed like all people of desire and body—“of Eros and of dust”—and “beleaguered” like them by “negation and despair,” sends out his own poem as “an affirming flame.”
By the same token, we can turn to that poem for affirmation.
Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.
Did Auden disavow this poem because he felt he was posturing, offering up a romantic hope that would be belied by the horrors of World War II. I can see why the poem might seem trite following the worst war the world has ever seen.
The ultimate sin in the face of evil, however, is yielding to despair. If Auden’s poem helps us recognize and fight against our own stupor, then it will have achieved some of its purpose. I am not yet clear what course of action we, as citizens, should recommend to our leaders about ISIS, but we should inform ourselves as thoroughly as we can and support and resist different proposed responses. We may not be able to do much, but we can at least hang on to the “enlightenment” and resist the “elderly rubbish” that we are sure to hear from political con artists.
