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A Poet's Protest: An Address by W.S. Merwin at SUNY, Buffalo, October 1970

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   And at the head of my own hurried and necessarily incomplete statement I would like to quote (correctly, I hope, because I am doing it from memory) a question which I think must be described as rhetorical, from the Stoic Epictetus:

   "Can the soldiers' oath be compared to ours?   For they have sworn to obey Caesar before everything, but we to respect ourselves first of all."

   [The above reminds me of the frantic flag-waving that goes on in this country, no matter what the context, no matter how absurd and even thoughtless it might seem at times.   We may also recall the endless debates over vote-bank non-issues such as prayer in school, flag-burning, and of course the pledge of allegiance that sometimes dominated the tenure of Bush the Elder.   Such mechanical practices might well have had slight justifications at some point in their enactment, but adhering to anachronistic practices (with non-cerebral slogans such as My country right or wrong or Freedom is not free) is as far removed from free-thinking as one might imagine.   These practices are the perfect foil for the corporate- military complex to maintain its stranglehold upon all free thought in this country, or all efforts at holding government or business (rather often both being the same) accountable for domestic or international crimes.   Not much attention is given to the fact that "under God" was not originally intended to be part of the pledge of allegiance in a secular-minded nation.   Indeed, so vastly and so frequently are the lines grayed between Church and State, and the political pandering to the religious right is so indistinguishable in the duopoly and its unperturbed robots, that this nation might as well rightly call itself a Theocracy, if not other appropriate designations except Democracy.]                 

   Let me deal first with a few minor quibbles.   Legal language presumably has a precision of its own, perhaps even when it sounds -- as it does here -- to mean not, but blunder round about a meaning.   What are these duties of a visiting lecturer which I am to discharge faithfully, in the opinion of heaven knows who among the politicians of this sovereign state?   I asked no favor of them, and I am not grateful to them for being put in a position in which it might appear as though I had.   I was asked to come here.   It seems to me that I am, at the moment, faithfully discharging my duty in addressing anyone, including myself: I am trying, in a given situation, to tell the truth.   As for the reading or speaking of my poems, I will not be accountable to these faceless worthies on that subject for the sake of money, even though it were more money than they can pretend to command.  

   Next, the signer pledges himself to "support" these two constitutions.   I take the provision seriously -- perhaps more seriously than the framer of the oath.   And I have to confess, for one thing, that I am not at the moment deeply conversant with the constitution of the State of New York, and would scarcely have had time to study it properly between being told the conditions under which I might be paid, and this evening.   I have a longer acquaintance -- of an amateur sort -- with the Constitution of the United States.   It is one of many subjects that we are frequently told should be left to professionals to interpret -- unless it's a question of swearing to support it, despite the limitations of our private understanding.   Speaking from my own limitations, I cannot believe that the framers of the Constitution of the United States meant it to be a humiliating experience to be an American citizen.   I find the existence of this oath, and the demand to sign it, humiliating, and I would find it still more shaming if I were to sign it, in these circumstances.   It seems to me, in my position as an ordinary, relatively helpless citizen who has never sought public office, that I could not better support the Constitution of the United States -- whatever about it I respect, and whatever its authors meant to protect -- than by refusing to sign a statement which is clearly a small legislative outrage against individual liberty, perpetrated in its name.

   I believe that what the legislators who framed and adopted this condition had in mind was not the Constitution but only the interpretation of it that suited their immediate convenience.   I am far from sure that I could promise to support that, when they apparently saw no inconsistency between the Bill of Rights, and the loyalty oath in question, in a situation like this.

   I know that someone can usually be paid to argue more quickly, more cleverly, more deviously, probably more convincingly, than the ordinary citizen.   In a society based on buying and persuading to buy, this is phenomenon that we watch daily, and that compounds the temptation to despair.

   [The above lines from the Poet Laureate, speak a profound truth essential to Western civilization.   We may recall here Gandhi's immortal quip when asked what he thought of Western civilization, and his characteristically brilliant answer, "It would be a great idea."   Trade, or the acquisition of wealth by any means necessary, has been the hallmark of Western civilization throughout history.   The barbarity and savagery exercised in that quest has been unspeakable and immeasurable.   An entire library can be readily filled up with accounts of this relentless scourge upon humanity.   Yet, ironically, it is the West that reserves for itself, on the strength of its largely ill-gotten prosperity, to lecture people around the world about civil and cultural values.   Or, worse by far, about democracy.   In India, from the late 1600s, it became apparent that the motley group led by Thomas Roe, in the garb of The East India Company traders, had intentions far more sinister than to acquire permits from the Emperor Jahangir to establish a small trading outpost on the subcontinent.   In retrospect, if only Jahangir had learnt the necessary lessons from Montezuma and the many other victims of Western treachery.   I recall the famous Bengali aphorism from my childhood that summed up the nefarious intent of empire:   (In translation) The Scales of the Tradesman, before long, turned into the imperial Scepter of the Empress .     America's entire cultural life, especially what I observe in these recent decades, consists of virtually nothing other than massive bouts of buying and selling, from the shopping malls (where goods are acquired, more often than not, for therapeutic purposes to fill up largely empty lives) to the bell-ringing on Wall Street, a ritual signifying plunder on a massive scale for humans around the world.   Alarmingly, this soul-destroying virus is spreading rapidly around the world in this age of rapid communications.]      

One virtue of the situation, perhaps, is that it drives us back -- if we had needed to be driven back -- to things that cannot be bought.   I was asked to come here not because I am, in fact, a visiting lecturer (that was simply the category in which I was put, for administrative purposes) but because those who invited me thought of me as a poet.   What does that have to do with buying and selling?   If I am a poet -- and I say that with complete seriousness -- what responsibilities, what loyalties does that entail?   I hope I wouldn't presume to prescribe them, for anyone else.   Occasionally, in my own case, I think I know.   I remember Bertrand Russell saying that if a poet can't be independent, no one else can be.   I'm not sure he had that the right way around.   It seems to me that insofar as a man prizes some spring of independence -- independence from the cant of economics and the tyranny of history -- in himself, the hope of being fully human, which is integral to all poetry, remains alive.   As for me, whatever independence I can bear seems precious to me, something not to be sold for a bit of money, or a bit of security, or the approval of a few of the leaders of a corrupt and desperate society.

   [The above portion, to me, is the most profound of this fine essay.   In the dismal first decade of the new century, I have often hoped to see prominent voices speak boldly and courageously against the corporate-military enterprise and its criminal rampages worldwide.   I have hoped that individuals empowered to make a difference in the face of brazen, bullying, tyrannical forces, would speak words of Truth, stridently and trenchantly, as did Rabindranath Tagore, India's greatest poet-philosopher and timeless sage, and Bertrand Russell, whom Merwin quotes.   Indeed, it is given to poets and thinkers, more than anyone else in society, to reveal the truth, to exercise the freedom that in fiction was given only to the little boy who actually "saw" the emperor's new clothes.   This poetic freedom was so important to Tagore, that in one of his rather well-known poems, dedicated to the concept of freedom, he maintains, Where the words come out from the depth of Truth; Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit; Where the mind is led forward by Thee into ever widening thought and action.   This was the Heaven of freedom Tagore dreamt of for his country (and therefore his people).   In such a world, such narrow domestic walls (and even worse, politically motivated) as pledges of allegiance would have no place.]           

I am not what is sometimes called "politically minded".   Politics in themselves bore me profoundly, and the assumption of the final reality of the power to manipulate other men's lives merely depresses me.   But injustice, official brutality, and the destruction on a vast scale of private liberties are all around me and I cannot pretend that it's not so, nor that I can accept such things, when I have a chance to say no to them.   Layman that I am, Section 3002 of the Education Law of the State of New York, as amended seems to me a deliberate degradation of all that the authors of the Bill of Rights had in mind.   It is not really surprising to me that such a situation should obtain at a time when the laws of the United States, as presently interpreted, apparently condone the continuation of an undeclared, racist war conducted against small countries -- heaven knows how many of them at this moment -- half way around the world, and when the laws of the State of New York permit police entry without warning, and the holding, month after month, without trial, of the Panthers in New York City.  

   [And here Merwin raises questions pertinent to gross government abuses of civil and constitutional rights. What is even more frightening is how much worse, by far, US corporate/military/government tyranny has become in the decades since the 1970s.   Indefinite detentions, searches without warrants, wire-tapping private conversations, extra-judicial killings anywhere and everywhere, blatant disregard for human rights, including the rights of protesters (this is now going on routinely, using bludgeons, tasers, and other lethal instruments, next to which tear gas seems almost civilized.   The Occupy Movement protesters are writing the sordid history of empire's brutality every day; at this very moment, it is going on in Chicago where the imperial Masters, cloaked as NATO, or Group of 8, or 16, or however else such tyrannical groups are designated, are gathered to hatch further means of taking power and justice away from human beings).   The previous list does not even include torture, violations of the Geneva Conventions, violations of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, violations of all other standards of civilized behavior.   This, I am sure Poet Laureate Merwin finds with the deepest sorrow, is the face of the U.S. today, no longer behind the scenes, no longer via "covert" operations, no longer under a pious faà §ade.   From Rachel Corrie to Bradley Manning and the numberless many, Americans and others in the world in much greater numbers, are being subjected to such savage and blithely naked savagery.]     

Is it, after all, those who protest these circumstances, or those who perpetuate them, who are displaying the real contempt for the Constitution of the United States -- and, for all I know, that of the State of New York?   I hope there is never a better time to say that I believe that the insistence on individual liberty, and poetry itself, rise from the same source -- what Keats called the truth of the imagination, and what others have called the human spirit.   And I hope I may never hesitate in placing my loyalty to that source, as and when I recognize it (for no one else can recognize it for me) before my loyalty to any state document or institution.

   These, at any rate, are some of the reasons why I refused to sign.   I have spoken of them to no one else here, and the responsibility for what I have said cannot be laid in whole or in part upon any member of the faculty of this university.   Now I am going to read anyway, and you will all know what I mean if I call it a free reading.   

Signed, W.S. Merwin

 

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Monish R. Chatterjee received the B.Tech. (Hons) degree in Electronics and Communications Engineering from I.I.T., Kharagpur, India, in 1979, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering, from the University of Iowa, (more...)
 

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