Leaving a Cruel Culture -

For Annie

A friend asks me, What is the Story that needs to be told at this time? 

Synchronicity.  I glance over three letters in the mail today from strangers who each thank me for the ways we have interconnected in the past.  Last night, a participant in my writing class read us a poem he had found in a book he had been gifted from the library of a friend after her death.  An hour later, her photograph showed up on his random screen saver. It was W S Merwin’s amazing poem, Thanks, which ends

we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
thank you we are saying and waving
dark though it is.

and so I pay attention.  One woman came to study with me 30 years ago and I never heard from her again. Now she is retiring from teaching and is writing a book: Tracking the Miraculous ... “it’s focus is synchronicity...” she writes. 

A second person writes me a long letter having discovered that the woman, who created this poster which has been hanging in his house for decades, is alive. 

“It was always beautiful, “he says, “and life affirming.”  I am glad he found something beautiful, whatever it was, for his 15,000+ word letter –  “ I’ve enclosed some things about me mostly because, and despite my lack of happiness and success, it amuses me to have people read them and say to themselves, ‘who the hell has sent this – and why?’” –  tells the heartbroken story of someone who has had a life of alienation and suffering. He wrote, “I have come to accept that I am alone in the world.  There is no one who needs me to be alive.” 

What is it in our culture that creates such loneliness?  Why have we forgotten village and tribal life of mutual caring?

Another letter writer thanks me for an act of healing I extended to her, a stranger who was a friend of a friend.  The writer had been suffering, so one extends what one can.  I imagine that many acts of healing from others and her own efforts led to the note of thanks saying she is cancer free now.  Why do we think that acts of kindness can’t be medicines?  

As it happened, the extraordinary artist, Andrea Bowers, told me of her friend’s suffering; she is also the friend of the woman who wrote the new book, Tits Up, which the second writer read which introduced him to the poster. So we are all interconnected – if only we lived accordingly as do the trees and actually all the beings in the natural world as interconnection is its essence.  

Letter writer 3 sent a gift, a film she had made in 2010, Kenneth Rexroth - The Signature of All Things.  One former student who is missing from the film is Sam Hamill who, himself, became an extraordinary poet and founded Copper Canyon Press.  Sam was my student, though he knew more about poetry than I did, through the accident of needing a degree when I was teaching creative writing at Los Angeles Valley College in 1966.  He had learned so much of what he knew from the kindness, wisdom and poetry that Rexroth had extended to him when he returned broken to the US from the Vietnam war.  

The Vietnam war broke Sam Hamill and poetry restored him.  When we say the Vietnam war broke him, we mean this country, this culture, and our war obsessions, broke him.  We mean cruel, munitions focused, money focused, privilege focused, domination focused cultural values that are disconnected from the natural world. These extremely individualistic values determine the way we live and devastate the earth, poison the waters, the soil and the air, and are leading us directly toward climate dissolution and extinction.  You, who are reading this, know what I am talking about because you are watching with horror as I am what our government is supporting as the Israeli military cruelly slaughters the Palestinian people.  

Today’s headlines:

“Israeli air strikes on a UN-operated school sheltering war-displaced Palestinians in central Gaza killed at least 33 people, including 12 women and children.” Israel’s army says Hamas fighters were also in the shelter.

“Dozens of people, including children, were slaughtered while they slept” at a UN school attacked by Israeli forces, Oxfam International says. “Israel’s Military Defends Strike on U.N. School Building, Saying Its Target Was 30 Militants. “Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters were hiding inside three classrooms,” a military spokesman said. 

Rexroth clearly understood the consequences of this culture as you can read in the Bad Old Days which have lead directly to these worsening current days, to times that are crueler and more dangerous than anything we have known, leading directly to extinction of the more than human and the human which looms ominously.

The Bad Old Days 
By Kenneth Rexroth 

The summer of nineteen eighteen   
I read The Jungle and The
Research Magnificent. That fall   
My father died and my aunt   
Took me to Chicago to live.   
The first thing I did was to take   
A streetcar to the stockyards.   
In the winter afternoon,   
Gritty and fetid, I walked
Through the filthy snow, through the   
Squalid streets, looking shyly   
Into the people’s faces,
Those who were home in the daytime.   
Debauched and exhausted faces,   
Starved and looted brains, faces   
Like the faces in the senile   
And insane wards of charity   
Hospitals. Predatory
Faces of little children.
Then as the soiled twilight darkened,   
Under the green gas lamps, and the   
Sputtering purple arc lamps,   
The faces of the men coming
Home from work, some still alive with   
The last pulse of hope or courage,   
Some sly and bitter, some smart and   
Silly, most of them already   
Broken and empty, no life,   
Only blinding tiredness, worse   
Than any tired animal.   
The sour smells of a thousand   
Suppers of fried potatoes and   
Fried cabbage bled into the street.   
I was giddy and sick, and out   
Of my misery I felt rising   
A terrible anger and out
Of the anger, an absolute vow.   
Today the evil is clean
And prosperous, but it is   
Everywhere, you don’t have to   
Take a streetcar to find it,
And it is the same evil.
And the misery, and the
Anger, and the vow are the same.

No surprise that Hamill influenced by such a soul teacher as Rexroth, organized Poets Against the War, and conducted a reading at the White House gates on February 12, 2003 in addition to arranging over 160 public readings in many different countries and almost all of the 50 states. He ultimately gathered the work of over 9,000 poets to oppose the war in Iraq.  

When I awaken every morning, I check the news to see if we are still alive and if so, whether we still have a chance to change our ways of life that are so brutish and banal, with our stupefying celebratory culture and obsession with weaponry and power, the culture that justified Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that imagined Agent Orange, and currently developed the AI programs Lavender and Where’s Daddy – thank you, Google – which no doubt were responsible for the savage attack on the UN school last night, while we pretend to seek a cease-fire in order to seek votes.  It is all so sordid.  An AI funder, stated that he does not think humans will be annihilated by AI by 2030.  But, he says, continuing his investments, 2060 is likely.

Gentle Boy, my beloved maybe wolf /Husky, calls me to the kitchen for his 6 o’clock snack. Ask anyone who knows him whether or not GB can tell time as he interrupts me whatever I am doing at 6 pm, or close enough, even accommodating the shift to Daylight Saving Time or the return to Pacific Standard Time.  Animals are so much more intelligent than we have the capacity to understand.

I go to the kitchen, and look across the patio and the hills wild with golden sunflowers, and purple sage, where the beginning of the snake spirit of a white cloud creeps into the canyon, tender against the Santa Monica mountains still rising green this June.  Such beauty.  How do we preserve it?  

Now, I return here and continue writing.  Where are we?  Oh yes, I am recounting reading the homicidal news each morning and my response which is imagining how I take another step out of the culture toward a life that honors the Earth first, and loves Life and cherishes it, and doesn’t murder or poison or destroy. 

What is the Story that needs to be told at this time?

The Story that needs to be told is of the process of leaving this mercenary culture that  entrains us toward destruction, that rapes the natural world and expresses unlimited violence toward all beings.  The Story that needs to be told is the one of bearing witness to the horror and corruption of our history and these times and scrutinizing our lives accordingly. It is the Story of the long and exacting process of disengaging, consciously ceasing our involvement in what injures and destroys.

It is the Story of finding other beautiful ways. Imagine that we take the original dictum that once underlay true medicine – First, do no harm – as the direction for how we live each day.  First do no harm.  Then love life and the Earth immoderately and live accordingly.  May we all live so there is a viable future for all beings.  

And, oh yes, Thank you.  

“thank you
thank you we are saying and waving
dark though it is.”