“Wirklich, ich lebe in finsteren Zeiten!”, some random thoughts on our responsibility as intellectuals / poets / writers / researchers / teachers

“We live in an age which silence is not only criminal but suicidal”, wrote James Baldwin in his “Open Letter to My Sister, Angela Y. Davis”. The year was 1970. I wonder if there has ever been a time when silence was neither criminal nor suicidal. I would like to live there and then, for sure.

In his poem “A leaf, treeless, for Bertolt Brecht” [“Ein Blatt, baumlos, für Berlolt Brecht”] (published posthumously en 1971 in the book Schneepart [Snowpart]), Paul Celan contended that crime lay in any conversation, not only in conversations about trees, as Brecht suggested in his famous “An die Nachgeborenen“. Without trees, every conversation merely repeats what has already been said. (I have a verse from this poem and the tittle of Celan’s answer to it tattooed in my left forearm).

I always wondered what Celan meant by this short poem. Why did he, who still believed in language after all, say that talking about any subject (saying things in general) was nearly a crime? Was he perhaps saying that once everything has been said, talking and doing nothing is criminal? But sometimes saying things out loud is, in itself, an action, and often a very dangerous one. Take for example Rodolfo Walsh’s “Carta abierta a la junta militar” (“Open letter to the Military Junta” 1977, English translation by Arturo Desimone here):

The above are my thoughts on the first anniversary of your infamous government, and I seek to ensure the transmission of my thoughts to the members of this Junta, without any hope of being heard. Although I am certain that I will be persecuted, I am also faithful to the commitment I made a long time ago, the commitment to bear witness in the difficult hours.
Rodolfo Walsh. – Citizen Identity number: 2845022
Buenos Aires, March 24 1977.

 

The next day he was murdered and made disappeared by the mass-murdering machinery put in motion by this same Junta and imported from the French contra-revolutionary methods executed in Algeria.
In an existentialist vein, Baldwin claimed in his letter to Angela Davis that the connection between knowing and acting is normatively necessary:

Some of us, white and Black, know how great a price has already been paid to bring into existence a new consciousness, a new people, an unprecedented nation. If we know, and do nothing, we are worse than the murderers hired in our name.
If we know, then we must fight for your life as though it were our own—which it is—and render impassable with our bodies the corridor to the gas chamber. For, if they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night.

Back to poetry. In 1991, Adrienne Rich retook the poetic and militant conversation started by Brecht in 1939 and wrote this poem, “What Kind of Times Are These”:

 

There’s a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill
and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows
near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted
who disappeared into those shadows.

I’ve walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don’t be fooled
this isn’t a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here,
our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,
its own ways of making people disappear.

I won’t tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods
meeting the unmarked strip of light—
ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise:
I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.

And I won’t tell you where it is, so why do I tell you
anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these
to have you listen at all, it’s necessary
to talk about trees.

I like the point suggested by Rich: even if everything has already been said, that doesn’t mean it has been heard. What has been said a thousand times may still remain unheard-of. I add: even if there is someone listening, that doesn’t mean that they understand; and even if they listen and understand, that doesn’t mean that they care enough about what they are being told.

It is hard to believe in words but maybe there are a few times when talking about it (whatever this “it” is) is a revolutionary action. And sometimes it is the only thing there is to do.

Here’s a picture of some trees in Buenos Aires I took this morning, while lying on the grass to take a break from the disastrous situation we are living now in Argentina under this far-right government and from my daily militancy. (It is not a good picture in aesthetic terms, just my view from somewhere).