The Politics of Poetic Imagining

"Something may be true in politics which is false in fact." (David Hume)

The American election results have plunged us into the stark realisation, not only that democracy has failed but that it contains within itself the seeds of its own destruction. Of course, we should always have known that. It’s an experiment that has imploded repeatedly throughout history, and Phoenix-like has risen from the ashes in different cultures and forms. But in this age of globalisation, nobody on the planet can escape the consequences of the US elections. We wait in fear and trembling to discover what the impact might be, for ourselves and for our beautiful planet which is already showing signs of irreparable damage to its capacity to sustain so many life forms, including our own.

Yet this may be the krisis that the world needs to shake us out of our complacency. Neoliberalism is a savage ideology, an idolatry even. It conceals its savagery beneath the myth of progress, seducing us with false promises and placating us with the illusion of choice posturing as freedom. By “us” I mean those of us who are not caught up in the wars and tyrannies, the exploitation, poverty and alienation that constitute its shadow side. The system is stronger than it has ever been, but the velvet glove has been stripped away and now the iron fist reveals itself for what it is, so at least there can be no more pretending that this is a viable and just political order.

Social media offers a platform for the rhetoric of dismay, condemnation and defiance by which we deceive ourselves into thinking we are taking a stand and aligning ourselves with the forces of righteousness, but this is a panacea. So long as they let us shout into the void, they can claim that we have freedom of speech.

I am weary of the sound of my own voice. I am weary of all the voices that now howl their disillusionment and despair or, worse, offer passive-aggressive claims of universal love and inclusivity as if that were an antidote to this emergent global order of corruption, misogyny and violence. “I love everybody”, say some memes, giving vent to the soft-focus sentimentality of traumatised liberals. No, you don’t and you can’t. Human love is by nature exclusionary, partial and particular. Only divine love is universal. To tell everybody to be kind, to tell everybody that they are safe with you, to tell everybody that they must love everybody, is a form of bullying that tolerates no disagreement or dissent. It’s an abdication of the common ground of struggle and turmoil wherein every one of us must navigate our own dark capacities for intolerance, envy and rage. It denies the fact that sometimes we must act upon our natural human instinct to defend ourselves and our loved ones against those who would do us harm.

I can’t help but wonder if tyranny is winning because it offers a cathartic outlet for, and even validates, anger and frustration, impotence and resentment, in its manipulation of public opinion to suit its own ends. I knew when I listened to Kamala Harris, just as I knew when I listened to Hillary Clinton, that their optimistic promises of progress issued through cosmetically dentrified smiles (have you noticed how all rich Americans have the same smiles?) were no match for the anarchic aggression of their opponent. The smooth-talking rhetoric of liberal elites has little to say to people who have been impoverished, marginalised and rendered redundant by the beneficiaries of progress. They may believe they have little to lose by opting for a radical alternative. Yes, I believe that they are catastrophically wrong, just as I believe that those who voted for Brexit were catastrophically wrong—and many of them now realise that. But this is not about good and evil, or moral rights and wrongs. It’s about the chaos that begins to emerge when a degenerate political and economic order begins to disintegrate, and people will risk anything so long as it’s not more of the same.

Anyway, let me nip that rant in the bud.

For all its risks and failures, the worldwide web can be a place of encounter and enrichment. There are sites I go to again and again when I need to be inspired and broken open anew to different ways of interpreting this wild, perplexing world. Pádraig Ó Tuama’s Poetry Unbound is one, and Maria Popova’s The Marginalian is another.

The other morning I went for a walk through an old churchyard carpeted in autumn leaves. As I walked, I reflected on David Whyte’s poem, “Sometimes”, and the poet’s accompanying commentary in a Marginalian post.

SOMETIMES
by David Whyte

Sometimes
if you move carefully
through the forest,
breathing
like the ones
in the old stories,
who could cross
a shimmering bed of leaves
without a sound,
you come to a place
whose only task
is to trouble you
with tiny
but frightening requests,
conceived out of nowhere
but in this place
beginning to lead everywhere.
Requests to stop what
you are doing right now,
and
to stop what you
are becoming
while you do it,
questions
that can make
or unmake
a life,
questions
that have patiently
waited for you,
questions
that have no right
to go away.

Whyte reads the poem and meditates upon what it means to walk silently until the questions we push to the margins are allowed to find their way into our consciousness.

He speaks about the need to stop our surface conversations in order to write poetry—conversations where we’re in competition, where we feel besieged and fragmented. We need to “drop down to a central image or tonality in the body or in your understanding, that can hold a whole constellation of individual qualities together that circulate around you at the edge of your ordinary everyday life, and this is called the poetic imagination.” This means deepening the conversation by stopping the one we’re having now, in order to “drink from a deeper well, in order to come down onto ground which leads you into a new place.” He speaks of:

the invitation to the understanding that almost always you are tiptoeing into an epoch of your life that you don’t understand. You think you understand it, but actually, what is going to occur is unannounced, and the person you’re going to become is unannounced. You’re actually going to cross the threshold without being able to name or speak the stranger that you’re going to become, and the strange and beckoning life that calls you. … A life sincerely followed is always surprising, and always leads you into places that you did not feel that you could either enter or that you could deserve. Part of the ability to hold the silence as we move and as we tiptoe or walk or take our pilgrim path from one epoch of our lives to another is the ability to not name things too early, and to allow yourself to be surprised as to where you’ve arrived.

As I swished through the dewy autumn leaves in the silent serenity of the graveyard, I thought of how often I’m drawn into debates that generate more heat than light, that create a sense of alienation rather than encounter, especially in these fragmented and frightening times.

The poetic imagination is not sentimental. It allows us to speak of love’s capacity to wound as well as to heal. It accommodates death as well as life. It releases us into linguistic spaces in which speech is not free but costly, not affirming of the self but calling the self into question. Maybe when the language of politics has been evacuated of meaning, we need those who have the gift of poetic imagining to guide our quest towards some shared vision of a possible future rooted in a hope that is more real and truthful than the fantasy of progress.

I follow George Saunders’ Substack, “Story Club”:

A Slightly Altered Course

This week, he reflects on the tensions that emerge when his posts on writing and literature stray into political observations. His solution is to try to separate the two—the “political” and the “literary”—though the line between them is nebulous. In some ways, that’s what I’ve tried to do in my Substack sites. In this site, “Listening to the Essence of Things”, I allow free reign to a fluid voice of yearning and searching, while my other site, “Through a Glass Darkly”, explores more controversial and challenging questions to do with debates around the politics of feminism and gender identity. Some liberal pundits are beginning to acknowledge that the latter might have played a more significant role in winning votes for Trump than they realised.

As I listened to David Whyte and reflected on George Saunders’ post, I felt less anxious than I usually do about the many different voices that joust for my attention. I write poetry and novels; I write theology in academic and popular mode; I get drawn into polemical arguments in social media and then wish I hadn’t; I write so much more in every genre inside my head than I ever set down in writing. Such is life: messy, conflicted, polyphonic, paradoxical.

I’ve been reading Irish Murdoch’s short essay, “The Darkness of Practical Reason”, in a collection of her writings titled Existentialists and Mystics. The essay is a review of Stuart Hampshire’s 1966 book, Freedom of the Individual. Murdoch criticises Hampshire for failing to recognise the ways in which imagination shapes our values and blurs any clear distinctions between “active and passive, reason and will”. She quotes David Hume, who observed that “something may be true in politics which is false in fact.” What words of wisdom for our time!

Murdoch writes of the importance of recognising the role played by imagination in ethics and politics:

We have already partly willed our world when we come to look at it; and we must admit moral responsibility for this “fabricated” world, however difficult it may be to control the process of fabrication. … The world which we confront is not just a world of “facts” but a world upon which our imagination has, at any given moment, already worked; and although such working may often be “fantasy” and may constitute a barrier to our seeing “what is really there”, this is not necessarily so.

Murdoch calls fantasy “bad imagining”, and she writes of willing ourselves to imagine differently:

The formulation of beliefs about other people often proceeds and must proceed imaginatively and under a direct pressure of will. We have to attend to people, we may have to have faith in them, and here justice and realism may demand the inhibition of certain pictures, the promotion of others. Each of us lives and chooses within a partly private, partly fabricated world, and although any particular belief might be shown to be “merely fantastic” it is false to suggest that we could, even in principle, “purge” the world we confront of these personal elements. Nor is there any reason why we should. To be a human being is to know more than one can prove, to conceive of a reality which goes “beyond the facts: in these familiar and natural ways. … We evaluate not only by intentions, decisions, choices (the events Hampshire describes), but also, and largely, by the constant quiet work of attention and imagination.

Murdoch was writing in 1966, before social media had the power to shape politics by the fantasists and fanatics who prey upon the imagination. A criticism levelled against the Democrats in the recent election was that they lacked a convincing story. One could say that they did not invite people to will a different story about the possibilities of politics for delivering a better life. A focus on single-issue policies, an optimistic campaign based on vacuous generalisations that did little to address the fears and anxieties of ordinary people, failed to ignite the kind of populist passion that Trump is able to arouse with such manipulative ease. That seems to me to be the challenge we all face now: to ask how optimism and fantasy might give way to hope and imagination, by following poetic pathways through language, thought, and politics.

George Saunders allows himself “one final overtly political post”, in which he writes:

I am, above all else, an artist.  As an artist, I am trying to be interested in what has just happened. I am trying to maintain two ideas at once: 1) Most people who voted for Trump are nice people.  (I know this because many close friends and family members voted for him and, well, more than half of voters did), and 2) Our democracy really may be in peril. Trump has repeatedly said things to indicate this and people who worked closely with him the first time have said this. 

So, what I’m trying to figure out is: how do the people who voted for Trump, some of whom I love, not see what I see in him?  And, also, importantly: what am I not seeing, about the way the world looks to them?  I’m not saying that the way they see it is right—I feel very strongly otherwise—but I am saying, or accepting that, yes, it really does look that way to them. 

In Brexit Britain, many of us have made that difficult journey of understanding, not to affirm what may truly be the destructive choices made by our fellow citizens, but to understand that these choices are often an expression of despair and defiance against politics as usual. With Brexit as with Trump’s re-election, there may be dark forces at work, including Russian influences. The politicians who feed upon the suffering of those abandoned by progressive liberalism are cannibalistic in their ruthless ambitions, but the more polarised society becomes, the more they are able to exploit us. Do we condemn and reject, or do we stumble towards some middle ground, a broken middle wherein we might discover the poetics of hope through the politics of empathy?

A quote from Toni Morrison, apparently posted by her publisher, is doing the rounds on social media:

This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.

I do believe that civilization can heal, even if it must go through a long dark dying before it can be reborn in the realm of fragile new possibility. Beauty can change the world, but beauty has a dark and sorrowful dimension. Without that, it’s sentimental kitsch.

Murdoch ends her article by observing that “Ethics and aesthetics are not one, but art is the great clue to morals.” Perhaps, before we ask somebody what their politics are, we should ask them what they love—what books do they read, what music gives them joy, what art speaks to them, where do they find beauty and hope, inspiration and consolation? From such imaginative worlds, politics are reborn.

And, as St Augustine reminds us, we are what we love, so be careful what you love, and be honest about who, what and why you love. If your answer is “everybody”, are you really anybody worth listening to?