Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

On a recent return flight to Nashville, I secured a window seat. I looked out as the jet sped up the runway, as the nose pointed skyward, and the earth receded. That’s when the fantasy began. My whole life I have imagined a world without war.

Pitched in the clouds with stretches of prairies, mountains, and cityscapes below, it is easy to imagine peace. Maybe it’s the serenity of the cabin at take-off. Maybe an in-the-air perspective diminishes our disagreements. Absent the visibility of people, I am thrust into the sublime understanding that our conflicts are comparatively small. From above, what I see is a planet in need of care.

Yet, “Earth’s the right place for love.” wrote a famous poet. Leaving it in flights of fancy avoids a very serious and fundamental duty. Amidst our ideological, religious, and political differences, we must work to engender kindness and tenderness on our planet. What obstructs this responsibility, it seems to me, is an unyielding quest for dominant power — an unwillingness to carry forward the gains of what we once marched for, and what others imagined in their poems and works of art. Generations of artists and activists have fought for mutual compassion and unity. Instead of steering towards those principles, our global and national politics have embraced reactionary gridlock. I observe a lot of spectacle and “my team against your team,” with smatterings of egomaniacal and hurtful rantings.

We once believed in the notion of mutual respect. We spread acceptance of each person’s unique self as an underpinning of living in a pluralistic society. We made a commitment to decency and communal care. Maybe, we still do.

Today’s poem imagines harmony as a well-earned state of existence, where our past struggles are within sight, but a halcyon sense of peace rules.

Vision from the Blue Plane-Window
by Ernesto Cardenal, translated by Jonathan Cohen

In the round little window, everything is blue,
land bluish, blue-green, blue
                                       (and sky)
           everything is blue
blue lakes and lagoons
                              blue volcanoes
while farther off the land looks bluer
          blue islands in a blue lake.
This is the face of the land liberated. 
And where all the people fought, I think:
                                                           for love!
To live without the hatred
                                     of exploitation.
To love one another in a beautiful land
so beautiful, not only in itself
                              but because of the people in it,
above all because of the people in it.
That’s why God gave us this beautiful land
for the society in it.
And in all those blue places they fought, suffered
                            for a society of love
                                       here in this land.

One patch of blue looks more intense…
And I thought I was seeing the sites of all the battles there,
and of all the deaths,
behind that small, round windowpane
                                                            blue
                                               all the shades of blue.

“Vision from the Blue Plane-Window” by Ernesto Cardenal, translated by Jonathan Cohen from PLURIVERSE © 2009, Jonathan Cohen. Used by permission of New Directions.