Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

Right now, I feel the history and weight of human conflict. Nobel laureate Albert Camus wrote “In the face of so much suffering, if art insists on being a luxury, it will also be a lie.” For over thirty years, I have returned to these words from his lecture “Create Dangerously,” given at the University of Uppsala in Sweden in late 1957. In times of global crises, I reacquaint myself to argue Camus’s finer points and increasingly find his remarks pertinent and weighty as they relate to the artist’s conscience during times of political volatility.

Undeniably someone somewhere presently is facing an ethnic hatred; someone else feels they have been given permission to hate them and therefore, ethnic hatred is on the rise. Someone somewhere is being persecuted, and someone is attempting to assert their rage through misguided and extreme violence. Someone somewhere is a traumatized survivor of that violence. As a pacifist and poet, I am jolted by an atmosphere in which language is no longer a viable option to settle issues. On multiple continents, our planet is witnessing large-scale massacres, competing perceptions of humanness, and as always, with it, a very powerful parallel struggle of words that results in a repressive environment.

Amid deep-seated hostilities that flare to remind us that war blinds entrenched enemies to the possibility of our collective moral imagination to resolve conflicts, Camus’ clear articulation of the pressure on artists comes back to me. In the face of such bitterness, society asks, “Where are the poets?” Camus notes they are forced to spiritually confront the relevance of their art. He says, “If they speak up, they are criticized and attacked. If they become modest and keep silent, they are vociferously blamed for their silence. In the midst of such din the writer cannot hope to remain aloof in order to pursue the reflections and images that are dear to him.”

With great courage, writers, activists, and poets choose to speak for peace and the value of human life; yet they face being ostracized and harassed for their views. Today’s poem reminds me of the value of ethical resistance and the valor of asserting a fundamental belief in life.

The Book of Barely Imagined Beings
by Ailish Hopper

How quietly we line up 
To break the law. Strangers, 
Arm-in-arm, so freeway cars must stop; 

Car bumpers rock, caliper-
Piston-stopped; the sun dissembles, 
The tarmac melts; 

Cops circling their vans 
To kettle us. Like wandering clouds, 
Students sent forth from home;

With no more shelter, we walk in the mist,
Get wet. I speak up 
At my job, receive a warning. Every revolution 

Tests a surface, 
Click, opens a lock. Outside
Can’t see in:

The ten thousand shatterings --- weeping child 
On lap, father’s shush; front-lawns’ 
Blaze, you don’t belong --- we hold gently
In our palms. Free. The lion for real,

Ginsberg called it. There’s a space 
Between someday and never

Called nuisance

Where we stand. A bright gap. A tenderness.

"The Book of Barely Imagined Beings" by Ailish Hopper. Used by permission of the poet.