MEDITATIONS ON ACTIVISM   

Tikkun Magazine, May/June 2010

MEDITATIONS ON ACTIVISM

MOSAIC ORPHEUS by Peter Dale Scott
McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2009

Review by Alan Williamson

The last quarter of the twentieth century was not the strongest period for American political poetry. True, the identity-experiences of many minorities entered the poetic dialogue almost for the first time. But few poets attempted, as Lowell and Ginsberg had, to speak for, to, and about the polity as a whole.

Peter Dale Scott was one of the few. A former Canadian diplomat, and a celebrated writer about conspiracies and the dark underside of American politics, he brought unusual credentials to the task. And, indeed, his landmark book-length poem Coming to Jakarta was triggered by his inability to publish, in standard academic venues, some fairly incontrovertible evidence about American involvement in the coup and massacre in Indonesia in 1965. But as the poem evolved, it became an extended meditation on how political activism and political impotence mesh with aesthetic, familial, and religious life commitments. No other poet I know of has treated this subject so poignantly and honestly.

Mosaic Orpheus is the latest in a series of books extending this project. The political material has become ever more chancy, scary, and ambiguous. The long poem "The Tao of 9/11," if I am reading it correctly, entertains the possibility that the Chechen bombings in Moscow, the war in Kosovo, and the September 11 attacks were all encouraged by forces in the international drug milieu, for the simple reason that there are

 

                        Two kinds of businesses:

                        those which flourish from peace

                        and the strengthening of law

                        and those which require the opposite

 

                        zones of incessant chaos

 

Scott wonders out loud whether our reluctance to believe such things makes us "like the good Germans / not thinking about who caused the Reichstag fire." But he himself doubts, remembering the betrayals and inscrutable motives of informants he had relied on in the past.

In a world where such untouchable (and unprovable) influences may underlie the obvious fact "of increasing superwealth / and declining average income," Scott feels "Uncertain as always / whether this republic is past saving." As he becomes increasingly disillusioned about the possibilities of institutional politics, he is more and more drawn toward religion and (in "Secular Prayer" and some of his recent prose) toward faith-based utopian hopes. In this, as he well knows, he resembles some of the great ancestors he often invokes -- the Dante of Paradiso, Milton, Pound. Scott's religion is of a peculiarly attractive kind, rooted in Buddhist meditation but reaching out empathetically toward his wife's Judaism, his childhood Christianity, and Islam. I suspect many readers of Tikkun, like me, will be delighted to encounter it, after the militant secularism that afflicted the Left during the Bush years. Whether or not we believe it can transform politics, it certainly cannot hurt our political behavior. Scott's lovely poems about meditation ("Breathing Exercise" and "Commuting to the Land of Medicine Buddha") are also important, it seems to me, because they take American Buddhist poetry a step beyond the earlier, Gary Snyder tradition, in concentrating less on moments of enlightenment than on the troubled Western ego struggling, breath by breath, with distraction and psychological fears.

Finally, I wouldn't want to leave this book without noting that some of the best poems, from a purely lyrical point of view, are the more personal ones, that don't try to transcend the facts of aging and loss. "Pelican" is a small masterpiece, the dying bird's

 

                                      small eye          open

                          blinking slowly once or twice

 

                        not for terror

                                    but in some bardo where

                          there is much to contemplate

 

                        a distance making it

                                    closer to us near death

                          than was possible in life

 

Other very fine poems of this kind include the elegies for Scott's first wife, Maylie, the two sonnets for Raquel Scherr, and "Occitanian Spring." Scott remains, above all, a humane poet. Whether we see him grieving about loss, fidgeting on his meditation cushion, or bewildered by his own conspiracy theories, his deepest subject is always how to live.

 

 

Alan Williamson is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of California, Davis. His most recent books are The Pattern More Complicated: New and Selected Poems (Chicago) and Westernness: A Meditation (Virginia).

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Williamson, Alan. 2010. Meditations on Activism. Tikkun 25(3): 66