I’m on vacation, so this won’t be much of a post. But I wanted to offer this quote from Claudia Rankine’s striking book Don’t Let Me Be Lonely (subtitled An American Lyric):

The sadness is not really about George Bush or American optimism; the sadness lives in the recognition that a life can not matter. Or, as there are billions of lives, my sadness is alive alongside the recognition that billions of lives never mattered.
—Don’t Let Me Be Lonely (Graywolf, 2004, p. 23)

Claudia read at Goddard a few nights ago. I had been hearing of her work for a while but this book, which I purchased at the event, was my first direct contact with it. I have received the vague impression that her earlier work was “Language-y” or “post-Language-y” or some other version of haute experimentale, in other words more concerned with exploding expectations about communication than with communicating. The new book, then, is said to represent a turn towards the political, toward writing as though language could after all matter in the social world.

Although I liked Claudia’s reading, I received an entirely inadequate sense of the book from it. I didn’t get the fact that the book is a labyrinth; that images of loneliness, death, the vulnerable body, racial hierarchies, and the inevitable mediation of our emotions by “the media” build on one another in a way that seems as crucial to the book’s meaning as does the content of any individual section. For example, the “emotion” that many British people claimed to experience upon the death of Princess Di comes back as the narrator’s reaction to the trial of a child who killed another child and claimed he had simply been playing at being a professional wrestler. The book is clever (though never merely so), studded with footnotes devoted to “facts” which in some cases are poignantly relevant (e.g. “corrected” details about the Nazis’ rules for tattooing concentration camp inmates); in other cases intentionally frivolous (a dream about being at a party with a number of prominent Kennedys prompts a footnote listing the names of all of the Kennedys prominent enough to have been candidates for dream inclusion). It is also relentlessly topical, a feature that seems almost inevitable in a work designed as a meditation on our mediated lives; but it combines the incessant references to news events with allusions to foundational notions of Western culture such as Hegel’s contention that the person who has ceased to fear death is beyond the control of the state.

I’m asking myself about that topicality, and about the strategy of focusing on what America is doing here and now. Part of me says it is the most appropriate approach for those who can be assured of rapid publication. Part of me thinks one ought to take the longer view, as David Wojnarowicz did in titling a hallucinatory memoir of a trip through the southwestern desert “In the Shadow of the American Dream: Soon All This Will Be Picturesque Ruins.” Wojnarowicz’s essay is full of “American” themes (nuclear weapons, automobiles, homophobia) but contains few if any internal references that could pin it down as to decade. I agree with the implication of the paragraph quoted above: that America is only the most evident manifestation of a globalized social disease. “America, great untasting devourer, you’re not the only evil, just the one I know by heart” (in the words of my character Paula Schweike, from The Company of Cannibals).

Speaking of America, I had occasion the other day to reread the Declaration of Independence, the full text of which I had probably not been exposed to since secondary school. The occasion was an airplane journey on the Fourth of July, in the course of which I purchased a copy of the Boston Globe which had reproduced the document on its editorial page. I was so forcefully struck by the eloquence of the Declaration’s rebuke to abusive power that I could almost have persuaded myself the Globe had intended the reprint as a gesture of defiance of the present order rather than of patriotism. But in the middle of the oh so apt bill of particulars (“He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power”; “for transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offenses”) comes this horrible reminder of the original sin upon which the national foundation was laid: “He…has endeavoured to bring on the Inhabitants of our Frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known Rule of Warfare, is an undistinguished Destruction, of all Ages, Sexes and Conditions.”

*****

In reply to Vic Perry’s comment on my last post: It’s certainly relevant that Vic did not feel doomed to nuclear destruction during the Reagan era, though the fact that many other people did is attested to by the enormous antinuclear protests of the early 1980’s. In no era do people of any age group have a uniform experience. I think the point is well taken that there was for much if not all of the Cold War a significant gap between the intentions of the powerful on both sides and the public relations spin. Certainly U.S. administrations had plenty of incentive to exaggerate the symmetry of the standoff. I guess whether you find a significant difference between a situation in which people are fully prepared to destroy the world at the drop of a hat and one in which they only pretend to such bravado but are nevertheless quite capable of destroying it by accident (and continue to take further actions that make such destruction more likely) depends on your view of how much of what happens in the world is the result of purposeful action and how much springs from inadvertence. I’m reminded of a favorite quotation from Chairman M. Foucault: “People know what they do, they even know why they do what they do, but what they don’t know is what what they do does.”

I’m not really very much interested in the question of guilt in the way that Vic seems to think I am. I don’t in fact feel a personal responsibility at all proportional to the destruction that concerns me. I don’t feel it’s my individual fault that we’re in such bad shape. But I do often feel unutterably depressed to be part of a whole that can’t seem to do any better than this. This depression is what, ultimately, it means to me to say that experience, language, identity are social. This seems to be what Claudia Rankine is saying about loneliness: that to realize “billions of lives never mattered” (a realization one can hardly avoid if one gives any thought to the matter) is to experience the uttermost extreme of isolation, a death-before-death.

I think there’s something to what Vic says about the psychological gravity, for Christians of earlier centuries, in the thought of God’s righteous destruction of the world. Yet, my point was never that the old-style narrative of the world’s end was easy to deal with. My point was, rather, that the old and new narratives support fundamentally different psychological orientations. It is very difficult to deal with thoughts of one’s own death, and in many ways must be more difficult for people in times and places where preventing vast numbers of early deaths is impossible. But that difficulty is fundamentally different from the difficulty of having one’s mind flooded with suicidal thoughts. The pain is different; what one has to do to cope with the pain, and avoid succumbing to it, is different. So with the difference between old-style stories of God’s judgment and modern-day visions of auto-genocide.