When we speak of “points of view,” we usually think spatially: about geographic location, social positioning, or psychological perspective. I’m going to take a different tack and ask you to consider point of view as a function of positioning in time: species time, planetary time, location in history.
More specifically, I’m concerned with the problem of what writer Tom Engelhardt refers to as our crisis of “futurelessness.” What does it mean for us as writers to be living in a time when we can have no confident assurance that future generations will be around to read our words?
This is obviously a huge question—so huge that it seems not only staggering to confront but almost embarrassing to pose. I often feel that, like the prospect of our individual deaths, it’s something most people have decided ought not to be brought up in polite society. Not that this prohibition has prevented my obsessing about the problem ever since my early childhood, which was spent under the Cold War cloud of nuclear terror, with air raid drills, the fallout shelter craze, and the Cuban Missile Crisis. In those years, concern about the future of human life on earth seemed inevitably linked to the dangers of nuclear weapons. Some of that anxiety went underground with the end of the Cold War and the fond notion that the nuclear standoff had been resolved. It went underground but it didn’t go away. And for the past few years we’ve had our attention re-focused on a range of apocalyptic perils: not only the nuclear weapons that keep on proliferating, but the cumulative collapse of our ever more degraded environment under the joint impacts of high-tech wars, rapacious resource extraction, and worsening global poverty. And need I mention global warming and emergent epidemics? A couple of weeks ago, the astrophysicst Stephen Hawking made headlines by calling for humans to colonize space, with the idea that such a move represents the only reliable method for insuring the survival of our species.
As a practical matter, I agree with Alice Walker, who in the early 1980’s gave a wonderful, pithy address to an anti-nuclear rally, the text of which was published in Homegirls: A Black Feminist Anthology under the title “Only Justice Can Stop a Curse.” Walker makes the point that looking to outer space a safety valve for humanity’s destructive behavior on this planet is just an open invitation to extend racist colonialism and exploitative patriarchy to the stars, and the stars don’t deserve it. So I take a dim view of Hawking’s proposed solution, but I do think it’s crucial to pose the question head on: where are we, really, in human history? How much time do we have? What can be done to better the prognosis? We can all see now, as most of us couldn’t years ago during the Cold War, that the real threat is not linked to any specific technology. The ultimate Inconvenient Truth is that a species which evidently lacks an efficient survival instinct (and may in fact be argued to possess a potent death wish) has got its hands on a range of methods for committing collective suicide.
In my life as a citizen, I’m very concerned with the political tasks implied by this situation: to put it in the terms supplied by Alice Walker, how can we create the planetary Justice that will stop the Curse of our tremendous destructive capacity? But in speaking to you here at the MFA residency, and in my own creative life, I’m centrally concerned with different tasks, those of the imagination. Learning to live with—let’s say to manage—our species’ suicidal bent is not only a political assignment but a job for the imagination. We do not really know yet what it means to say that we have brought upon ourselves this Curse of potential and looming self-destruction because it cannot be comprehended as an arrangement of facts, but only as an imagined reality. (I take that phrase from Philip Gourevitch, who writes in his book about the Rwandan genocide, We Wish To Inform You that Tomorrow We Will be Killed with Our Families, that when he came to write about Rwanda, he found himself confronted with the seeming paradox of having to imagine through his writing what he already knew to be real.) Likewise, we can’t hope to create forms of sane and life-cherishing life—the Justice that stops a Curse—without first imagining their outlines. So we writers have our work cut out for us.
I’m now going to explore these ideas in relation to a couple of writers who mean a lot to me, then draw a connection to my own recent work.
It would be well worth the while of anyone who wants to explore this question of historical location as point of view to closely examine the amazing manipulations of perspective that Walt Whitman accomplishes in the poem “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.” That poem begins, “Flood-tide below me! I see you face to face!/Clouds of the west–sun there half an hour high–I see you also face to face.” So it opens in the very immediate present, establishing a relationship with the pulse of the planet itself. Very shortly, however, the speaker reaches forward, expanding the temporal space of the poem to engage in dialogue with future generations, then stepping rhetorically into future space so that we look back on the ancestor-poet in his own time. As in so much of his work, Whitman aims here for what we might call a radical democracy of point of view:
What is it then between us?
In Muriel Rukeyser’s The Speed of Darkness, there’s a wonderful poem entitled, simply, “Poem.” It goes like this:
There’s an echo of Whitman in the way that Rukeyser manages to bridge the experience of centuries, and also in the eerie rhetorical stance of posthumous survey. But for Rukeyser, it is the active response to “these wars” that becomes the occasion for “setting up signals across vast distances.” Thus the poem acknowledges that we have entered a fundamentally new situation; in the first “century of world wars” and the similar ones to follow, survival means doing the work of survival: “to construct peace,” to consider “a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined values.”
Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel Ceremony, first published in the late 1970’s, tells the story of Tayo, a young American Indian man who returns to Laguna Pueblo in a shattered state following service in World War II. The novel is about his healing process but, rather than focusing on individual psychology as one might expect in an American novel about post-traumatic stress disorder, Ceremony frames Tayo’s story in a sacred and mythic dimension of oral narrative, incorporating creation stories and other “time immemorial stories” from Laguna and Navajo tradition. The novel is really about the same thing as Rukeyser’s poem: how to use the imagination as a resource to construct survival in the face of humanity’s enormous penchant for destruction. Drawing on the imagined reality of her Native American past, in which genocidal assaults on human beings intertwined (and still do) with violence to the natural world–Ceremony tightly connects war, environmental disaster, racism, and nuclear peril.
The novel’s approach to framing a protagonist’s experience inside mythic narratives allows Silko to touch on the imagined reality of a single fate for the entire human species without committing the artistic and historical sins of a false universalism. Tayo’s story of sickness and healing can comment on our collective peril precisely because it is imagined as specific to a particular character, a particular and beloved physical setting, and the particular imagery and rhythms of Laguna Pueblo and Navajo sacred texts. The novel’s temporal dimension is similarly multi-layered, in that it’s simultaneously located in a determinate historical time and in what we might call the “universal time” of myth. This latter is the time in which—so long as human beings take the trouble to “remember the story”—past, present, and future exist simultaneously.
I recently completed a novel called The Company of Cannibals in which I was finally able to take on, as a creative “object,” my lifelong concern with futurelessness. The novel features a group of people who are obsessed with the fate of the earth. At their center is Paula Schweike, a poet turned secular prophet who gives public performances in which she burns her own journals. Paula’s disciples face a terrible choice when, in protest against the seemingly terminal condition of the planet, she commits suicide, instructing her nearest and dearest to ingest her remains. In order to tell this story, I found it necessary to construct my own version of the temporal shifts that become point of view shifts in the works I’ve been discussing here. So we get versions of Paula’s tale in the pedantic, chilly voice of a historian looking back from a distance of hundreds of years in the future; in the mythic voice of a quasi-scriptural retelling; in the vernacular voice of collective retrospect; and in the form of contemporary documents, including journals, composed by participants in the drama. I found that I had to construct some version of a future—even though one very partially, disjointedly glimpsed—to make the peril of our own present seem sufficiently real. Paula’s methods may be questionable but her concern cannot be argued with because we have the voice of the Redactor telling us that there really was a Universal Crash, which humanity just barely survived. Even more importantly, constructing an imagined future, however grim, let me, the author, out of the supermax prison of “presentist” thinking in which we all live. It freed me from the cultural tyranny that Guy Debord diagnosed in The Society of the Spectacle when he said that only that which “appears” is deemed to have substance or worth.
I want to leave you with a couple of broad ideas and one question. The first idea is that past, present, and future are completely interdependent. Appearances notwithstanding, they simply can’t be de-linked. To lose the future is to lose the past, and once that happens, we’re standing upon a dangerously thin, ultimately untenable and even illusory slice of present time. It follows that we as writers face the crucial task of reweaving the links between temporal dimensions.
The second idea is that there’s something in our identities as writers that requires the reasonably secure prospect of a future audience. Very few of us, I think, write solely for the present. So much of what we do is by way of putting messages in bottles; if we lose confidence that someone will be there to retrieve them, we might as well pack it in right now.
Finally, and it’s too big a subject to go into adequately here, I want to acknowledge that the imagination cannot be commanded. One can’t productively sit down and determine to write a book that will make a difference to the future of the world. And yet I want to reaffirm that writers have a collective responsibility to help the world come to grips with its very real jeopardy—and then to access the so far “unimagined values” that can help us keep on keeping on.
The question I’ll leave you with is the title of these remarks, and it’s sort of a Zen riddle: Does a planet have a point of view?