I will not pretend there was ever a golden period of history when such things were not common. I will not pretend that we live in "different" times. We do not; if anything, the more uncanny characteristic of these days is how strongly they echo of all the others. We still hear the ringing in our ears from the sixties, and the baby boomers still consider their own collective whim of the moment to be the most important thing in America, whatever that whim drifts into being from one decade to the next. The hangman's noose still scuttles softly, in the darkness, and we still catch it from the corners of our eyes. Vietnam is thick in the air. Other wars are thick in the air. Other times, too... we fight the same fights as have been fought for a hundred years. Workers versus their own companies. Industries versus the towns that have birthed them. We still feel the warmth of fever dreams dreamt by Ayn, and rouse self-declared militias to protect against the menace of the differently skinned. And how can this be? How is it that men and women can learn the truth and folly of things within their own lifetimes, but we invariably set the same scenes for ourselves from every generation to the next? All men are created equal, says one document that we have elevated into holy writ, and yet all men are clearly not, and we go out of our way to diagram out all the ways in which the holy writ is wrong, and men does not mean men, and equal means only when equal is desired.
I wish I could be spiritual, and in the proper way of things. I wish at least I could properly mourn the absence of the collective self, of the simple capacity to convey learned experiences over generations. A computer can transfer information from one cycle to the next; it has such memories. People do not. Every tree on the planet grows from itself, adding to its own form from one year to the next, ever building something greater from something smaller. People are not trees; we cannot regrow our limbs, or easily regain our souls if they have been severed from us by our own moments of pique. We exist as wolves exist, as a pack of discrete individuals. There is no such thing as a collective memory, no id more substantial than genetic instinct. The pack lives as the pack has always lived; any sliver of new knowledge of any individual wolf has one chance in ten thousand of not being lost into the snows, when that one wolf breathes last. The pack moves on, and lives as it has always lived.
And yet there are always sparks. There is always progress, no matter how maddeningly slow. It may take an individual a day of study, or a year, or a decade to decide for themselves that, for example, slavery is wrong; for the collective, it takes millennia. It is a monstrous thing, the wait, and then it happens, and the thing is done.
Does it ever go back? Do we ever lose limbs from that tree, limbs of giant, vibrant knowledge?
Among the most famous words of the New Testament are these: let he who is without sin cast the first stone. Thousands of millions of people have considered these words to be the direct words of God, and yet they have sat, untranslated, repeated only as the primitive, gutteral mimickry of infants, for two thousand years. They are considered guiding words from God himself to his most favorite animals, and yet they are incomprehensible gibberish. What does it mean? How can it be interpreted? How can we best adjust the words to better wrap our own thin voices around them? Is it an admonition against murdering the guilty, or just one particular type of guilty, or in one particular way? How can the words be best captured, and circumscribed? How can the frightening implications best be domesticated and put to the plow?
What of the apocryphal Samaritan, a man of the right morals but the wrong faith? How, ever, shall we interpret such a thing? Surely, there must be complexities that only the most learned among us can comprehend? Surely, it would be abomination to presume it an assertion of tolerance, since tolerance is as foreign to the human mind as wings are to the human back? Surely the message is not as clear as it is, and the Samaritan not so good, and the faithful but coldhearted do not stand so unambiguously condemned? Surely, the Samaritan's home and family should be bombed into a sheet of glass, the better to pave a smooth and glossy way of the truly righteous?
I started writing because words, properly tuned, are a song, and there is no human on earth who can shield themselves from the urgent, fervent compulsion to sing. It is ingrained; it is our gift. Believe in God or nature or both, it makes no difference to me; the song is the gift, and the song is the thing for which the rest of it exists. We sing, and we make our inner minds known to the cosmos. We cannot touch the stars, but we can sing to them. We cannot fly, but we can still shake the air. I started writing because I wanted to capture the winds for myself, and bend them around me ever so slightly, and make those around me feel a different thing, cooler or hotter, than they felt from the breezes on the last few days and nights.
And it is, in a word, insanity. Just as it always has been. Every song is madness, and yet we sing anyway. We howl, we rant, we croon, we snarl. We write books about boys that drift downriver, and sing songs about the same foolish loves that everyone else has loved and failed at. We pretend it will make a difference; we pretend the songs will work as formaldehyde, and will mummify our crippled corpse when we ourselves finally drift off into the snow and do not come back. We pretend that our songs will exist where our eyes will no longer wander, and will be heard by those we can no longer speak to, and we find solace in moving the molecules of infinity in some small, fragmented way, and we pretend that someone will notice.
It is cold outside, and nighttime, and the air squeezes itself onto every branch and twig, waiting for morning. It will show itself as glittering white crystals for the briefest of spans, before the rising sun burns them up and they are gone, never to reform. Other crystals will come, yes, on different nights. But not those; those are gone. They exist only until the first sun rises, and then they are murdered by the passing moments, and their blood returns in drops and wisps to the eternal.
I do not think our songs will last. If they were meant to last, they would have by now. If we were meant to have a collective morality, it would have found itself. If the omnipotent words of God Himself can be bent into hollow submission by those that claim themselves to be his most cherished servants, of what possible substance could our own songs have?
I have lived in only five decades, and cannot speak for the others, and the songs through all of them have been abominable. But I have seen one hell of a dance, and it goes on at breakneck pace. This particular one is the small and rhythmic dance to show that torture is not torture, when the proper words are used as ramparts around it, and it is masterful and fear-inducing, like the snake-charming dances of Kipling stories, or like a tangle of vines growing up and around the dancer, rending them something less than a human, and something more than a lawyer. It is neat and precise and exercises morality from the thing as if by expert scalpel, and I cannot help but think that we are supposed to applaud, so masterful is the dance and surgical the strokes.
It feels like a dream, and it feels like we are indeed supposed to applaud, because of all the songs of the new millennium, of all the songs of the next thousand years, if you would have told me that songs of torture would be most prominent I would not have believed you. I would have thought it a joke. The songs of war are warm and familiar; the songs of bigotry ring with almost soothing echos of predictability. But the bestial things, spoken from the brightest of podiums; this song is one of inhumanity. It is not song so much as howl, and as it separates morality from marrow, onstage, under spotlights, I cannot tell from which direction the screaming comes.
It is chilling only because has arrived with such mundanity, and yet seems immobile. The thing cannot be budged from the stage; it is as solid as an obelisk. Torture is not torture: the split is made: the thing stands, and will not give.
And it is insanity, because it is among the worst of all man's songs: it is the song of fire and wind, the song that says a thing is not what it is, because we will try to bend the wind around the words, instead of the opposite, and we will cut our own reality and let it bleed, we will kill it outright, in order to have the thing we are after. War, yes; bigotry, yes; torture, yes. And none of the words mean what they meant a scant few hundred sunrises ago, because the dance is a new dance.
There is nothing you or I can do about it. What do we do, meet blood with blood? What do we do, except sing small songs in whatever places are left quiet as the larger one sweeps through like a storm? Who but an insane man would even contemplate uttering a peep?
Thoreau sang his song against slavery, and he sang it into an empty woods, where more trees heard it than people. Christ himself spoke and had his words fed as scraps to the lions of his own followers' ambitions. There is a grand tradition of singing the quiet songs, and watching them be murdered in the very air. How futile it must be, then, for any more miniscule fool to pretend to hum a single note.
I feel so old. I feel a hundred years old; I feel like a fossilized bone being displayed in a museum. I feel as if my entire song is only an echo of a song heard two hundred years past, one now turned quaint and archaic and sepia-toned. I am only too keenly aware of being a throwback to a throwback. I feel foolish; I feel embarrassed; I feel humiliated.
What is maddening is not the battles. What is maddening is how readily we devolve, collectively, when faced with the slightest pangs of fear. We are truly willing, and eager, and viciously attached to making all the words not mean what they mean. It is not enough to support torture; we must deny it the word, and declare that the denial of the word denies the thing. We etch the faces of the killers of our words onto monuments, and praise them as geniuses of our times. Partisan is recast, as is loyalty. Patriot hangs lynched from a flagpole. Progress is a hollowed corpse of a word.
When Grover Norquist declared bipartisanship to be date rape, he was entirely correct; the word bent around him, by collective will, and bipartisanship is now a word divorced of any meaning at all. It was cut to ribbons, to be used as a mask for any other word that needs one, and now can mean compliance or acquiescence or resignation or anything else that needs to be said.
I had thought we had decided as a nation that internment camp was a monstrous thing. What foolish thought; it needed only a new era, and someone new to exhume it and give it the kiss of diplomacy, and now even that is a reasonable pair of words to utter.
Truth, though, seems the coldest word of all. We have decided that truth does not mean truth, and from that atomic alteration, all the other words reorganize themselves in seismic shifts. If truth does not mean truth, then journalism does not mean journalism, and law does not mean law, and freedom does not mean freedom, and equitable does not mean equitable, and every other word can be decapitated as well, left on the ground like so many fallen soldiers in an unexplainable war. Is one of our presidential candidates secretly a Muslim, and hiding it from us? Who cares, if the accusation can be made? Does a new law have a claimed effect? Who cares what the facts themselves might say, if there is someone to dispute the point? There are no more songs, only cacophony, and we do not care.
We can describe an act of torture. We can describe it in intent and in practice; we can recite the histories, and we can show the images. And yet there is nothing that will make the word mean the word, if a man behind a podium is determined to deny the thing. We have decided that object permanence is no longer a physical aspect of our universe; we intentionally regress ourselves towards infancy, and declare that a thing denied is a thing that does not exist. And we can bend it all by merely murdering our words.
I feel foolish. I feel like a coward; I feel impotent. I feel as if I am the one who has lost my sanity, for presuming the same reality exists from one year to the next. In a world with no collective self, there are no words, either, at least none with the power to outlast a single gust of wind.
And most of all, I feel ashamed for even now so fervently wishing otherwise.
