* * *
At the end of the hour, the room empties except for the public affairs director, Curtis, who watches me turn off the recorder and pack up. There are documents and links he wants to send to me, he says, things that came up in the meeting. He wants, very much, to be helpful. He admits they are trying hard to mend their relationship with the community, but their efforts just aren’t really going anywhere. I suspect they see the community—the moms in particular—as problematic, difficult.
“Look,” I say, still telling myself that I am neutral in all of this. “They have no power whatsoever to change their situation. They can’t get out there with shovels and dig this stuff out of the landfill. They can’t put out the fire or stop the leachate from seeping into the groundwater. They feel like they can’t protect their children, or go outside, or breathe the air. They’re powerless.” He looks down toward his hands, nodding as I speak. I do not envy him. I say, “From their perspective, you have all the power. And you’re choosing to do nothing at all.”
* * *
Uranium, thorium, Agent Orange, dioxin, DDT. I am thinking of all the ways our government has poisoned its citizens as I board the plane that will take me back home. The sky grows darker; blue gives way to purple, to red and orange near the horizon. I read recently about a housing project in St. Louis, the infamous Pruitt-Igoe, where the government sprayed nerve gases off the roof to see what effect it would have on the people living there—testing it for its potential use as a weapon in war.
“On every continent, the history of civilization is filled with war, whether driven by scarcity of grain or hunger for gold, compelled by nationalist fervor or religious zeal,” President Obama says during his speech at the Peace Memorial in Hiroshima. “Empires have risen and fallen. Peoples have been subjugated and liberated. And at each juncture, innocents have suffered, a countless toll, their names forgotten by time.” At no point during this speech does he apologize for what some have called a war crime. The closest he comes is this: “Technological progress without an equivalent progress in human institutions can doom us. The scientific revolution that led to the splitting of an atom requires a moral revolution as well.”
A 2005 Gallup poll showed that a majority of Americans still approve of having bombed Japan. Admittedly this is down from near-total approval in August 1945, but it’s hardly a “moral revolution.” One factor in the decision to use the bomb was that its destructive power would end the war and save American lives—some estimated that as many as a million American soldiers would have perished in a ground invasion of Japan. Does saving one life require taking another? Must they both be soldiers, loyal to their countries and their neighbors? After Nagasaki was bombed, a woman walked through the burning streets asking for water for her headless baby. A four-year-old boy, burned alive under the rubble of his crushed house, was crying out, “Mommy, it’s hot. It’s so hot.” President Truman called this bombing an “achievement” in his solemn radio broadcast from the USS Augusta: “The Japanese began the war from the air at Pearl Harbor. They have been repaid many fold.”
* * *
In the last few months of his term, President Obama was reportedly considering the idea of adopting a no-first-use policy on nuclear weapons—an official promise that we would use them only in response to an attack by our enemies—but ultimately his advisers talked him out of it, arguing that it is our responsibility to our allies to maintain the illusion of ultimate power. Now that we have a new president with access to the nuclear codes, we must face the consequences of projecting, and protecting, that illusion.
There are about sixteen thousand nuclear warheads in the world right now, enough to destroy the planet many times over. The United States and Russia own 90 percent of these, and though various treaties prevent them from making additional weapons, both are working to modernize the bomb-delivery systems they do have. The US government recently approved a plan to spend $1 trillion over the next thirty years to make our arsenal more modern, accurate, and efficient.
One trillion dollars. This number is staggering, not least of all because one factor—a minor one but still a factor—deterring the EPA from fully excavating the radioactive waste created by the program that developed these nuclear weapons in the first place is how much it will cost—maybe as much as $400 million. That’s a lot of money for an EPA project. Budgets are not so simple that one government program, like the Department of Defense, could direct money to another, but the fact that they are not does makes our priorities apparent.
Even if every gram of radioactive waste was removed from the landfill, where would it go? Facilities in Idaho and Utah are willing to accept it, but those facilities are located in communities, or near them, and the nearby residents don’t want this waste in their backyards or their gardens or their rivers or their drinking water either. Even if we box it up and send it in train cars to remote places, it will be there, ready and waiting to kill any of us long after we’ve forgotten where we put it, or what “it” even is.
* * *
“Why should we tolerate a diet of weak poisons, a home in insipid surroundings, a circle of acquaintances who are not quite our enemies, the noise of motors with just enough relief to prevent insanity?” Rachel Carson asks in Silent Spring. Nothing is sacred, or safe, or protected. As a species we have evolved to recognize threats to survival: plants we cannot eat, animals we should not approach, places we cannot safely go. Fear of the other is perhaps an enduring trace of this ancient instinct: that barbaric impulse to attack and destroy anyone different from ourselves, anything we do not understand. But increasingly it seems our ability to invent technologies that destroy one another has evolved faster than our ability to survive them. Carson asks, “Who would want to live in a world which is just not quite fatal?”
Not all radiation is fatal. Radiation is around us always, and each of us is exposed to radiation daily: from the sun, from the dirt, from sources we would never think to suspect. We ourselves are a source of radiation, since each of us carries radioactive elements inside our bodies from birth. Throughout our lives, we are constantly irradiating one another, not only with charged microscopic particles but also with suspicion and fear and blame. We find infinite directions in which to project our rage and bewilderment and grief.
* * *
“Do you ever think about just walking away?” I asked Dawn Chapman recently. She’s just learned that her own daughter has developed a tumor on her salivary gland. It’s not cancer, the doctors say. Not yet.
“I don’t know. I dream,” she answers. “This weekend my husband and I dropped the kids off with my family and drove around and dreamed for a while about what it would be like to walk away. But I don’t know how to walk away from it even if I wanted to, knowing what I know about what’s going on, how it’s hurt people. In the end, I’m not even fighting to win. And even if we could win, a win isn’t what you think it is. A buyout isn’t a win because we could move but this poison would still be inside us.”
For Karen, winning means the government finally caring for its citizens like it has always promised it would. “I am shattered. I am broken,” she says. “And now my children and my grandchildren have those chances of being sick as well. Our human rights are being violated and it has to stop. It has to stop here.”
* * *
As the plane lifts off the ground, I open the tiny window shade to see, one last time, that familiar green that never fails to make some bell in me ring. This place has always been a confluence of things, like the two rivers that converge just north of the city, where the glaciated plains meet the Ozark Highlands, where an eroded mountain range called the Lincoln Hills rises now only a few hundred meters above the alluvial floodplain, all of it pushed into place by the Laurentide Ice Sheet half a million years ago. All of it divided into neat rectangles and squares by city streets, subdivided, fenced into single lots—as if a few planks of wood and slabs of concrete could isolate any one place from the world.
We are a
ll connected. The rivers and streams and tiny creeks wind through the city and go on winding. They twist and bend and run backward on themselves, changing course and direction a thousand times over the ages. The water swells and leaves its banks with the seasons, swells into the streets we build, and our backyards and gardens, into the places we never think of because we do not want to see them: our landfills, our factories, our toxic dumps, all of the remote places we send our worst creations. There is no fence to keep it all out. The disaster that approaches is ourselves.
ART IN THE AGE OF APOCALYPSES
The first semester in my new job, I taught one class only, a nonfiction writing class, which met on Tuesday afternoons. We spent September and October talking about facts, about narrative, about evidence and ethics, but then November arrived and because voting is more important than nonfiction, I insisted that if anyone needed to miss class in order to vote, they would be excused. On Election Day, only a few were missing from the circle we had made with our desks. I checked in with those who were present: Did you vote yet? Did you? Most said yes, they definitely voted earlier in the day, or during early voting, or they had mailed absentee ballots back to the states where they are registered. A handful did not vote at all. One, registered in Florida, said she just wasn’t very excited about either of the candidates. (I regret the ways my face registered the horror with which I reacted to this.) Another, registered two hundred miles away in San Antonio, said her vote wouldn’t make any difference anyway. I looked at my watch: 3:15. The polls closed at 7:00. “You can make it,” I said. “Go there. Drive now.” My students didn’t understand why I was so worried. They believed in the data, in the arc of history. One said, “The outcome is certain.”
I raced home after class to prepare for guests. I warmed appetizers, opened bottles of wine. Our neighbors arrived with food in their hands. The children raced from room to room—from inside to outside through wide-open doors—in a shrieking, tumbling pack. The adults laughed and clinked our glasses together and turned on the television. Nervous laughter rose as one said, “It’s early.” “There’s still New York,” said another. We stuffed ourselves with cheese. It was nearly midnight when the children were gathered and returned to their homes. My daughter asked, as I tucked her into bed, whether a woman was president and I said, “No, darling. Not yet.”
A week later, I found myself back in the same classroom with my students, now living in a different world. Or it was the same world, but revealed to us, and we were all different for having seen it as it is. They looked a little gray and unwashed, wrung out or strung out; their eyes were swollen or sunken or bloodshot. They wouldn’t look me in the eye, didn’t meet my gaze. They stared at the floor, slouched low in their seats.
Neat piles of pages were stacked on every desk in our circle: three brave writers had shared their essays about trauma and desire and loss, written before any of us knew what we know now, but my students did not want to workshop. “Workshopping,” one said, “is the last thing in the world I want to be doing right now.” As if it was completely clear to everyone that art cannot rise to an occasion like this.
“What do you want to be doing right now?” I asked. One shrugged her shoulders. “Go back in time,” one said. “Die,” said another. I had not prepared a speech—I had felt too distraught, too much a hunted animal to do anything but rage and grieve—so instead I listened and pretended to be wise and calm. It is hard to find the words, they insisted. One gestured broadly over her head with her hands. “There is nothing we can do,” she said.
* * *
“What are the words you do not yet have?” Audre Lorde asked attendees of the Modern Language Association Convention in 1977. “What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence?”
In my life, as in my art, the uncertainties of the world often strike me silent, but I find my voice again by describing things I know. I know, for example, that William Carlos Williams famously said that a poem is a “small (or large) machine made of words.” I love this quote, and I have repeated it often to my students because it offers an inroad to thinking about what our words can do when it seems there is nothing to be done.
Every semester my students struggle with this idea that art is not an object but a machine. Some arrive believing—insisting, even—that art exists to communicate “hidden meanings.” I don’t want to disparage my students for thinking this way, because in fact they do learn to let go of it. But the misconceptions illustrate one of the many drawbacks to coming of age in a culture at war with itself. When daily life is saturated with the devastating spectacle of the so-called real—visualize, for a moment, what reality television has obscured about actual reality—we are asked to pledge allegiance to the appearance of fact, even as we observe its fabrication.
Machines don’t have meanings; they have functions, I tell them. It is difficult for them to accept that a painting or poem has no meaning just as a toaster has no meaning, which is not to say they do not perform their work for us. Just as high-speed Internet, email, the twenty-four-hour news cycle, the three-strikes law, the private prison industrial complex, the war on terror, and, perhaps more alarming, the broadly shared experience of terror also perform their work for us. Which is to say that my students have no memory of a time when the world was not, as one so aptly put it, “deeply and profoundly fucked.” If the function of saturating our experience with horror is to make us accept this as inevitable, perhaps art, that doorway to the symbolic, can make us see something more.
* * *
When I was a much younger woman, long before I began teaching or writing even, I found myself unemployed after having been kidnapped and raped and very nearly murdered by a man I had once loved, so I frequently visited the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, which houses one of Monet’s Water Lilies in its permanent collection. For hours I sat in front of the painting, only looking. “We only see what we look at,” John Berger writes in Ways of Seeing. “To look is an act of choice.” Looking is a form of recognition, a method for contemplation that can approximate a form of prayer. “If we accept that we can see that hill over there,” Berger continues, “we propose that from that hill we can be seen.” This is not to say, exactly, that as I sat looking at Monet’s Water Lilies, I felt the painting look back at me, but rather that perhaps my looking was not only a meditation on a sublime visual cue, but part of a desire to comprehend the world, and my place in it, differently.
In this way, the act of making art also begins with looking. When I sat for many hours looking at the Monet, I had not yet found essays. Or perhaps essays had not yet found me. Years later, I would discover in essays a way of reseeing the world in which the world could be changed—in which no ocean was ever just a rising body of water, and no mistake had ever been inevitable, and no bruise was ever just an accident. Not even, I would conclude, the ones I had sometimes worn on my face.
What later unfolded in me for essays began unfolding in me as I sat for hours, looking only at the Monet. All those hours I meditated on the water, the flowers in the water, the clouds reflected in the water, I also looked closer at myself. I saw myself, and all the ways in which I might be a better, stronger person. I had no words yet to describe the person I might be, but it was a version of myself I could not unsee.
* * *
In my classroom one week after the election, my students did not want to think or talk about art because the apocalypse had arrived on our doorstep. “There is nothing we can do,” one said again. “Then what is art for?” I asked. This question met their blank faces. “What is art for if not precisely this moment?” I asked again. Their eyebrows furrowed. This was not the speech they came to hear.
There’s a story I’ve heard Project Row Houses founder and MacArthur Fellow Rick Lowe tell about his evolution as an artist. He began as a painter whose work documented social problems, but one day a high school student came by his
studio and asked him why he made work about problems. “We don’t need people showing us what’s happening. We already know what’s happening. If you’re an artist and you’re so creative, why can’t you create a solution?” the student asked. It was an important question. Afterward, Lowe gave up trying to document problems and instead began wrestling with the problems themselves. Along with several other artists, he purchased and renovated twenty-two shotgun-style houses in Houston’s Third Ward, one of the city’s oldest African American neighborhoods. The work became known as Project Row Houses, which is simultaneously a residential program for young mothers, an education program for their children, a residency program for artists, a historic preservation program for the neighborhood, and a work of art.
It’s this last statement that’s a point of some contention. Is it activism, or is it art? Is it protest or performance? Am I making art or making a point? “Real” art, we are told, must be commodifiable to have value. “Political art” is a small, stigmatized domain, a ghetto for the radical few.
But the art that has shaped and continues to shape my trajectory as an artist proves this untrue: William Kentridge’s 9 Drawings for Projection, a series of charcoal animations protesting South African apartheid, which I watched in a poetic forms class in graduate school even as I was learning that racism was a term that also implicated me. Or El año en que nací, a recent work of documentary theater in which eleven artists born during Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile take the stage to reckon with the crimes of the generation before, alternately implicating and exonerating their very own parents, and revealing the ways that history and memory can be remade, old divisions can be redrawn or, sometimes—and only with great patience and generosity—erased. There is also The Way Black Machine, an installation of flickering monitors that acts as an archive of footage of both traditional media and social media coverage of the events at that time still freshly unfolding in Ferguson, Missouri. There are the series of public die-ins that were staged across the country by medical students, clergy members, lawyers, and even university presidents, all in solidarity with the protests against police brutality across the country.
The Reckonings Page 15
