“The poet is on the side of undeceiving the world.” - Seamus Heaney
There are those who speak the language of politics. Others, theology and philosophy, literature and art. Sport and culture. My language, I am sometimes ashamed to say, is that of a witness.
I know enough of the world to speak to it, but often not about it. I can look at a burgeoning war and remind you that wars are not fought by those who start them. How it seems that every life we take is justified through a tangle of loopholes in a convenient morality that reliably skews to our preference.
But I cannot trace the complicated fuse of geopolitics that led to this exact moment.
I’m getting older, and I’m learning that history is just people recycling the same tired animus, the same vindictive bone dust—never truly pioneering, just finding new ways to do damage.
The people are in a panic today as one country kills people in another country—take this sentence and put it anywhere on our historical timeline. The reasons are always there: they are a threat. Their sovereignty is of the wicked sort, and ours is not. If God is for us…
But, it has always been this way. What mandate is within us that compels violence?
The poets and artists wage war too, in our own way. Wildly stupid confrontations with time and human nature. Foolishly believing the mob will stop to read our cardboard signs.
The artists are adjacent to the events unfolding—or sometimes inside of the unfolding. Witnesses to the math of what a body is worth. What a city is worth.
We are. Recording, remembering, retelling. Writing a new history that sounds too familiar. Lamenting. Hoping. Writing music that haunts timelessly, taunts the fates. Making art that is not tired of repentance.
You probably can’t hear it over the bombs and the news talking about the bombs, or the wildfires and burning hills, or the riots and the marches, or the sound of your own heartbeat thumping wildly in your ribcage—but we are here. Some of us in warplanes and battleships, others of us at a desk, looking out into the old growth forest who is also a witness to our constant unraveling.
“The world is not given by our fathers, but borrowed from our children.” - Wendell Berry
Brilliant. Thank you, fellow witness.