Impolitic Manifesto
American Samizdat: "in remembrance, of what we meant to make of ourselves"
Over the period of his first presidential campaign and the four years of his presidency, one was rightly preoccupied with Donald Trump, I among millions of others. Increasingly over the four years, though, I was preoccupied not by Trump as much as I was by what he means about us, the United States, as a society, with the national culture that society came to produce and about the people within it who accepted Trump and celebrated him, even as a businessman and celebrity.
By the time Trump’s 2020 re-election campaign approached, with all its frightful implications for America’s future and that of the world, the politically argumentative case-making against him, against his cruel and craven collaborators, against his foolish supporters became tiresome to me. Necessary, but tiresome. And there were plenty of people to make it, equaled only, almost, by the plenty of people to make it against. Political opinions, in all that clever and committed political opining, are as plentiful as those proverbial grains of sand, stars in the sky, or maybe it’s minnows in the stream. They serve handily as bait at the end of a hook.
I felt the need to say something more, something else, something — more essential. Something that might escape the gravitational pull of that disputatious black hole into which both the brilliant and the benighted are often equally drawn. In contrast, I felt, along with G.W.F Hegel, in his Lecture on Aesthetics, that “Poetry is the universal art of the spirit which has become free in itself,” which “now transcends itself” and “passes over from the poetry of the imagination to the prose of thought.” One might call that philosophy — and I don’t imagine there are too many poets, however naturalistic or plain spoken who don’t in some way believe that to be so. Through early 2020, then, I worked on “Impolitic Manifesto.”
Among the only two poems in my 2021 poetry collection Waiting for Word, then, that directly address political themes is the following, the subject of which, if not otherwise, is known from its subtitle. When the collection was published in April of that year, after the horror of January 6 but then the accomplished succession of Joe Biden to the presidency, it seemed the nation and the world had been spared a grim fate and I released from that dread I had carried with me through the isolation of the Covid pandemic.
Now it is two days from Election Day 2024, and I’m filled with fear and trembling. In the poem’s title, I play on the varied meanings of its two words, with the role of manifestoes in society and art and with the different but related senses of politics and politic and of the prefix im, which can mean, like in, “not” but also “toward.”
Impolitic Manifesto November 8, 2016 It isn’t so much that words fail as fail to measure up, not inadequate to a task, but incommensurable to things. They line the shore like vacant houses, rise up indistinct in the hills above. We sail by, thoughts calling out. I don’t think they hear us… So all this mess, all about, offers no surprise. Civilization’s rough delivery, breech and botched, squat- dropped in a field, carries on in cries, a cruel labor in dumb design, of inconceivable conception. Upon this rock, Plymouth, mouth plum of dreams… Yet these dreams we share with each other ravish the vision (nightmares ravage our eyes), till we take them as the peopled world. Our bodies, sculpted of dust and water, scrape clay pots out of sediment, scan the sky for radiant vapors. And dogs still bark at the moon… For the achievement, such as it was, bold as a bird free on the wing, manifest in its power, exceptional in its reach, haunted by guiltlessness, mined from membranous mind, out of nothing, an idea of the free, dignified and rightful citizen… That was the meaning, the conveyance from then to now, the import of what was imparted, not the thing, but the making out of it: what was to be recalled in remembrance, of what we meant to make of ourselves, what, taken outright, might be earned, might be squandered… What, then? That half concealed and still, tigers in the bush, we stalk ourselves? As if tigers conceive a destiny, or commemorate their kill — solemn and ceremonious — worship the carcass on altars of tooth and claw, fan holy columns of flies in spirals to the sky. The thing is done, the lie told — the offending body stinks, and no one will claim it. Disguised as history, the present maligns the past, ventriloquizes virtue, mocks all meaning, while the pretenders cry in protest, and dissemble every seeming: “Who are you to tell me? Who is anyone to know?” History does not commit itself. May it remember, as well as it forgets, who put this fire to flame, the political mind and its claim that conscience might survive in calculation. Here, then, are the princes in which men trust, their hoarding of silver and gold, and there is no end to their getting … My father, yours, said on this rock, I will teach you to be a man, to live as man and woman in fair relation, to know a man, and what is not a man, measure of all things. This wealth alone I leave you. For we cannot know the end of what we do, though what we do will end. AJA
Poet. Storyteller. Dramatist. Essayist. Artificer.
The breadth of this essay astounds, Jay, as the days close in on this crucial election. The poem says so much and does so with such power: May you be heard, my heart shouts!
I woke up early to grab a glass of water, then my phone to read a bit. And the first thing I read is this. I didn’t know my thirst would be quenched by more than water. Thank you so much for this. I will read it more than once for each layer of meaning it promises to reveal for me.