War and the war of power …
War and the war of power and money are not things that I readily understand, but they have such an effect on the world (a subtle effect, I think, the way gravity bends space) that I want to understand them. The best way to understand any process is by doing it, letting it shape your nature, and then hoping you can see what has happened. The action I have committed myself to is writing and especially to that peculiar form of discourse, poetry. I can't know what power and war and money are really like, but I can find analogues, and by the kind of induction that the hunter uses when he imitates his prey, I can try to make myself an avatar of these imponderable forces that clutch and twist us so intimately. And if I induce these states in language, the poems become more than statements:
They become the kind of heuristic
objects I studied long ago locked in
my adolescent bedroom, objects like
transistors, which repeatedly direct
forces that can be described
effectively but never precisely, in
ways that can be described
effectively but never precisely, and
yet it is done, each time
differently and yet enough the same
to be workable, like reading a poem.
There, you see! I know so little about anything but poetry that I am too easily distracted. I am old enough to remember the exalted rage felt over the crimes in Vietnam and we all know now how war has been scrubbed, but it's still the same old reprobate. Just now I heard Schwarzkopf comment on the Kurds, to the effect that any professional army can mop up a bunch of guerillas in the mountains (Sic transit memoria militum!). And the only reason that the third world entrepreneurs don't follow the big-time capitalists into the now-burgeoning arms trade is that they are as yet too small-time or are (vide the USSR) in disarray. We need a spiritual center, a true one, if we are to manage the appropriate moral decisions as a race. Personally, I am confident of my own, but I'm not an ideologue, a preacher, or a historian; I'm a poet, so I feel comfortable only in what follows.