One of my favorite poems, and certainly my favorite American poet.
The Waking
– Theodore Roethke
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.
We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go….
etc.
Adagio en Mi Pais (Adagio in My Country), written and sung by Alfredo Zitarossa.
Zitarossa was a beloved and important Uruguayan composer, poet, singer, and journalist, who was ostracized for his involvement with the Frente Amplio of the left, during the 1970s, at the time when the military junta (with its torturous secret police) came to power in Uruguay. Zitarossa’s songs were banned in the Southern Cone countries and he himself was forced to live in exile in Argentina, Spain, and Mexico. He died young in 1989 at the age of 52. The most characteristic voice of resistance in Uruguay’s second “independence,” he makes a good subject for a post on Independence Day (Dia de la Independencia) , which happens to be today.
Behind every door
my people are alert,
and no one can silence their song,
and tomorrow they will sing again.
In my country we are tough,
the future will show that.
[Here is a complete translation by Yoshi Furuhashi, Monthly Review Press]
A bit of history: Uruguay won its independence from a triangular war between Spain, Argentina, and Brazil between 1825 and 1828. As the second smallest country in South America (after Surinam) it’s still somewhat overshadowed by its giant neighbors, Argentina and Brazil, with whom it shares it western and northern borders respectively.
Uruguay has many things to recommend it to a libertarian temperament. It’s a small country. The culture is unpretentious and laid back. It’s the home of the gaucho, the ferociously independent vagabond cowboy of South America. And the national motto, Libertad o Muerte (Liberty or Death) echoes Patrick Henry’s famous words (“Give me liberty or give me death”) before the Virginia Convention in 1775.
It’s traditional to go out on the night before Dia de la Independencia and I made it to a neighbor’s asado (barbecue). According to the Uruguayans, the asado, mate (the ubiquitous herbal tea that is sipped through a straw), and tango all come from Uruguay, not Argentina. Of course, in Argentina, you hear another story.
The asador did a fine job with the wood fire that cooks the meat. I took a shot at it too. The idea is to spread out the embers as they fall through the grate of the parrilla (grill)* from the log fire. Too many in one place and the meat gets burned. Too few and it doesn’t cook. Most of our guests wanted their meat – the world-famous Uruguayan organic beef – well done, so the asador and I were quite busy. The beef cut is called tira de asado (a cut from the ribs) and is mixed with other kinds of meat, like chorizo (sausage). We served the asado with chimichurri – a relish from oil, oregano, garlic, and chopped belly peppers – and with baguettes and clerico (made by mixing fruit drinks and wine).
*The term parrilla is also used, by analogy, to refer to torture and to the torture-rack, which were wide-spread in the 1970s and 1980s in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, and Brazil…..
For the role of the US in fostering the routine use of torture in Uruguay, read this piece by Bill Blum.
Reading the history of these regions, I came across this early example of the futility of trying to fend off nature…
No other part of the world has in recent years suffered from such a
plague of locusts as the agricultural districts of Argentina. They come from the north in clouds that sometimes darken the sun. Some of the swarms have been estimated to be sixty miles long and from twelve to fifteen miles wide. Fields which in the morning stand high with
waving corn, are by evening only comparable to ploughed or burnt lands. Even the roots are eaten up.In 1907 the Argentine Government organized a bureau for the destruction of locusts, and in 1908 $4,500,000 was placed by Congress at the disposal of this commission. An organized service, embracing thousands of men, is in readiness at any moment to send a force to
any place where danger is reported. Railway trains have been repeatedly stopped, and literally many tons of them have had to be taken off the track. A fine of $100 is imposed upon any settler
failing to report the presence of locust swarms or hopper eggs on his land. Various means are adopted by the land-owner to save what he can from the voracious insects. Men, women and children mount their horses and drive flocks of sheep to and fro over the ground to kill them. A squatter with whom I stayed got his laborers to gallop a troop of mares furiously around his garden to keep them from settling there. All, however, seemed useless. About midsummer the locust lays its eggs under an inch or two of soil. Each female will drop from thirty to fifty eggs, all at the same time, in a mass resembling a head of wheat. As many as 50,000 eggs have been counted in a space
less than three and a half feet square.During my sojourn in Entre Rios, the province where this insect seems to come in greatest numbers, a law was passed that every man over the age of fourteen years, whether native or foreigner, rich or poor, was compelled to dig out and carry to Government depots, four pounds
weight of locusts’ eggs. It was supposed that this energetic measure would lessen their numbers. Many tons were collected and burnt, but, I assure the reader, no appreciable difference whatever was made in their legions. The young jumpers came, eating all before them, and
their numbers seemed infinite. Men dug trenches, kindled fires, and burned millions of them. Ditches two yards wide and deep and two hundred feet long were completely filled up by these living waves.
But all efforts were unavailing–the earth remained covered.— “Through Five Republics on Horse-back: Being an Account of Many Wanderings in South America,” G. Whitfield Ray, 1915
My Comment
An apt metaphor for most government intervention..
Efforts to tackle our own plague of locusts are just as futile..
Sometimes nature must take its course…and right now, nature demands that a season of fat be followed by a season of lean..
This is an insightful segment from the powerful French film Danton (1983), by Polish director, Andrzej Wajda
The film is based on the short story, Danton’s Tod by the Romantic German playwright, Georg Buchner, and contrasts two of the leading figures of the French Revolution – Georges Danton and Maximilien Robespierre. The two revolutionaries fall out when Danton, the man of the people, dissents from Robespierre’s post-revolutionary Reign of Terror.
Wajda made the film in France but used Polish actors for Robespierre and his flunkies to convey his contempt for the Communist government in Poland, which was at the time trying to break the popular movement, Solidarity, by imposing martial law on the land. The French actor, Georges Depardieu, is tremendous, especially in the scene before the Revolutionary tribunal that condemns him to die. But this scene too is powerful, if a little black and white, in its contrast of the sickly theorist and vain “idealist,” Robespierre, who claims to speak for “the people,” and the vital, if corrupt, man who is actually one of them.
The scene makes a fitting commentary on a certain malignant strand of liberalism in America today.
Play the Federal Reserve Game. [Thanks to Eddy Elfenbein’s Crossing Wall Street blog).
Brazilian pop singer Elis Regina (1945 – 1982) is one of my new finds. One half of an album Elis and Tom (with Antonio Carlos Jobim) that’s considered one of the best in bossa nova, Regina was a passionate, supremely gifted, and original performer. Not as overtly political as other singers, her own unconventional life and stage presence lent weight to her political engagement. She was once vilified for a public performance in support of Brazil’s military junta (1964-1985) that later turned out to have been coerced. After that, the cartoonist Helfil, one of her detractors, became her friend, and she joined him to support a popular movement demanding the amnesty of political prisoners and exiled artists and intellectuals.
This was the subject of her classic 1979 performance of “O Bêbado e a Equilibrista” (Blanc/Bosco), which refers to “the return of Henfil’s brother.” This was the cartoonist’s older brother, Betinho, a leading sociologist, who had been exiled. Regina’s campaign was an important contribution to some 5000 Brazilian political prisoners returning from exile.
O Bebado e a Equilibrista
The Drunk and the Tightrope Walker (1979)
Lyrics: Carla Cristina
Music: Aldir Blanc/João Bosco
Translation: Steven Engler
Evening fell like a bridge
A drunk in a funeral suit reminded me of Chaplin’s tramp
The moon, like some brothel madam
Begged a rented shine from each cold star
And clouds, up there in the blotting paper sky
Sucked at tortured stains
What insane pressure
The drunk with the bowler hat made a thousand bows
For Brazil, my Brazil’s night
Is dreaming of the return of Henfil’s brother
Of so many people who left, in a dangerous situation
Our country is crying, gentle mother
Marias and Clarices are crying on Brazilian soil
But I know that pain this sharp can’t be pointless
Hope dances on the tightrope with an umbrella
With each step on that rope you can hurt yourself
Bad luck, the balancing hope
Knows that each artist’s show must go on
“In the United States, doing good has come to be, like patriotism, a favorite device of persons with something to sell.”
– H.L. Mencken
Jeff Knaebel tore up his US passport out of hatred for the state and became a stateless person wandering through the villages in India. In case you’re thinking he must be some kind of hippy, Knaebel is a former CEO of a company and an engineer trained at Cornell University.
“The one actual, real and direct action that I could take was to break the paper chains that were holding me as a slave to the Empire. I tore up my U.S. passport at the Gandhi Samadhi, Rajghat, New Delhi. Rather than arrest me, the Indian police told me that I was free to roam anywhere in India, and to call them for help if I ran into any trouble.
The great Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote, “Man is moral choice.” This is what I have been calling the Law of Moral Causation. By unilateral renunciation of my citizenship, I chose to assert my responsibility by denying that the U.S. government could act in my name and on my behalf.
Here is the quotation of a freedom fighter in Mexico which seems equally relevant to the India of today:
“Why is it necessary to kill and to die so that you should listen to Ramona, seated here beside me, tell you that Indian women want to live, want to study, want hospitals, want medicines, want schools, want food, want respect, want justice, want dignity? ~ Insurgente Marcos to President of Mexico Salinas after the cease fire in Chiapas, San Cristobal de las Casas, February 1994 (Our Word Is Our Weapon, Seven Stories Press).
I plan to continue to present to the State and to humanity the question of whether we are ready to permit a peace-loving man to exist and to move about freely, without tracking tags and permission-to-exist documents. Or have we been so thoroughly conditioned that everyone except third world villagers and tribal people is destined to live in the big surveillance sheep pens constructed by states all over the world.
Hat-tip to Lew Rockwell for running the article on his site.
My Comment
Bravo for the gesture. But as an Indian by birth I must say I wouldn’t advise any expat Indian to try this. The Indian police will treat you very differently from a vellakara (this is Tamil for ‘white man’ ). A friend of mine, a graduate of one of the Indian Institutes of Technology, spent the year after his graduation roaming India, minus “English language privilege” – i.e. he pretended he didn’t speak it. He said he saw a side of India he hadn’t experienced until then.
Besides, the cynic in me wants to know – did Knaebel dispose of his assets before this gesture….or after? And if so, how? I’m sorry if my questions seem derisive. They’re meant respectfully.
I feel the same way about some…some... elements in the “patriot” movement.
Did civil liberties and the police state work them up so much when George Bush was in power? Is it civil liberties or the thought of an African-American president that incenses some people?
I’d say in a few cases it’s the latter….
“There is a crack, a crack in everything/That’s how the light gets in.”
— Canadian poet and song-writer, Leonard Cohen (via Truth to Power blog)
Uruguayan writer, Mario Benedetti, was the poet of the urban guerrilla movement of the 1960s-1980s called the Tupamaros. He died on May 17, 2009 at the age of 88. Here, the distinctive Argentine tango singer, Adriana Varela, sings a poem of his, “No Te Salves”:
No Te Salves/Don’t Save Yourself
by Mario Benedetti
No te quedes inmóvil Don’t stay motionless
al borde del camino by the way side,
no congeles el júbilo don’t freeze your joy
no quieras con desgana or love half-heartedly.
no te salves ahora Don’t save yourself now
ni nunca or ever.
no te salves Don’t save yourself,
no te llenes de calma don’t be so calm,
no reserves del mundo and in this world don’t keep
sólo un rincón tranquilo a tranquil corner,
no dejes caer los párpados or let your eyelids
pesados como juicios drop heavy with judgments.
no te quedes sin labios Don’t be left without lips,
no te duermas sin sueño don’t sleep without dreams,
no te pienses sin sangre or imagine yourself bloodless,
no te juzgues sin tiempo or judge yourself with haste.
pero si But if,
pese a todo after all,
no puedes evitarlo you can’t help it,
y congelas el júbilo and you freeze your joy,
y quieres con desgana and you love half-heartedly,
y te salvas ahora and you save yourself now;
y te llenas de calma if you stay serene,
y reservas del mundo and in the world keep
sólo un rincón tranquilo only a tranquil corner,
y dejas caer los párpados let your eyelids
pesados como juicios drop heavy as judgments,
y te secas sin labios remain without lips,
y te duermes sin sueño and sleep without dreams;
y te piensas sin sangre if you imagine yourself bloodless,
y te juzgas sin tiempo judge yourself in haste,
y te quedas inmóvil and stay motionless
al borde del camino on the side of the road,
y te salvas – and you save yourself –
entonces Then –
no te quedes conmigo. don’t stay with me.
(Mario Benedetti)
[I’ve made minor changes to the translation to make it easier to understand the sense…I apologize if that detracts from the poem for those who know it in its original form].