Imagination in Place Page 3

  The word occurs more credibly in Edmund Burke’s Speech On American Taxation, in which he pleads desperately against the impositions that brought on the American Revolution:

  Yet now, even now, I should confide in the prevailing virtue and efficacious operation of lenity, though working in darkness and in chaos, in the midst of all this unnatural and turbid combination: I should hope it might produce order and beauty in the end.3

  The American Revolution may have been another “irrepressible conflict,” but Burke, who saw it as a civil war, seems never to have doubted that there were two other possibilities: reconciliation on terms of justice or amicable separation.

  Lenity can be understood as lenience or gentleness or mercy, and there was too little of it in Burke’s England in 1774. There was too little in our North and South from 1861 to 1865, and before, and after. Failing lenity in any conceivable form, relishing its differences, savoring its animosities and divergent patriotisms, the nation divided and went to war. The two sides met in a series of great battles, and at last the strongest won in the name of emancipation and union.

  That is the official version, and it is right enough as far as it goes. But to grant a just complexity to this history let us add a third side: that of the dead. Armies, by the necessity and purpose of military organization, are abstractions. We think of battles as convergences not of individuals but of “units.” Survivors, in their memoirs, speak as participants. Only in the aftermath of battle, on the nighttime battlefields horribly littered with the dead and the dying, do the individual soldiers begin to enter our imagination in their mere humanity. Imagination gives status in our consciousness and our hearts to a suffering that the statisticians would undoubtedly render in gallons of blood and gallons of tears. Maybe I am speaking only for myself, though I doubt it, when I say that to me the dead in Mathew Brady’s photographs don’t look like Unionists or Confederates; they look like dead boys, once uniquely themselves, undiminished by whichever half of the national quarrel they died for. In those photographs we meet war as a great maker of personal tragedies, not as a great enterprise of objectives.

  Mathew Brady was by no means the first to show us this, nor was Shakespeare, but Shakespeare did show us, with a poignance unsurpassed in my reading, the tragedy specifically of civil war. In Henry VI, Part III, there is a battle scene in which first “a Son” and then “a Father,” not identified as to side, enter separately, each bearing the body of a dead man whom he has killed and whom he now looks at. The Son says:

  Who’s this? O God! it is my father’s face . . .

  And the Father says:

  But let me see: is this our foeman’s face?

  Ah, no, no, no, it is mine only son!4

  Of our own civil war Walt Whitman saw clearly the pageantry and glamour and “all the old mad joy” of battle that Robert E. Lee acknowledged. But he saw also the personal tragedy much as Shakespeare saw it. With the same anonymity as to side, he speaks of coming at dawn upon three of the dead lying covered near a hospital tent:

  Curious I halt and silent stand,

  Then with light fingers I from the face of the nearest the first just lift the blanket;

  Who are you elderly man so gaunt and grim, with well-gray’d hair, and flesh all sunken about the eyes?

  Who are you my dear comrade?

  Then to the second I step—and who are you my child and darling?

  Who are you sweet boy with cheeks yet blooming?

  Then to the third—a face nor child nor old, very calm, as of beautiful yellow-white ivory;

  Young man I think I know you—I think this face is the face of the Christ himself,

  Dead and divine and brother of all, and here again he lies.5

  Once dead, the dead in war are conscripted again into abstraction by political leaders and governments, and this is a great moral ugliness. The dead are made hostages of policy to sanctify the acts and intentions of their side: These have died in a holy cause; that they may not have died in vain, more must be killed. And to benefit the victors, there is always the calculation, frequently alluded to but never openly performed: At the cost of so many deaths, so much suffering, so much destruction, so much money or so much debt, we have got what we wanted, and at a fair price.

  There is no doubt that wars may have moral purposes. Union and emancipation were moral purposes. So were secession and independence, however muddied by the immoral purpose of slavery. But battles don’t have the same purposes as wars. The only purpose of a battle, once joined, is victory. And any price for victory is acceptable to the generals and politicians of the victorious side, who are under great pressure to say that it is acceptable. But the accounting is conventionally not attempted. Victors do not wish to evaluate their victory as a net gain, for fear that it will prove a net loss.

  I doubt that such a calculation is possible, even if somebody were willing to try it. But that should not stop us from asking, if only to keep the question open, what we gained, as a people, by the North’s expensive victory. My own impression is that the net gain was more modest and more questionable than is customarily said.

  The Northern victory did preserve the Union. But despite our nationalist “mystique,” our federation of states is a practical condition maintained only by the willing consent of the states and the people. And secession, today, is still not a dead issue. There is now, for instance, a vigorous and strictly principled secession movement in Vermont.

  The other large Northern objective, the emancipation of the slaves, also was achieved. But this too appears in retrospect to be an achievement painfully limited. It does not seem unreasonable to say that emancipation was achieved and, almost by the same stroke, botched. The slaves were set free only to remain an exploited people for another hundred years. My guess is that, after the decision was taken to make slavery an issue of war, emancipation was inevitably botched. The North in effect abandoned the ex-slaves to the mercy of its embittered and still dissident former enemy, to whom they would be ever-present reminders, symbols virtually, of defeat.

  Furthermore, we have remained a people in need of a racially designated underclass of menial laborers to do the work that the privileged (of whatever race) are too good, too well educated, and too ignorant to do for themselves. Our Stepanfetchits at present are Mexican immigrants, whom we fear for the familiar reasons that we exploit them and that we depend on them.

  And so our Civil War raised questions that have been raised a number of times since: Can you force people to change their hearts and minds? Can you make them good by violence? Again and again human nature has replied no. Again and again, ignoring human nature and history, politicians have answered yes. And yet it seems true that Martin Luther King Jr. and his followers, by refusing to answer violence with violence, did more to alter racial attitudes in the South than was done by all the death and damage of the Civil War.

  Is this reading of history too idealistic and unforgiving? Probably. Must we not say, pragmatically, that a botched emancipation is better than legal slavery? Well, I am a farmer, therefore a pragmatist: Half a crop beats none; a botched emancipation is better than none. But, as I am a farmer, I am also a critic, and I know the difference between a bad result and a good one. Of our history, though we cannot change it, we must still try for a true accounting. And to me it seems that the resort to violence is the death of imagination. Once the killing has started, lenity and the hope for order and beauty vanish along with causes and aims. Edmund Wilson’s logic of the two sea slugs, the larger eating the smaller, then goes into effect: “not virtue but . . . the irrational instinct of an active power organism in the presence of another such organism . . .”6

  Once opponents become enemies, then the rhetoric of violence prevents them from imagining each other. Or it reduces imagination to powerlessness. Men such as Lincoln and Lee, from what I have read of them, seem not to have been destitute of imagination; of this I take as a sign their grief, their regret for the war even while they fought it. I see t
hem as figures of tragedy, each an instrument of an immense violence which, once begun, was beyond their power to mitigate or stop, and which made of their imagination only a feckless suffering of the suffering of others. Once the violence has started, the outcome must be victory for one side, defeat for the other—with perhaps unending psychological and historical consequences.

  When my thoughts circle about, trying to give my disturbance a location that is specific and familiar enough, they light sooner or later on “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” This song has a splendid tune, but the words are perfectly insane. Suppose, if you doubt me, that an adult member of your family said to you, without the music but with the same triumphal conviction, “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord”—would you not, out of fear and compassion, try to find help? And yet this sectional hymn, by an alchemy obscure to me, seems finally to have given us all—North and South, East and West—a sort of official judgment of our history. It renders our ordeal of civil war into a truly terrifying simplemindedness, in which we can still identify Christ with military power and conflate “the American way of life” with the will of God.

  I have made clear, I hope, my failure to perceive the glory of the coming of the Lord in the Civil War and its effects. The North was not uniformly abolitionist; the South was not uniformly proslavery or even prosecession. Theirs was not a conflict of pure good and pure evil. The Civil War was our first great industrial war, which was good for business, like every war since. The Civil War established violence against noncombatants as acceptable military policy. The Army of the United States, no longer the Northern army, proceeded from the liberation of the slaves to racist warfare against the native tribespeople of the West. Moreover, as the historian Donald Worster has said, the Civil War supplanted the “slave power” of the South with the “money power” of the North: “The fact of the matter is we have not even today figured out how to come to terms with the money power that replaced the slave power . . .”7 The great advantage of the aftermath went, certainly not to the ex-slaves or to the farmers and small tradesmen of either side, not to the people Wallace Stegner called “stickers,” but rather to those he called “boomers”: the speculators and exploiters, the main-chancers, the Manifest Destinarians, the railroads, the timber and mineral companies.

  My purpose in reciting these problems is not to suggest that a Southern victory would have been better—which I doubt—but only to point out that the Northern victory set the tone of overconfidence, of self-righteousness and assumed privilege, that became the political tone of the whole nation.

  The Civil War was followed, perhaps as a matter of course—and would have been followed, no matter who won—by the industrial exploitation of our land and people that still continues. While we have stood at our school desks or in our church pews asserting the divine prerogative of “The Battle Hymn,” we have been destroying our country. This is not an impression. By measures empirical enough, we have wasted perhaps half of our country’s topsoil; we are destroying by “development” thousands of acres every day; we have polluted the atmosphere and the water cycle; we have destroyed or damaged or brought under threat all of our natural ecosystems; in our agriculture and forestry we are treating renewable resources as carelessly as we have burned the fossil fuels; we have severely damaged all of our human communities. We have established unregarding violence as our means of choice in everything from international relations to land use to entertainment.

  What are we to conclude? Only, I fear, that violence is its own way, which is entirely unlike the ways of thought or dialogue or work or art or any manner of caretaking. Once you have committed yourself to the way of violence, you can only suffer it through to exhaustion and accept the always unforeseen results.

  I have been describing an enormous failure, and to me this appears to be a failure of imagination. Though we are now far advanced in the destruction of our country, we have only begun to imagine it. We are destroying it because of our failure to imagine it.

  By “imagination” I do not mean the ability to make things up or to make a realistic copy. I mean the ability to make real to oneself the life of one’s place or the life of one’s enemy—and therein, I believe, is implied imagination in the highest sense. When I use this word I never forget its definitions by Coleridge and Blake, but for present purposes I am going to refer to the writings of William Carlos Williams, whose understanding of imagination, though compatible with that of his English predecessors, is peculiarly American in its urgency.

  Three generations and more ago, Williams was fretting about the inclination of Americans to debase their land and, with it, themselves,

  as if the earth under our feet

  were

  an excrement of some sky

  and we degraded prisoners

  destined

  to hunger until we eat filth . . .8

  We were, he thought, “like a chicken with a broken neck, that aims where it cannot peck and pecks where it cannot aim, which a hog-plenty everywhere prevents from starving to death . . .”9

  Williams seems to have been one of the few so far who could see the vulnerability of a highly centralized economy. In a letter to James Laughlin on November 28, 1950, he tells of the disruptions of a recent storm, and then he writes:

  But witnessing what one small storm can do to a community in these parts I am awonder over the thought of what a single small atom bomb might not accomplish. Disruption of every service, now become more and more centralized, would starve us out in 3 days . . .10

  Against such craziness he set the “single force” of imagination: “To refine, to clarify, to intensify that eternal moment in which we alone live . . .” And imagination, in this sense, is not passively holding up a mirror to nature; it is a changing force. It does not produce illusions, or copies of reality, or “plagiarism after nature.” And yet it does not produce artificiality. It does not lead away from reality but toward it. It can be used to show relationships. By it “the old facts of history” are “reunited in present passion.”11 Thus I have pieced together Williams’ thoughts from the prose fragments of Spring and All. Thirty or so years later, in “The Host,” one of the devotional poems in The Desert Music, he lays it out more plainly, giving it, like Coleridge and Blake, a religious significance:

  There is nothing to eat,

  seek it where you will,

  but of the body of the Lord.

  The blessed plants

  and the sea, yield it

  to the imagination

  intact. And by that force

  it becomes real . . .12

  If what we see and experience, if our country, does not become real in imagination, then it never can become real to us, and we are forever divided from it. And for Williams, as for Blake, imagination is a particularizing and a local force, native to the ground underfoot. If that ground is not in a great cultural center, but only in a New Jersey suburb, so be it. Imagination is as urgently necessary in Rutherford, New Jersey, or in Knott County, Kentucky, or in Point Coupée Parish, Louisiana, as it is in San Francisco or New York. As I am understanding it, imagination in this high sense shatters the frameworks of realism in the arts and empiricism in the sciences. It does so by placing the world and its creatures within a context of sanctity in which their worth is absolute and incalculable.

  The particularizing force of imagination is a force of justice with obvious crucial correspondences in biology and in our legal system. Robert Ulanowicz says that “in ecosystems comprised of hundreds or thousands of distinguishable organisms, one must reckon not just with the occasional unique event, but with legions of them. Unique, singular events are occurring all the time, everywhere!”13 And, except for identical twins, every creature that comes into being by way of sexual reproduction is genetically unique. Recognition of the uniqueness of creatures and events is the reason for the standing we humans grant (when we do grant it) to one another before the law, and it is the reason we “return thanks” (when w
e do so) for food and other gifts that come to us from the living world. Without imagination there is no right appreciation of these rarities—no lenity, amity, or mercy. And, I think, there is no satisfaction either. Imagination, amply living in a place, brings what we want and what we have ever closer to being the same. It is the power that can save us from the prevailing insinuation that our place, our house, our spouse, and our automobile are not good enough.

  Historians and scientists work toward generalizations from their knowledge, just as all of us do. We must do this, for generalization is a part of our means of making sense. But generalization alone, without the countervailing, particularizing power of imagination, is dehumanizing and destructive.

  “The South,” for example, as the name of an historical side, can have a reckonable and useful meaning. But as the name merely of a part of the country, it means less. If “region” means anything at all, then the South, like the North or the West, is a region of many regions. But so is Kentucky. My county has several distinct regions. My neighbors don’t look like Southerners or Kentuckians to me. The better I know them, the more they look like themselves. The better I know my place, the less it looks like other places and the more it looks like itself. It is imagination, and only imagination, that can give standing to these distinctions.

  If imagination is to have a real worth to us, it needs to have a practical, an economic, effect. It needs to establish us in our places with a practical respect for what is there besides ourselves. I think the highest earthly result of imagination is probably local adaptation. If we could learn to belong fully and truly where we live, then we would all finally be native Americans, and we would have an authentic multiculturalism.