Thursday January 5, 2023; 6:45 AM EST
- In the early 1960s, in The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin wrote of a labyrinth of attitudes and fears that prevented the United States from casting off its racist ways, from fear and greed keeping the reality of our circumstances at arm's length, preventing us from seeing clearly our circumstances and our failures. Yet reality is always here, ready to teach us if we dare look its way, Baldwin suggested. In those eloquent pages, he said that we might renew ourselves at the fountain of our own lives. We might always do so.#
- In our idle thoughts, our stock phrases, our words to friends, our media diet, our social posts, we are always in our near the labyrinth of attitudes belonging to this moment in our culture's history. We are always threatened by the rote language, the deadness of stock phrases and the attitudes behind them, the ease with which they appear to account for our experience. And we are always within sight of a possible exit from the labyrinth, within sight of the fountain of renewal promised to those who look hard enough at experiences for the stock words to grow pale and fade away. A time follows when we don't know what to say, but describing the world begins again, the fountain of language and arts has a chance to grow strong and offer us renewal. This is always within our reach, if we dare to do the work.#
- So Baldwin says, the labyrinth of attitudes is always there, and the bracing fountain of reality, of renewal is always there as well. We wake up each day with the choice before us. As individuals, as families, as communities, as a nation or even a world. Every day a choice.#
- Walking out of the labyrinth requires naming the world another way, using new words that honestly, not glibly, recognize suffering and cruelty, bravery and dignity and hope. Doing so usually requires naming the particular acts of particular people, in essential moments of their lives. It is not in any way adequate simply to say the big words, the slogan words, the noble words. These words, without the specificity of people's lives to animate them, are little more than propaganda.#
- In A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway's narrator rejects the speeches comprised only of the big words. he is repulsed by these speeches by World War I politicians when he places them in his mind next to the particulars of certain particular places where people suffered and endured or did not. He struggles to name the experience of war more truly. That war, with the modern improvements in weapons, with poison gas and barbed wire and trenches, with artillery shells reaching across the no-man's land for hours and days, that war, he said, was like the stockyards in Chicago if nothing was done with the meat after the slaughter. No use or redemption. That was his formulation of the reality of trench warfare.#
- In World War II, magazines sent reporters and photographers to the front, but they softened the stories and pictures they printed in the beginning. In time, first pictures of combat areas began to appear, and writers like Ernie Pyle worked out ways to tell stories that respected the grief and suffering of soldiers. They stopped protecting the friends and family back home from hints of the reality their loved ones were suffering at the front. They nudged the society away from the glib words of wartime patriotism toward a fuller sense of reality. You might see a soldier smoothing the uniform back in place around the fatal wound of a fellow soldier he respected. You might see past the dirty uniform and unshaved face of a soldier, the effects of living outside for weeks at a time, you might see past that now to the eyes of a twenty-year-old, barely an adult now but exhausted and cramped with fatigue and with the weight of what he had seen and felt and feared, looking in the eyes like an old man who still carries great burdens in his heart. The country let some of that reality in for a time later in the war. We started numbering World Wars in those days.#
- Not surprisingly, much of the literature and art of the twentieth century has been about despair and chaos. Think of Picasso's painting of the aerial bombardment of Guernica, for example. Even in more ordinary places, we see it, for example in the 1960s TV show Combat, which occasionally used twisted methods of visual storytelling developed for The Twilight Zone to evoke the mental torture that sometimes overpowered the defenses of soldiers during World War II.#
- Yet when it comes to some things, we avert our eyes. We accept the labyrinth. We defer the chance for renewal. Nevertheless, Baldwin suggests, the exit from the labyrinth is always there, the fountain is always there, if we choose.#