As Natalie Merchant observes in the notes to her (wonderful) new album "Poets are our soft-spoken clairvoyants. They tell us about the things that have made us and keep us human."Not so many people read poetry these days - gone are the days when any educated person could quote dozens of poems by heart, when people like Whitman or Tennyson were national heroes. Poetry now is marginal; it lives on the far fringes of academia and commercial publishing, on what scraps it can gather. Not replaced by a more contemporary form, just cast aside; the unacknowledged legislators of today's world are economists or TV hosts.
Interesting, and very sad, since poets are the ones who know what the treasure is and where it's buried. Economists can't help us when we go astray on a soul level as we have over oil. The treasure, it turns out, wasn't the oil we pumped, but the landscapes which the oil is about to bury, and which they all told us had less value.
And in Louisiana of all places - the land that the white man tore from its occupants, where he exterminated the native vegetation to grow cotton, where he made money from earth, money from blood. Louisiana, sold by one group of white men to another, including the bodies of the red men who lived there and black men who worked there.
But then there's New Orleans - songs of love and joy from America's most wounded region, wounded yet again by Katrina, the Federal Government stepping in to little too later just as it has with the oil slick. No surprise there; we've all lost touch, we don't recognize our treasure any more, so we let it bleed away, blow away, become swamped and fouled with heavy sticky oil.
Anyone who can still feel will have a heavy heart today - trapped like a bird in a slick. We can't go on using the planet like this.
If only we could see that it's poets, not oil, that we really depend on.
Great post Simon, and good to see the blog set up. Yes, this latest environmental disaster is just one more message that we cannot keep treating the planet like this. Stan Grof, in his book "When the Extraordinary Happens", tells of an LSD-inspired vision he had where he connected with Gaia, and saw that fossil fuels actually contain a death impulse, being the trapped consciousness of life which has not been allowed to return to spirit (he put it more articulately). The poisons being pumped into the air and water are thus toxic at a far deeper level than we realise.
ReplyDeleteMarcus
That's very interesting, Marcus. I was wondering what that oil represented - is it buried there for some reason, which means that we're better off not touching it?
ReplyDeleteMy feeling that a balanced and limited use of oil, like any other resource, is perfectly reasonable - but not the insane ogre-like appetite for the stuff on which our economies are built today.