I listened to the British Prime Minister Tony Blair on television a few weeks ago. Public opinion in Europe was turning against his decision to go to war with Iraq, so he needed to win back the doubters. He was asking us all to remember the thoughts we had had as the planes smashed into the World Trade Centre on September 11. So I cast my mind back for a few moments to those frantic pictures we had seen on our TV screens some years earlier. What I discovered was something unexpected: a shameful and guilty memory of which I'd been totally unaware.



Let me explain. In the days prior to September 11, I had been reading the works of the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca. His book of poetry, "Poet in New York", had been a violent response to the New York he encountered as a student at Columbia University in 1929 and 1930. Lorca was passionate in his dislike for the city: its brutality, loneliness, poverty, inequalities and insane pride had all disturbed him. Abandoning his usual lyrical style, Lorca's reaction was a series of experimental poems expressing, in no uncertain terms, his tortured feelings of dislocation from his beloved Andalusia, and his hatred of the city in which he now found himself:

"I denounce everyone....,

the half who can't be redeemed,

who lift their mountains of cement

where hearts beat

inside forgotten animals;

and where all of us will fall

in the last feast of pneumatic drills.

I spit in all your faces...

I denounce the conspiracy

of those deserted offices

that radiate no ecstasy,

that erase the plans of the forest....

In part, the poet's bitterness and hostility were due to his own sense of loneliness and distance from his family in Spain. So in truth, the city he railed against could easily have been any large metropolis in North America, not just New York. Lorca was especially incensed by what he saw as the "loss of soul" this heartless city had engendered in its population: its worship of profit and greed. Lorca was nothing if not passionate! His reaction was violent, his images - those of destruction and apocalyptic revenge. Nothing could satisfy his mind but an image of the destruction of New York, that symbol (he believed) of all that was wrong with the modern world:

"..scream in front of the domes!

scream as if all the nights converged!

scream with such a heart-rending voice

that the cities tremble like little girls

and knock down the prisons of oil and music.

Because we demand our daily bread

alder in bloom, and perennially-harvested tenderness.

Because we demand that earth''s will be done,

that its fruits be offered to everyone..."

(Call from the Tower of the Chrysler Building)

These were the kinds of poems I was reading in the days prior to September 11. As I watched the planes penetrating the World Trade Centre a day later, I confess that for a moment (a spit-second), something ran in me like intoxication. I was feeling exhilarated. Inexplicably, it seemed as if some great weight had been removed from my neck, relieving me, freeing me! In that brief moment, I felt that the World Trade Centre had been destroyed because of its pride, its arrogance and its usury. It was a modern-day Tower of Babel (two towers even, surpassing the original!) destroyed by the hand of God! I was complicit in its destruction. Was I excited? I confess: I think I was! A line from Lorca even echoed in my mind (I may even have whispered it): "Oh savage, shameless, North America!"

The whole experience lasted only a moment (a millisecond even); though it seems longer in retrospect. I quickly came to my senses: became conscious of the reality - the twisted metal, the carnage, couples jumping from windows (hands clasped together in a confused amalgam of love and fear). What had I done! I felt ashamed and uneasy with myself. For a little while, I tried to rationalize my feelings: I tried to blame the poetry of Lorca for seducing me with its images and lyrics, (because I had never been to New York; it was a mythical city for me). But it was not the poetry; it was not Lorca. It was something in me (perhaps something in all of us) that rejoices when great catastrophes occur: some demonic, inhuman joy takes possession of us then turning us into a tangle of primitive, mindless, nerve reactions. When Fire, Deluge, Death strike on so grand a scale we feel ourselves to be demons too, working alongside them, toiling to relieve the earth of its houses and its populations, its cities and its technologies, seeking to restore the earth once more to its original, pristine purity; erasing all trace for ever of man and his works. I suspect that even the gentle Basho may have had somesuch similar thought when he wrote:

"When the house is burned down

You own a better view

Of the rising moon"

So now, when George W. Bush speaks of a war against Terrorism, I know he is talking about me: a war against the wild, scarred, mountainous, barren areas of my soul that cannot be bombed by "daisy-cutter bombs" or infiltrated with United Nations Special Forces. It is a war I can only declare on myself. I know that the war against terrorism begins exactly here at home (in the heart) and not in some distant country about which we know nothing but stories and poetry. But I suspect that the rhetoric to continue the bombing is also a similar, persuasive kind of Dark Poetry.

Resources:

F. Garcia Lorca. Poet in New York. Penguin. 1988 (Transl. by Christopher

Maurer) ISBN 0-14-018467-8