I started Poetic Reveries because I hadn't read a single poem since being forced to read them to pass exams in school and college. Then earlier this year, I read Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard—a book that's littered with delightful and luminous verses. Instantly, I felt ashamed that I'd lived a life devoid of poetry and the reveries it evokes.
So I set up this section of the blog to read a poem a week and share it, hoping that a wayward traveler on the internet might stumble upon one and be inspired to read poetry like I was. I failed. I only posted twice and I've been somewhat lazy. I now intend to fix that by reading more and sharing all the beautiful verse I come across here.
An individualistic hellhole
We live in an age where the "I" is more dominant than the "we." Through some weird and kinky intercourse between culture, politics, and history, we've not only lost the ties that used to bind us but we have abandoned them with pride and aplomb.
We live in the age of the individual—nay, we have been living in the age of the individual for nearly half a century now. The world we live in is not just individualistic, but narcissistic. Real Life has been turned into a massively multiplayer role-playing game (MMORPG) where it's you versus the world. We all live in a weird solipsistic fantasy.
The incentives of life have been so twisted and warped that the very act of going through life has become not only adversarial but performative. Of course, none of these are original observations.
The reason why I am saying all this is, when I was writing last week's post about a modest proposal for utopia, I came across this gut punch of a poem by Adrienne Rich. I'm embarrassed to say that I did not know who she was, a mistake I intend to correct now. It's a haunting poem that explores the same themes of individualism and narcissism that I mentioned above:
In those years, people will say, we lost track
of the meaning of we, of you
we found ourselves
reduced to I
and the whole thing became
silly, ironic, terrible:
we were trying to live a personal life
and yes, that was the only life
we could bear witness toBut the great dark birds of history screamed and plunged
into our personal weather
They were headed somewhere else but their beaks and pinions drove
along the shore, through the rags of fog
where we stood, saying I
Utterly stunning and haunting, right?
This poem was published in 1992, and yet it rings truer than ever. I'm reminded of the word "Asabiyyah" I discovered thanks to Roman Krznaric:
The concept was familiar in the pre-Islamic era, but became popularized in Ibn Khaldun's Muqaddimah, in which it is described as the fundamental bond of human society and the basic motive force of history, pure only in its nomadic form.[3] Ibn Khaldun argued that asabiyya is cyclical and directly relevant to the rise and fall of civilizations: it is strongest at the start of a civilization, declines as the civilization advances, and then another more compelling asabiyyah eventually takes its place to help establish a different civilization.
Despite all technologies that promise to connect people, we are more distant than ever. We also seem to be okay with the fact that the culture we are part of pits us against each other, where this sense of oneness and solidarity often stands in the way of achieving status, wealth, or whatever else we're all chasing.
I’ll leave you with these beautiful passages from an equally beautiful article by the great Rebecca Solnit:
Positive social change results mostly from connecting more deeply to the people around you than rising above them, from coordinated rather than solo action. Among the virtues that matter are those traditionally considered feminine rather than masculine, more nerd than jock: listening, respect, patience, negotiation, strategic planning, storytelling. But we like our lone and exceptional heroes, and the drama of violence and virtue of muscle, or at least that’s what we get, over and over, and in the course of getting them we don’t get much of a picture of how change happens and what our role in it might be, or how ordinary people matter. “Unhappy the land that needs heroes” is a line of Bertold Brecht’s I’ve gone to dozens of times, but now I’m more inclined to think, pity the land that thinks it needs a hero, or doesn’t know it has lots and what they look like.
That’s another part of our rugged individualism and hero culture, the idea that all problems are personal and they’re all soluble by personal responsibility—or medication that helps you accept what you cannot change, when it can be changed but not by you personally. It’s a framework that eliminates the possibility of deeper, broader change or of holding accountable the powerful who create and benefit from the status quo and its myriad forms of harm. The narrative of individual responsibility and change protects stasis, whether it’s adapting to inequality or poverty or pollution.
What did you think?