And I am crushed by the knowledge that another black man has been lynched, this time in Minneapolis in full view of spectators who were able to film at least part of it. At a time when I am numb with outrage already, yet another detestable, brutal, violent injustice. And I reach for words—because I am old, I feel impotent as a citizen, I am shamed.
All the usual responses are in evidence, as if prepared. Police who lynched George Floyd have been fired but are yet to be charged with any crime. Protests began almost immediately and continue, eliciting predictable responses from local police, who have denied reports of rubber bullets, but cannot deny reports of fire hoses and tear gas. Social media again fill with support for the protestors side by side with now familiar attempts to exonerate fired police. Black lives matter memes circulate widely; no doubt there will also be memes asserting the primacy of blue lives once a justification of this new murder coalesces on the political right.
Now, notice of Larry Kramer’s death reminds me that the pandemic goes on, that my doctor yesterday reminded me to get a pneumonia vaccination when even massive suffering and death can no longer move many of my fellow Americans, as it failed (or fails) to move many during the continuing AIDS crisis, which has killed 675,000 since its beginning and continues to kill some 13,000 people each year. I’ll get my pneumonia vaccination the next time I can visit a doctor in person, and I’ll continue to be shamed by the cesspool my country has become. How is it that we tolerate this present regime as lynchings, mass murders, antisemitism, and the other trappings of fascism surround us daily. I want to scream, to run into the streets with the protesters. I find myself understanding, perhaps for the first time in my life, the impulse to throw a bomb.
It takes training to return violence with violence, force with force. I lack such training, but I begin to understand how one might become so desperate as to go in search of it. I am developing some new understanding of what it might mean to become radicalized. And at the same time, I’m troubled to be using such language. Do I really want to incite violence? Normally, I’d have answered “No” with alacrity, but today I am angry, and my anger puts me at odds with myself. In order to write my anger I should have to overcome my own stoicism and in the act of that face the question, “Do I really want to do this?” I don’t want to face that question, but perhaps I should.
What I am describing is the dilemma that gave rise to Stevens’ “Mozart 1935,” a poem I’ve written about before in the aftermath of the Michael Brown verdict. As I read back over what I wrote then, I find that I used Stevens’ poem to image a feeling of being marooned that is similar to what I feel today, and I remember something Isaiah Berlin Says of Verdi.
He was the last master to paint with positive, clear, primary colors, to give direct expression to the eternal, major human emotions: love and hate, jealousy and fear, indignation and passion; grief, fury, mockery, cruelty, irony, fanaticism, faith—the passions that all men know.
Verdi, as praised by Berlin, was perhaps the last Major European humanist who was not at war with himself.
When Haemon asks his father Creon if it is reasonable never to listen to reason as the catastrophe of Antigone unfolds, the answer is obvious—the question is merely rhetorical. But in our time perhaps a different answer might be returned. In a time when even God can be put on trial, as in Guenter Rutenborn’s The Sign of Jonah, when the world as we know it seems poised on the brink of a new era of Fascist strife, and nobody seems able to stop it, and “good” people seem determined to inflict it upon the rest of us, perhaps it is no longer reasonable to listen to reason.
If they throw stones upon the roof
While you practice arpeggios,
It is because they carry down the stairs
A body in rags.
Perhaps ours is less a time to ‘return to Mozart’
He was young, and we, we are old.
than to join the stone throwers.