Poetry as Survival

9. Convulsive Transformation of the Overculture

CHAPTER NINE Convulsive Transformation of the Overculture I pray for many things, things the Overculture may never pray for. SARA HUTCHINSON Sara Hutchinson is a Cherokee Indian woman interviewed in the book Surviving in Two Worlds. The "two worlds" are the worlds of contemporary, white-dominated America and the traditional world of first Americans. In the book, she does not define the term "Overculture" quoted above, and so, in adopting it, I have given it my own definition. In my definition, Overculture refers to the ideological and institutional formations and attitudes that support a given society or culture—established religions and political, social, and economic structures, as well as the values that validate them or emerge from them. The Overculture, then, is the stream that we individuals swim in. But unlike fish, individual humans can dream: they can "pray for" other things and values than those they inherit because of where and when they are born. Not all culture-wide traumas can be neatly placed in a framework of a few crucial years such as World War II or the Yeshov Terror written about by Rozewicz and Akhmatova. The most significant culture-wide convulsion in the Western world took place during the eighteenth century. This isn't the place to do more than list some of the turbulent phenomena that century unleashed, but they are worth mentioning, since they form the context of our contemporary being and also explain why the personal lyric is so important in our modern world. i33 134 TRAUMA AND TRANSFORMATION Although the changes I refer to took place in all aspectsof society, perhaps we could say they started in science with the seventeenthcentury genius Isaac Newton. As few individuals have, Newton changed the world irrevocably. His discoveries concerning gravity, optics, and mathematics made it seem possible to understand the fundamental scientific laws that rule the entire material world. It's impossible to exaggerate the impact of his activities. AsAlexander Pope put it in a deliberate parody of the Biblical creation story: Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night: God said, "Let Newtonbe!" and all was light. In the wake of these scientific breakthroughs came technology, the practical application of scientific principles to create inventionssuch as the steam engine and the spinningjenny, which, in turn, fed the growth of the industrial systems of emergent capitalism. A century after Newton, his example inspired the Enlightenment intellectuals. Such thinkers as David Hume and Adam Smith in Scotland; Voltaire, Diderot, D'Alembert, Montesquieu, and others in France; Kant in Germany; andJefferson, Franklin, and Madison in America were eagerto use reason and rationality to make sense of the human world, either deductively (asin mathematics) or inductively (as in physics). Progress would replace superstition and hide-bound tradition. Using the rationality and logic Newton had employed so successfully in physics, they would redesign the intellectual, moral, and political universes as Newton had the scientific. In England, which had undergone a bloody political revolution in the seventeenth century, there was sufficient political flexibility to permit the emerging bourgeoisie and capitalists to take leading roles in running the country. In France, on the other hand, the aristocrats and church hierarchy resisted the political implications of economic and intellectual changes, as did the king of France himself. This resistance met its end with the violent upheaval we know as the French Revolution, which itself metamorphosed into the Terror, whose ceaselessguillotinings presaged the stateterrorisms of our own times. Convulsive Transformation 135 Everything in Western Europe, especially England and France, was in transition. And toward what? No one knew. Of course, as always, people responded differently. Some were exhilarated and joined their fates to the movements and motions, gave themselves up to the new ideas and opportunities. But many others were confused and uncertain about the intense and ceaseless change that was overtaking and altering all that surrounded them in the physical and intellectual landscape. They felt the idea and beliefstructures they had been raised within crumbling under the pressures of new developments. Where would they turn for the ordering ideas and values that we call meaning? Many felt they could no longer rely on religion or philosophy. Nor wasthis existentialcrisis merely intellectual ; peoplefelt it, experienced it personally as anxiety, confusion, and despair. Forced to confront this bewildering world naked of inherited beliefs, individual selves fell back on their own world of feelings and experience. It isjust such a set of crisis...