Doug Roy, Waterline, Cut Paper
Thebes, First Day of Summer
In the hour of treason / The landscapes are beautiful.
Heiner Müller, “Motiv bei A.S.”, Ende der Handschrift. Suhrkamp: Frankfurt am Main, 2000.
My translation.
As you are waiting in the poorly watered park for the demo against one empire,
And only for certain victims,
The tragic choice between ideals foreign to them, the believers in wishes,
In the one good packing all deities in good harmony,
Neither theirs nor yours giving any shade (note to self: water the bougainvillea).
Yet, because it’s summer, you are thankful to these monotheists who keep you sharp,
For your lawn is green, Celibidache conducts, the purple allium blooms,
The gecko ate its own shed skin, nothing useless left behind, rewarded with water to lap.
Later, at night, in bed, exhausted,
Though you got a meal, and no bomb has fallen on your apartment,
You review the order between your particle and the world,
How tomorrow morning will be just another half treason of all those we commit,
For all to see and ignore, panorama of all the things that want to be, and fail,
You as well, and the light all over it.
_________________
Massimiliano Nastri
Review by Manny Blacksher
Nastri’s “Thebes, First Day of Summer” is ‘narrated’ in second-person: I/we are its speakers and its subjects. In coming to grips with the poem, my/ ‘Our’ first question was ‘Which Thebes are we inhabiting, the one that was in Egypt or the one that was an imperial center of ancient Greece?’ In one sense, Nastri, who has engaged with Sophocles’ tragedies in other poems, must be pointing to our living in the dramatic Grecian Thebes, especially as it’s the subject of Antigone.
In Sophocles’ tragedy, Antigone fights to have her defeated brother’s body, which, as he rebelled against his brother to capture the monarchy, has been left to be scavenged and to rot outside the city’s walls as punishment for his insurrection. It was treason to rebel against the justly crowned king, and for Polynices to seek to have his brother killed was both regicide and fratricide, crimes against both the state and the sacred integrity of the family. Antigone’s uncle, King Cleon, has forbidden Polynices to be given sanctified burial, which both disgraces the family (of which Cleon is a member) and deprives the unburied of the most recognition of his human dignity. Polynices’ devoted sister Antigone fights her uncle, King of Thebes, to have her brother given proper burial both out of commitment to the dead man and with the aim of saving some of her family’s remaining honor and sanctity. In the context of the play, King Cleon has also betrayed his sacred duties to his family and to his nephew, who goes unburied, and to his niece, who suffers knowing her brother is travestied, left to be eaten by scavenger animals. Antigone proves herself willing to die in order to redeem her brother and her family, though this means she rebels against the sanctity of the King’s decree and the gods’ judgment against an insurrectionist.
In Nastri’s poem, ‘I/you/we’ clearly inhabit a modern urban now, so the Thebes in the title is a metaphorical Thebes—a ‘spiritual’ Thebes or a Thebes that identifies our predicament. Like characters in Antigone we’re all born into a world of orders of authority that, we are taught, it’s our duty to obey and venerate. But it’s a fact of our ‘freedom’ that, in living our devotion to some of the orders of sovereignty we esteem—to self-autonomy, to the family, to our commitment to religion, to the local government, to the nation, to a humanitarian world unity and a revered planet—we neglect or defy our responsibilities to others. Perhaps, with violent certainty, we could be honest and resolve that we’ll only honor the authorities we’re fully committed to (and so preserve our self-integrity) but every hierarchy and community of authority we withdraw our assent from is one we’re effectively ‘banished’ from. Really, we must question whether, in openly defying one system (like religion or the sanctity of the family) we won’t be publicly condemned by other people for undermining another order that we do claim to honor and protect (like a jurist who opines he couldn’t trust the testimony of someone not a Christian).
Nastri pretty clearly points out that our good, civil, representative-democratic societies (when they’re working well) aren’t geared towards punishing rebels but to enjoining all of us to give our consent to the inherent goodness of all the major public orders and common goods. Usually, we’ll affirm that we don’t live under tyranny in which compliance with every system of order is actively, violently enforced—though we allow that exceptional instances of defiance and law-breaking must be punished. Instead, we live in hegemonies, interconnected social orders in which our assent and compliance are assumed. Implicitly, Nastri raises the good question, “Really, can each of us comply with the expectation that we accept all the bases of authority that different people in our society venerate?” His answer is we don’t all comply and honor all the systems of authority we’re supposed to revere; to uphold one system’s overarching authority means to undermine or diminish or defy the authority of others. But, smartly and with moderately clean consciences, we participate with others in inclusive celebrations of the good orders we’re all supposed to submit to, though they enjoin rules and laws that we quietly dissent from. We’re all “traitors” deep down, even and especially when we get out and demonstrate with our civic family of citizens that we’re ardently devoted to all the good forms of government we should be obeying without exception.
And the cognitive dissonance of knowing we’re good and upstanding, while also admitting we’re not standing up for everything, and we’re really strongly against some supposedly good things that we privately don’t believe are legitimate. . . the deep down feeling that we’re ‘traitors’ gives our lives’ sweetness a special aesthetic beauty that comes from precarity, from knowing that if religion, the local patriotic militia, or the state government were sweeping up all the ‘fakers’ and believers-in-name-only, we’d probably get punished and sent to work in the reeducation camps. The proof of our secret exceptions would be there for everyone to witness, but then everyone else would have their own authorities they were inconsistently devoted to.
It’s a terrible given that our ‘good’ orders each have their particular groups of scapegoats whom we’re supposed to despise. And if it were commonly known that we empathize with the persecuted, it could be us being sent to the country to work the People’s good soil or we who get the “bomb [fallen] on [our] apartment.” The epigraph from Heiner Muller speaks of broader, more lovely “landscapes” made more delightful because they could be taken from us, but landscape could also signify a broad ‘vista’, a way that we see all the nice things together when we’re not having to look too close at any particular things.
The poem begins with ‘us’ standing with other we’s waiting to participate in a peaceful “demo,” a ‘demonstration’ against the things in our landscape that aren’t right. But we’re all standing with each other in safe demonstrations because we’re aware of places and times and peoples (people like us) who are seeking cover from violent, murderous “demo”-‘demolitions’ of entire landscapes and civic vistas. We might even be aware that our freedom to demonstrate in public is built on the understanding that our orders of authority do persecute scapegoat other groups as the rightful punishment our authorities give dissenters.
Nastri’s poem ultimately calls us away from pleasantly recognizing the nice things that come to us in the package we gain by colluding with orders of authority we might not respect and truly agree with. There are still people who are simple or zealous enough not to feel the incoherence of our convictions but rather who believe all the worthy things in our society are part of the one, unified good package of beliefs and commitments. These are his “monotheists” who keep us who know ourselves to be peaceful, amiable “traitors” and polytheists “sharp.”
For a humane perpetrator of “half treason,” Nastri concludes with the harsh recognition that tonight we privately “review the order between [my/our] particle and the world” and recognize that, if we were more devoted to inclusive goods, we might follow through with our impulses to be better than we are now and make a world that’s not, for most, “poorly watered.” We sleep well, and tomorrow will be bright with summer sunshine. For all to see, we’ll continue on with our “half treason” in never really trying to square the narrow myopia of our little ‘harmless’ selfishnesses and inconsistent virtues and willingness to “ignore” what’s known by all to be messed up with the grand “panorama of all the things that want to be, and fail.” And just as we acquiesce as good traitors each day to the reality that some good things will inevitably fail, we sense that what’s ‘good’ and ‘visionary’ in us must be among the things that we’re doomed to try, more or less, to reconcile until we fail.