Page 18 - WTP Vol. X #5

Translated to Somewhere Else (continued from preceding page)
him and shaken his hand and thanked him for at least trying to take the case for invading Iraq to the U.N. instead of letting the war go ahead unilaterally. Did he know the case he made was a pack of lies? Maybe the look on his face that night should have told me
he knew. He looked ill and alone. But I was looking at him as a man, and he looked to me like a good man, and I felt compassion for his predicament. Then he was joined by his fellow diners, and I focused on my own table, and never seized the moment to acknowl- edge a fellow American from a very different camp. Man is a changeable beast.
The next time I went to the capital was in April 2017 with my Australian wife, and now I saw the place through her eyes. Washington D.C. is an unusu-
ally beautiful city, in part because there are no sky scrapers, in part because of the monuments to
those remarkable men, the founders, many of whom were slave owners. There are newer monuments acknowledging this complex history, reminding any citizens willing to be reminded that, as somebody said, one can be responsible to history without hav- ing to be responsible for it. We went into the Library of Congress and read the many mottos in plaques on the painted ceiling:
“There is but one temple in the universe and that is the body of man.”
“The inquiry, knowledge, and belief of truth is the sovereign good of human nature.”
“Books must follow sciences and not sciences books.”
“Words are also actions and actions are a kind of words.”
The building presented its own complicated rhetoric of America. One can read Washington D.C. as a layout of contradictory texts.
In Lafayette Square, the little park across from the White House, we saw a young black man break- dancing for a crowd of students and teachers. We saw the motorcade of Donald Trump speeding off some- where, sirens wailing. We walked across a bridge meant only for cars to Arlington National cemetery and read the names of soldiers on the graves, and
my wife shed more tears at the grave of JFK. Her first memory was as a three-year-old girl in Hobart ask- ing her daddy why he looked so sad one day, and her daddy saying, “The President is dead.” Imagine that:
a man in Hobart, Tasmania, in shock about what had happened in Dallas, Texas. We saw the monuments to
Lincoln and to Jefferson. On one wall of the Jefferson memorial these words are chiseled:
“I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions, but laws and institu- tions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind.”
~
And we were moved by these things, which are still foundational to the arguments that make the United States what it is. The mob attacking Congress on January 6, 2021, largely comprised people who thought they were being patriotic. But when patrio- tism is based upon lies and bigotry, it is no longer patriotism, merely the behavior of a mob.
It was hot in Washington, where I was giving a po- etry reading at the Greek Embassy. Our days were spent looking for shade, appalled by the poor main- tenance of monuments in a nation founded by tax rebels. But the nation is large and does contain mul- titudes. We flew to Denver, picked up our Chevy van in the parking lot, and drove north into Wyoming for another poetry event. From the April heat of D.C. we were translated to an April blizzard in Wyoming, at times unable to see the edge of the Interstate high- way in front of us. This too was America. America was weather, and it was also words. In a gallery in Buffalo, Wyoming, we saw a painting by “The late William Pawnee-Leggins, a Sun Dancer,” and a quota- tion by his grandfather, Fool’s Crow: “The survival of the world depends upon our sharing what we have and working together. If we don’t, the whole world will die. First the planet, and next the people.”
Lawrence was lured to New Mexico by Mabel Dodge Luhan because she wanted him to write about Native Americans, and Lawrence obliged, but only in his own terms, refusing to see anyone sentimentally. He accepted the essential strangeness of other people and their rituals, and never presumed to understand them or to have absorbed the lessons of their way
of life. For my own part, I believe in learning from indigenous cultures, as a form of respect for life and the earth. I believe “The Uluru Statement from the Heart” is one of the world’s most important docu- ments. That does not mean I understand anything. But I can feel kinship with what I do not understand, and I think Lawrence did as well. He felt more kin- ship with what he did not understand than with what he did understand, and he knew that the English
coal miners his father had worked among were also participants in the mysteries, traveling deep into the bowels of the earth. He is a reliable guide to the state
11