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William Stafford and the Dawn of the Space Age by James Armstrong § § § Sightings: George Venn’S Beaver’S Fire § § §

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William Stafford and the Dawn of the Space Age by James Armstrong § § § Sightings: George Venn’S Beaver’S Fire § § § TAFFORD S A Journal & Newsletter For Poets & Poetry ARA B AR Volume 21, Issue 2 - Winter-Spring 2017 B the two superpowers had been steadily ratcheting William Stafford and the upwards since the late 1940s. America detonated Dawn of the Space Age the first hydrogen bomb--500 times more powerful BOARD OF TRUSTEES By James Armstrong than an atomic bomb--in 1952, and the Soviets had followed with their own hydrogen bomb in 1955. Chair: Dennis Schmidling On October 4th, 1957, at around 6 pm Eastern Just a month or so previous to Sputnik the Russians Standard Time, the Soviet news agency Tass launched their first intercontinental ballistic missile, Tim Barnes announced that the Russians had launched Sputnik and this gave Americans a new sense of vulnerability. Patricia Carver 1 into orbit around the earth. The news of the The fact that a Soviet satellite was whizzing overhead— world’s first man-made satellite spread rapidly on even though its purpose was claimed to be scientific— Martha Gatchell evening radio and television news and was the lead made Americans feel even more frightened; it also story in American newspapers the next morning. made them feel their government had been caught off Joan Maiers According to historian Roger D. Launius, writing on guard. Susan McKee Reese NASA’s history site, Americans immediately sensed In addition, America was fearful of betrayal from this was a watershed event and they reacted to it very within. Although by 1957 the Supreme Court was Jim Scheppke emotionally: “The only appropriate characterization beginning to reign in the excesses of the House Un- that begins to capture the mood on 5 October American Activities Committee and Senator Joseph Helen Schmidling involves the use of the word hysteria” (Launius). McCarthy’s power was waning, the “red scare” was One person who wasn’t hysterical was William still in full bloom. The “Hollywood Blacklist” is well Stafford. On that Saturday morning he was up early, known, but many ordinary people had lost jobs or as usual, and his daily writing directly addressed this even faced imprisonment during this period. One in new astonishing reality (which he must have known five employees in the U.S. were required to undergo about from the broadcast news reports the night loyalty tests by the late ‘50s. It is in this context of before). On a loose sheet of typing paper (his usual (cont. on p. 2) medium), Stafford noted the date and then made a list of three items: 1) Russian moon 2) Each person a prisoner of his self—and I alone watching a performance I used to think a play, NATIONAL ADVISORS but now know a chess game. Marvin Bell 3) Go forward but never catch before Robert Bly Chief Joseph gave up; but another chief got away. (Stafford 5 October ) Donald Hall Stafford does not usually enumerate his entries, so Li-Young Lee it is reasonable to assume in this case he’s implying Ursula K. Le Guin a connecting between these three phrases—though exactly what this relation might be is not clear. Do Paul Merchant the numbers indicate order of importance? Are Paulann Petersen they steps in a syllogism? He doesn’t elaborate. Chris Merrill But by considering Stafford’s numbered comments carefully, and by looking at the entries that follow in W. S. Merwin his daily writing for the month of October, we may Naomi Shihab Nye get some sense of how Stafford reacted to the dawn of the Space Age. Gary Snyder Stafford’s first phrase, “Russian moon,” is simply a statement of fact: the earth has a new moon now, and it is owned by our cold-war enemies. This is of “At the Bomb Testing Site.” B. G. Dodson. Acrylic/ course what caused Americans to greet the launch of Mixed media on an 18”x24” wood panel. 2014. Sputnik with such anxiety. The “cold war” between Inspired by Stafford’s poem of the same name. Friends of William Stafford is a non-profit organization dedicated to raising awareness of poetry and literature in the spirit of the legacy, life and works of the late award-winning poet William Stafford. 2 (cont. from p. 1) a climate of fear and paranoia that we must read Stafford’s acerbic (The Way It Is, TWII,75) comment, “Russian moon.” This mutual opacity leads to acquiescence to a socially prevalent Stafford’s second observation: “Each person a prisoner of his error—and the result will be a perpetuation of that error: “following self—and I alone watching a performance I used to think a play, the wrong god home we may miss our star.” but now know a chess game” must also be considered in context. In some ways the first half of “A Ritual to Read to Each Other” The notion of the self as “prisoner” has a long pedigree in Western can be construed as a paranoid call to “vet” one’s neighbor: what kind thought—for Christians it often refers to the soul’s helpless captivity of person is your neighbor, anyway? What if the pattern that prevails in the sinful body. As the apostle Paul puts it, “Wretched man that I is Soviet communism? Many politicians were calling for Americans am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?” (Romans 7.24). to “wake up” to the threat of communist infiltration—the wrong Modern philosophy—meaning philosophy from the 17th century god. Yet the inauthentic self that Stafford is warning against is not on—transformed this conflict into one between the reasoning mind socialist man, but the social conformist Emerson, for example, is (the agent of the Enlightenment, as it would come to be deemed) railing against when he says, in “Self Reliance,” and the irrational physical body. John Locke’s notion of the mind Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for as “tabula rasa,” or blank slate, implied the self could only be built the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender from its observations and memory; his description of the process the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is implied a passive intelligence, watching through the keyhole of the conformity. senses and inductively building its identity through its observation Human society, Stafford claims, looks like a line of elephants, each of Nature. Because Nature in Locke’s time was considered to be holding the other’s tail—the speaker in his poem admonishes that logically ordered by Newton’s laws, the properly-We have a choice we must vigilantly watch over the “parade of our conducted induction would lead one to develop a mutual life” so that “if one wanders, the circus won’t self not unlike the ideal scientist: dispassionate and to be “awake” or find the park.” We have a choice to be “awake” or to logical. The purpose of Locke’s epistemology was be complicit in a kind of mutual misleading. How to safeguard the individual from irrational forces of to be complicit in do we wake up? Stafford’s method for resisting this political and religious enthusiasms—but it had the a kind of mutual conformity seems similar to that recommended by side effect of greatly increasing individual isolation. Emerson and his Transcendentalist circle (who are Because the self was now completely identified with misleading. taking their cue from German Romantic philosophers rational thought, Westerners became prisoners of their own minds like Kant and Fichte): by listening to an authentic and at odds with their bodies, whose instincts and emotions were moral intuition inside oneself, a more universal (transcendental) to be disregarded. As Stephen Toulmin says in Cosmopolis, his solution may arise. Stafford says: explication of the foundational beliefs of Modernity, the duality of And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy, mind and body is a central tenet of the 17th century: humans live a remote important region in all who talk . “mixed lives,” because So when Stafford says, in his daily writing, that he is “alone . as creatures of Reason, their lives are intellectual or spiritual, watching a performance” he is referring to a performance which as creatures of Emotion, they are bodily or carnal . Emotion must be critiqued, resisted. In Stafford’s great moral and political typically frustrates and distorts the work of Reason; so the human poems, he often plays the role of the one who is “alone” and outside reason is to be trusted and encouraged, while the emotions are to the situation, watching: as the boy with the paper cup walking be distrusted and restrained. (Toulmin 109-110) toward the elevator man, in “Serving with Gideon,” the boy who was For Moderns this seems self evident—note our constant use of “almost one” of the “old boys who ran the town,” but was awakened the word “objective” to mean “dispassionate” and therefore more at the last moment as “right and wrong arced” (TWII 213). As a discerning. As passive and isolated Lockean intelligences, we are pacifist who served as a CO in World War II, Stafford was well aware watching the world as if watching a performance. But Stafford of the powerful compulsion society has over people. The solution further characterizes that performance as a “play”—implying that he to this is neither “reason” (as the Enlightenment would have it) or viewed it as something socially constructed, something imaginative. ideological action (as the political movements such as communism Stafford did not fully share in either the sin/soul or the mind/ and socialism were urging), but a combination of listening to oneself body antitheses—as a poet, his philosophical roots were in the and others, trying to discern that “shadowy” voice that might then Romantic Era, which arose in opposition to the inadequacies of the act in subtle ways, might make signs which others may detect.
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