Where Order Is No Longer Imposed

Abstract

It seems almost certain that one books marking millennium will be New Directions' publication Peter Dale Scott's Minding Darkness, third and final book in his magnum opus, Earthway. If first two books, Coming to Jakarta (1988) and Listening to Candle (1992), are any indication, this trilogy may well become most fitting tribute and elegy to revolutionary hopes North America after Second World War. Not only will it put horror our excesses in full view, but it will range freely across this one person's considerable reading and experience in search whatever might bring world back from what he calls in Candle a Great Regression (189) to or toward a social order of nature and reason (35). Coming to Jakarta is, like Divine Comedy, one most unusual political poems ever written. Frustrated in his efforts as an investigative journalist to expose complicity United States in overthrow Indonesian leader, Sukarno, Scott decided to treat this matter in a poem. Coming to Jakarta is a different kind investigation (conducted largely through memory, which is to say, autobiographically) social and economic structures in capitalist North America that easily provided assistance and cover to CIA's brutal, anti-democratic policy in Indonesia. As he says in Listening to Candle, (we must always be two minds about this civilization that joins politeness and enlargement discourse to enlargement violence for whatever it takes to maintain inequality (174) Scott does not spare himself in this. He is in many ways natural, even high-minded, offspring social and political order, Canadian and American, that he condemns for its murderous anti-communist frenzy. By itself, Coming to Jakarta is a brilliant condemnation a politics gone awry. It is not just that forces proclaiming freedom and democracy in world gave way to coercion, assassination, and totalitarianism, but rather that these vices were knit up in fabric social being and personal inclination those politicians and bureaucrats who championed western, liberal virtues. ...opposed to hereditary caste so-called elites our open society competitive aggressive over-specialized workaholics all owing their status to state could only re-invent rituals sovereignty and not transcend them. (Candle, 153) Listening to Candle finally proposes a recuperative effort in wake failure western democracies to bring about truth and justice. Quoting 1 John 4:16 and prose Wallace Stevens, Scott proclaims that the serious voyage / (he that dwelleth in love / dwelleth in God) is to arrive here a violence from within that protects us from a violence without solution at center we occupy universe where order is no longer imposed but comprehended. (Candle, 94) Coming to Jakarta, then, is first step on a much longer voyage. Listening to Candle makes it more apparent how much even that first book began as a disengagement from limited, not to say futile, strategies proving that conspiracies exist. The move from investigative journalism, designed to call guilty to account, to poetry underlines at least a change tactics, if not a change philosophy. Scott's poem frees him tyranny fact and proof and allows his whole mind, in particular imaginative, speculative, skeptical, passionate (impulsive may be better word), and irrational sides it room to muse. An open-field aesthetics replaces rational argument - an in search itself (Candle, 115), as he says quoting poet Robert Duncan. With references to aesthetics Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Duncan, and Ron Silliman, Scott evolves an art exploded self' (Silliman's term [161]), a self that, thankfully, is no longer interested in making its proofs (against proofs others), a self that has dream / controlling darkness (Candle, 179), lost even, one is tempted to say, dream controlling altogether, and has let go. …