Poetry, Globalism, and Taboo

In 1981 and 1982 the Polish Poet and Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz delivered a lecture series at Harvard that was collected into a thin volume published in 1983 entitled The Witness of Poetry.  Milosz was a survivor of Europe’s horrific 20th century and described the experience there as forming an entire vision of poetry.

As a result, all of us who come from those parts appraise poetry slightly differently from the majority of my audience, for we tend to view it as a witness and participant in one of mankind’s major transformations. I have titled the book The Witness of Poetry not because we witness it, but because it witnesses us.

Milosz’s own poetry served as witness to the enormous eruptions of the 20th century, and his somewhat itinerant life captures in miniature the diminution of the role of geographic place in the newly industrial, globalized world. Milosz hailed from Lithuania, but lived in France, Paris in fact, the center of the universe at the time. He reflects on his arrival in Paris in a poem entitled “Bypassing Rue Descartes,” which, though originally penned in Polish, he wrote while he lived in Berkeley, California. Yes, he got around.

The poem considers the complexity of national origin and local culture in the maelstrom of globalization. “I descended toward the Seine, shy, a traveler, / A young barbarian just come to the capital of the world.” He is shy for good reason, of course.  Hailing from the backwoods of Lithuania, his arrival on the Rue Descartes in Paris impresses him with his own cultural, moral, and intellectual barbarism. 

Milosz recounts a few of the sources of his shame— embarrassing things like ritual prayer— before turning in admiration to the dazzle of the universal city. But the admiration is short lived. It seems that these intersections between the unenlightened world and the world of “universal, beautiful ideas,” ideas like communism that were in the air at the time, are never quite benign. 

Ritual prayer, in fact, is one of the first targets of the would-be benevolent, but also relentlessly secular, neo-colonial efforts of both the West and East. Even Pope Francis has noticed and decried the “ideological colonization” enacted by the “developed” and largely secular world on the “developing” world.¹

Milosz’s young barbarians are “[a]shamed to remember the customs of our homes,” incantations and choral prayers among them. Is the shame that the “young barbarian” feels in Paris a dialectical gift from the beneficent working of a higher culture, an image of the progressive dream of continual chronological improvement that will eventually trickle down to (or be imposed upon) the unenlightened? 

For Milosz, the lesson Europe teaches as it wallows in human blood spilled by compassionate ideals is one of conversion toward the modest, the local, the metaphysical.  He writes, “there is no capital of the world, /….And the abolished customs are restored to their small fame.”  

The poem ends with a meditation on taboo. Not taboo as an abstract kind of thing…that would betray the whole effort of his poem. Rather, he recalls a particular taboo with its local authority over him.

He remembers rolling a rock down a bank onto a water snake coiled below him and says that “what I have met with in life was the just punishment / Which reaches, sooner or later, the breaker of a taboo.” Sacred in ancient Lithuanian lore, but meaning nothing in cosmopolitan Paris, or Berkeley for that matter, the water snake taboo is modest, local, and metaphysical. Milosz is free to leave it behind geographically. But he will never be free of its actual authority which carries the moral force of a curse.

This is what’s so delicious about the poem. The secular globalists scoff and mock the absurd backward superstition of the locals. And all the while their neo-colonial maneuvers enact the precise consequences of the taboo on its violators. What Milosz met with in life, his continent-hopping, multi-lingual life, fleeing the communists in Poland and pandering to the spoiled liberal children of the American bourgeois at Berkley, was a just punishment.

At the end of his life Milosz is able to size it all up, able to survey the dazzling ideologies and totalizing visions of the twentieth century. He finds it all more than a little disappointing. Give up the ambitious ideology. Abandon the Rue Descartes for the small creek that runs by your parents home. Remember the modest, local, and metaphysical. Go home.

1. Pope Francis, “Pope Francis to Families: Be examples of Holiness, Prayer,” Vatican Radio, accessed 9 November, 2016, http://en.radiovaticana.va/news/2015/01/16/pope_francis_to_families_be_examples_of_holiness,_prayer/1118503