What Kind of Times Are These

Was sind das für Zeiten, wo

Ein Gespräch über Bäume fast ein Verbrechen ist

Weil es ein Schweigen über so viele Untaten einschließt!

(Bertolt Brecht, "An die Nachgeborenen"; Brecht reads it here)

What kind of times are these, when

A conversation about trees is almost a crime

Because it implies silence about so many atrocities!

(Bertolt Brecht, "To Those Born Later," my translation)

The "conversation about trees" that Brecht refers to in this poem from the 1930s has often been associated with poets who were then writing about nature rather than about the "atrocities" taking place even before the Second World War began. In this (entirely justified) reading, Brecht is setting up an apparently exclusive alternative: write about nature, or write about politics.

Adrienne Rich's 1991 poem "What Kind of Times Are These" (video here) takes up Brecht's imagery directly both in its title (a translation of "Was sind das für Zeiten") and in its concluding lines:

… why do I tell you

anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these

to have you listen at all, it's necessary

to talk about trees.

Brecht addresses "those born later"; in contrast, Rich addresses her contemporaries: those readers or listeners who "still listen." This first phrase seems like praise of the addressee, but what follows has a critical edge: "talking about trees" is a lure that is "necessary" to get "you" to listen at all. In a reading of these lines in terms of the reading of Brecht sketched above, a "conversation about trees" becomes a way for a poet to trick someone into thinking about "atrocities" rather than a way of avoiding doing so. Writing poetry about nature, here, does not exclude writing poetry about politics; in fact, "in times like these," only poetry about nature can engage the listener in such a way as to get poetry about politics heard at all.

Unlike Brecht, who mentions trees only once, and only indirectly ("a conversation about trees" and not the trees themselves), Rich actually does write about trees. In keeping with the poem's conclusion, the first stanza already makes a move from trees to politics:

There's a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill

and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows

near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted

who disappeared into those shadows.

Rather than politics in general, this is a history of a "revolutionary" politics engaged in by "the persecuted." It is also a history of failure: the path of the revolution "breaks off into shadows"; the "meeting-house" for the revolutionaries was "abandoned." In this light, the odd formulation that "the grass grows uphill" makes sense: the revolution is an uphill battle with many setbacks and many obstacles.

The obstacles to revolution include the atrocities referred to by Brecht. The "disappearance" of South American leftists during the 1970s and 1980s may only hover in the shadows of Rich's first stanza, but the idea of someone "being disappeared" by the authorities appears explicitly at the end of her second stanza:

I've walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don't be fooled

this isn't a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here,

our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,

its own ways of making people disappear.

The reference to a "Russian poem" comes quite unexpectedly; is it the "mushrooms" or "the edge of dread" that is supposed to make it necessary to insist that we "not be fooled"? Along with her use of Brecht's poem for her title, Rich's note to the poem includes another reference: the juxtaposition of "truth" and "dread" echoes the conclusion of W.S. Merwin's translation of a poem by Osip Mandelstam: "the earth’s moving nearer to truth and to dread." It's not the mushrooms that might have been "Russian," then, but the "dread." 

So this is not Russia, where Mandelstam was "disappeared"; nor is it a South American military dictatorship whose actions led to the coining of the transitive sense of "disappear" (usually in the passive voice as "Jorge was disappeared last week"). For some American readers, all the words describing this "place between two stands of trees" might well have pointed to such an "elsewhere," a country whose distance from the reader's own makes it easy to condemn. But this is "not somewhere else but here"; this is "our country," which we readers cannot distance ourselves from.

Still, the poem does not name the country in question. The author's name and biography tell us to think of it as the United States, and that specificity is very important to her work. At the same time, the lack of specificity is important to the poem itself, because it does not allow non-American readers to distance themselves from their own countries' atrocities, their own societies' "ways of making people disappear."

In the third stanza, Rich makes her lack of specificity explicit by refusing to identify the place in question:

I won't tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods

meeting the unmarked strip of light—

ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise:

I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.

If Rich told us where this "paradise" is, the specificity would relieve anyone from "somewhere else" of responsibility for the "disappearances" the poem refers to. But this refusal to identify the place also protects it from capitalist exploitation, even if the attempt to do so has already failed, just like the revolutions that left the "ghosts" behind at the "crossroads." After all, if she knows who is going to "buy it, sell it, [and] make it disappear," then her concealment of the location of this place will not actually protect it from "development."

For Brecht, a poem "about trees" is a poem that is explicitly not about politics and "atrocities." Rich implies that a nature poem can be a way to draw people into a consideration of politics. But in this third stanza, she makes clear that a poem "about trees" can also be quite explicitly political. The first two stanzas understand politics in terms of revolution and political history; this third stanza criticizes how capitalism aims to turn everything into a commodity to be bought and sold; in the process, the small "paradises" that can be found in out-of-the-way places are "disappeared."

This reading of the last line of the stanza in terms of political economy can be complemented by an "environmentalist" reading. By the late 20th century, after all, it had become clear that "a conversation about trees" might well involve speaking about "atrocities," as landscapes all over the world are destroyed in the name of economic progress. In this light, Rich's poem completely overturns Brecht's stark distinction between nature poetry and political poetry. Nature is not just a tool to get people to think about politics, as the final stanza implies with its variation on Brecht. In fact, nature itself, commodified and potentially "disappeared," is already as much a site of politics as any "revolutionary road" or "meeting-house" for "the persecuted." 

Feminists in the 1970s insisted that "the personal is the political," and much of Rich's most famous poetry explores the implications of that claim, which challenged the idea of the private sphere as an apolitical space. "What Kind of Times Are These" extends this challenge by implying that "the environmental is also the political." And it demonstrates how a "political poetry" can address the full range of politics while still being a poem "about trees."

Grayling's biography of Descartes

A. C. Grayling's biography of Descartes helped me see how Descartes used doubt: he was a "methodological sceptic," not a "problematic sceptic" (282); doubt for Descartes was a tool for argument and not a fundamental problem. Grayling states this quite fully:

The sceptical arguments employed in the method of doubt do not themselves have to be plausible or sustainable. They may indeed be far less plausible than what they impugn; but that does not matter. They are simply a device, an heuristic, something that helps one to see how it is that when one says "I exist" it cannot but be true. (284)

Grayling also points out that even the Cogito itself is not entirely original with Descartes:

When St. Augustine wrote in the early fifth century AD that we can doubt everything except the soul's doubting ("On Free Will" II 3:7) he was even then not inventing a new idea, and presumably Jean de Silhon, who published his The Two Truths in 1626 containing the remark "it is not possible that a man who has the ability, which many share, to look within himself and judge that he exists, can be deceived in this judgment, and not exist", must have known St. Augustine's remark or — independently of that — the idea itself in the philosophical tradition. (278-279).

Grayling spends a great deal of time discussing Galileo and his conflict with the Inquisition, because Galileo's punishment had a significant influence on Descartes: it kept him from publishing Le Monde and hence, in the long run, played a great role in the forms his work took. Had Descartes published Le Monde, Grayling's book implies, then he would not have written The Discourse on Method and The Meditations! Galileo's punishment made Descartes back down out of fear of similar sanctions—and, Grayling emphasizes, Descartes backed down because he was a devout Catholic who did not want to run afoul of the Church.

Grayling's discussion of Galileo, then, taught me something that I had not registered previously (neither when reading Galileo in SLE nor when studying Brecht's Leben des Galilei in graduate school):

Galileo published his telescopic discoveries in a little book called Sidereus Nuncius (the Starry Messenger). But in the next couple of years he made more accurate observations of the moons of Jupiter and, while puzzling over inconsistencies in his data, realized he had to take into account variables in his own position relative to the motions he was observing—specifically, variables which had to be caused by the motion of earth round the sun, thus showing that Copernicus's model was not, as Copernicus himself had taken it, merely a convenience for simplifying calculations of the motions of heavenly bodies, but actually correct. (166)

The new point to me is that Galileo did not just believe that Copernicus's model was an accurate description of the universe; instead, he demonstrated that it is. (For a fascinating book on the Catholic Church's ambivalent relationship to astronomy, I recommend J. L. Heilbron's 1999 study The Sun in the Church: Cathedrals as Solar Observatories. The Church needed astronomers to calculate the correct dates for Easter, but feared the implications of their research.)

Finally, Grayling also nicely summarizes contemporary theories of consciousness (all of which dispense with Descartes's mind-body dualism):

Consciousness has arisen amongst higher mammals, according to these theories, because of its survival advantage—an organism’s appropriate use of energy and protection from harm are much enhanced when it is able to place itself in a map of the environment and make plans about the best courses of action in it. Creatures which are merely biological automata, even if highly sensitive to their surroundings, would not be as adaptive as creatures that are genuinely conscious. (288)

This succinctly captures the role of evolution in the development of consciousness, while also emphasizing, pace Descartes, that animals are also conscious beings (and not mindless machines). Or rather, Grayling points out how human beings are also animals and are as subject to evolution as any other living species is.