Activity

Begin Post – Part 3
For most of my life I have felt split between two conflicting approaches to reality: 1) as a researcher trying rigorously and methodically to understand violence in the world, and 2) as a poet, responding to intuitive impulses to say what moved me, whether rational or not. But recently my editor Mark Selden suggested that I write about the role of Coming to Jakarta in my political thinking. In responding to his request I have come to realize that the two sides of my life have become synergistic, each side not just facilitating the other but indeed enabling it. Because each can be characterized as an attempt, using radically different methods but towards the same goal, of becoming more aware of forces in our life that are not easily understandable by normal rational investigation. So that each is an exploration, if you like, on the same frontier between the known and the unknowable.

In particular I have had to acknowledge to myself that I could not possibly have depicted the scene in the opening pages of American War Machine if I had not first, with some pain, written Coming to Jakarta. This poem is often presented (even by myself) as my response in 1980 to the anguish of knowing facts I was unable to share, about U.S. involvement in the 1965 massacre by the Indonesian army of over half a million Indonesian men, women, and children. But it was also a confrontation with the disturbing reality that there is a gap between the world as we think we know it, and darker, more inscrutable forces at work both in the world and in ourselves. As I wrote in 2000,

Soon … I was looking at the same process of denial in myself: I had once discounted my own university’s support of elements working with the army. In this way Jakarta took the form of an argument, at first with the external world, but increasingly with myself”1

Mark’s request was a timely one. Just then I was attempting to write in prose about what I consider the failure of structural (or what I call Newtonian) social science to deal adequately with deep unstructured and unarchived forces in our society, such as the international drug traffic. I was also studying the prose writings of the Nobel-winning Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, who helped inspire the Polish Solidarity movement, and later wrote that the social task of the inspired poet is “to transcend his paltry ego,” and remind the “soul of the people” of “the open space ahead.”2