The violence in this description is breathtaking:
I've been thinking about the Slow Foods movement -- the call to scale back the processed food from our lives, the emphasis on convenience over nourishment. I think the world needs a Slow Reads movement as well. Most of the reading we do these days is fast -- search for this, scan that. Slow reading meanders. A good read is an internal drama with questions embedded in questions, and it moves from expectation to startle to new expectations. And a good read stays with you in a way that a youtube video just doesn't.
Robert Frost's Collected Poems is on my bed stand along with books by Harlan Cobin and Lisa Unger. The poem that keeps calling for me is "The Exposed Nest." The poem has been sitting inside me for months now, recalibrating my view of the world.
In the poem a father figure recalls a small, passing moment after a harvest. He had thought that the child was playing ("You were forever finding some new play.") in the field, but he discovered that the boy or girl had a more serious concern. The tractor had exposed a nest of birds.
But what drives the poem is its shifting ideas about "play." At first the child seems to be play-acting, -- acting out s story with only internal consequences. But then suddenly the consequences become real:
What starts out as a work of art for the child - a sort of morality ritual - becomes an act of external consequence. This isn't a mere acting out. It is an effort to right a wrong, give protection to the exposed chicks. The speaker helps the child put up a grass wall.
Then it gets complicated. You really should read the whole poem. I love the way the poem makes its final turn on the idea of play. You think you're in for a happy ending. Perhaps you wonder why there are so many lines left in the poem. Well, it's because by the end of the poem, you're left to doubt the lines between acting in the world and play-acting.
The speaker asks if any good came of all this:
And then here's the clincher:
So you start to suspect that the act really was a work of play after all, more about the actors than the birds they tried to protect. This judgment solidifies in the last lines of the poem when we find out that the speaker doesn't remember returning to check on the birds.
And my question is, is that a bad thing? One of the reasons we have art is because we need a walled-off area of our lives to practice who we are. We act out our fears, hopes and aspirations through art. Art is a morality ritual. It expands the possibilities. The tenderness and care the two practiced on the field might translate into tenderness and care in another situation where the impact is more verifiable. Even the word "prove" has a double meaning. You prove something when you demonstrate it. But prove also means "improve." We improved our ability to care.
We are like the child in this poem every time we enter the ballot booth. We rarely know at any moment if we're breathing in or out: voting for an impact, or voting because of who we want to be or who we want to be like.
I voted for Barak Obama because I thought he had a better grip on the problems facing our economy than the other candidate. That was voting for the external consequences. I also voted for Barak Obama because I wanted to be the kind of person who voted for Barak Obama. That was voting as a work of art.
Others voted for Sarah Palin because they shared her belief in limited government: consequence. Or maybe they voted for her because they identified with her. She represents something - small town America, a past that was simpler, a population that is friendlier because it is less diverse: art.
Third-party candidates depend upon the voter-as-artist. The Ralph Nader, the Ron Paul - neither of whom ever had a chance to be president -- they drew on the voters for whom meaning is more important than consequence.
Many of us who think that Al Gore would have been a better president than George W. Bush, feel a certain bitterness about that. One of the factors leading to Bush's near victory those years ago was the Ralph Nader voters in Florida who, I would say, threw away their votes. For them, voting was not about calculating and weighing the best possible outcome. It was about self expression.
I've been bitter about that for a long time. But time and this poem -- well, my interaction with this poem, because I'm taking it places Robert Frost wouldn't have wanted to go -- has softened that bitterness. I still hope that the Nader voters in Florida regret their decision. But I'm more understanding of the deeper value of the vote as a work of art, as a spiritual practice. Practicing the ritual might make you a better person in other areas of your life.
They voted the way they did because to vote for Al Gore at the time would have been a statement about themselves -- a statement saying "I am corporate. I just go along with the machine." This is hard to say, what with all the vivid hindsight, -- the lives lost in Iraq and the credibility this nation has lost in Guantanamo Bay, the economy -- but maybe those voters did the right thing, for themselves if not for the country. As bad as eight years of George W. Bush has been, maybe it would be worse if some of us didn't practice the pure unadulterated act of proving they cared.