Well, yes, those files are a weird look into some oddity of government 'mind' if it
can be called that and how it seems to be the weirdest of intersections of
government power and bureaucracy with all sorts of ordinary pettiness, desires,
from any number of people intersecting with it and lending it life, etc, like a
publisher wanting one's book to sell more copies, or someone wanting to take
someone else down with the ship out of various undisclosed resentments, and,
yes, I'd guess it does work like this, that if you name someone else then you're
'cooperating' and can save your own hide. But in a way it does show that small
individual choices can fuel these things, and if those who made them had
chosen 'not' to, there's have been much less for this to run on. Your family
history, your father's is interesting, for I think fear's most effective when those
subjected to it have gone through particular traumatic experiences and so
there's a reality behind it and also a random unpredictability. Though I don't
think it's likely we'll be taken out and shot anytime soon. Rukeyser is
interestingly the only poet on that list and she kept on teaching at Sarah
Lawrence among other places. Well, it's an interesting look at a certain ideology
which has continued since then, through the Nixon adminstration, etc. and to
the present, albeit depressing. I liked your poem, the way the sound sort of
clumped up there at the end,
best,
Rebecca
---- Original message ----
>Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2005 11:56:39 -0500
>From: Ken Wolman <[log in to unmask]>
>Subject: Re: files
>To: [log in to unmask]
>
>Rebecca Seiferle wrote:
>
>>This url is better and you can read other files, like Rukeyser's for instance, so
>>strange, a list of her poems and where published followed by comments such
as
>>the odd "Other poems by this author indicate she could not have written
>>anything except in a period of disordered economics." or a kind of
unintended
>>praise (the second clause anyway) "her poetry contains no appeals to the
>>proletariat and her symbols of revolt are imaginative".
>>
>>http://foia.fbi.gov/famous.htm
>>
>>Best,
>>
>>Rebecca
>>
>>
>Some of this is almost funny. It moves me back to a time in which I was
>alive but was uncomprehending. I mean, how much does anyone understand
>at age 8, unless their adopted last name is Meeropol? Lucille Ball,
>dangerous agent of a foreign power, turned in by someone who admitted to
>her own membership but who just had to take someone else with her: that
>WAS the price, wasn't it?--talk to save your own career and ass and then
>lie about someone else's? Humphrey Bogart, having to defend himself to
>a slimebag like Ed Sullivan. What I remember? Fear. Plain and
>simple. Nobody in my family I KNOW of carried the infamous membership
>card, but they came from a place (Russia and/or Poland) and age when the
>promise of Freedom here was suspected to be a veneer. The pogrom starts
>with one, it goes to all. I DO remember my father, apolitical,
>irreligious, and self-absorbed, nevertheless inveighing against the
>"goddamn McCarthy." And there were the Rosenbergs--I am sure several
>people in my family who as children witnessed pogroms in Russian towns
>fully expected the black horsemen to come down on us all in the Bronx in
>1953.
>
>Rukeyser as dangerous...probably less dangerous than Mandelstam and
>Akhmatova because less endangered. At least for a few moments America
>took a poet seriously. The Russians, Cardenal, so many others...no, I
>don't feel like being taken out and shot this week, thank you, or sent
>to the prison camp in Jacques Itch, Louisiana, or Gitmo, but it would be
>nice to have acknowledged the collective danger we can present. Thank
>you, Sam Hamill.
>
>And of course how could this topic end but with some chunka vanity,
>something I wrote a long time ago about what it felt like to be a kid
>back in 1953--mark it "Good start needs work":
>
>PREHISTORIC LANDSCAPE WITH VENTRILOQUIST
>
>As middle age has aligned past and present,
>caught up at last with me and them,
>the voices of my dead, their dream-parade,
>once harsh, becomes a consort--
>and because we now are in nearer rooms,
>blend toward a music made softer
>by remembrance.
>
>Long gone, their voices live only within me.
>They are my history,
>mine alone to tell,
>so none of it is wholly true.
>For mine is a single voice, sounding through
>memory, replaying, distorting:
>producing from one self-schooled voice a repertoire
>of sighs, cries, imprecations, and laughter
>fed through memory's synthetizer
>that makes legacies even of the half-remembered...
>
>of how my parents put me to bed at Aunt Rosie's,
>on the cot in her sewing room,
>of how I heard through the door, slightly ajar,
>those voices I hear now:
>my mother and father, Aunt Rosie, Uncle Aaron,
>Julius their son, Roz his wife--
>from two rooms away, all going in and out of Yiddish,
>arguing, shouting, swearing about McCarthy,
>about the Rosenbergs who'd lived round the corner,
>had children--poor little orphans--Kenny's age,
>names that meant nothing but that made me cry
>because of how Cousin Julius spoke them;
>
>Finally of drifting off to sleep,
>of being shook awake by my father in the moonlight,
>seeing the old Singer treadle sewing machine
>next to the bed, black-gleaming in the moonlight
>a stack of dinosaur bones looming over me,
>reassembled now in the timeless skeletal shadows
>of the past.
>
>April 29, 1993/rev. 7/6/03
>
>
>
>
>
>--
>Kenneth Wolman
>Proposal Development Department
>Room SW334
>Sarnoff Corporation
>609-734-2538
|