Just a few months back, in a lecture on Vajra Yoga and Buddhist thought, Tenzin Bob Thurman, drew a lesson on the line from Shelley’s 1821 A Defence of Poetry. “Poets Are the Unacknowledged Legislators of the World.”
The line, written 100 years before 1922, the year of my father’s birth, of Kerouac’s, Vonnegut’s, now 200 years old.
President Kennedy, a reader of poetry, pointed out in November 1962 at the cultural gathering/fund-raising dinner generative for what would become the Kennedy Center, that the Russian people are, at heart, very much like us. The Russian people order volumes of Jack London, Twain and Hemingway, Whitman, Steinbeck, and we here in America in turn read Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, and Pasternak.
For Russian people there is a holy Slavic Orthodox Church, living on, one way or another. There is art and cinema, ballet, sports of grace, literature and music. And there is always lots of talk, too. Alongside, as well, there is particular ingrained legacy that goes way back to the collective trauma of surviving, the tendency to wish for a Tsar, a strongman, to protect them and their villages from the hordes.
The apparatus on the Putin/KGB side of things is well-known for floating bold face lies. The claim of self-defense. Always, lies about intention. Journalists die, errant oligarchs fall out of windows, foreign territories invaded. Disinformation at its finest. No, we did not try to poison Navalny, no. We are not holding him as a political prisoner, but as a criminal, charged with crimes. No, we are not trying to kill him, sending him off to the furthest most desolate gulag possible.
Yet, people know, they get it. They listen to classical music, are touched by the beauty of ballet, cinema, literature.
The poet seeks the truth about the nature of reality, alive to love — to this beautifully human form capable of more than violence and self-protection. The poet imagines, like Buddha, previous and current lives, consciousness inhabited in life form. The poet knows the strangeness of the wish of the Bodhisattva, that one must imagine his or her own life leading on with slow perfection of infinite future lives in order to achieve that which will save all sentient beings from suffering and on to Enlightenment of the true nature of reality.
The conflict was, is, inevitable, the Tsar, who preys upon fear, versus the poet, who seeks reality.
To be a poet without means and resources to avoid the common enemies of living is a fatalistic choice — an endangerment. At work, solitary as it must be sometimes, the poet is reduced to one. To being alone with his/her own dicey personal choices and iffy employment record. The Dark Night of the Soul. And also then, there stands a chance, for the true inner meditations and mantras and sutras that reveal there is a path, actually, to Enlightenment, to freedom, to a love for humanity, as the Buddha found and taught.
Beyond the practice of craft, does the poet even need the poem? What’s the point except as a referent to the inner truth he, she, senses, vibrating in everyone and everything.
No-one who takes in the spirit of the people of Russia can long consider them soulless. But if you’re on the verge, take the time to read Chekhov’s first great long short story, “The Steppe.” The story of a boy sent away across the steppe in a carriage with his uncle, a merchant, and a priest, to attend school on the other side of the world, the proverbial Siberia. The story reads largely as a travelog, told from the boy’s perspective, reminding one of “Behzin Meadow” in Turgenev’s Sketches From a Hunter’s Album, where a lost hunter comes upon the camp of peasant boys telling night-tales by the fire. Chekhov’s tenderness and ability to inhabit another being a gift to literature and to us all. That first story only published through the efforts of an influential newspaperman who befriended Chekhov early in his writing career, catching wonder on the wing.
Dostoevsky opens The Brothers Karamazov with an epigraph, before the introduction, with its “sudden flooding wind.”
Verily, verily, I say unto you
Except a kernel of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone:
But if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.
John 12:24
Then in parting from the false, and in an awakening in the truth, the Power of One is released. The inner unspoken less known self truth is liberated, to become inhabited by the many.
It’s said that Navalny left behind, as others have before, Bonhoeffer, a journal. A dissident’s Letters From Prison. It is said that he converted to Christianity, I don’t know. He was a fighter, as well as poet. His truth will march on. He will be championed. No one can stop that happening.