{"id":133801,"date":"2019-05-20T12:00:05","date_gmt":"2019-05-20T11:00:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=133801"},"modified":"2019-05-27T11:50:42","modified_gmt":"2019-05-27T10:50:42","slug":"answering-the-mysterious-call-of-an-artists-spiritual-vocation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2019\/05\/answering-the-mysterious-call-of-an-artists-spiritual-vocation\/","title":{"rendered":"Answering the Mysterious Call of an Artist\u2019s Spiritual Vocation"},"content":{"rendered":"

What You Have Heard Is True<\/em><\/strong>: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance,<\/em><\/strong> by Carolyn Forch\u00e9\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u201cFriend, hope for the Guest while you are alive.\u201d <\/em><\/p>\n

— Kabir, \u201cTo Be a Slave of Intensity\u201d<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

Strange how a man
\n<\/em>Can enter your life<\/em>
\nJust like that: a knock
\n<\/em>Out of nowhere<\/em>
\nAnd you\u2019ve slipped away<\/em>
\nTo a rendezvous with destiny<\/em>
\nThat always awaited you.<\/em><\/p>\n

— EJC, \u201cThe Birth and Death of Trauma\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Myths and popular tales, like life, are replete with accounts of those not answering the call, of locking the door to their hearts and shutting themselves up in sterile and safe lives where the rest of the world is not even an afterthought, where others suffer and die because of one\u2019s indifference.\u00a0 Answering can be very dangerous, for it can take you on a journey from which you may never return, surely, at least, as the same person.\u00a0 Only the courageous heed the call.<\/p>\n

When Carolyn Forch\u00e9, a twenty-seven year old na\u00efve academic poet living in the San Diego area, miraculously answered the call of a Salvadorian stranger named Leonel G\u00f3mez Vides, who showed up at her door out of the blue, to go to El Salvador, a country she knew very little about but to which he said war was coming and her poet\u2019s eye was needed, she acted intuitively and bravely from her deep soul\u2019s murmurings and said yes, not knowing why or where she was heading except into the unknown.<\/p>\n

This memoir, a souvenir of hope and terror and a call to resistance, a poet\u2019s lucid dreaming between childhood and an adult awakening, invites the reader to examine one\u2019s life and conscience through language that emulates our living experience as it strains toward meaning through a wandering dialectical consciousness that weaves the past present with the present past and lucid dreaming with the waking state. One experiences this book as one does life, not, as the French existentialist Gabriel Marcel, has said, \u201cas a problem to be solved but a mystery to be lived.\u201d\u00a0 It is impossible to adequately \u201creview\u201d a book that breathes.\u00a0 One can only conspire with it to uncover the conspiracy of silence that is American government propaganda.<\/p>\n

For at the heart of this mystery are facts, which Forch\u00e9 describes in graphic detail, the truth of how the United States government has long been doing the devil\u2019s murderous work in El Salvador, throughout Latin America and the world, as current events confirm.\u00a0 Forch\u00e9 asks us to enter into her memories not to wax nostalgic, but to wake to the truth of today.\u00a0 The truth that little has changed and the past was prologue.\u00a0 The U.S. is still \u201cMurder Incorporated,\u201d and Americans must see this clearly, and resist.<\/p>\n

Carolyn\u2019s \u201cYes\u201d to the enigmatic stranger Leonel, so I sense from her reveries, was the fruit of a seed of faith planted when she was a child of ten or so in Michigan. \u201cThe girl I once was, who had been a Catholic, woke for the bells of the Angelus at six in the morning, Angelus Domini<\/em>.\u00a0 I sang to myself as I walked to morning Mass under a canopy of maples, through a wetland of swamp cabbage and red-winged blackbirds, the quiet, low Mass where it was possible to pray in peace, with the Latin liturgy a murmur in the air\u2026.I felt at peace in the church, on the padded kneeler near the stained-glass windows depicting the seven sorrows along the west wall, the seven joys along the east\u2026.When I knelt beside them, the floor, the pews, and my own body were quilted in colored light.\u201d\u00a0 But she tells Leonel that she has \u201cfallen\u201d because she no longer attends Mass.<\/p>\n

Leonel, a \u201cnon-believer\u201d who says \u201cI believe with my life, how I live,\u201d tells her about Padre Rutilio Grande, a Jesuit priest who was murdered with an old man and a boy by the U.S. trained and supported Salvadorian death-squads.\u00a0 \u201cGod that Padre Grande taught was not up in the sky lying in some damn cloud hammock.\u00a0 This was a God who expected us to be brothers and sisters and to make of earth a just place.\u201d<\/p>\n

This was her introduction to a new theology, a way of connecting her spiritual core from a conservative Catholic childhood piety to the liberation theology that created Christian base communities of the poor and persecuted in El Salvador and other Latin American countries.\u00a0 Dissident Christianity. True Christianity. When she went to El Salvador soon thereafter, not only did the poet leave the quiet of her study where her work might have revolved around herself, but the little girl left the church building to discover, as a changed woman, Christ among the poor and persecuted in the living world.<\/p>\n

One night she meets a man in the shadows of such a Christian base community where a few of its members had been killed and dismembered by the government death squads.\u00a0 His pseudonym is Inocencio.\u00a0 \u201cYou can say Chencho,\u201d he tells her.\u00a0 At first he thinks she is a nun, (\u201calthough,\u201c as a girl, \u201cI considered that vocation.\u201d) because she smokes, and some of the foreign nuns smoke and don\u2019t dress in traditional habits.\u00a0 He asks her why she is there and she says, \u201cYou know, I\u2019m not sure.\u201d\u00a0 She then explains how an unnamed person invited her to come to see the truth for herself because war was coming, and when she returned to the United States to \u201cexplain the reasons for the war to the North Americans, because my friend tells me that this will be important, that the real reasons be known, so that the people of the United States understand.\u201d<\/p>\n

Chencho is a catechist who secretly moves under darkness of night from one small Christian base community to another, encouraging the campesinos to keep the faith because God is with them, la gente, los pobres<\/em>, the people, the poor.\u00a0 He says to Carolyn,<\/p>\n

Listen to me, hermana<\/em>.\u00a0 We are brothers and sisters in Christ, and Christ is moving through the world now, through us.\u00a0 He is acting through us in the struggle against injustice, poverty, and oppression.\u00a0 To be with God now is to choose the fate of the poor, to be with them, to see through their eyes and feel through their hearts, and if this means torture and death, we accept.\u00a0 We are already in the grave.<\/p>\n

Later, Leonel takes her to visit a friend who is in a prison from hell where men are tortured in padlocked wooden boxes the size of washing machines.\u00a0 Afterwards she vomits. Then they go to visit a dirt poor young mother give birth in a casita<\/em> in which there was nothing, \u201creally nothing: a candle, a plastic basin, a ladle hanging against the wall, and, in the candlelight, the shadow of a wooden chair dancing on the wall.\u201d<\/p>\n

I followed him [Leonel] through the darkness into a passage, then through a door lit by a candle and, by the light of it, saw people gathered and one of them, someone, took me by the hand and drew me into the circle surrounding a young woman who was lying on her side on a blanket on the floor, her head propped in her hand.\u00a0 There was a cardboard box beside her, and in the box, a newborn girl with her hair still wet, lying in a towel.\u00a0 Leonel was looking at me from across the room.\u00a0 \u2018She was born about a half hour ago,\u2019 a young man beside me whispered.\u00a0 \u2018She\u2019s early.\u00a0 We\u2019re going to name her Alma. Bellisima<\/em>!\u2019<\/p>\n

Then it is on through night to meet with four young impoverished men who read their \u201cpolitical\u201d poems for her, written under pseudonyms for fear for their lives, poems they hope might stir the hearts of people in the United States.<\/p>\n

That night I knew something had changed for me, and that I wasn\u2019t going to get tired or need a shower or want to call something off so I could rest, and I hoped that if I forgot this I would somehow remember Alma in the cardboard box in the barrio, and the mimeographed poems\u2026.The woman who went into the prison in Ahuachap\u00e1n left herself behind in a barrio called La Fosa, the grave.<\/p>\n

The na\u00efve young poet is buried and the political poet of witness is born.\u00a0 It is impossible not to be deeply moved and nourished by such a birth.\u00a0 Who, I wonder, are the \u201cfallen\u201d ones?\u00a0 What is writing for?\u00a0 What good are poets?\u00a0 Why say yes to a stranger\u2019s request when it is so much easier to not answer the knock on the door? \u00a0So much easier to barricade ourselves behind walls of denial and say \u201cme first.\u201d\u00a0 So much easier to ignore the truth that this book reveals: that the United States is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world and our society rests on keeping the poor poor and under the vicious thumbs of the rich.<\/p>\n

The world is filled with writers who witness only to their imprisonment in their own egos.\u00a0 When Carolyn Forch\u00e9 said yes to Leonel and then returned from El Salvador to write \u201cpolitical\u201d poems such as \u201cThe Colonel,\u201d she was attacked by writers wishing a poet would stay in her box and not disturb their universe.\u00a0 That she was not like them angered them, J. Alfred Prufrocks who were not going to come back from the dead to tell us all as she has, poets who had time on their hands to neurotically contemplate their navels with their fellow Americans:<\/p>\n

Time for you and time for me,<\/em>
\nAnd time yet for a hundred indecisions,<\/em>
\nAnd for a hundred visions and revisions,<\/em>
\nBefore the taking of a toast and tea.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Having heard Leonel\u2019s descriptions of \u201cthe silence of misery endured\u201d and the American supported death-squads massacring impoverished Salvadorians, she tells us,<\/p>\n

I knew that if I didn\u2019t accept his invitation, I could never live as if I would have been willing to do something, should an opportunity have presented itself.\u00a0 I could never say to myself: If only I\u2019d had the chance.\u00a0 This was, I knew, my chance.<\/p>\n

Wasn\u2019t such a daring decision by this \u201cfallen\u201d poet the quintessence of the creative act, exactly what inspired artists do when they see the act of writing as an adventure into the unknown where startling truths wait to reveal themselves to the unsuspecting author?\u00a0 A journey fraught with danger and delight, perhaps delightful danger or dangerous delight, but always ready to surprise with hidden truths that might unlock the prison gates that enclose the world in suffering and pain? Does not the artist proceed into this alien territory armed only with a fierce faith in the power of truth to reveal its face and so strengthen us through disarmament?\u00a0 Doesn\u2019t a poet trust in a power greater than herself and know what she wishes to say only in the act of saying it?\u00a0 Isn\u2019t real writing a transmission between the creative spirit and the world of flesh and blood, the living and the dead, a visionary opening into the future where freedom beckons?<\/p>\n

Carolyn somehow knew this then and now, and her memoir is the result, a haunting trip into the past to liberate the present.\u00a0 \u201cThe strange, mysterious, perhaps dangerous, perhaps redeeming comfort that there is in writing,\u201d wrote Kafka in his diary.\u00a0 Perhaps there are certain writings that cannot be adequately reviewed but must be experienced. As I said, I think What You Have Heard Is True<\/em>: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance <\/em>is such a book.\u00a0 How do you review a prayer and a mystery?\u00a0 You must enter them if you are willing.<\/p>\n

Carolyn, drawing on the uncanny spirit of her mystical, Gypsy-spirited Czechoslavian grandmother Anna (\u201cI will get Anna out of you if it\u2019s the last thing I do\u201d her mother told her, to no avail), chose to develop her \u201clegitimate strangeness,\u201d as the French poet Ren\u00e9 Char urged, heeding his words that \u201cwhat comes into the world to disturb nothing merits neither attention or patience.\u201d\u00a0 Disturbed and perplexed by the stranger\u2019s tales and her former husband\u2019s experiences in Vietnam and the United Sates\u2019 savage war there, as well as by her mystical Catholic childhood\u2019s faith and its tug of conscience, she joins the mysterious Leonel in El Salvador.<\/p>\n

To those ensconced in instrumental rationality, her decision seems insane. However, instrumental rationality is insane, and it has taken us to the brink of nuclear extinction.\u00a0 It is to the poet\u2019s truth we should turn. \u00a0The data driven instrumental rationalists have given us WW I, II, Auschwitz, Vietnam, the CIA, death squads, Iraq, Syria, etc. \u2013 should I give you numbers, list it all, do the logic?\u00a0 When has such logic convinced the disbelievers?\u00a0 Logicians don\u2019t trust the soul\u2019s promptings and, like Carolyn, take a chance, take a leap of faith.\u00a0 They do calculations, follow computer models, and dare not enter the world outside if they are told there is a 60% chance of rain.\u00a0 And if they are told the sun will shine and all will be well with the world, but a hard rain does fall and the poet shouts there is blood on our hands, they act shocked.\u00a0 Always shocked at the truth that was there from the start.\u00a0 If only we had known.<\/p>\n

Is it any wonder so many Americans are depressed?<\/p>\n

For Carolyn, the child of Czechoslovakian ancestry, the German holocaust atrocities haunted her, and she grew up suffering from periodic depressions that would lift once she felt the urge to do something about the injustices she saw. The urge to act for others freed her from wallowing in depression. \u00a0Rather than becoming a nun, she became a poet, and when Leonel told her that an American poet was needed to witness the truth of the American supported atrocities in El Salvador, she trusted the spirit to lead her on, not knowing why this might be so.\u00a0 What use are poets, she wondered, in the U.S. poetry \u201cdoesn\u2019t matter.\u201d\u00a0 She would soon help change that.<\/p>\n

There is an old Catholic prayer that goes like this: \u201cCome Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faithful and kindle in them the fire of your love. Send forth your Spirit and they shall be created. And You shall renew the face of the earth.\u201d<\/p>\n

Might such words have bubbled up from her unconscious?\u00a0 I have long felt it was a prayer for poets as well as the religiously faithful \u2013 are not all inspired together?\u00a0 Is there a difference? \u00a0\u201cI believe in the magic and authority of words,\u201d said Char, the French resistance fighter.\u00a0 Witness and resistance.\u00a0 Words.\u00a0 Poetry.\u00a0 Prayers.<\/p>\n

It is best that I not tell you too much about Leonel.\u00a0 You will wonder about him, and you will wonder with Carolyn what her relationship with him is all about.\u00a0 You will discover his essence in the reading. You will learn that he once said to Carolyn that \u201cit isn\u2019t the risk of death and fear of danger that prevent people from rising up, it is numbness, acquiescence, and the defeat of the mind.\u00a0 Resistance to oppression begins when people realize deeply within themselves that something better is possible.\u201d\u00a0 You might, like me, question whether this is true only for the most oppressed, or whether it applies to Americans whose lives depend on the subjugation of others in foreign lands.<\/p>\n

You will be terrified to learn of the death squads, the brutality and cold-bloodedness of their murders, and Forch\u00e9\u2019s close escapes as they hunted her.\u00a0 You will feel her fear.<\/p>\n

You will learn of the courageous women who befriend her, her meeting with Monse\u00f1or Oscar Romero the week before he is assassinated while saying Mass and Carolyn has left the country at his urging, and you too will be lost in reveries as you travel between worlds of night and day, wealth and poverty, life and death, now and then.<\/p>\n

If you are like me, you will be inspired by what the poet Char called \u201cwisdom with tear-filled eyes.\u201d\u00a0 This book is just that.\u00a0 It is a call to Americans to face the truth and resist.<\/p>\n

__________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em>Edward Curtin is a writer whose work has appeared widely. He is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment<\/a> and teaches sociology at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. His website is <\/em>http:\/\/edwardcurtin.com\/<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance, by Carolyn Forch\u00e9 – If you are like me, you will be inspired by what the poet Char called \u201cwisdom with tear-filled eyes.\u201d This book is just that. It is a call to Americans to face the truth and resist. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":133818,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40,67,208],"tags":[642,868,109,870,805,70],"class_list":["post-133801","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-transcend-members","category-reviews","category-literature","tag-literature","tag-poetry","tag-politics","tag-reviews","tag-spirituality","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133801","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=133801"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133801\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/133818"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=133801"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=133801"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=133801"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}