Issue of
June 16, 1999
 
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Pinsky: U.S. a great
nation, but still engaged in becoming a great people
This is a
transcription of the speech by U.S. Poet Laureate Robert
Pinsky, Commencement speaker, on June 13, 1999.
I'll start in the formal
traditional way by addressing President Casper and
Provost Rice, the trustees and faculty, the honored
guests, the graduates and their families and their
guests. Thanks a lot for inviting me to come here. I
really appreciate it. I call attention to the formality
of the traditional beginning of this kind of speech,
because one of the things I want to talk to you about
today is the question: What are we doing here?
Graduation exercises, like
this one, embody one of the great secular rituals in our
culture, unique and strange occasions involving funny
hats which some here have made funnier and more
light-hearted and more individual and more festive with
pineapples and inflatable surgical gloves and trees and
things I don't know what they are. But you have not
succeeded in the making the hats any more strange than
they already are. Many of us have traveled great
distances to wear these special get-ups, to witness a
procession of individuals in these unusual garments whose
colors are part of the symbolic code elaborately
explained in your program and remembered by almost
nobody. We have come to take part in the handing over of
special emblematic objects, diplomas, which bear language
dimly understood or downright incomprehensible inscribed
on unfamiliar materials signed and stamped with seals so
formal they're nearly mystical with symbols and mottoes.
The hats are like a ritual symbolic surrealist mystery, a
symbol flamboyantly representing mystery itself.
Related
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By comparison, other
secular rituals, like the inauguration of an American
president, for example, or the ceremonies of becoming an
American citizen, get accomplished with a kind of quick,
understated simplicity, more like getting a driver's
license than our ceremonies today.
Why do we mark these
occasions with such intense degrees of, as the song title
is, "Pomp and Circumstance"?
My question is only put
the more by the Stanford tradition of doing something a
little silly or weird to go along with it. It's another
way of putting the same question: What is this?
There are two usual
explanations for this remarkable intensity of
ceremoniousness. One is that the graduates have worked
very hard for their education. Possibly so. Another is
that the parents and family have made material
sacrifices, sometimes mortgaging homes or taking second
jobs in order to pay for the education. There's something
in that notion, too. But neither one seems an adequate
explanation of these rituals.
On some deeper level, I
think that what we see today is the celebration here of
the two great obligations or standards, the two great
tests that apply to every tribe and culture on earth, the
two values by which any human society must be judged.
These two measures of any people, of any nation,
challenge us Americans at the end of what has been called
"the American century" in special ways. These
secular rituals and extraordinary gowns and processions
invoke those two monumental standards and propose that on
this splendid campus in the midst of a prosperous,
technologically sophisticated society, which this is in
some ways the center, in a richly burgeoning mass
culture, we do continue, so these exercises are meant to
assert, to fulfill the ancient fundamental purposes of
community.
I mean the two great
requirements of the human animal, without which human
community is corrupt or useless, namely, caring for the
young ones and honoring the wisdom of the old ones,
including the ways and wisdom of the dead. The tribe or
community or nation that fails at either of these
missions brings woe and destruction on itself. Today the
graduates pass symbolically from being the objects of the
first concern, young ones who have been nurtured, to
bearing the responsibilities of the second, those who are
supposed to care for the young and who will preserve and
extend the wisdom of the dead.
Colleges and universities
are places where those fundamental activities -- taking
care of the offspring, revering the ancestors -- come
together in a single effort. Commencement exercises are a
sort of transition or meeting place between those two
broad purposes. If you come on a tribe that neglects its
children or ignores its old ones, you know that some
tremendous woe is about to extinguish that people's
spirit.
I think that the special
outfits and music and titles and diplomas are a kind of
prayer that our spirit be healthy, that those missions
are still sacred one way or another. And clowning is part
of the sacred; clowning is a way of pointing toward the
sacred.
I'm going to try to
comment on those missions in a specific way that apply to
Americans today, and to these graduates, but first let me
elaborate the general idea a little bit. Most mammals
have to care for their young, but in the famous classical
tag, the human animal is an especially puny creature. Its
claws are almost useless as weapons. So are its feeble
little teeth. Its hide offers only flimsy protection. The
pathetic animal can't swim very well. It can't fly at
all. It can't jump very high. Its climbing is mediocre
and even its most athletic specimens are not very fast,
compared to other animals. But we're a clever, observant,
busy little monkey. And for survival, we have developed
means of communication -- communicating not only
horizontally, so the animal can cooperate with its peers
in gaining food or shelter, but also vertically with its
predecessors and successors so that the experiences of
past lifetimes can be applied to make up for our physical
weakness.
For this purpose of memory
and transmission the animal has devised the binary code
of the computer, and before that, printed marks, and
before printed marks, incised or written marks, and
before the incised or written marks, the creature made a
technology out of its own body, notably with the highly
refined system of grunts emitted through its feeding
orifice. Like the griots in Alex Haley's Roots who
could call up across centuries information about
dynasties, family relations, property rights, the human
animal through this amazing grunt code of speech can
retain subtle shades of information -- which food is
available at what time of year, what customs for mating
or burial best serve a community, information as precise
or as subtle as "Get me a pound of galvanized
ten-penny nails" or "I love you but not that
way."
Mostly we take this
process for granted, but not always. I remember when I
was in grade school they used to show us movies provided
by industrial groups -- "The Story of
Glassmaking" or "The Amazing Truth About
Paper" -- and these movies had these informative
graphic diagrams and vivid scenes showing very
complicated machinery pulping paper or making bottles or
fiberglass curtains, and also shots of technicians in lab
coats working the machinery or developing the processes,
making notes on clipboards. And in grade school I used to
watch those machines in assembly lines in the movies,
those elaborate diagrams of chemical processes, and I
used to think to myself: "There's no way kids
are going to learn to do this stuff." I felt that
when the grownups who worked in those factories and
laboratories died, it was all going to fall apart. There
would be no more Coke bottles or paper or whatever.
"I know these kids," I said to myself.
"When it's our turn to manage all this stuff,
they're not going to work those machines, where the caps
come down on the bottles ten times a second!" I knew
in my bones that maybe one or two kids in a hundred had
absorbed the diagrams, and none of us could work the
machines! It was all going to collapse.
In a way, it is amazing
that of course the people in my generation and later did
learn to work the machines, and the machines that make
the machines, and we not only mastered the process, but
extended and improved and supplanted and developed and
exceeded what had come before. It still surprises me.
Most or all of the people who made those movies about
glass or paper or whatever are dead now. Most of those
people in those obsolete factories are dead, and those
who practice their crafts and professions today honor
them in their work, without necessarily thinking about
them. Or maybe once in a while they do think about those
old ones of glass or paper. I hope they do. In the
interest of the community, the community instructs the
young in the ways of the past; and if I have one
superstition, my superstition is that we had better honor
those before us as we hope to be honored by those to whom
we pass on our treasures of knowledge and skill.
Maybe the most powerful,
even disturbing, statement I know concerning that process
of receiving from the old ones to give to the young is
the legendary half-mythical speech given by Chief
Seattle, the Suquamash Indian leader. In the most
authentic of the many versions of Seattle's speech, he
recognizes that the white invaders have displaced and
conquered his people, reduced now to a remnant who have
to rely on the goodwill of the white leaders. His people
are a faded, hopeless community now, says Seattle to the
conquerors, and soon there may be none left of a people
who once were more numerous and hopeful than yours. He
muses that the white men have said that their god is the
god of the Indians as well, but Seattle says he has to
doubt that. Why, if the two peoples have this one father,
does he treat the one so much better than the other? And
how can we be brothers, he says to the triumphant
newcomers, when we're so different.
As his great central
example of that difference, Seattle points to how
differently the two peoples behave in relation to their
dead. He says:
To us the ashes of our
ancestors are sacred and their resting place is hallowed
ground.
You wander far from the
graves of your ancestors and seemingly without regret.
Your dead cease to love
you and the land of their nativity as soon as they pass
the portals of the tomb and wander away beyond the stars.
They are soon forgotten
and never return.
"Our dead never
forget this beautiful world that gave them being,"
he says, and he explains that they often return to advise
and comfort the living.
This is very smart,
cunning rhetoric on Seattle's part, seeming to concede
and submit while it defiantly chastises. Then his speech
takes a different, rather surprisingly rhetorical turn,
musing that despite these differences, on the other hand,
he says, all peoples eventually wither and die away;
nothing lasts forever. "We may be brothers after
all," he says.
"We may be brothers
after all" -- brothers in mortality, brothers in the
fact that all nations wither. Nothing lasts forever. And
then Chief Seattle makes a remarkable statement, a
sentence that has rung in my mind since I first read it: "They
are not powerless, the dead."
"They are not
powerless, the dead." I believe that these famous
remarks of Chief Seattle speak to something deep in the
nature of the United States of America, as though Seattle
intuited something profound about our possibilities and
our risks. I associate his saying that the dead are not
powerless with the nature of American memory -- our
particular national ways of honoring the old ones.
It's been said that while
the United States is beyond doubt a great nation, it
remains to be seen if we are a great people, or whether
we are perhaps still engaged in the undertaking of
becoming a great people. I propose to you that a people
is defined and unified not by blood, but by shared memory
-- a people is held together and identified by what
successfully gets passed on from the old ones to be
remembered by the young. A people is its memory, its
ancestral treasures.
The greatness of our
military and political and economic power, the greatness
of our technology, are beyond question. And beyond that
power and abundance there are our great national
documents -- the Constitution with the Bill of Rights,
the Declaration of Independence. And beyond those, some
of our cultural accomplishments seem unarguably great --
our jazz certainly, our feature films maybe, the poetry
of Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, writing by Cather
and Ellison and Faulkner.
But the crucial question
is: Who are the people who remember those documents, who
are the people who remember the music of Ellington or
Parker, the films of Buster Keaton, the poems of
Dickinson or Whitman? Am I right in supposing that these
are among our sacred shared treasures? Or is the list
more uncertain than that, or different from that? Do we
or do we not recall our treasures? Do we know what they
are, and do we remember them, whatever they may be?
In this country, it's
especially evident that a people is defined by memory,
not by blood -- more evident than in a country where more
of the citizens resemble one another physically. In our
country, where we don't all resemble one another quite so
much physically, the conscious process of memory, the
deciding who we are by what we remember, is more overt
and visible because also, relatively speaking, we do
without the two great supports of memory in many other
cultures. Even our racial division, with its history of
injustice, in this context is perhaps only the greatest
and most painful example of our still ongoing quest to be
a great people. What are the two things that we do
without?
On one side, we do not
have a single unifying folk culture in which the
grandparents all tell the same stories and sing the same
songs to the children. The Italian American grandma and
the Eastern European grandma and the African American
grandma and the Lebanese and Chinese and Southeast Asian
grandmas in America all tell somewhat different jokes and
tales and sing somewhat different songs. Secondly, on the
other extreme, we are relatively without a social class
that considers itself the hereditary curators of art.
That is, possibly in that imaginary village of President
Casper's, that one person with a college degree who says,
"I'm well born. My ancestors and I take care of this
memory, these things. Somebody else does the folk memory,
I do the aristocratic memory." But here, there's
relatively little snob value to art. There are countries
in the world where politicians must pretend to love the
great national poet. In those countries, if a driver is
angry at another driver, he yells at him, "You have
no culture!"
I submit to you that this
is not an American insult.
In the absence of a single
folk culture, in the relative absence of the aristocratic
notion, where do we Americans get the memory that holds
us together as a people? How do we stave off the
withering away that's implicit in Chief Seattle's
observation that we don't keep our dead with us? How is
it that we have managed to hold together as a people? How
can we expect to?
One answer is that we're
still working on it -- that we have developed a national
genius for making it up as we go along. Improvisation
characterizes our music, our clothes, our blue jeans, the
get-ups that you have on today, the headlong invention
and energy of our businesses, our mass entertainment. But
the spirit of improvisation alone, though we may be proud
of it, it alone cannot sustain the process that transmits
the ways of glassmaking and papermaking, or the ways of
understanding ourselves across the generations.
A second, perhaps terribly
anticlimactic answer to how do we get along without a
single folk root, and without a dominant aristocratic
ideal, answer can be expressed in one disappointing yet
hopeful word: school. In America's public schools
and in our colleges and universities -- this particular
university improvised by a couple not far out of living
memory -- we have improvised some notion of who we are.
Or, to be precise, who our old ones are. Who are the dead
we keep with us?
My personal favorite
example of that process of choosing our old ones is in
the writing of the great American essayist W. E. B.
DuBois. In a memorable paragraph, where DuBois associates
the great works of the past with the spirit of freedom,
DuBois writes -- you can tell a good 19th-century prose
style by the way he writes, almost in blank verse -- he
writes:
I sit with Shakespeare
and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm in
arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and
welcoming women glide in gilded halls. From out the caves
of evening that swing between the strong-limbed earth and
the tracery of the stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius
and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with
no scorn nor condescension. So, wed with Truth, I dwell
above the Veil.
You may not have his
examples, but you better have examples. Here in his rich
19th-century cadences, DuBois affirms that the care of
the old ones and care for their works is a matter of
choice and love, not blood. He indicates that culture
through its greatest works is a means to individual
freedom. In Chief Seattle's terms, DuBois walks with his
dead.
To this lofty idea of his,
we can add another element of national memory, our
popular culture, a realm where the inventions and
improvisations of immigrants, a mixing of African and
Latin and European and Asian elements have created a
fabric of tremendous richness. But it's a peculiarity of
this fluid, dynamic popular culture that memory can be
very short. Ellington and Keaton, Billie Holiday and
Preston Sturges were popular, even mass art not long ago,
but within a generation or two, they, too, are taught in
school and remembered largely through the work of school.
Given this importance of school as curator of American
culture, in the absence of those two other repositories,
it's no wonder that these commencement exercises are so
elaborate, and so overtly laden with symbols and
mysteries.
The work of those artists
in movies and jazz comes into school, as the best sitcoms
and cop shows are coming into school, partly because of
the accelerating pace and increasing scale of mass art --
mass art, which perhaps should be distinguished from
popular art. Mass art, which can be wonderful and
glorious -- I don't mean to disparage it -- is by nature
designed and produced by experts, distributed by experts,
marketed by experts who hope to make it popular in one
specific sense. Popular art, true popular art in a larger
sense is produced by a people, distributed by means more
like gossip than like marketing campaigns. The mass
product of the steel oil drum, the ugly and unpromising
object, was made a musical instrument of popular art by
people who used it to invent a new music. Then steel drum
music was marketed by the organs of mass art, and perhaps
some of that product was sampled into a rap tune before
rap, in its turn, was transformed from popular art into
mass art, perhaps to be made popular art again in a
complex American circulation.
I promise to apply my
thoughts about honoring our predecessors and caring for
our young to this moment, to these particular graduates.
Your generation has
experienced mass culture with a special intensity. By the
time you were 12 or 13, you had consumed many, many
different mass-marketed products, some of them brilliant
and wonderful, some less so. As small children you saw
the movie and had the illustrated book, and you pleaded
for the spin-off products and you got the action figure
and the little figures at the fast-food place, and you
saw the cartoon version on television on the weekend. By
the time you were 14, manipulated so many times, so
effectively, you were more than a little jaded or ironic
about mass art, sometimes while being nostalgic about it,
at the same time. The normal response to these
manipulated cultural waves is to sort of lump them and to
feel a little disgust with them.
Many of the styles of your
generation, in music and dress, as I perceive them, are
as if designed to come up with something that resists the
mass scale, a kind of grooming or music that won't easily
be sold by Sears & Roebuck to 10-year-olds within a
few weeks. In this sense, it has occurred to me that the
body-pierce shares some roots and motives with the
current American resurgence of my own art of poetry,
poetry which has become increasingly, well, increasingly popular
in recent years. Like certain fashions, like having a
piece of steel go through the bridge of your nose or
something, poetry seeks to live on an individual human
scale. The medium for a poem is one person's voice. So by
the nature of the medium, it is a counterweight to mass
art.
One of your hallmarks as a
generation from my point of view may be an admirable,
droll skepticism. You do not want to be too easily sold
or too easily sold to, and your presence here today as
individuals indicates that you have held out for quality
goods and excellent pursuits. The hijinks with the
academic garments are in that category. I don't want to
overpraise them. I'm aware they can slide off into a kind
of languid privileged class arrogance, you know, like
kids at community colleges have to take this seriously,
we can crap around. I'm aware that there's a balance
there. I understand that, and you don't want to become
like the upper classes in the Evelyn Waugh novels, where
they trash stuff, and he writes, "It was the sound
of the English upper classes howling for broken
glass." But you can handle that one.
In a way, as a generation,
you have reversed the lines I recall from my beloved
great teacher here at Stanford, Yvor Winters.
Winters wrote this
quatrain in a poem called "On Teaching the
Young":
The young are quick of
speech.
Grown middle-aged, I
teach
Corrosion and distrust
Exacting what I must.
I hope your corrosion and
distrust carry you far, and that your resistance and
skepticism not prevent you from picking and choosing and
walking among the great dead, as W. E. B. DuBois
describes.
In relation to the ideas
of honoring the old ones and caring for the young, I pray
that my own generation has not let you down. I pray that
we have not been as Chief Seattle wondered if we are. The
language in which I've been addressing you, the machines
that are amplifying my voice, the dyestuffs in our
garments, the subjects you've studied, none of this was
invented by anybody here. We got this language and the
garments and the mathematics and the music and the
ceramic engineering, all the rest of it, from our elders
who got those goods from people who are now dead, in a
chain going back farther than anybody can trace.
Woe be to us if we have in
any way broken that chain that goes so far back. Curses
on us if we've held treasures that have crossed thousands
of years through successive generations, from the dead to
the not yet born. Think of your ancestors: Among them,
for everybody here, among your ancestors have been
princes and slaves. Everybody here in this stadium, if we
seek among your tens of thousands of ancestors, will find
not only slaves and royal personages, but the products of
love matches and rapes, people who died of starvation,
people who thrived, and across all those adventures and
misadventures, somehow the treasures have been passed on.
Therefore, though some of
you who graduate today will found mighty businesses, and
some of you will make spectacular works of art and some
of you will be effective healers and scientists and
thinkers and politicians, I ask you to remember that in a
certain sense, the most important thing about you will
not be the prizes you win or your accomplishments.
Though you win a Nobel
Prize in physics and literature, in a sense it is more
important that you keep physics and literature alive, to
be passed on to the generations that follow you, as
treasures that you got from the generations that preceded
you. Your success in business or law may be laudable, and
may enrich you and your families and communities, but
that is less important in the largest way than the fact
that by practicing your skills and exercising your
knowledge, you are also preserving them and perfecting
them, and you thank those predecessors who preserved and
perfected those skills for you by maintaining them for
those to follow you.
I charge you not to break
the chain that goes back to the primates that evolved
what we now separate into bands and music and poetry and
speech as a means of extending memory in an individual
lifetime and beyond it. I charge you in whatever way you
choose to honor the past and to convey its treasures to
the young.
They asked me to read
something of my own, and I'll close by reading a poem of
mine that maybe will be a good addendum to what I've said
to you, because it presents a notion of the past as not
necessarily, or history as not necessarily, the doings of
big shots. The history in here is in many, many places,
and you're sitting on it and wearing it and thinking it,
and it's in your grooming and the shape of your nose and
the garments on your back. The poem is called
"Shirt."
Shirt
The back, the yoke, the
yardage. Lapped seams,
The nearly invisible stitches along the collar
Turned in a sweatshop by Koreans or Malaysians
Gossiping over tea and noodles on their break
Or talking money or politics while one fitted
This armpiece with its overseam to the band
Of cuff I button at my wrist. The presser, the cutter,
The wringer, the mangle. The needle, the union,
The treadle, the bobbin. The code. The infamous blaze
At the Triangle Factory in nineteen-eleven.
One hundred and forty-six died in the flames
On the ninth floor, no hydrants, no fire escapes --
The witness in a building across the street
Who watched how a young man helped a girl to step
Up to the windowsill, then held her out
Away from the masonry wall and let her drop.
And then another. As if he were helping them up
To enter a streetcar, and not eternity.
A third before he dropped her put her arms
Around his neck and kissed him. Then he held
Her into space, and dropped her. Almost at once
He stepped to the sill himself, his jacket flared
And fluttered up from his shirt as he came down,
Air filling up the legs of his gray trousers --
Like Hart Crane's Bedlamite, "shrill shirt
ballooning."
Wonderful how the pattern matches perfectly
Across the placket and over the twin bar-tacked
Corners of both pockets, like a strict rhyme
Or a major chord. Prints, plaids, checks,
Houndstooth, Tattersall, Madras. The clan tartans
Invented by mill-owners inspired by the hoax of
Ossian,
To control their savage Scottish workers, tamed
By a fabricated heraldry: MacGregor,
Bailey, MacMartin. The kilt, devised for workers
To wear among the dusty clattering looms.
Weavers, carders, spinners. The loader,
The docker, the navvy. The planter, the picker, the
sorter
Sweating at her machine in a litter of cotton
As slaves in calico headrags sweated in fields:
George Herbert, your descendant is a Black
Lady in South Carolina, her name is Irma
And she inspected my shirt. Its color and fit
And feel and its clean smell have satisfied
Both her and me. We have culled its cost and quality
Down to the buttons of simulated bone,
The buttonholes, the sizing, the facing, the
characters
Printed in black on neckband and tail. The shape,
The label, the labor, the color, the shade. The shirt.
Good luck and
congratulations to you, Class of '99. SR
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