The Keynote Address by James Ragan  at the Word Literature Today Conference, Normal University,  Beijing, China,  October 16, 2008

by James Ragan

It has been said that man’s innate proclivities for creation and destruction are so inventive and so apocalyptic that in their genius lies the “unwritten” testament to man’s future. It is to his art, however, to his prose and poetry, the “written” testaments of man’s place in his universe, that we turn for truth and understanding. If man is to survive such creations of his own undoing, as the threat of nuclear and chemical arsenals or the god-science of biotechnology, an entirely new creed of morality must be proposed, and it begins with the artist, who has in the past fashioned our most durable foundations of communication and, by extension, the primacy of conscience. It is in the environment of the creative mind that a new morality will inspire global communication designed to retard or arrest the technological advances, which threaten man’s already fragmented psyche and existence. The artist, by nature, must represent a standard of nobility, bound at the core of his being, by passion and compassion.

Our present goal as impassioned, free-thinking members of a community of artists is to return to our trust in literature, and to celebrate our freedoms to pursue the standards of the nobility of conscience. Like Descartes, we know that the mind thinks. However, we must face the truth that it does not necessarily improve—unless we choose to improve the environment of the imaginative and creative functions of the mind, afforded us by the metaphoric powers of language.  Language with its mirror into the ecology of the mind has in recent times been debilitated by cynicism and political non-speak and is too long in recovery. I’m often reminded of the response Mahatma Gandhi once gave to a journalist’s question, “What do you think of Western civilization?” Gandhi responded, “I think it would be a good idea.”

In America, from the sixties on, language has been in the process of “telegenic revivification.” Perhaps due to a post-Kennedy anti-intellectualism, the new life revived in a devolving language during the Nixon years was media-inspired, script-annotated and sound-simplified, suitable for television’s instant broadcast and mass audience consumption –and sadly destined for semantic collapse.

“Instant imaging” like TV’s political sound-bite has become the vehicle for instant truth and gratification. This telegenic impulse to immerse us, as Octavio Paz suggests, “in the now that never stops blinking,” to, in effect, “instantize ” or “formulize” the visual image at the expense of truth and “context” has provided the impetus for the public’s movement away from books and book reading toward an evolving infatuation with the modern new media.

The “instant imaging of truth” has also contributed to the misdirected goal of arresting or pacifying the imagination. It was Albert Einstein who once said, “Imagination is more important than intelligence.”  It is the media’s rush to instant truth, without context, that has paralyzed our nation’s need for reflection. And art has always demanded context and reflection. Instead of the artist’s mandate to disturb the imagination on levels that metaphor has the power to achieve, today’s writer runs the risk of devolving language with an immediately recognizable, multi-visceral, cliche-bound vocabulary consistent with and suitable for the anti-intellectual and “dumbing down” trend in today’s society. We have become a tabloid culture. Thriving currently on the narco-narcissism of Facebook and twittering, we have stream-lined our collective identity as the “You Know?” generation – Like, you know?

For the “you know?” generation weaned on tabloid cynicism, television, video games, cyberspace, and the  “me-me-me” rabidity of Facebook, the technologies of “instant imaging” and Tweet “short-handing” have supplanted the polysemy of the written word. We have ceased to become a country of ideas. The sterility of the computer screen has replaced the passions of spoken dialogue. We are data-basing ourselves into mental atrophy.  According to one critic, we don’t practice repression in our society, we practice triviality. We need look no further than to recent Presidential political races. Only in a tabloid culture environment, where communication is reduced to the “cliché” denominator of social discourse can a presidential candidate’s elevation of language to the level of eloquence be criticized as “elitist” – while another’s  “semantical” slaughtering of the English language is praised  on the grounds that “he sounds like one of us.”

In 1988 as a guest of the Chinese Writers Association in Beijing, and more than a decade before Gao Xinjian won the Nobel Prize for Literature, I wrote an essay for the Los Angeles Times entitled “A Renaissance in Modern Chinese Literature.” In it I stated that “a new revolutionary rationale has infiltrated an old-culture consciousness. China is in transition—economically, socially, and politically—but nowhere are the changes more dramatic than in its literature.” This potential remains still to be realized.

Contemporary writing and writers must reflect once again an imagination and eclecticism that has distinguished previous generations of authors, devoted in their verse and prose, to the pursuit of a global conversation in the arts. Indeed, the balance of wit and form offered in their works is met with the counterbalance of colloquy and reform. What is not lacking in either is imagination and the articulations of a global vision. A diversity of traditions was AND IS an unspoken mandate.

In 1985, as one example of a globalization of the arts, I was honored to be invited to read alongside Seamus Heaney, Bob Dylan, and Robert Bly in Moscow for the First International Poetry Festival, hosted by Mikhail Gorbachev. We had read for 8,000 people in a hockey stadium. I’m reminded of what a poet said to me after the celebrity of our reading. “James, he said, now that we’ve become national monuments, look out for the pigeons.”  His admonishment to beware of our detractors had not gone unheeded.

Where once there existed a systemic starving of the intellect for an entire generation of Soviet artists, glasnost had served for them to free the encumbered spirit. I began the performance with the assessment that one of the still sacred powers of the artist in any period of intellectual recession is the ability to move and shape the minds of kings (world leaders), who in turn move and shape the minds of society. While sadly, at times, it appears there are few kings (world leaders) with minds willing to be moved – or, perhaps, writers seem no longer inspired by that intention– it still remains for the “artist,” that beleaguered and irrepressible shaman of image and language, to persist in the pursuit of universal truth, to afflict the comfortable, and comfort the afflicted, no matter how irascible or anti-cathartic society remains in its response.

It is the hope that with a collective call for the globalization of a literature of conscience, with its renewed devotion to artistry, one will be inspired by the verve and compassion with which the poets and prose writers had, in the past, informed their art in order to, in turn, move and shape the hearts and minds of a seemingly dispassionate culture. Indeed, even if one lingers on their poetry, prose, plays, or films for only moments, there will lie over these moments what Rainer Maria Rilke called “the dimensions of gigantic intentions.”  In the convening of this International Writers Conference, I am inspired by the many authors who in their best work continue to reflect the “dimensions of gigantic intentions” currently being published in climates of political cynicism and oppression, during this, the first decade of a new millennium.

Each in his own way has weathered the shifts in the literary topography to remain steadfast in his or her own search for artistic identity in a period in which the culture and the temper of the times are so distinctively in flux. Each continues to look forward beyond the merely safe and familiar. Each continues to evoke the prophetic and the universality in all experience. The artist at the beginning of this century, most suited to being called nature’s prophet, is one who sees the past and future as the unifying factors of all art and one with whom nature and human nature share in the prophesy and the expedition. This is the sense of the best work in all literary periods and traditions, in all languages, and in all cultures.

Wallace Stevens reminds us that the great poems of heaven and hell have already been written; the great poem of the earth has yet to be written. With this in mind, the new “young” generation has become obsessed with the experimentation in new forms as they explore both the “consciousness in nature” and the “conscience” of human nature. Their works seek only to speak in their own language and with their own sensory responses, and in so doing, they reflect through the “conscience of the eye” the diversity and multi-culturalism of our times.

In her essay, Until Taxis Dance With Daffodils, Virginia Woolf asks us to immerse ourselves in the most profound and primitive of instincts, the instinct of rhythm. “All you need,” Woolf says, “is to stand at the window and let your rhythmical sense open and shut, open and shut, boldly and freely, until one thing melts in another, until the taxis are danc­ing with the daffodils, until a whole has been made from all these separate fragments.”

Woolf and Stevens agree that one of the primary concerns of the writer is to rediscover and reshape language, for, indeed, it is the word that has seemed to fail us in this “telegenically” in­spired culture of the literal-minded, the narcissistic, the greedy and the mentally atrophied. Here, then, is the key to appreciating the writing of so many of the distinguished authors in this assembly. The astonishment of experience, as alluded to by Woolf leads to an astonishment of “insight,” so necessary to the advancement of free thought and to the formation of conscience. Indeed, one is reminded of Robert Frost who was fond of saying, “How many things have to happen to you before something occurs to you?”

In conclusion, the 1987 Nobel Prize winner Joseph Brodsky stated that the artist’s vision is one of “exercising prophecy and perpetually re­defining individuality through his loyalty to language.” Litera­ture is a conversation, Brodsky says, “and in the moment of this conversation a writer is equal to a reader, as well as the other way around, regardless of whether the writer is a great one or not. This equality is the equality of consciousness.” In this convening of voices in World Literature Today, let us enjoy the universal astonishment of insight as we engage in the true democracy of literature’s global conversation.  Let us continue to write, in order to “live out loud,” passionately, and through the expansive and compassionate reach of art, achieve community through a common language.