Poetry and Terror

Politics and Poetics in Coming to Jakarta

By (author) Peter Dale Scott University of California With Freeman Ng Foreword by Robert Hass

Publication date:

15 August 2018

Length of book:

302 pages

Publisher

Lexington Books

Dimensions:

230x159mm
6x9"

ISBN-13: 9781498576666

A study at many levels of Scott’s long poem Coming to Jakarta, a book-length response to a midlife crisis triggered in part by the author’s initial inability to share his knowledge and horror about American involvement in the great Indonesian massacre of 1965. Interviews with Ng supply fuller information about the poem’s discussions of: a) how this psychological trauma led to an explorations of violence in American society and then, after a key recognition, in the poet himself; b) the poem's look at east-west relations through the lens of the yin-yang, spiritual-secular doubleness of the human condition; c) how the process of writing the poem led to the recovery of memories too threatening at first to be retained by his normal presentational self, and d) the mystery of right action, guided by the Bhagavad Gita and the maxim in the Gospel of Thomas that "If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you.”

Led by the interviews to greater self-awareness, Scott then analyses his poem as also an elegy, not just for the dead in Indonesia, but “for the passing of the Sixties era, when so many of us imagined that a Movement might achieve major changes for a better America.” Subsequent chapters develop how human doubleness can lead to an inner tension between the needs of politics and the needs of poetry, and how some poetry can serve as a non-violent higher politics, contributing to the evolution of human culture and thus our “second nature.”

The book also reproduces a Scott prose essay, inspired by the poem, on the U.S. involvement in and support for the 1965 massacre. It then discusses how this essay was translated into Indonesian and officially banned by the Indonesian dictatorship, and how ultimately it and the poem helped inspire the ground-breaking films of Josh Oppenheimer that have led to the first official discussions in Indonesia of what happened in 1965.

Introduction

I. INTERVIEWS WITH FREEMAN NG

Introduction: The Stream One Lives By

I.i–I.iii Wind-driven ghost of snow

II.i–II.iii As if in a small plane

II.iv–II.v The blind man’s prophecy

Appendix to II.iv–v “shalt lose all companions”

II.vi–II.vii We who desired to prepare the soil

II.viii–II.ix The world like myself

II.x–II.xi Cave of winds

II.xii–II.xiii Indonesia

II.xiv–II.xv This world that can only be dominated

II.xvi–II.xvii The ruthlessness that made possible

II.xviii–III.ii Part of the enemy

III.iii–III.v An ovenbird’s nest

III.vi–III.vii The brooding toils of energy

III.viii–III.ix Like the heroes of all good tales

III.x The stream one lives by

III.xi–III.xii The known and unknown roadways

III.xiii–III.xv Like giant doomed stars

III.xvi–III.xvii The cool hissing of the bullets

IV.i Beyond the mists

IV.ii-IV.iii The music changing

IV.iv–IV.v Those baffled eyes

IV.vi Truth and nonviolence

IV.vii–IV.ix Its propensity to distance

IV.x–IV.xii Portending deluge

IV.xiii–IV.xiv If a sentence is left dangling

IV.xv ¡Djakarta se acerca!

IV.xvi–IV.xviii Whirr of low wings

V.i–V.ii The shadow play

V.iii Let there be the courage

II Trauma, Poetry, Politics, and the Mystery of Hope

III America’s Culpability in Indonesia, and Why We Should

Acknowledge It

IV “Gaps” of Consciousness; or, How Writing Coming to Jakarta

Led Me to Deep Politics

Preface to Chapter 5

V The CIA and the Overthrow of Sukarno, 1965–1967

Epilogue to Chapter 5 (2015)

VI Catastrophe and Hope: Art and Better Politics

Coming to Jakarta (1988) was probably the first poem to actually shock readers since The Waste Land (1922). Both poems are tied to cataclysmic events, The Waste Land to the horror of World War I, Jakarta to the under-reported massacre of hundreds of thousands of Indonesians in 1965, with encouragement and support from the United States. Poetry and Terror is a welcome addition to the growing literature surrounding Peter Dale Scott’s masterpiece. Calling it an elegy 'for the passing of an era when many had hopes for major changes in America,' when America still had the reputation of advancing 'universal principles,' Coming to Jakarta is now seen as an early warning that democracy in America has been abridged from encroachments by the deep state. Most of the book is taken up with an extended interview of Scott by a former student, Freeman Ng, which is essentially a close reading of Jakarta. More important, in Poetry and Terror Scott asserts his belief that by turning from the prose exposés for which he had long been known to the writing of poetry, he found a way to release the hidden half of what he calls the double self. The protocols of academic argument stood in the way of his seeing clearly and therefore stating his own connection to the truth of the deep state’s activity in Indonesia. The experience left him with the conviction that in all art we have 'a form of corrective alterity,' or more precisely, 'that poetry can be part of humanity’s approach to truth' and thereby to the recovery of justice.