Essay: Enron

Deepenings: Responding to the Images Around Enron
The animal envoys of the Unseen Powers no longer serve, as in primeval times, to teach and to guide mankind.
Neither in body nor in mind do we inhabit the world of those hunting races...(yet) memories of these animal
envoys still must sleep, somehow, within us...wake...when we venture into wilderness. -Joseph Campbell

The week I first heard of the collapse of Enron the wild pigs came. My husband was out of town for the week and I had invited a friend to share a late meal. We were lingering there at the table delighting in the low, slow interchange of conversation when a whole community of javelinas marched right onto the back patio. It was not until the next morning that I was able to assess what had been damaged. It took a whole extra day to grieve the losses. Among the lost was a rather expensive terracotta piece of mosaic artwork I was fond of. I've been thinking about all this ever since.

Not many days later I watched The Bill Moyers' program, "Now.” Moyers unfolded a continuity of images beginning with the events of 9-11, the collapse of Enron, deregulation in California, capitalism, NAFTA, the democratic principles of self-government, and the War on Terrorism. I then began to suspect that the "real" war going on creating so much domestic havoc in my life had something to do with awakening an undeveloped something in myself. Perhaps the "War on Terrorism" masks another kind of warring going on with "the terrors". Perhaps, these "terrors" are none other than the things I fear.

In the doings of what television does and doesn't do, it does give us quite an array of images to respond to and to work with. The first airing of the Moyers' special offered me one such image, deeply compelling. It was the story of an African-American woman living in California whose water supply had been poisoned by an additive in the gasoline supply. NAFTA regs seem to impede the ability of the State of California to govern itself preventing such a thing, and the woman is trapped there in the burden of her economic limitations. She can’t move away. Further, she must raise her young children on an abominable food known to create serious illness in the body.

Poets like myself work with images. We think in images. One of the images shaping my thoughts regarding global concerns belongs to my image of mothering. The first obligation of a mother is to feed her children a healthy food. Every mother has her own list of what her babies should and shouldn't have. Most of us would blacklist poison water. A mother's job is to grow her children to be well.

What happens inside a mother trapped in a life that no longer allows her to be what she most deeply is? This questioning is what is known as a poetic move. It allows a body and a mind to inhabit the events going on in the culture in a deeper way. I’ve been wondering if many of us are not, in fact, suffering losses of the sensitivities of the body. For how can any one of us be a terrorist (or a terrorist capitalist insisting on corporate profit rights over rights of states to protect their environments) if we can feel the body of the one we hold captive? Finally, when a place like this gets into a poet like me, what does it want?

To enter here requires a willingness to descend to that source in our selves where the unspeakable speaks. No one can bare this woman’s truth, a truth buried in her heart, till we bear in our own hearts the sorrow she faces. Digging down I uproot a deeper identity, one whose unity identifies as belonging together wild black pigs on civilized patios and the “black” food in a civilized people’s food supply.

David Miller suggests in Three Faces of God: Traces of the Trinity in Literature and Life that this other kind of unity exists as a result of a belongingness formulated through a variety of unlikenesses as opposed to a unity achieved through a systematization, centering, and authoritative synthesis. For “…systematization, centering, and authoritative synthesis do not compel persons living in the fragments of a riddled world,” he says (47).

This way of turning things involves a descent, an in-way of turning the images that, although they show up as quite an array of very different things one would not have thought belonged together, they show up on the scene together as nonetheless belonging. When a place like this “other kind of belonging-together” gets into a poet like me, sometimes it is because something poetic is feeding there.

Poetic powers involve one's developing of the ability to see the likenesses in things that are unlike. My ability to make a connection between the wild pigs of the other night and a young mother's plight in California evolve out of the way these images deepen into and out of a third image not visible. I call that third thing a scarce food. When the Hungry Ones show up they scar the landscape with the expression of their hunger. The visible violence in the way life gets nibbled and gnawed becomes the scare in the scar below whose surface a hunger is feeding. And, as Miller suggests, it is a radical metaphor such as this that makes these (re)connections.

That brings me to a recognition of what this young mother's situation is like. It is like that situation Toni Morrison speaks to in her novel, Beloved. Sethe, a run-away slave and nursing mother, is confronted with recapture twenty-eight days after her escape to freedom. Rather than allow herself and her children to be absorbed back into such a system as slavery, she begins to slaughter her young. What haunts my own pondering also terrifies my wonder where I ask myself what kind of mother or "Mother Country" (deliberately?) sets up the destruction of her own off-spring.

Does not such a moment suggest fixity in valuing where the basic thrust in a nurturing mother/parent/country to feed and to protect life confronts not just the forces of American political and economic interests but also American democratic ideals of self-determination? Are we not, in part, seeking out through this confrontation of contending voices a reexamination of our deepest valuings endowed in us by our Creator? Do not such valuings involve our basic inalienable rights of self-determination? Do we still hold self-evident that neither hard work, nor accumulation of savings through sacrifice shall be for naught? Do we still honor that the simplest and most basic concern of parental care toward our young shall bear no violation? And through these values endemic to American ideals of freedom shall we yet preserve among all our people---for all our people the empowerment of attainable dreams in sustainable lives? 

Many times these moments can stay hidden from our conscious concern for a long time. Even where they are completely forgotten, however, there is a place where guilt is not forgotten, for guilt grows up on the inside surfaces of our psyches. Eventually, like Beloved and like the wild pigs, guilt will walk, fully clothed, out of the (poison) water and onto the patios of civilization and will demand of each of us a deeper response.

                              Works Cited

Campbell, Jospeh. Historical Atlas of World Mythology Vol I: The Way Of the Animal Powers Part 1: Mythologies of the Primitive Hunters And Gathers. New York: Harper & Row, 1988.

Miller, David L.. Three Faces of God: Traces of Trinity in Literature and Life. Pennsylvania: Fortress Press,1986.

Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: PLume Books, 1988.