Only a Blockhead: Aetherial Monuments

Something I wrote about Donald Rumsfeld a few years ago:

Knowing Donald Rumsfeld

Hart Seely, writing in Slate in 2003, was among the first to comment on the poetic genius of the then Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld. Though Seely feels that Rumsfeld’s “work . . . is reminiscent of William Carlos Williams’ [and] . . . is as entrancing as Frank O'Hara’s,” it is clear that Rumsfeld’s “jazzy, improvisational riffs,” as well as his embrace of spoken-word performance, are in a direct line passing through the Beats and on to their grandchildren, the poetry-slammers who howl to this day into open-mikes at Bohemian cafés.

Few poets, however, Beat or otherwise, have grappled with fundamental philosophical questions as passionately as Rumsfeld. This is, perhaps, most evident in his much-loved and much-anthologized, “The Unknown” (2002), in which he speaks of epistemological conundrums such as: What do we know? What don’t we know? and Can we know what we don’t know? with the intensity other poets might reserve for the death of a beloved pet or the setting of the sun behind trees.

Knowledge and lack of knowledge are Rumsfeld’s obsessions. His tragedy is that, writing about them in the conventional way, he is a prisoner of his own subjectivity, inevitably constrained by his lack of knowledge, and even more by his knowledge. Rumsfeld recognizes this, and concludes his masterpiece with a poignant evocation of his defeat: “We don’t know.”

Employing the mesostic method that John Cage put to such good use we can move the profundity of “The Unknown” beyond the limits imposed by Rumsfeld’s knowledge and lack of knowledge. We do not know what the method will produce; in not knowing we begin.

Many would consider the Iraq War to be Rumsfeld’s greatest achievement (placing his poetry, of course, to one side). Thus it is tempting to use “Iraq War” as the spine of the mesostic. Considering, however, that Rumsfeld did not see the Iraq war as a one-off, but rather hoped that it would serve as a template for future wars of liberation, the broader, more all-encompassing “war” seems appropriate. Using “war” as spine rewards us with a poem that moves us a step further on our epistemological journey:

unknoWn
           As
   theRe

    knoWn
       Are
   theRe

    KnoWn
     ThAt
      theRe

           We
           Are

“[U]nknoWn / As / theRe,” we learn in the first stanza, and history dictates that we read “theRe” as the “there” with which the poet will forever be associated: Iraq, a place that, for Rumsfeld, was then and is now mostly unknown.

This lack of knowledge is quickly complicated however, by the first word of the second stanza: “knoWn.” In the midst of the unknown “theRe” is something known, but known by whom? The perspective, we see, has shifted: the “knoWn” is “theRe” with the Iraqis—distant from the poet who is trapped here, in his own world, his own subjectivity.

The third stanza elaborates on this elusive knowledge that is never here, but always there. What is known is “ThAt,” but what “ThAt” is is mysterious; the deictic remains an elusive, perhaps even empty, signifier until the final stanza in which the poem takes a sudden Cartesian turn: “We / Are.”

Whether we are here or there is unknown; all we can know is that we are, and by affirming this we can return with fresh eyes to the known knowns, known unknowns, and finally to the most perplexing of epistemological riddles, the unknown unknowns that defeated Rumsfeld in "The Unknown." The mesostic has shown us a way out.

--David