The 'Days Between Stations' columns, Interview magazine 1992-2008: Not Singing Too Fast

February 2002

"I don't think she could bear not to be in the headlines," said a professor two weeks after Susan Sontag's instantly notorious New Yorker comment on the September 11 mass murders as "a consequence of specific American alliances and actions"—there apparently being no need to name what they were. The woman speaking had lived through Auschwitz and, as a dissident intellectual, through three decades of a postwar Stalinist regime; at 72 she suf­fered no fools. But Sontag was no different from so many others, from novelists to reporters, from columnists to philosophers, who after that day stepped forward to deny that anything had been done that required any rethinking of anything at all. None had changed his or her mind in the slightest about anything. Nearly every argument was intend­ed to congratulate the speaker for having seen all the way around the event even before it happened. The speakers could have said what President Dwight Eisenhower once said: "Things are more like they are now than they ever were before."

---

---

Perhaps more than those called to other callings, artists work in the dark—and without artists, society would enter the future blind. "I accept chaos. I am not sure whether it accepts me," as Bob Dylan once put it; the best artists trust that instinct. Especially in a time of chaos—when so many are insisting that what one might feel is chaos is still order—artists can explore, track, and map the wilderness of uncertainty and doubt that ordinary political speech means to deny. Rather than calculat­ing what will do the most good or please the most people, artists can trust their own blind bets, without calculating any effects whatso­ever. That doesn't mean art has no effects; it means the best artists accept that they have no control over what those effects might be. But the speech of artists—the language their work speaks—can be as impoverished as that of anybody else.

I think one reason so many people think of the firefighters and police officers who were called to the World Trade Center on September 11 as heroes—those who lived and those who didn't—is that as they acted to save their city and their fellow citizens, they kept their mouths shut. They had neither the time or the need to justify, apologize, or explain. Perhaps singers and musicians, who like political actors engage in public speech, have something to learn from firemen and police officers, from people whose extraordi­nary but also everyday heroism now keeps the word "hero" from being too easily applied.

---

---

What singers and musicians might have to learn is this: When you have nothing to say, it is not incumbent upon you, as a public person, to say anything. "[He] made it very clear he'd written the song about the state of things post 9/11," San Francisco Chronicle critic James Sullivan said to me about Rufus Wainwright's debut of his song "Eleven Eleven" during a performance last November. "The first lines were 'Woke up this morning, it was 11:11,' or ‘…the clock said 11:11'­—I distinctly remember thinking, ‘Uh-oh. The dreaded journal entry.' I like Rufus plenty, but the song struck me like it was his dutiful song­writer's homework project." At the austere September benefit concert America: A Tribute to Heroes, Bruce Springsteen offered his song "My City of Ruins"—and, really, you could answer its chorus of "Come on, rise up! Come on, rise up!" with, "Shut up, God dammit! Give me time to despair! Give me time to hate!" Did the song, written two years ago for the residents of Asbury Park, New Jersey, need to be sung in this utterly different context? Wouldn't it have been more powerful, more shocking—more of an affirmation of the terrorist attacks not as a "dose of reality," as Susan Sontag described them, but as a rent in reality—for an artist as eloquent and honest as Springsteen to step forward and attest that for the moment he had nothing to say?

"Let us not talk falsely now," Bob Dylan sang in "All Along the Watchtower," three years after his comment on chaos, in the middle of the Vietnam War, just before the assassina­tions of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy. How do you do that? In a time of public crisis, when, more than oneself, one's community is in jeopardy, from within or from without, it may be that a citizen, and especially a citizen who is also an artist, avoids speaking falsely by offering nothing less than the very best of what he or she has to say—which sometimes might mean nothing at all.

---

Originally published in Interview Magazine, February 2002