‘And I, who live yapping in my cantos,’ wrote Menno Wigman, ‘if only I had something new, something new to say.’ They are lines that have haunted me since the moment I first read them. It seems like the older I get, the more often they come up, whenever I doubt the usefulness of writing—and it often is.
Because how on earth can poetry or a novel or any work of art match reality? We live on a planet that is dying of war and exhaustion. In the West we have the freedom to make what we want, there is no censorship and there is no war yet. But what to do with so much freedom, when the ground on which we live crumbles beneath our feet? Do we really not get beyond the good, restrained existence within the frameworks to which we are condemned?
Wigman’s poem moves me to tears, even though I read it countless times, because it is about our ability (and perhaps also; our desire) to copy each other. It is about “Vinex neighbourhoods, fledgling and dead, where people want to look inglorious as people”. The same lives, in the same houses, with the same jobs. We suffer the same, we all die. The lines of this poem awaken an uneasy realization that our lives are a prison, made up of “ink of nothing that says we exist” (“In conclusion” from this is my day2004).
I came across one of the most interesting perspectives on that so-called freedom of our modern existence in The Dawn of Everything (translated into Dutch as The beginning of everything) by David Graeber and David Wengrow. The authors—an archaeologist and an anthropologist—offer an alternative view of human history. What I took from the book was their idea of how we constructed a society of lack of freedom.
The first freedom that was taken from us is closely related to ideas about hospitality and the right to shelter. That is the freedom to leave and settle elsewhere, knowing that wherever you go, people will receive you and not chase you away.
The second freedom we gave up long ago is the freedom to refuse to obey those who are considered our superiors.
Those two freedoms, which, according to Graeber and Wengrow, have never been violated in previous – and other – societies, are necessary for the third, and perhaps most important, freedom. This is a creative freedom, one of the experiment; it is the freedom to imagine new ways of living together. The book thus unintentionally contains what you feel shimmering between the lines of Wigman’s poem, namely what the importance of the imagination is, and how this coincides with the freedom that is necessary for that imagination.
I still don’t have an answer to that question about what art does to reality. It is a duty, I think so, to keep an eye on that freedom – whatever it may entail. And it is a duty to imagine possible other realities, as a writer. Or, if we can’t or don’t want to, show us the bars of our cage.
Karin Amatmukrim is a writer and man of letters. She writes here every other week.
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of May 3, 2022