Dear editors,
Writing in 1836 to jolt an intellectual culture still anchored to European traditions, Ralph Waldo Emerson named a persistent danger:
Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchers of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?
Emerson derides the temptation to live perpetually through the reflections of others, admiring their tombstones rather than pressing ourselves into the living world. He warns against treating history and art as relics to be cataloged, or as authorities to be obeyed. We must keep the voices of the past close enough to be argued with if we are to avoid this trap. We must make room for two simultaneous, inebriating movements: a reverent study of what has been given, and a restless insistence on what must still be done.
Resistance is not a rejection of the past but a radical act of conservation, saving not the polite memory of a principle but its living, disruptive force. In the 1770s, Philadelphia colonists staged a funeral for Liberty following the Intolerable Acts, mourning an abstract principle as though it were flesh and blood. In the 1960s, Abbie Hoffman tossed dollar bills onto the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, watching as the suits scrambled on hands and knees to snatch at their paper god. In the 1980s, university students built shantytowns in front of administrative offices to haul investments in apartheid South Africa directly to the chancellor’s door. These are public acts of poetry: sudden, theatrical intrusions into the everyday that make silences visible. Using the physical body and public square as their medium, they refuse the dry prose of policy, demanding metaphor instead. By doing so, they force an original relation to the universe in the middle of the street, ensuring our dissent does not calcify into routine, carving fissures into the artificially smooth surface of the quotidian, squeezing juice from the ordinary with bare hands.
The landscape of modern dissent, its branded solidarity and permitted choreography, has traded this theatrical poetry for sterile doctrine. As this administration dismantles democratic norms, we secure permits for police-escorted weekend parades, mistaking the matching merchandise and rehearsed slogans for a genuine threat to power. In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard offers what he intends as a critique of the artist: “A poet is not an apostle,” he spits. “He drives out devils only through the power of the devil.” On this point, we should be wholly with him. An apostle curates a finished past, sealing history safely behind glass. The poet, however, is a holy vandal. They shatter the glass, pulling our ghosts from the display case into the dirt of the public square, demanding we reckon with them as living forces. To banish devils with the devil’s fire is frightening, necessary, beautiful work. Like Kierkegaard’s poet, true resistance need not offer perfect doctrine; it simply needs to make us see with more force than an apostle ever could.
When bemoaning the modern despair that there is nothing left to conserve, we are looking at the wrong artifacts. What remains to be conserved is not the sepulcher, but the interruption. We must preserve an original relation to the universe while remaining in conversation with our ghosts. Not the marble founders who demand our obedience, but the unquiet spirits of their vandals: the students of Tlatelolco who stripped Mexico City’s mask of progress with broadsides and wet paint before the state answered in gunfire; the self-immolation of Thích Quảng Đức, who transformed his own flesh into an unbearable spectacle of protest; the prisoners of Attica who seized the prison yard and forced the nation to look inside its cages.
The voices of history should propel us forward—toward Ithaca, not endlessly anchored in Ogygia. Public acts of poetry remind us that resistance requires ruptures of the ordinary, la plage sous les pavés. We should expect, even hope, to see Liberty’s coffin carried past our doors, to watch the dollar bills scatter across a trading floor, to be shoved into the streets, to remember that the world demands our hands, not our reverence.
Irreverently,
Drew Phaneuf
Image: Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes, Alexander at the Tomb of Cyrus the Great, oil on canvas, 1796 (Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois).