Students And Historical Time
By
Paul Musgrave has a lovely meditation on a poem he doesn’t teach. The poem is “Wichita Vortex Sutra” by Allen Ginsburg, about the Vietnam War. Paul lists some of the many issues the poem raises and how those issues prevent him from teaching it. Like the poem, Paul’s article raises many issues. One particularly struck me.
How much historical background can be expected of students? The poem was written in 1966, when its material was still raw, when Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles were no further away than Barack Obama is today. The Vietnam War was beginning to push out all other news, as Donald Trump now has for all too long.
The year 1966 is 58 years ago. In 1966, 58 years earlier would have been 1908, before the world wars, before the Russian Revolution. Much of the poem, as Paul points out, is current today, but only if you know something about the contemporaneous history of 1966 and the Vietnam War.
I’ve been spending quite a bit of time lately reading on the 1950s into the early 1960s and keep finding things I didn’t know or didn’t understand and knitting that back into my lived experience. So far, I haven’t happened on anything that changes the history as I understand it in a large way, but everything adds depth and resonance, in addition to its relevance (or not!) to today’s situation.
The 1960s were a divisive time in the US, as is the present. The issues are worth looking at in their similarities and dissimilarities. I would argue that several social revolutions were in progress and cut short by being drowned out in the internal conflict over the Vietnam War. We are now reworking those revolutions under much worse conditions.
The 1950s have been slighted in popular history as being conformist and supportive of a particular vision of comfortable hominess, but it was also a time when nuclear strategy was developing in wildly divergent ways and the old colonial powers hadn’t quite given up yet. It was scary, and little kids had nightmares. That was part of Ginsberg’s world.
When I was in college, I knew nothing about pre-WWI Russia, which I’ve also been looking at lately. I don’t know how Paul would teach that poem now either.
Please read Paul’s post. It’s very good.