Feeling the Unthinkable, Vol. 4: Power of the Pen - Iconoclasts to the Rescue

By Donald Gutierrez

Amador Publishers, LLC is proud to release Feeling the Unthinkable, Essays on Social Justice by Donald Gutierrez in a 4-volume collection of e-books for ease of reading and reference. Each of the four volumes follows exactly its corresponding Part in the print edition. Each e-volume is introduced with relevant excerpts from the Author's original Introduction to the consolidated print edition.

Volume 4 "Power of the Pen - Iconoclasts to the Rescue" poses the humanities and spirited iconoclasts and dissidents such as Howard Zinn, Edward Abbey, D. H. Lawrence, and the humane, empathic sensibility of poets, as significant forces against the massive social evil and the indifference to others besetting the contemporary world. Humanist values suggest an aperture in the darkness offering light, hope, creative energy, individual integrity and humane sociability from which community could bit by bit - or even suddenly - evolve.

"Surely there is no more astute and sensitive observer of our political culture than Don Gutierrez. Whether eloquently decrying torture, our prison system or the failure of society to engage the humane wisdom of poets in matters of democracy and justice, Don is a prophet and also a historian and philosopher.... Gutierrez' collection of essays and book reviews resonates with the literate indignation of time-honored heroes like Kant, Rousseau and Chomsky. .... He is a gentle man, but mightily pissed by the representatives of the Dark Side. Don sees liberty's oxygen being squeezed by media-induced, corporate stupidity which is turning the scholar-citizens of Franklin, Postman and Socrates into the soma-guzzling robots of Huxley. This is definitely a treasure for the thoughtful." --Bob McCannon, founder, Action Coalition for Media Education

• Language: English
• Publisher: Amador Publishers, LLC
• Release date: Sep 16, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301164738

Donald Gutierrez

Donald Gutierrez was a member of the University of Notre Dame English Department faculty from 1968 to 1975, then joined the English Department at Western New Mexico University in Silver City. He retired from WNMU in 1994 and moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico with his wife Marlene Zander Gutierrez. He received a "New Mexico Eminent Scholar Award" in 1989.Gutierrez has published six books of literary criticism, two of which focus on D. H. Lawrence and and one on Kenneth Rexroth. Since retirement, he has published over fifty essays and reviews, most of which concern social justice and American state terrorism abroad.

Book preview

FEELING THE UNTHINKABLE

Essays on Social Justice

by Donald Gutierrez

edited by Zelda Leah Gatuskin

Collection Copyright © 2012 by Donald Gutierrez

All essays used by permission of the author.

Volume 4

Power of the Pen - Iconoclasts to the Rescue

published by

AMADOR PUBLISHERS

SMASHWORDS EDITION

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Dedication

To my wife-artist Marlene

(April 1932 - August 2011)

Cover Art: detail from

Illuminating the Dark Side by Marlene Zander Gutierrez

Collage and acrylic, 24.5x 40.5

Feeling the Unthinkable Volume 4

Power of the Pen - Iconoclasts to the Rescue

Contents

Author's Preface

About the E-Edition

Introduction to Volume 4

Chapt. 1. Review: Howard Zinn, The Zinn Reader: Writings on Disobedience and Democracy

Chapt. 2. The Humanities: Finite Perfections

Chapt. 3. Why Read Good Fiction?

Chapt. 4. Spirit Versus Spirit: A Meditation on a War Poem by Thomas Hardy

Chapt. 5. Maker/Worker/Profit-Maker: B. Traven's Assembly Line

Chapt. 6. Competition, Cooperation and Us Versus Them

Chapt. 7. Review: Jack Loeffler, Adventures With Ed: A Portrait of Abbey

Chapt. 8. Industrialization, Nature and Human Nature in the Work of D. H. Lawrence

Chapt. 9. Poets, Poetry and Social Crises

Chapt. 10. Afterword: The Occupy Wall Street Movement

Bibliography

Acknowledgments

About the Author

About the Artist

…if way to the Better there be,it exacts a full look at the Worst.

Thomas Hardy, In Tenebris: II

Author's Preface

The essays and reviews in this book were written during fifteen years of retirement beginning in 1994, a few of them before that year. All but one of them have been published in a variety of venues, and most of them in at least two or three different publications.

Feeling the Unthinkable is not a scholarly study or an organically structured work. It is a collection consisting of essays and reviews and one memoir. Nevertheless, the various pieces are, I feel, sufficiently interrelated in subject and polemical stance to lend Feeling a certain unity of voice, tone and social-political humanist outlook. That unity is based on the implication that a revolution in sensibility is essential to changing and repairing the world, and that that revolution could be brought about by coming alive in our feeling states and imagination to the social evil abounding in the modern era, no little of it created by governments (certainly ours) and the elites they serve.

We can think about the unthinkable, but feeling it is a challenge reaching to the depths of our being. Who knows what we become after that immersion into personal darkness. That is the ultimate challenge of Feeling the Unthinkable. [Donald Gutierrez, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 2012]

About the E-edition

Amador Publishers, LLC is proud to release Feeling the Unthinkable, Essays on Social Justice by Donald Gutierrez in a 4-volume collection of e-books for ease of reading and reference. Each of the four volumes follows exactly its corresponding Part in the print edition (that is, Volume 1 has the same articles in the same order as Part I; Volume 2 as Part II, etc.). However, the chapter numbers have been changed in Volumes 2, 3, and 4 so that the first essay in each e-book is Chapter 1 and those that follow are numbered sequentially.

The complete print edition Table of Contents with corresponding e-book volume and chapter numbers is available online: http://amadorbooks.com/books/xrpftu0.htm

The complete Bibliography has been published at the end of all four e-volumes.

Each e-volume is introduced with relevant excerpts from the Author's original Introduction to the consolidated print edition. This complete Introduction is also available online: http://amadorbooks.com/books/xrpftu1.htm

The Afterword and other back matter are published at the end of Volume 4.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the periodicals which previously published, in slightly different forms, the essays and reviews collected herein. Their credits appear at the end of each chapter.

The print edition of Feeling the Unthinkable is available from Amador Publishers.

Feeling the Unthinkable

Introduction to E-edition Volume 4

Power of the Pen - Iconoclasts to the Rescue

Power of the Pen offers a humanistic perspective against the preceding visible darknesses broached in Feeling. It poses the humanities and spirited iconoclasts and dissidents such as Howard Zinn, Edward Abbey, D. H. Lawrence, and the humane, empathic sensibility of poets, as significant forces against the massive social evil and the indifference to others besetting the contemporary world. Obviously, the humanities and the rebel iconoclasts hardly balance the scales against the enormous and pernicious state and corporate evil exposed in Feeling. Rather, humanist values centered in the human, the compassionate, the esthetic and psychologically liberating suggest an aperture in the darkness offering light, hope, creative energy, individual integrity and humane sociability from which community could bit by bit - or even suddenly - evolve.

Is this expecting too much? Dictatorships are suddenly resisted or dissolved with a fury of desire for freedom and democracy, as in the Middle East, at immense cost of life and agony. Wall Street seems indomitable today, yet even now perhaps some child has been born (another Brooksley Born or Ralph Nader!) who could have the organizing social genius or the moral, legal or political passion to restore financial sanity or a sense of limits and interdependence as basic to society. A grassroots movement, already existent, might grow into a potent force against the Street's egregious financial concentration. The 20th century French philosopher, anti-Nazi activist and concentration-camp survivor David Rousset, who created the phrase L'Univers Concentrationnaire (The Concentrationary Universe) to describe his era, once said that Normal men do not know that everything is possible (epigraph to Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism). Buchenwald, Hiroshima, Vietnam, Pol Pot, the contemporary torture cells of the world come to mind.

But that 20th century prophecy, true enough then and today, bears its inescapable opposite: that anything beautiful, compassionate, noble, generous, humane, empathetic is also possible, and could provide a series of lattices upon which to lay new possibilities of the Good Life and the Beloved Community of the mystics and poets. Everything is possible, an expansion more open than Rousset might accept, but then he lived through the universe that a concentration camp surrounds with barbed wire, and that bears authority against over-valuing the potential of the benign.

Of course one doesn't have to be a poet to lose sleep thinking of the wrongly imprisoned, the tortured, the bombed and wounded, the starving people throughout the world. Still, as a good friend once told me, one can't take the suffering of the world on one's shoulders.

But surely there's plenty of room between, say, Christ and the Marquis de Sade for empathy towards, or even just sympathy for, gross suffering and agony imposed by institutional cruelty or greed. If Americans don't accept responsibility for at least knowing what their government is up to at home and, especially, abroad, they are