14 July 1991: At what point does one’s continued presence at a place become complicity in what happens there? Does moving to another place remove complicity? Does survival mean complicity? Could there be a world in which survival means complicity? Or would dying do that? Or being comfortable?
27 September 1991: The main damage of war turns out to be the enmities: people can’t work together, make deals, relax from war taxes, plan for sustained production, reconstruct ways of maintaining trust.
1 October 1991: The body you wear, its outline, the cut of its coat and skirt or pants, will go out of style. And the young, wearing their new, semi-permanent bodies, will try to forget history and how it comes clanking along like a tank no matter where they run, or how loud you laugh at the tank–damaged old bodies around you that used to be stylish.
One young statue fell after the war and weathered into a quaint old body that squinted sideways from the grass. They hauled it away quickly, lest the new heroes read their inscriptions and think about how heavy stone is at night or in the rain.
19 October 1991: In our society one trend is toward confrontation, vulgarity; another trend is toward social action against some of the results of vulgarity (prejudice, bullying, harassment). Confused people entangle themselves in both.
20 October 1991: Several generations now have lived by values or disvalues generated by war, including the Cold War and its reliance on “deterrence” through terror. The situation continues the social qualities of confrontation, competition, power; and we now have a world balanced continually on the brink. Brinkmanship is our current unnoticed religion or prevailing myth.
27 November 1991: Why was I given citizenship here on Earth?
28 November 1991: People who react randomly, angrily, with odd surges of negativity, have a disability that should be cared for just as generously as other disabilities. Their thinking is a hobble. Their seizures paralyze their ability to perceive. They stumble from one mistake to another.
17 January 1992: Blaming others: I do my evil in different ways.
1 June 1992: Today Reality Corrupts: The spiral down.
Things get so bad that describing them is an act of obscenity. It is corrupting to deal with such a reality. Those who deal with current events are damaged as human beings.
Fascination with things as they are becomes addictive; stronger and stronger shocks become necessary. People want even their entertainments to satisfy their lust for fear, cynicism, and disgust.
Staffs of periodicals, banks of moviemakers, cadres of politicians comb through garbage for their material, and thus they feed what they intend–or pretend–to decry. Their work promotes the corruption they are monitoring.
We must suspend the old course of current events in order to protect the young. And even the old, battered, disoriented, blase can no longer register human feelings in the blizzard of our time.
Sanctuary. Sanctuary. What lives needs sanctuary.
Source: Entries from William Stafford’s journal, selected from Every War Has Two Losers: William Stafford on Peace and War.
On the day of his death in 1993, Stafford wrote:
You don’t have to
prove anything, my mother said.
Just be ready
for what God sends.
Stafford was a conscientious objector during World War II, doing forestry and soil conservation work in Arkansas, California, and Illinois for $2.50 per month. In 1970 he was named Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (a position now known as Poet Laureate), and from 1975 to 1990 was Poet Laureate of Oregon.
