About Beauty, Terror, Traumatized Words, 'a Tree' Poem by Dennis Ryan

begun Friday August 29,2014

--for my son Shawn Michael Ryan, and his mother Kim Ryan

PART I

'For good and evil, man is a free creative spirit. This produces
the very queer world we live in, a world in continuous creation
and therefore continuous change and insecurity.'

Imagine, then, Joyce Cary, the rocky isthmus of Attica,
stands of oak, white poplar and pine along the shoreline,

and that you are going down to the sea
to watch ancient warships being built from wood...

And imagine

'now [you are] offered another image of a tree... This time
the image will be entangled in its history. Now it is one of the images that were used... for scale in the 1941 architectural blueprints for Crematoria II and III at Auschwitz-Birkenau... if you could not use the word ‘tree' without this tree in mind—then... the word [has] been traumatized, marked by a particular history that restricts what otherwise might be said.'

And about beauty Wittgenstein had said ‘when the eye sees something beautiful, the hand wants to draw it.' Beauty brings copies of itself into being.

The drawings of a tree... in sunlight?
Does it shine in my son's eyes?

His current drawings are—I had not thought to use this word— 'traumatized'

trees, grasses, oceans, people...

Shawn attacked, beaten, tazed four times—
the silent victim of police violence many times over.

Trees, buildings, homes, streets—all are indices, signs of trauma.

A shelter of oaks and pines opens onto a nearby meadow,
on the edge of which black raspberry, wild grape and elderberry grow;

bluebirds fly there, make their homes in nearby trees;
it's August; this sanctuary is unmarked by trauma.

PART II

When Shawn was a child, before the trauma began,
I began hanging his drawings in our farmhouse,

outside of the town of Storm Lake, Iowa—
that winter of 1996-1997—

a tremendous yellow sun ran the width of the canvass,
a broad, arcing sun with birds racing, clouds in blue skies—

happy, optimistic renderings.

Shawn in 5th grade, his drawings now hanging in

'the silence [that] is no silence at all, in a place where
no words have come to an end, / and no phrase...
nothing but a pause... between words, a blank—
you see all the syllables standing around waiting'

waiting for this and other such silences
to end, silences 'resonant with trauma.'

According to our circumstances—
had Shawn's European relatives on my mother's side
of the family, Poles, been imprinted...?

'In Poland Lanzmann filmed Jan Piwonski, a railworker at Sobibor in 1942-43, who recalls that at Sobibor as at Treblinka and Belzec, the ‘Virgilian langscape' was historically recreated... Where both the beauty and the silence become the evidence of a crime, and now... a particular form of listening. After ‘the revolt [in the camp, when] the Germans decided to liquidate the camp... early in the winter of 1943 they planted pines... to camouflage all the traces.'

By 1944, ‘you couldn't guess what had happened here, that these trees hid the secret of a death camp'—that the screen of trees [was]... where the mass graves were.'

Does that screen of trees still stand,
now as a landmark to traumatic memory?

PART III

'The beautiful, almost without any effort of our own,
acquaints us with the mental event of conviction, and so
pleasurable a mental state is this that ever afterward one
is willing to labor, struggle, wrestle with the world to
locate enduring sources of conviction—to locate what is true'

Shawn has spoken to us about the beauty of certain trees—
the beautiful has been revealed to him, lives in his words.

Beauty is a starting point...

PART IV

'The love of the beauty of the world... involves...
the love of all the truly precious things that bad fortune can destroy. The truly precious things are those forming ladders reaching toward the beauty of the world, opening onto it.'

'The love of all truly precious things... '

our loved ones,
like ladders reaching out

to others, ladders reaching toward
the beauty of the world, opening into it...

'Dice la esperanza...
Dice la esperanza: un dia la veras, si bien esperas.
Dice la desesperanza: solo tu amargura es ella.
Late, corazon...
No todo se lo ha tragado la tierra.'—

No, not everything—these acts of terrors included—
is swallowed up by the earth. Although you wait,

Hope says one day you will see justice.

Beat, heart...

PART V

Imagine a man that is like a tree planted near flowing waters...

a tree that grows on a high bank at a bend in a stream,
the sun shining down on green leaves that shall not wither—

if you can see this tree at the bend in the river,
this man standing on that bank, feel these words,

then—you can imagine Shawn as he attempts
to weather all crises, persecutions and attacks.

PART VI

Smoke is streaming from Crematoria II at Auschwitz-Birkenau,
no starlight, no bird singing in pitch-black darkness.

A different tree is planted nearby,
a tree that serves as an index to memory.

Two trees then— for good and evil,
vastly different indices, of good and evil.

(It is cowardly to give up on beauty, truth, goodness
as long as one is able-bodied. Even thereafter...)

Imagine Shawn once again as he weathers
all crises, persecutions and attacks.

How long must he endure this terror?

We alone bear witness, give testimony.