color line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women
glide in gilded halls. From out the caves of evening that swing between the strong-limbed
earth and the tracery of the stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will,
and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension. So, wed with Truth, I dwell
above the Veil.
You may not have his examples, but you better have
examples. Here in his rich 19th-century cadences, DuBois affirms that the care of the old
ones and care for their works is a matter of choice and love, not blood. He indicates that
culture through its greatest works is a means to individual freedom. In Chief Seattle’s
terms, DuBois walks with his dead.
To this lofty idea of his, we can add another element of
national memory, our popular culture, a realm where the inventions and improvisations of
immigrants, a mixing of African and Latin and European and Asian elements have created a
fabric of tremendous richness. But it’s a peculiarity of this fluid, dynamic popular
culture that memory can be very short. Ellington and Keaton, Billie Holiday and Preston
Sturges were popular, even mass art not long ago, but within a generation or two, they,
too, are taught in school and remembered largely through the work of school. Given this
importance of school as curator of American culture, in the absence of those two other
repositories, it’s no wonder that these commencement exercises are so elaborate, and so
overtly laden with symbols and mysteries.
The work of those artists in movies and jazz comes into
school, as the best sitcoms and cop shows are coming into school, partly because of the
accelerating pace and increasing scale of mass art — mass art, which perhaps should be
distinguished from popular art. Mass art, which can be wonderful and glorious — I don’t
mean to disparage it — is by nature designed and produced by experts, distributed by
experts, marketed by experts who hope to make it popular in one specific sense. Popular
art, true popular art in a larger sense is produced by a people, distributed by means more
like gossip than like marketing campaigns. The mass product of the steel oil drum, the
ugly and unpromising object, was made a musical instrument of popular art by people who
used it to invent a new music. Then steel drum music was marketed by the organs of mass
art, and perhaps some of that product was sampled into a rap tune before rap, in its turn,
was transformed from popular art into mass art, perhaps to be made popular art again in a
complex American circulation.
I promise to apply my thoughts about honoring our
predecessors and caring for our young to this moment, to these particular graduates.
Your generation has experienced mass culture with a special
intensity. By the time you were 12 or 13, you had consumed many, many different
mass-marketed products, some of them brilliant and wonderful, some less so. As small
children you saw the movie and had the illustrated book, and you pleaded for the spin-off
products and you got the action figure and the little figures at the fast-food place, and
you saw the cartoon version on television on the weekend. By the time you were 14,
manipulated so many times, so effectively, you were more than a little jaded or ironic
about mass art, sometimes while being nostalgic about it, at the same time. The normal
response to these manipulated cultural waves is to sort of lump them and to feel a little
disgust with them.
Many of the styles of your generation, in music and dress,
as I perceive them, are as if designed to come up with something that resists the mass
scale, a kind of grooming or music that won’t easily be sold by Sears & Roebuck to
10-year-olds within a few weeks. In this sense, it has occurred to me that the body-pierce
shares some roots and motives with the current American resurgence of my own art of
poetry, poetry which has become increasingly, well, increasingly popular in recent
years. Like certain fashions, like having a piece of steel go through the bridge of your
nose or something, poetry seeks to live on an individual human scale. The medium for a
poem is one person’s voice. So by the nature of the medium, it is a counterweight to mass
art.
One of your hallmarks as a generation from my point of view
may be an admirable, droll skepticism. You do not want to be too easily sold or too easily
sold to, and your presence here today as individuals indicates that you have held out for
quality goods and excellent pursuits. The hijinks with the academic garments are in that
category. I don’t want to overpraise them. I’m aware they can slide off into a kind of
languid privileged class arrogance, you know, like kids at community colleges have to take
this seriously, we can crap around. I’m aware that there’s a balance there. I understand
that, and you don’t want to become like the upper classes in the Evelyn Waugh novels,
where they trash stuff, and he writes, "It was the sound of the English upper classes
howling for broken glass." But you can handle that one.
In a way, as a generation, you have reversed the lines I
recall from my beloved great teacher here at Stanford, Yvor Winters.
Winters wrote this quatrain in a poem called "On
Teaching the Young":
The young are quick of speech.
Grown middle-aged, I teach
Corrosion and distrust
Exacting what I must.
I hope your corrosion and distrust carry you far, and that
your resistance and skepticism not prevent you from picking and choosing and walking among
the great dead, as W. E. B. DuBois describes.
In relation to the ideas of honoring the old ones and
caring for the young, I pray that my own generation has not let you down. I pray that we
have not been as Chief Seattle wondered if we are. The language in which I’ve been
addressing you, the machines that are amplifying my voice, the dyestuffs in our garments,
the subjects you’ve studied, none of this was invented by anybody here. We got this
language and the garments and the mathematics and the music and the ceramic engineering,
all the rest of it, from our elders who got those goods from people who are now dead, in a
chain going back farther than anybody can trace.
Woe be to us if we have in any way broken that chain that
goes so far back. Curses on us if we’ve held treasures that have crossed thousands of
years through successive generations, from the dead to the not yet born. Think of your
ancestors: Among them, for everybody here, among your ancestors have been princes and
slaves. Everybody here in this stadium, if we seek among your tens of thousands of
ancestors, will find not only slaves and royal personages, but the products of love
matches and rapes, people who died of starvation, people who thrived, and across all those
adventures and misadventures, somehow the treasures have been passed on.
Therefore, though some of you who graduate today will found
mighty businesses, and some of you will make spectacular works of art and some of you will
be effective healers and scientists and thinkers and politicians, I ask you to remember
that in a certain sense, the most important thing about you will not be the prizes you win
or your accomplishments.
Though you win a Nobel Prize in physics and literature, in
a sense it is more important that you keep physics and literature alive, to be passed on
to the generations that follow you, as treasures that you got from the generations that
preceded you. Your success in business or law may be laudable, and may enrich you and your
families and communities, but that is less important in the largest way than the fact that
by practicing your skills and exercising your knowledge, you are also preserving them and
perfecting them, and you thank those predecessors who preserved and perfected those skills
for you by maintaining them for those to follow you.
I charge you not to break the chain that goes back to the
primates that evolved what we now separate into bands and music and poetry and speech as a
means of extending memory in an individual lifetime and beyond it. I charge you in
whatever way you choose to honor the past and to convey its treasures to the young.
They asked me to read something of my own, and I’ll close
by reading a poem of mine that maybe will be a good addendum to what I’ve said to you,
because it presents a notion of the past as not necessarily, or history as not
necessarily, the doings of big shots. The history in here is in many, many places, and
you’re sitting on it and wearing it and thinking it, and it’s in your grooming and the
shape of your nose and the garments on your back. The poem is called "Shirt."
[Pinsky reads the poem]
Good luck and congratulations to you, Class of ‘99.
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