Terrible Satisfactions: On Nick Gulig's "Orient"
Nick Gulig | Orient | Cleveland State University (CSU) Poetry Center | 2018 | 130 Pages
One of the lasting images of America’s last presidential campaign came from Texas Senator Ted Cruz. In 2015, on the debate stage with Donald Trump and a dozen other Republican aspirants, Cruz vowed to obliterate ISIS with a flurry of bombs. “I don’t know if sand can glow in the dark, but we’re going to find out!”, he cried.
Cruz needed to distinguish his willingness, even excitement, to use violence in foreign policy -- what the American press casually calls “hawkishness”. His image was made to order. The suggestion of the desert, bright with explosive fire, was visual. It played on the way generations of Americans have come to understand war since the September 11 attacks: through the footage of cameras mounted on attack planes.
It is not war exactly, but our images of war, that concern Nick Gulig in Orient. Its dozen poems reckon with the absurdity of experiencing perpetual war, visited upon distant deserts and unnamed faces, from the safety of our living rooms. We know war is hell, yet we find its imagery strangely arousing. We know the people we see on screen are real, yet they seem impossibly foreign. The narrators of Orient ache: “It’s beginning to feel a lot / like I’m at fault for something / far away.” They feel a gravity dragging them away from empathy and back to numbness.
Gulig wants to defy this even as he acknowledges that most of us lack the tools to do it. Gulig himself grew up in Eau Claire, WI, raised by Thai immigrant parents. Ever-conscious of borders and the world outside America, he nonetheless found his haven on the freshwater lakes and hardwood forests of north Wisconsin.
The counterpoint to that serene world is the harsh, hostile expanse of the desert. The deserts of Orient are lands whose borders empires have drawn and redrawn for centuries. They are blank canvases onto which history is written, rewritten, and then forgotten. “Before Islam defined ‘the east,’ Christianity ‘the west,’ a multiplicity of vibrant histories interacted in a vital, empty space,” says Book of Crossing. Gulig’s aim is to challenge our crude, medieval notions of “orient” and “occident” and whatever we imagine to distinguish us from them. These notions may help us understand maps of the Middle East, but they also shackle our understanding of it.
Orient is dedicated to a mother and child Gulig saw on TV. Fleeing the Syrian civil war, they had reached the edge of the desert when a reporter stopped them to ask a question. The mother paused, then, “holding her daughter, she asked the reporter how it could possibly be so difficult for people watching to imagine why she needed to leave her home, [and] why, at the same time, she also needed someone brave enough to offer her a new one,” Gulig said.
No Ph.D needed here -- the woman’s sense of terror could not be more emotionally intuitive. Yet something impedes our empathy. For so many Westerners today the news is all really quite overwhelming, refugees, drones, genocide. We just can’t. We shut down. Orient wants to scream, why is this so hard to understand?
One reason: noise. The speakers of Orient find themselves battered, disoriented, left dumb and numb by airwaves. It’s not just the grim news on TV. They wander the centerless, nihilistic fog of the internet, an realm where you can Google “September + towers + fall” -- then erase it and search for choking porn. War itself has morphed into a “strange pornography,” disembodied, available in consumable bites, ripped from its moral roots.
Orient’s narrators sense something isn’t right, but they can’t quite find the words for it. In Some Pornographies, Gulig portrays someone who starts off searching porn on his laptop but loses his arousal in the pornography of war:
“Politics exists because economy.
When Inger died in January, the snow existing,
The economy exists because “I want to be
inside you, darling.” The Dow
Jones Industrial Average. Afghanistan.
Afghanistan exists, and Syria, our civil difference
witnessed and returned
to us, a distant presence speaking in the waves.
The passion of the terrorist
Exists [which terrorist], and so the war
is indescribable, here”
The arrhythmia of the line breaks, the rhymes across lines and not within them, the frustrated efforts to think of something that exists -- these are what disorientation feels like. The speaker wants to care, yet he can only muster search-engine babble, shot through with guilt. It’s what results when war becomes a mediated thing, rather than the grotesque thing it is.
There is an escape from the numbness, Gulig says. It starts with expanding our notion of war. We understand war to take place through missiles, bombs, beheadings and village-razing. Orient argues there is violence embedded, too, in our notions of us and them, here and over there, my daughter and your daughter. Like weapons, these words sever humans from other humans.
This simple-enough point is, Gulig argues, deceptively difficult. Orient says that to really understand war, and to humanize those in it, we must return to the most elemental things that unite us. Take air, for instance: a borderless substance that connects us all. We all depend on each other’s exhalation and inhalation. Air makes it possible for singers to perform techniques like falsetto and vocal fry.
Conversely, air is the reason poison gas would kill any of us. Gulig uses that shocking juxtaposition in Denizen:
“An irritant known mostly for its pulmonary
properties, chlorine gas affects the body through the production of hypochlorous
and hydrochloric acid. To perform the vocal fry correctly, one controls the air, taking
care, above all else, to stay suspended above a whisper. This occurs when elemental chlorine reacts with water.”
Gulig’s interpolation of thoughts on singing and chemical weapons, conveyed with the flat tone of AP news copy, is meant as absurd. It speaks to how sheltered most Americans are; we can’t even picture chemical weapons without thinking of pop-singing techniques. But another way to interpret it is as an exercise in humility. To really have compassion for other people, we must understand their lungs to work no different than our own, in singing or in death. We must accept that without each other we are doomed. As Denizen, the concluding poem of the set, says, “One is left no choice but to imagine. No world / but that of words to build a breathing world between us.”
Orient was published in 2018, but nearly 20 years after 9/11 its meditations remain relevant to American life. Flanked by oceans, we struggle, as ever, to believe the foreigners on TV are real. We return to the comforts of otherizing language -- as in the bizarre and ignorant attempt to brand as the “China virus” a pandemic that has infected 2.6 million people across borders.
Meanwhile, war pornography remains a useful palliative for the public. Recall the dropping of the “mother of all bombs” on an ISIS base in 2017, or note the success of movies like Zero Dark Thirty and American Sniper. War arouses us even as it erases others.
Gulig’s at his strongest when he captures the difficulty of imagining real people who are actually living through the wars we watch on screens. To truly love strangers’ families as we love our own -- it’s a lot to ask from the best of us. Noise sets in; we lose the feeling.
Perhaps the present pandemic represents an opportunity in this way. If we are struggling to empathize with others, it helps to remember that the virus knows no borders; it wants us all. Our challenge, if we can recognize it, is a collective one.
This review is part of the CRB x Barnhouse Series, which was created in partnership with Cleveland press and literary collective Barnhouse in order to better highlight recent poetry releases. Learn more about Barnhouse here.