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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 May 2025
For most of my life I have felt split between two conflicting approaches to reality: 1) as a researcher trying rigorously and methodically to understand violence in the world, and 2) as a poet, responding to intuitive impulses to say what moved me, whether rational or not. But recently my editor Mark Selden suggested that I write about the role of Coming to Jakarta in my political thinking. In responding to his request I have come to realize that the two sides of my life have become synergistic, each side not just facilitating the other but indeed enabling it. Because each can be characterized as an attempt, using radically different methods but towards the same goal, of becoming more aware of forces in our life that are not easily understandable by normal rational investigation. So that each is an exploration, if you like, on the same frontier between the known and the unknowable.
1 Peter Dale Scott, “Afterword,” Minding the Darkness, 245.
2 Czeslaw Milosz, The Witness of Poetry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1983), 28, 25, 14.
3 Peter Dale Scott, “How I Came to Jakarta,” Agni 31/32 (1990), 297-304.
4 Peter Dale Scott, Coming to Jakarta: A Poem about Terror (New York: New Directions, 1989), 24-25. The complete section is online at Poetry Foundation. My suspicions in the Caldwell murder have since expanded to include Indonesian secret services, who in the 1970s were much more influential in Cambodian politics, and massacres, than is generally recognized. See Peter Dale Scott, The War Conspiracy (Ipswich, MA: Mary Ferrell Foundation, 2008), 238; Peter Dale Scott, American War Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection, and the Road to Afghanistan (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010), 128.
5 Scott, Coming to Jakarta, 102; quoting from Warren Commission, Hearings, Vol. 23, p. 166; Ed Reid, with Ovid Demaris, The Green Felt Jungle (New York: Pocket Books, 1964), 156-57; House Committee on Assassinations, Report, 151. The complete section is online.
6 Peter Dale Scott, “The Sleep of Reason: Denial, Memory-Work and the Reconstruction of Social Order,” in Literary Responses to Mass Violence, (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University, 2004), 38-39; quoting from Alfred McCoy, Politics of Heroin, xii (emphases added); quoting in turn from Coming to Jakarta, 147-48.
7 Arthur G. Neal, National Trauma and Collective Memory: major events in the American century (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 1998), 4. Cf. Neil J. Smelser, “Psychological Trauma and Cultural Trauma,” in Jeffrey C. Alexander, Cultural trauma and collective identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). 31ss.
8 Scott, American War Machine, 1-5.
9 Scott, American War Machine, 3, 5. In June 2010 I quoted this last sentence to a Russian authority on drug trafficking, after he confessed to me that he had been studying the traffic for thirty years, and had come to realize he did not know who the enemies were.
10 See for example, Peter Dale Scott. “9/11, Canada, left gatekeepers & Zelikow.”
11 Cf. Walter Isaacson, Einstein: His Life and Universe (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007), 90-94, 323, etc.
12 Alfred McCoy, Politics of Heroin, 461-63.
13 See especially Scott, Coming to Jakarta, 133-35; online here.
14 Peter Dale Scott, “Poets Who Grow Gardens in Their Heads,” Stronach Lecture, 2010 (Berkeley: Bancroft Library, University of California Press, forthcoming). Cf. “Art as the Experience of Alterity: Theodor W. Adorno's Aesthetic Theory,” Poiesis XII, 2010 [not seen].
15 Theodor W. Adorno, “Commitment,” New Left Review I/87-88, September-December 1974; in Terry Eagleton and Drew Milne, Marxist literary theory: a reader (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996), 202. One can perhaps see in this an echo of Marx's thesis on Feuerbach: “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.”
16 Consider for example the closing lines of The Prelude: “What we have loved, /Others will love, and we will teach them how” (Prelude XIV. 446-47).
17 Scott, Coming to Jakarta, 109, quoting Time, December 17, 1965; cf. Scott MacPhail, “Poetry and Terror in Peter Dale Scott's Coming to Jakarta,” Chicago Review (1998), 41-50.
18 Scott, Coming to Jakarta, 149-50.
19 Scott, Minding the Darkness, 242-43
20 Cf. T.S Eliot, “I believe that at the present time the problem of the unification of the world and the problem of the unification of the individual, are in the end one and the same problem, and the solution of one is the solution of the other.” (T.S. Eliot, “Religion Without Humanism,” in Norman Foerster (ed.), [Humanism and America: Essays on the Outlook of Modern Civilization New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1930], 112; misquoted in Peter Dale Scott, Listening to the Candle, 68; cf. Peter Dale Scott, “The Social Critic and His Discontents,” in A. David Moody, The Cambridge Companion to T.S. Eliot [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994], 63).
21 Peter Dale Scott, “Czeslaw Milosz and Solidarity; or, Poetry and the Liberation of a People,” Brick 78 (Winter 2006); citing Adam Michnik, “In Search of Lost Sense,” Sign and Sight, 9/21/05. Cf. Adam Michnik, Partisan Review, Winter 1999, 19.
22 Czeslaw Milosz, The Witness of Poetry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1983), 28, 25, 14.
23 Milosz, The Witness of Poetry, 26, 14.
24 Czeslaw Milosz, The Land of Ulro (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1985), 120.
25 Paul Zweig, Walt Whitman: The Making of the Poet (New York: Basic Books, 1984), 320.
26 Sidney Lanier, Select Poems, ed. Morgan Callaway, Jr. (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1899), xxxix-xl.
27 Jadwiga Maurer, Z matki obcej: Szkice o powiazaniach Mickiewicza ze swiatem Zydów (London: Polska Fundacja Kulturalna, 1990). 31. Cf. Ezra Mendelsohn, “The Frankist Novels of Isaac Bashevis Singer,” in Literary Strategies: the Jewish Texts and Contexts (New York: Oxford UP), 1996), 125, 128. Milosz doubts that Mickiewicz's Jewish mother was Frankist, but asserts emphatically that his wife was (Milosz, The Land of Ulro, 116-19).
28 Jacob Frank, trans. Harris Lenowitz, The Collection of the Words of the Lord, Saying 103; Jacob Frank, trans. Harris Lenowitz, Selections (Berkeley, CA: Tree, 1978).
29 Adam Mickiewicz, “Digression,” in Waclaw Lednicki, Pushkin's Bronze horseman: the story of a masterpiece (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1955), 122.
30 Czeslaw Milosz, To Begin Where I Am (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), 351; Peter Dale Scott, Poets Who Grow Gardens in Their Heads (Berkeley: Bancroft Library, University of California, forthcoming); “Czeslaw Milosz and Solidarity; or, Poetry and the Liberation of a People,” Brick 78 (Winter 2006), 67-74.
31 Eliot, “The Waste Land,” v. 357.
32 Walt Whitman, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd;” Harold Bloom, The Best Poems of the English Language: From Chaucer Through Robert Frost (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), 904.
33 Allen Ginsberg, “Poetry, Violence, and the Trembling Lambs, or Independence Day Manifesto,” Deliberate Prose: Selected Essays 1952-1995 (New York: HarperCollins, 2000), 3-5.
34 Francis X. Clines, “Allen Ginsberg: Intimations of Mortality,” New York Times, November 11, 1984.
35 John Leonard, The Nation, April 28, 1997.
36 American Civil Liberties Union.
37 Philippa Strum, When the Nazis Came to Skokie: Freedom for Speech We Hate (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1999).
38 CBC News, February 15, 2007. The man, Ernest Zundel, was eventually deported from Canada to Germany, where he was sentenced for the same offense to five years in prison under German law.
39 Aaron Latham, “The Lives They Lived: Allen Ginsberg; The Birth of a Beatnik,” New York Times, January 4, 1998.
40 Allen Ginsberg, “Elephant in the Meditation Hall,” Cosmopolitan Greetings: Poems, 1986-1992 (New York: HarperCollins, 1994), 43-44.
41 Czeslaw Milosz, New Collected Poems (New York: Ecco, 2003), 77.
42 Young India, December 15, 1921; in Mahatma Gandhi, The Essential Gandhi: His Life, Work, and Ideas: an Anthology (New York: Vintage, 1963), 150.
43 Peter Dale Scott, “Czeslaw Milosz and Solidarity; or, Poetry and the Liberation of a People,” Brick 78 (Winter 2006); citing Adam Michnik, “In Search of Lost Sense,” Sign and Sight, 9/21/05. Cf. Adam Michnik, Partisan Review, Winter 1999, 19.
44 Ron Dart, George Grant: Spiders and Bees (Abbotsford, BC: Freshwind Press, 2008).
45 United States Northern Command, “U.S. Northern Command, Canada Command establish new bilateral Civil Assistance Plan,” Press release, February 14, 2008: “SAN ANTONIO, Texas — U.S. Air Force Gen. Gene Renuart, commander of North American Aerospace Defense Command and U.S. Northern Command, and Canadian Air Force Lt.-Gen. Marc Dumais, commander of Canada Command, have signed a Civil Assistance Plan that allows the military from one nation to support the armed forces of the other nation during a civil emergency.”
46 Czeslaw Milosz, “Treatise on Theology,” Second Space: New Poems, trans. Czeslaw Milosz and Robert Hass (New York: Ecco, 2004), 47.
47 Sandra Harmon, Mafia Son: The Scarpa Mob Family, the FBI, and a Story of Betrayal (New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 2010), 57-64.
48 Czeslaw Milosz, The Land of Ulro (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1985), 122.
49 Milosz, Witness of Poetry, 13-14.
50 Al Purdy, “On Canadian Identity,” in Al Purdy, Poems for All the Nanettes (Toronto: Contact Press, 1962), 47, 48.
51 “Leonard Cohen Live at the Isle of Wight 1970” [movie].
52 “Leonard Cohen Live at the Isle of Wight 1970.”
53 Cf. Thomas Merton, Life and Holiness (New York: Image, 1963), 37: “Man is neither a devil or an angel. He is not pure spirit, but a being of flesh and spirit, subject to error and malice, but basically inclined to seek truth and goodness;” Dante, Paradiso 2:19-21.
54 Daniel Ellsberg, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers (New York: Viking, 2002), 214.
55 Peter Dale Scott, Rumors of No Law (Austin, TX: Thorp Springs Press, 1981), 43.
56 Ellsberg, Secrets, 263.
57 “The fate of poetry depends on whether such a work as Schiller's and Beethoven's ‘Ode To Joy’ is possible. For that to be so, some basic confidence is needed, a sense of open space ahead of the individual and the human species” (Czeslaw Milosz, [The Witness of Poetry Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1983], 14).
58 Cf. Michel Brunet, “Trois dominantes de la pensée canadienne-française: l'agriculturisme, l'anti-étatisme et le messianisme,” Ecrits du Canada français (Vol. 3, 1957), 33-117.
59 Maurice Duplessis, Premier of Quebec from 1936 to 1939 and 1944 to 1959. His Union Nationale Party opposed the Liberal Party program of nationalizing Quebec's electrical power companies.
60 Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Power, and the Future of America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 22.
61 Ben Stein, New York Times, November 26, 2006.
62 Lester R. Brown, World on the Edge: How to Prevent Environmental and Economic Collapse (New York: W.W. Norton, 2011), 60-61.
63 Jeffrey D. Sachs, “The Global Economy's Corporate Crime Wave,” Project Syndicate, April 30, 2011,.
64 Scott, The Road to 9/11, 254; citing Daniel Singer, Whose Millennium: Theirs or Ours? (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1999).
65 Lester Brown, “The New Geopolitics of Food,” Foreign Policy (May/June 2011).
66 Augustine, Confessions, 8:8:19: “For to go along that road and indeed to reach the goal is nothing else but the will to go. But it must be a strong and single will, not staggering and swaying about this way and that–a changeable, twisting, fluctuating will, wrestling with itself while one part falls as another rises.”
67 Peter Dale Scott, American War Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection, and the Road to Afghanistan (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2010), 32-33; citing Paul M. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (New York: Random House, 1987); Kevin Phillips, Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich (New York: Broadway Books, 2002). Cf. Thucydides, History, III.45.4, III.82.8; Lucan, Pharsalia I.158-70.
68 T.S. Eliot, “The Waste Land,” vv. 357, 360. It has been suggested that Eliot identified the hermit-thrush “in the neighborhood of the Eliot family summer home on Cape Ann” in Massachusetts (Ronald Bush, T.S. Eliot: A Study in Character and Style NewYork: Oxford University Press, 1984], 250n; cf. Martin Scofield, T.S. Eliot: The Poems New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988], 13 [“This derives from a New England memory”]). But Eliot's own notes to “The Waste Land” specify that he heard the hermit-thrush “in Quebec County” – i.e. on Lake Memphremagog, where he spent a summer about ten miles from my own family summer home and camp on Lake Massawippi in the Eastern Townships, Quebec, visited also by Leonard Cohen. In my mind this cross-border experience strengthens the analogy to Milosz's “thrush on a branch” (New and Collected Poems, 569), if not also Cohen's “bird on a wire.”
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