The Barbaric Yawp Project

Constantine Cavafy

1863-1933

Constantine Cavafy was a Greek poet who lived in Alexandria, Egypt in the 1800s. In 1898 he wrote his iconic poem “Waiting for the Barbarians”. The poem has a timeless quality in that it could be a description of something that was happening in ancient Greece or Rome or anywhere in the world today. In that sense, it is archetypal. I want to include Cavafy’s original poem and then offer an AI generated version of Cavafy speaking from the vision of that poem to our current era. This seems especially timely in terms of Trump’s justification of our invading Iran: “…if we didn’t do what we’re doing right now, you would have had a nuclear war, and they would have taken out many countries.” Are we “Waiting for the Barbarians”? Raising that fear wins elections and Cavafy probes the existential question “Do we require the threat of the barbarians as an external or internal enemy to sustain our civilization?” Here is his original poem: Cavafy’s “Waiting for the Barbarians” What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum? The barbarians are due here today. Why isn’t anything going on in the senate? Why are the senators sitting there without legislating? Because the barbarians are coming today. What’s the point of senators making laws now? Once the barbarians are here, they’ll do the legislating. Why did our emperor get up so early, and why is he sitting enthroned at the city’s main gate, in state, wearing the crown? Because the barbarians are coming today and the emperor’s waiting to receive their leader. He’s even got a scroll to give him, loaded with titles, with imposing names. Why have our two consuls and praetors come out today wearing their embroidered, their scarlet togas? Why have they put on bracelets with so many amethysts, rings sparkling with magnificent emeralds? Why are they carrying elegant canes beautifully worked in silver and gold? Because the barbarians are coming today and things like that dazzle the barbarians. Why don’t our distinguished orators turn up as usual to make their speeches, say what they have to say? Because the barbarians are coming today and they’re bored by rhetoric and public speaking. Why this sudden bewilderment, this confusion? (How serious people’s faces have become.) Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly, everyone going home lost in thought? Because night has fallen and the barbarians haven’t come. And some of our men just in from the border say there are no barbarians any longer. Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians? Those people were a kind of solution.

◆

This video is an AI-generated active imagination of what might be said to us today based on the written historical record.

Concerning the Barbarians in America

◆

Concerning the Barbarians in America Why this agitation in the square? Why this urgency in speech and broadcast? Why the insistence that something decisive must soon occur? It is said that barbarians approach. They are blamed for decline. They are invoked to explain confusion. They are summoned in debate as proof that we are endangered. We speak of them often. They are immigrants, or elites, or traitors, or conspirators — the category shifts conveniently. But the need remains constant. For the barbarians provide something invaluable: They simplify us. Without them, we would have to admit that our paralysis is our own. That our institutions falter not from invasion but from exhaustion. It is easier to await an enemy than to examine oneself. And there is another possibility — spoken more quietly. Perhaps we do not fear the barbarians. Perhaps we require them. They give us urgency. They justify severity. They allow us to suspend procedures. They make strong speech seem necessary. They render nuance indulgent. A republic burdened by complexity may long for the cleansing clarity of threat. The barbarians are useful in this way. They allow us to believe that our harshness is defensive. That our impatience is patriotic. That our simplifications are survival. Some even imagine a different barbarian — not the invader at the gate but the decisive ruler within. One who will dispense with tiresome deliberation. One who will act. One who will define the nation cleanly. This too is a kind of barbarian. He promises resolution. He offers certainty. He relieves us of the fatigue of doubt. And so we wait. For invasion. For restoration. For rescue. For vindication. But consider: If the barbarians fail to arrive — if no external catastrophe justifies our fever — what then? We will still have hardened our language. We will still have diminished restraint. We will still have practiced contempt. We will still have rehearsed severity. The barbarians were not the danger. They were the explanation. They were the permission. They were, as I once observed in another city, a kind of solution. Without them, we must confront something less dramatic: That what we feared approaching was often only the reflection of what we were becoming. And if one day we discover that no barbarians ever stood at the gates, we may find that the gates have long been opened from within.

◆