Renewal and Remembrance.
Last night I heard the author, recorded when I was just born, reading his poetry. This one is nearly a century old.
[quote= Siegfried Sassoon]Aftermath.
Have you forgotten yet?…
For the world’s events have rumbled on since those gagged days,
Like traffic checked while at the crossing of city-ways:
And the haunted gap in your mind has filled with thoughts that flow
Like clouds in the lit heaven of life; and you’re a man reprieved to go,
Taking your peaceful share of Time, with joy to spare.
But the past is just the same–and War’s a bloody game…
Have you forgotten yet?…
Look down, and swear by the slain of the War that you’ll never forget.
Do you remember the dark months you held the sector at Mametz–
The nights you watched and wired and dug and piled sandbags on parapets?
Do you remember the rats; and the stench
Of corpses rotting in front of the front-line trench–
And dawn coming, dirty-white, and chill with a hopeless rain?
Do you ever stop and ask, ‘Is it all going to happen again?’
Do you remember that hour of din before the attack–
And the anger, the blind compassion that seized and shook you then
As you peered at the doomed and haggard faces of your men?
Do you remember the stretcher-cases lurching back
With dying eyes and lolling heads–those ashen-grey
Masks of the lads who once were keen and kind and gay?
Have you forgotten yet?…
Look up, and swear by the green of the spring that you’ll never forget.[/quote]
The horror of the green spring is that it brought, just a few years later, the Holocaust, and an hundred new poems. The crime of the green spring of renewal is that it readies us to do it all again.
We are doing it now, and turning the rotting corpses into a romance, and the defeat and destruction and turning back of the tide of misery fleeing new horrors into some heroic victory. We have no right to renewal.
We who, by good fortune, have not been shelled and gassed and bombed who have not marched and hobbled from nowhere to nowhere on rotting feet, starving and traumatised - we too are traumatised.
There is no peace, even in peace.
My helpless rage at my own helpless rage cannot quite capture itself; the trauma of my lack of trauma leaks out into this post or that, and like Rivers, the flow of my patching and healing, of my own ongoing renewal, serves the all-consuming machinery of war. To offer hope would be to serve the monstrous continuation, and yet...
This is what I carry into each discussion, of whether suffering has meaning, or the difference between wants and needs, or how to save the world. This is what I do, or do not, hold in remembrance, sitting in comfort to declare where you all have gone wrong. This is where I find my joy.
[quote= Siegfried Sassoon]Aftermath.
Have you forgotten yet?…
For the world’s events have rumbled on since those gagged days,
Like traffic checked while at the crossing of city-ways:
And the haunted gap in your mind has filled with thoughts that flow
Like clouds in the lit heaven of life; and you’re a man reprieved to go,
Taking your peaceful share of Time, with joy to spare.
But the past is just the same–and War’s a bloody game…
Have you forgotten yet?…
Look down, and swear by the slain of the War that you’ll never forget.
Do you remember the dark months you held the sector at Mametz–
The nights you watched and wired and dug and piled sandbags on parapets?
Do you remember the rats; and the stench
Of corpses rotting in front of the front-line trench–
And dawn coming, dirty-white, and chill with a hopeless rain?
Do you ever stop and ask, ‘Is it all going to happen again?’
Do you remember that hour of din before the attack–
And the anger, the blind compassion that seized and shook you then
As you peered at the doomed and haggard faces of your men?
Do you remember the stretcher-cases lurching back
With dying eyes and lolling heads–those ashen-grey
Masks of the lads who once were keen and kind and gay?
Have you forgotten yet?…
Look up, and swear by the green of the spring that you’ll never forget.[/quote]
The horror of the green spring is that it brought, just a few years later, the Holocaust, and an hundred new poems. The crime of the green spring of renewal is that it readies us to do it all again.
We are doing it now, and turning the rotting corpses into a romance, and the defeat and destruction and turning back of the tide of misery fleeing new horrors into some heroic victory. We have no right to renewal.
We who, by good fortune, have not been shelled and gassed and bombed who have not marched and hobbled from nowhere to nowhere on rotting feet, starving and traumatised - we too are traumatised.
This reinforced Rivers’s view that it was prolonged strain, immobility and helplessness that did the damage, and not the sudden shocks or bizarre horrors that the patients themselves were inclined to point to as the explanation for their condition. That would help to account for the greater prevalence of anxiety neuroses and hysterical disorders in women in peacetime, since their relatively more confined lives gave them fewer opportunities of reacting to stress in active and constructive ways. Any explanation of war neurosis must account for the fact that this apparently intensely masculine life of war and danger and hardship produced in men the same disorders that women suffered from in peace.”
? Pat Barker, Regeneration
There is no peace, even in peace.
My helpless rage at my own helpless rage cannot quite capture itself; the trauma of my lack of trauma leaks out into this post or that, and like Rivers, the flow of my patching and healing, of my own ongoing renewal, serves the all-consuming machinery of war. To offer hope would be to serve the monstrous continuation, and yet...
This is what I carry into each discussion, of whether suffering has meaning, or the difference between wants and needs, or how to save the world. This is what I do, or do not, hold in remembrance, sitting in comfort to declare where you all have gone wrong. This is where I find my joy.
Comments (60)
If any question why we died,
Tell them, because our fathers lied.
a dead statesman
I could not dig: I dared not rob:
Therefore I lied to please the mob.
Now all my lies are proved untrue
And I must face the men I slew.
What tale shall serve me here among
Mine angry and defrauded young?[/quote]
There is a ritual of remembrance - poppies, the Last Post, 2 minutes silence, that express, and thus evoke, honour, respect, gratitude, sadness.
Fuck that!
Remember horror, futility, obscenity. Even Kipling the great patriot wants to evoke guilt and anger - he was one of the liars.
And this was the lie, that you are still being told:
Dulce et Decorum Est
[quote= Wilfred Owen]
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.
Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.[/quote]
Remember, for pity's sake remember; tell your friends and enemies, that there is no depth to which we cannot sink, with one self-righteous lie. Have you heard that lie recently? Have you told it? Or the lie that that was all a long time ago, and things are different now?
The Great War produced many poets. Some, like Rupert Brooke, actually wrote of the impending death of war in an artful, compelling way, as being something even to be welcomed--":To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping, Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary." He joined the English Navy and died of blood poisoning on a ship bound for Gallipoli.
It was a peculiarly grotesque war, which nonetheless didn't stop us from having others. America didn't suffer the kind of horrible losses incurred by the European nations.
I bow to your erudition on Horace, but I think I know Owen's intent well enough.
Quoting Ciceronianus the White
Yes, it's a Europe thing, and some of the rhetoric that comes from the US sounds appallingly Victorian to my ears, at least - it's a lesson half-learnt here, though there is much mis-remembrance that continues to glorify the 'noble sacrifice'.
There wasn't a lot of war mongering going on prior to WW1. It was a bizarre event from beginning to end. I mean, if you're going to remember, how about, you know.
I suppose I'd say: War, though it is not glorious or something to be celebrated, is sometimes necessary. In what sense necessary? I don't believe I'd say even morally speaking. Or even ethically speaking. Only that we find ourselves at an impasse, and here it is we are now. I don't wish for it, and think it a good to avoid at most costs. But sometimes it seems to me that war cannot be avoided, because it would mean such and such for not just the people I love now, but forever the people I love into the future -- or, if not forever, then at least war for them.
I think WW1 was an effort on the part of the great powers of Europe to lower their collective unemployment rate. For the US, getting involved in it was a terrible mistake. And I guess this thread was just more Fox News, more CNN, more Washington Post, more spew in a sea of spew. For a second there I thought it was something else. :confused:
I would say defending against an attacker is justified. War isn't anything glorious, but defending against an agressor it is justified and isn't a futile endeavour. As coming from a tiny and quite expendable country which got it's independence thanks to WW1 and barely avoided defeat, occupation and the Soviet dictatorship in WW2 my views perhaps are different from others.
Many see WW1 as something totally avoidable and as an accident that just happened because of stupidity of the ruling people (who as monarchs perhaps shouldn't have held power in the first Place). Yet then WW2 seems for them to be something else, as the justified war against evil. This view is highly distorted as WW1 and WW2 are interlinked with the second truly being the sequel to the first. And how avoidable was WW1? Luckily it didn't happen after the Agadir incident and if Serbian extremists would haven't been successfull in their , I am sure something would have started it. After all, the continent hadn't blown up since the Napoleonic Wars and those wars were ancient history even then. No way without WW1 and WW2 and a pile of millions of dead bodies would Europeans started an integration process and formed an European Union. The bellicosity of Europeans wouldn't have waned just by time. Yes, it's sad, but unfortunately true.
Not in Britain. Britain was complacently dominant as the world's leader. However:
http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/rg_greatwar1.htm
I'm not an historian, nor a poet, but a philosopher and psychologist, and it is of interest to me that 'hysteria' has come up again, and as a symptom of a society, not just of an individual.
The op proposes, "it was prolonged strain, immobility and helplessness that did the damage, and not the sudden shocks or bizarre horrors". I imagine the situation that provokes road-rage; one is in the business of driving, but one cannot make progress. As a passenger, one is helpless, but there is less strain, because one accepts the helplessness, but the driver is helplessly responsible. It is an identity of power in conflict with the reality of helplessness that causes the strain.
In the case of Britain, perhaps we could talk about identity as natural rulers of the world and purveyors of civilisation meeting the reality of decline, as the industrial revolution spread around the world, and Britain's pre-eminence began to be challenged. Perhaps we could consider too a pre-industrial social order meeting the new money, and new morality of the industrial age.
And that makes me think of the digital revolution, and the decline of European and American dominance. And the new hysteria of fake news and enemies everywhere; of making America great again, and making Britain sovereign again, and all the other national nostalgias, presented as renewals.
Such nostalgia must lead to hysteria, as it attempts to hold onto the identity that conflicts with reality, and my hope, next time, is to look at some other form of renewal that does not.
If heaven were to do again,
And on the pasture bars,
I leaned to line the figures in
Between the dotted starts,
I should be tempted to forget,
I fear, the Crown of Rule,
The Scales of Trade, the Cross of Faith,
As hardly worth renewal.
For these have governed in our lives,
And see how men have warred.
The Cross, the Crown, the Scales may all
As well have been the Sword.
[/quote]
If one sees the violence in everything we do, in every institution, every nation, every righteous identity, even every family, what is left of man to renew? Even despair is violent. This is the question that is answered adequately only by silence. All we have known is violence, all we have known is noise that covers up the sound of distant gunfire. Where will you go and what will you do, when you come to this?
There is fear of this unknown, that is not fear of the unknown, but of the loss of the known - of everything known, of my own identity.
I stand on the edge the known; I stand in silent witness; this is the last post. There is meaning in this ritual of farewell. Two minutes' silence and then, mostly, we go back to the same old same again, but we do not have to. We can go on into the silence, but not 'we'; one goes alone.
[quote= Hunter/Garcia]There is a road, no simple highway
Between the dawn and the dark of night
And if you go no one may follow
That path is for your steps alone
Ripple in still water
When there is no pebble tossed
Nor wind to blow
You who choose to lead must follow
But if you fall you fall alone
If you should stand then who's to guide you?
If I knew the way I would take you home.[/quote]
"For us lads of eighteen, they ought to have been mediators and guides to the world of maturity, the world of work, of duty, of culture, of progress--to the future. We often made fun of them and played jokes on them, but in our hearts we trusted them. The idea of authority, which they represented, was associated in our minds with a greater insight and a more humane wisdom. But the first death we saw shattered this belief. We had to recognize that our generation was more to be trusted than theirs.
They surpassed us only in phrases and in cleverness. The first bombardment showed us our mistake, and under it the world as they had taught it to us broke in pieces.
While they continued to write and talk, we saw the wounded and dying. While they taught that duty to one's country is the greatest thing, we already knew that death-throes are stronger. But for all that we were no mutineers, no deserters, no cowards--they were very free with all these expressions. We loved our country as much as they; we went courageously into every action; but also we distinguished the false from true, we had suddenly learned to see. And we saw that there was nothing of their world left. We were all at once terribly alone, and alone we must see it through.
...we stood on the threshold of life. And so it would seem. We had as yet taken no root. The war swept us away. For the others, the older men, it is but an interruption. They are able to think beyond it. We, however, have been gripped by it and do not know what the end may be. We know only that in some strange and melancholy way we have become a wasteland. All the same, we are not often sad. "
Millions of people, whole generations had been sucked into the enormous vortex
of the WW1. Can we understand their experiences?
The poem is actually about us. It's about the whole world to the extent that we each are microcosms, and our world is a microcosm. In other words, we know something about a solider in WW1 who died choking on mustard gas because we each have known some kind of helpless suffering. We know about how the world that soldier lived in seemed to be driven by forces beyond it.
We know what the people who created the League of Nations felt in the way an autumn leaf that falls from a branch carries within in its dying all the ascending hope of last spring.
I'm happy for you to be the way you are: troubled in mind and full of angst. But I have to let go of that in order to see that soldier. I have to stop judging long enough to see that he is me.
Surely it is seeing that he is me that enables judgement? One does not judge a rock. But the mindset of the ancients is indeed fascinating. It seems they did not make the separation of psychic and physic - they had not quite excluded themselves from the world in the cartesian manner - and so the audience does not know two things, one psychological and one physical, but they are the same.
There is more than one ageing hippy on the boards.
ha - agree
I'm not proposing that we judge judgment to be bad. I'm pointing out that too much judgment obscures one's vision and so is not conducive to remembrance.
But sometimes, try to remember the soldier. Putting him up as a prop in a propaganda piece is not how you do that. Try to honor his life even if you know that in the process, you're actually honoring your own. If it helps, think of it as honoring all of life.
You do that for a minute and I'll take up your advice to hope for a better world. A minute is probably all I can give to that, but don't worry: that stuff springs eternal.
I don't advise that. That's what propelled a million young men to their deaths in the war to end all wars.
No. I do not honour folly.
Or rather, how to memorialise - I'm not that old.
Memorializing is sacred territory. Maybe some think of it as a place for condemning or worshiping icons. To me, it's about real people, so we try to dispense with the narrative. Maybe we can never entirely escape narration, but memorializing is an act of trying to do that for the sake of witnessing.
Otherwise, I think you're ambivalent about hope. I'm not.
Can you explain? What is real about a person who died 100 years ago, apart from the narrative?
Everything that happens leaves traces. One dead soldier left a broken-hearted wife. Another dead soldier's family celebrated because he was an abusive drunk. Those traces are all around you.
What all those routes lead back to was, as you said, not rocks. It was people. You know about what that is by looking out of your own eyeballs.
How does your kind of memorializing work?
It is only what you see here, a patchwork of hand-me-downs, fragments of stories and songs. For me, these are the traces, the only traces I have. There is a little museum of the wars not 50 meters from my home, and one of their little projects is to put on each house of the town, a poppy and a little note of the soldier that lived there and died. So many little stories. Next door there is one from WW1. Next door on the other side, Walter is 98, a veteran of the far East conflict in WW2. He gave us the packing case that shipped his gear back home at the end of the war for firewood, and we gave it to the museum - just a big wooden packing case.
This is a narrative, the stories you tell are narratives. Traces if you like, of what has been and is not.
"He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning." But not at me, unenlightened, but at Wilfred Owen, that I have heard tell of and read, and I tell of the telling, that he brought to the world. And everyone seems to want me to say of this guttering, choking, drowning, in chlorine gas (I have had a whiff in chemistry class), that there is something noble, honourable, virtuous. And I say no. It is an irredeemable catastrophe. That is the good faith I want to keep with Wilfred and his experience as he narrates it.
I asked you honor a man's life, not the means of his death. The fact that you confused the two indicates to me that you have trouble distinguishing a person from a set of narratives. Is there a difference?
And now you're talking about redemption. What does a living thing have to do to receive honor from you? Don't you realize the bad is wrapped up with the good?
Frank, who are you, to demand this of me? No. I have said it three times, "and what I say three times is true". Request denied. As if my honouring is of any value to a corpse. But it concerns you, as if I owe it to you.
Quoting frank
Don't you realise life is wrapped up with death? Death is the culmination, and life is what these people gave, in exchange for what? My feeble sentiment or yours? No, it was for an idea of nation and righteousness - a LIE.
I remember that.
All life is bound together. You can't condemn your childhood without condemning yourself. It all had to be the way it was for you to be who you are.
I was asking you to honor your own life. You want to pick and choose, though. You approve of this, but won't accept that. It doesn't work that way.
I get the feeling you don't approve of me for that.
Quoting frank
During the official centennial ceremonies of the ending of World War 1, the American president decides (against the advice of his staff) not to go the American cemetary at Belleau Wood as it's raining and he doesn't like his hair to get wet, as he might look bad with wet hair.
Now, even the best poet couldn't come up with this which is so telling of our time.
It is so proper it's incredible. A million or so dead we can cope with, but no one wants to look bad. The lesson has been well learned.
Very timely in that it's fake news.
But it tells us that Finland has yet to discover the umbrella. What, does the snow just blow off and you don't need them?
Frankly, I'm lost for words, Frank.
yeah exactly. Beautiful Soul.
The content of Owens' poem is powerful and right.
The role of someone who agrees with Owens is sublimated 'good boys get recognized' or 'good boys ought get first dibs on the lifeboat'
Why there are memorials built in New Zealand is simply because the graves are on other continents and nearly a third of the fallen soldiers have no grave.
Lol. Must be also fake news that Trump never has visited as Commander-in-Chief (or before, of course) the troops in the field in an actual warzone like Afghanistan or the Middle East, unlike Obama or Bush. Of course, it is totally logical for him not to do that because it would just focus media attention to the longest war that the US has fought and is, well, losing. But if you keep it out of sight, it is out of mind. Talk about a truly forgotten war in Afghanistan.
And Trump, who doesn't remember just in what foot he had bone spurs, has said, his personal Vietnam was avoiding venereal diseases in the 1970's. That's fitting too.
I would have had so much respect for you if you would have just said, "Oops, I picked up some fake news and ran with it. My bad."
But you just came back with bluster. Poor form.
Has he visited the troops in Afghanistan, Iraq or Syria? He has promised to go to see the troops, but he doesn't think it's important. See Trump: It's not 'overly necessary' to visit troops in the war zone
So, here's more fake news to you, frank.
No. NPR says rain meant he'd have to go by car instead of helicopter. It wasn't important enough to him, I guess. He went to a different cemetery the next day.
But you said he didn't go because he didn't want to get his hair wet. That's fake news that you have now doubled down on with unenlightened along with you.
What I'd truly like to know (from both of you) is this: if your plan is to be just like him, then what are you complaining about?
I guess that he's better at it than you with power and wealth to show for it.
This high horse might be more appealing if it didn't have Trump's face tattooed on its backside. Anyway please, can y'all stop taking about Baby Raindrop and his disputed hydrophobia. The conversation used to be interesting...
Actually, Trump tweeted that himself. Didn't find that on the NPR site now (perhaps in a radio broadcast?)
Quoting frankAt least he was still bitching about getting soaked at the later cemetary, so that's there to confirm that Trump didn't like being outdoors in the rain as the the Vanity fair scoop said . See here.
But I think we should continue (if we want to) this debate on the Trump dump, sorry, Trump thread.
:up:
The OP specifically stated that ssu's info was "so proper [to the thread] it's incredible." But I'm happy to move on.
It seemed a bit prolonged to me, but fair enough. My growing Trumpophobia is probably showing.
Yeah, but did you see Corbyn's disrespectful coat? !
So this is the shit that we dump on the follies of the past, to resurrect them for a pageant of competitive correctness. they'll be turning in their lack of graves. Here's another poem, to get us back on track.
[quote=Ralph Butler and Peter Hart]Nellie the Elephant packed her trunk
And said goodbye to the circus
Off she went with a trumpety-trump
Trump, trump, trump
Nellie the Elephant packed her trunk
And trundled back to the jungle
Off she went with a trumpety-trump
Trump, trump, trump[/quote]
And that's from an official website of the United States government, so it must be true.
Nellie knew when to bugger off. Other large destructive mammals are not so obliging, unfortunately.
Hegel's 'Beautiful Soul' is a (stage of the) soul which acts as though outside of the world, condemning the world
i.e. 'sitting in comfort to declare where you all have gone wrong.'
'good boy' is a flippant gloss, meant to suggest that when one takes the position of Beautiful Soul, one is doing so primarily a way of figuring out how to protect one's own goodness in a world that would muck it up. Imagine a world thrown into chaos - every conceivable species of inhumanity on display . A benevolent alien lands, surveys the scene reproachfully. How tempting to buttonhole him and say: "oh, yes, you're quite right, it's not good. Let me introduce myself. I see it just as you do. Not good at all." (Same tone as the monologuist in Camus' The Fall)
Or:
Rage is in-and-of-the world and is not beautiful. So rage's greatest trick is to sublimate itself; to put itself outside the world, self-beautifying, and place the ugliness in the world which it condemns.
Or:
Why did Owens say it in a poem?
That's worth its own thread sometime *mumbles something about beautiful tragedy*, but only poetry can speak the unspeakable, because words are weak, and deeds even weaker.
[quote=Ernest Christopher Dowson]
If we must part,
Then let it be like this.
Not heart on heart,
Nor with the useless anguish of a kiss;
But touch mine hand and say:
"Until to-morrow or some other day,
If we must part".
Words are so weak
When love hath been so strong;
Let silence speak:
"Life is a little while, and love is long;
A time to sow and reap,
And after harvest a long time to sleep,
But words are weak.[/quote]
I heard a programme about the poetry of Afghanistan last night - lots of flowers and orchards and sadness amongst the death and suffering, like the poppies of Flanders. It's very popular there apparently.
Poetry that touches people tells something about their lives and their feelings. Hence poetry from the WW1 era is from an age we have problems to relate to. It doesn't reflect our personal experiences and the reality we live in. Naturally poetry can be timeless also, but still.
(Poppies are indeed very popular in Afghanistan, but perhaps that's another issue)
He's a Holy Fool. Holy Fools also sit outside of society screaming at it. Unenlightened has the character of a Holy Fool. They're usually very irritating and sometimes end up being executed. St. Basil was a Holy Fool.