Stephen Crane, 1895
For years and years of my life, I never thought I would be a citizen of a country at war. Like Crane’s Henry Fleming, I thought unconsciously but quite certainly that war for the United States was something that happened in history. I remember nights when the radio played for hours as I tried to ignore house noises so I could sleep that I never, ever expected to wake up hearing about atrocities committed in wars perpetrated far away by me. And that, during a time when I felt ashamed to be an American, when there had been Reagan and then Bush, when broad-minded, sensible Europeans could only shake their heads at the still-puritanical Americans. I thought I knew then but did not know what it meant to be ashamed to be an American.
And I wonder if Crane’s Fleming knows that shame – that guilt. During all of my life, I have read history, and so much of history, so many of the books, are about wars. As a teenager, I read with fascination of the holocaust and the concentration camps of World War II. I read of the factory-style slaughter fields of World War I. I read of the painkiller-free amputations of the Civil War, of the noise and the smoke. I knew about all of it. But I don’t think I ever felt any of those deaths, even after studying the photographs, photographs of Civil War battlefields that frustrate in their refusal to yield detail, to show the face of death, the blood of it, the hands and feet turned impossibly wrong of it. I never felt the death that was there.
Maybe it took a war of my own – President George W. Bush’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and who knows where else before and since– to show me. Maybe it took the guilt.
Now I am older, many disappointments older, and I sleep less well. I depend on the sound of voices, reading literature or on the radio, to lull me back to sleep again and again, every night. And I know how it numbs not just one’s mind but one’s soul, to be guilty of the worst, of murder, yes, but also torture and rape and torture and abuse as American support for insurgencies and governments up to no good in many places all over the world has made me. And I am the more guilty that I do not suffer it myself. That’s the strange guilt and loathing of the whole thing. If I were raped or tortured myself, I would be so much less guilty. But as it is, so many different people and groups are doing so many different, terrible things, in so many different places – either at the behest of the U.S. government or simply enabled by it – everywhere but here. This is my government, my country. I am guilty.
And now that I am guilty of war, I think I can feel the death. And I feel, in a terribly personal way, the big question that the death represents. Death is universal, and, if anything in life means anything, death must.
I am disappointed in Crane and his Fleming. For the whole book is really about one man, or youth, facing the Question. But the Crane Question is about courage. What will I do when faced with peril? It’s the wrong question. He got the Question wrong. Either death ends everything that you know and everything you have been, or it doesn’t. He whom the sickle touches may run, but he will not prevail. Drone death strikes where one stands; gang rape, and the death that follows, offer no opportunity for escape, and if they did, there would be no question what to do.
A human life is like a boat with a wake. The human is this small thing that may be killed, but following behind, as long as he or she lives, is this history, the things done, the goals, the people known, the things in progress, his or her past. What happens to all this when the drone death or car bomb, the illness or accident, ends that life? If you cut the motor, the water churns and then answers only to the wind and the currents. The boat is an obstruction, nothing more. And it will be consumed by the water and the wind.
What was it all for? Why does one have a whole world in one’s head, a whole self, if sudden, random death is the goal?
My life, indeed, seems so relevant to me, so different from those of the 20 dead from this car bomb or the 10 killed by that drone. For one who has considered suicide as often as I have, it’s odd to find the sudden end so troubling.
And yet I do.
What is A Bookful Bequest? Read about Hannah Grachien’s Literary Circumlocutary
Coming soon: Upton Sinclair’s Dragon’s Teeth