Soundtracks of Chaos: There's Nothing Good About War (Part II)

I spent some words the other day trying to convince my readers and the rest of the world (from the perch of a relatively unknown blog, so kudos to me for the positive self-image) that war is an outrage -- an outrage that doesn't make us feel outraged, because it is an ingrained part of our world history. We simply throw our hands up and say: "It's part of life..."

I also posited the idea that war will never end until we can convince our children to see it as an outrage and to, more importantly, feel that it is an outrage. 

It so happens that, yesterday, my son was watching a Call of Duty tournament on YouTube. He plays the game, as well. I have never believed that these games cause kids to be violent (he is not violent, nor are the majority of kids who play it) but, having just written my last piece, it hit me like runaway rhino: this game is part of the problem of the normalization of war -- part of the muffling of the much-needed feeling of outrage. 

As long as people can look at war and at shooting others as a form of entertainment, we will never make the transition into the outrage against war that I called for in part one of this little anti-war series.  

We all agree that war is a thing best avoided, but, as a species, we humans have a hard time feeling that it is an outrage. It's, as I said, "part of life," to us. History tells us this; literature tells us this; film and TV tell us this; our elder family members may have fought in wars and we admire them (as we should) for their courage. Sure, we are all able to shake our heads and say, "Man, war stinks," but so few of us are able to feel outrage about it; to say: it just is not something we should continute to accept. 

I think I have recounted this before, but I remember my dad telling me about a time when he and some friends were watching the news during the Vietnam War, and, as they rolled footage of the fighting, my dad said, "Hard to believe. People are actually shooting guns at each other." According to him, his friends didn't know what to make of that statement. One of them even called him "a weirdo." 

He was, indeed, a weirdo. A sad state of affairs that more people are not that weird. 

So, there sat my son, watching a game with realistic graphics of shooting and killing and there sat (on the TV) an audience full of people cheering (cheering!) when one of their favorite players gunned down another. (Meh -- no loss. They just have to wait to "respawn.")

That said, let's process something together: Can you imagine a video game based on rape? -- in which the objective was to rape other characters? Of course you can't. But...why not? 

If any two actions vie for equal levels of moral outrage, they are the taking of a life and rape. (Though, personally, I often think rape is the worse offense.) We would never, however, create a video game in which raping people is the objective. This is because rape is felt to be as outrageous a violation of human morality -- of humaness itself -- as it really is. Everyone on the planet but the profoundly inasane and the deeply evil agree: rape is an unspeakably horrible act. 

This is the state that our thinking about war needs to reach. 

But, imagine the effect over the centuries if we off-handedly started to include rape in our games, films, stories, TV shows, etc. Not as a topic for awareness or as an outrageous act of some hateable villain, but as background noise or as a common occurance that people just shrug off and move on from. Imagine if, over generations, it were presented as an unavoidable occurance in life. Would the perspective shift? Would people say, about this unsepeakable new game objective, as they do about violent video games: "It's not really rape...it's just a game."

So another proposed impossible solution (which is more of a meditation than an implementable solution, you might have already gathered): 

We eliminate all media in which war is a topic. Over time, kids and adults who don't see violence as entertainment, will again be shocked and appalled by it and they will have developed the outrage for war that is necessary to produce leaders who will avoid it at all cost and citizens who will refuse to show up to fight. 

Sadly, we lose Henry V, of course. We lose great films like Glory and Saving Private Ryan. We lose all war-based video games and all games with guns and killing. The Iliad and The Odyssey need to go. Indiana Jones? Superman? Captain America? The Sun Also Rises? All Quiet on the Western Front?

Chess? (American) Football? Both based on war. Toy soldiers? Those little green army men? Boy Scouting? R.O.T.C?

I know is sounds ridiculous and I am even more aware that it is an impossibility, but it sure does underscore something: We are conditioned to accept war from the earliest periods of our lives. 

If we could do it, though, would it be worth it? Should some Shakespeare go out the window if it means that our sons and daughters would see war for the outrage it is? If this could all really be done, what would the impact on the economy be (no football)? What about the video game industry? -- the film industry?

If my solution were to work (probably over a century, if not longer) would the trade-off be worth it? I would argue that, to end war, even the greatest works of literature of all time might worth forgetting. Wouldn't you? Surely a few great movies, too... And some fun entertainment... 

As I said, this is all more of a meditation than a praxctical solution. I'm pretty sure it would work, but I know it could never be applied. 

A last thought, though: books and movies that conjure outrage for war might be allowed to remain... I'm thinking of works like Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried. 

At any rate, as Sting once wrote, "I hope the Russians love their children, too."

Teaching Literature: The Light and the Wind

It is heartbreaking to teach literature sometimes. Very rewarding, but often heartbreaking. I teach a lower-level group of high school juniors this year -- nice bunch of kids and many of them way smarter than their work habits show. We are studying American literature and, believe it or not, I insist on teaching them Moby Dick. How do you study the foundations of American lit. without Melville's greatest work?

No, I don't have them read the while book. (I didn't read it until grad school.) We read selections and we watch the movie with Patrick Stewart as Ahab. It is a pretty good Cliff's Notes version that manages to keep many of the themes intact; it also remains faithful to a lot of the book's dialogue. And, the kids like it.

What's heartbreaking is teaching sections like the St. Elmo's fire scene and being (every time) chilled to the bone by the profundity of it; being ignited with my own internal fire of appreciation for the lofty heights that the human animal can achieve in seeing Melville's brilliance in action.

How do you teach that? How do you impart the soul-deep fulfillment -- the actual "high" -- that rises up in you when, for instance, Mr. Starbuck, brought to his lowest of lows, seeing Captain Ahab posing with the aid of a natural phenomenon like static electricity as a God figure, utters the phrase, "Forbear, old man -- God has turned his back on thee. This light is not thine. This light is not thine..."

Literature and music have always been to me as is wind to Coleridge's Aeolian harp; the strings vibrate into feelings of wonder and beauty. Forgive the purple prose, but...how else can one say these things? No wonder the Romantics were poets.

I know it is probably something one can't teach; the strings are either there or they are not, I suppose. I just wish.

The Strange Case of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell

As far as novels are concerned, I am sometimes alarmed by how little I remember about those that I have read.

A friend of mine just recently posted that she was excited about the release of a BBC program based on the book Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke. She said it is one of her favorite books. I read that book, too -- I think, even, that it had been at her suggestion, quite a few years ago. I remember having enjoyed it very much at the time. Yet -- I couldn't tell you anything about it today. I'd actually completely forgotten about the book. It would seem to make no sense. I remember even recommending it to others, back then, having liked it as much as I did... Still, almost no recollection about the story.

I remember something about a girl and a white garment... That's about all. (Anyone know what that was? -- or am I nuts?)

So, how is it that I could have enjoyed that book and have, today, almost no memory of it?

An illustration fro the novel. 

Is it just passage of time? No -- I read Peter S. Beagle's The Folk of the Air some fifteen years before that, and I remember it very well, for some reason. I read The Old Man and the Sea when I was ten and I read Jules Verne's The Mysterious Island at twelve and I've always remembered them vividly. So, it's not just a lapsing memory on my part...

One of the other books that has stryed with me since my first readong is Pride and Prejudice, so it is also not a question of "guy books" vs. "girl books" -- at least not for me. (Though I always have and probably always will despise Middlemarch. Blech. )

Is it that ....Strange and...Norell... is just not a good book; that it's a page-turner without enough depth to latch on to my haughty literary expectations? I am completely sure that's not the case. My friend is no dummy. She would not enjoy a book without substance; we studied literature in grad school together and she was one of the sharpest knives in the rack. There's no way we're talking about empty pop lit. here.

I suppose that puts us on old ground: art is subjective. Corny, but delightfully true. (Frustratingly true to the quantifiers and researchers and catagory-makers [may their databases burst into spontaneous flames].)

Literary quality does not necessarily equal literary enjoyment. Literary enjoyment does not necessarily preclude quality, nor does it prove quality. It's literary impression that matters.

For some reason, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell made an impression on my friend that it did not make on me, even though we both liked it. I'm sure there are other books we have mutually read that work in the opposite.

Thankfully, the complex maze of factors that comprise the sort of impression a book makes on a reader is well beyond my understanding. I don't want an answer; I just want the joy of that experience of a book "touching my heart" or of its really "getting into my head."

You never know when the lightning will strike. That's cool.

At any rate, having liked the book, I will certainly watch the BBC series of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell when it starts up.

Complaints of a Nobody

I am currently reading a masterpiece: Wallace Stegner's Angle of Repose. The other night, while reading, I was compelled to post this to Facebook:

"From her temperate veranda she now saw only void where the valley used to be--a gray, smoky void into which she peered, hunting distance and relief from the mirage of mountains that quivered around her with visible heat. The wind that breathed past her and moved the banal bright geraniums in their pots brought a phantasmal sound of bells, and expired again, tired as a sigh." -- Wallace Stegner, from Angle of Repose. (And people read Twilight.)

So, okay. Maybe it is a little stuffy of me to say that. But it is frustrating to see people like, say, Dan Brown (and the Twilight writer, whose name I can't think of and refuse to look up) making a fortune with the writing skills of a sixth grader. 

I know that, in the end, it is not the prose that your average reader is interested in, but, are they even aware of prose like Stegner's? If they were, would they still be able to tolerate Dan Brown, or Twilight?

Atticus

I'm teaching my creative writing class to write fiction, now. This quarter, they start writing a novel. I know it is a novel that most of them will never finish, but the least I can do is to give them a push in the right direction.

As part of my plan, I am showing them two movies. They have read novels, but, for my purposes, the movies I have picked (Dances With Wolves and To Kill A Mockingbird) are effective in having them explore novel-style story structure.

Scout and Atticus

Today, we started talking about To Kill A Mockingbird, which they have all read at some point or another (way too early, as per the ridiculous and ubiquitous assumption that it is a book that kids are intellectually ready for simply because kids are the main characters), and I had an epiphany.

I stopped the lesson. I paused the film after Atticus hugs Scout good night. I told the girls that I wasn't talking to them for the moment. They laughed. I addressed the guys.

Listening Hard for Walt Whitman's Footfalls

We all, as we get older, tend to ask that cliched "where-does-the-time-go" question. I'll tell you where it goes; it goes past us while we toil over necessities and then try to fill our free time with "meaningful" activities. As I once said, paraphrasing Whitman: we fail to loaf and invite our souls.

Walt Whitman

A testament to this -- and one of whoppingly ironic proportions -- is the fact that I have lived within walking distance of Walt Whitman's summer home (the place where he reputedly wrote a good deal of Leaves of Grass) for more than a decade and have never, once, visited it. Granted, it is open by appointment, only, but -- you'd think a guy like me, who spent quite a few hours studying the man's work and who went to school in the city of Camden, New Jersey, where the poet spent a large portion of his life, would have made the effort.

Alas.

Well, today, I'm going -- not into the house, because it is Sunday, but, I will visit the outside of it and I will also venture into the nearby environs of Crystal Spring, where the poet once loafed, invited his soul and penned many of the pieces of his seminal collection of poems.

I'm off to loaf, and to invite Whitman's soul to pay me a visit. I'll be right back...with pictures.

One Ring, One of a Kind

I started reading The Lord of the Rings to my eight-year-old son last night. We finished the Narnia books a few weeks ago, so, I figured it was time to introduce my boy to the book that changed me forever -- the book that made me want to live among words for the rest of my life.

I've said this before, I think: at some point as a scholar of English literature, I figured out what makes a great novelist great; I figured out why Tolkien is no Steinbeck and why C. S. Lewis is no Thomas Pynchon. But, fortunately, I have never completely snobbed over.


"The Horn of Boromir," Matt Stewart

I still love Tolkien, for all his "weaknesses" as a novelist. In my opinion, he can string together as many adjectives as he wants; he can use "perilous" a dozen times per page. There is something in his work that is just right, as far as I'm concerned. His imagination is the unashamed creative abandon of a child who is living the fantasy every step of the way. His world existed, as he wrote, every bit as much as the pile of papers waiting to be graded at his elbow.

Reaching for the Skyrim

When the novel first began to gain popularity, especially in England, there were countless articles written by people of an artistic, philosophical and literary bent. The major complaint? That the young women of England were wasting their time reading novels -- hours on end -- when they could have been doing more productive things. In short, novels were, to the lovers of poetry and philosophy and theology, the soap operas of the age -- a mindless submersion in pure entertainment. They were so full of (here every literary fiction snob across the globe retches) . . .  plot. ("'Plot" even sounds like 'clot,'" once said a black-clad grad student holding a giant wine glass.)

By the way, many novels of that time, as in today's era, stank on ice. But that is neither here nor there. The point is, today, we wish our kids would while away summer afternoons reading, instead of doing other things, like watching TV or (curse it all) playing (holds the words out at arm's-length, like a dead mouse) video games.

Captain Grammar's Folly

Bradbury: Forever one of my heroes.

Fortunately, it is not possible to reach through the computer and slap people. I'd be in trouble if this were an option. See, this blog/comment stuff can be really cool. Or not.

Don't misunderstand me. People should be allowed to be as stupid as they want. And smart people sometimes say stupid things. Conversely, stupid people can wind up going all Forrest Gump and shining a light into the dark places for those of us who doubted them. So everyone should be allowed to speak.

But there is nothing worse than people of average intelligence with a little education who are convinced that they are insightful and that being insightful means exposing the stupidity of everyone but them. They wind up writing things that are equivalent to someone saying, to a batter who has just struck out:

"The White Curve of Her Neck"

One passage from James Joyce's story "Araby" has always moved me; it reminds me so much of my perspective on girls when I was a boy and it makes me think how wrong we have gone in terms of the way women can be perceived in our society. Here is the main character's view of his friend Mangan's older sister (with whom he is desperately in love) in "Araby":

While she spoke she turned a silver bracelet round and round her wrist. She could not go [to Araby], she said, because there would be a retreat that week in her convent [school]. Her brother and two other boys were fighting for their caps, and I was alone at the railings. She held one of the spikes, bowing her head towards me. The light from the lamp opposite our door caught the white curve of her neck, lit up her hair that rested there and, falling, lit up the hand upon the railing. It fell over one side of her dress and caught the white border of a petticoat, just visible as she stood at ease.

Maybe I'm getting sentimental, but this nearly brings a tear to my eye every time I read it. It is as if Joyce reached into my brain and pulled out the innocent, aesthetic aching for female beauty that I felt as a boy; the attraction that had nothing to do with ulterior motives -- nothing to do with lust, yet. It was more like a tree's need for light than anything else. Does every boy go through this for a time? Or was it born out of the concept that had I somehow gathered -- that girls were something special, even magical?