just to say i love

an iliad (and stories of war)

i went to see an iliad last night: stephen spinella as the poet, retelling homer’s iliad, with an alternate-universe modern-day perspective. he is mesmerizing. there was a scene where he took an imaginary picture out of a suitcase, a photograph of a world war i battlefield, of trenches and bloodied bodies on a battlefield, and talked about how when you look at it, you think, well those are just bodies. but then he gave them names and stories and — well, of course they were never just bodies anyway.

i have been thinking a lot about war lately.

—that isn’t quite accurate. i think about war — about things about war — often. i have inked remembrance into my arm, and i think it is always just sort of there — a passive kind of attempt at reconciliation and untangling of what these kinds of things mean, or do to us maybe. it’s been more active lately. i go to three classes a week where we talk about war and the legal aspects of waging it and what happens during and afterward, and about what justice is. i have always felt my way to things rather than analyzed or even just plain thought, but i am starting to make connections amongst things that i perhaps should have seen earlier:

when i was 19, in krakow, i took a course about memory and the holocaust, and i remember discussing complicity one day, about who should have been held accountable. where i thought that line should be drawn was much further down than where my fellow students — all of them european — thought it should be. i remember discussing the conductors of the trains that took people to the camps, and several of the other students saying that you couldn’t hold such a person accountable, they were just trying to survive, they were just trying to keep their families alive. that wouldn’t we all do the same in that situation? and how could we hold them complicit when we would have done the same. i was so horrified. there are pragmatic reasons not to hold an entire nation guilty, but — i remember thinking, at the time, then what’s the fucking point of us being here, in this room, discussing this? why are we studying these things if we don’t believe we can be better? maybe we’re lying to ourselves — but if we just assume we won’t be better, then how could we ever hope to be?

in warsaw, when i was 20, the day i met rajmund and jerzy, when i asked rajmund whether his parents were soldiers, he told me that back then, everyone was a soldier. and later, my grandfather asked why, during the war, during the ‘44 uprising, why they kept fighting when they knew there was no hope. when they knew they would lose. and i remember being surprised when jerzy talked about how after the war, as an adult, he went big game hunting in africa, and how when an animal was cornered or surrounded, there was nothing calculated or logical about what it did. you could see the panic in its eyes, in its movements. he talked about how that’s what it was like, during the war, during the uprising. ‘you knew you were going to die’, he said. ‘and you wanted to take as many of them with you as you possibly could.’

last week, in my nuremberg seminar, we watched part of a documentary, and there was an interview with an american world war ii veteran. he talked about eisenhower telling them they were on a crusade, and how strange it seemed to him, because they played cards, and drank, and danced with girls, and there was nothing religious about what they were doing; they were simply in a war. he said that as they advanced, as they discovered and freed the camps, dachau and mauthausen, he understood what eisenhower had meant. he began to feel, to realize that they were there for a purpose, for something noble and good.

i think perhaps this is a privilege of growing up american. or — growing up in a country where everyone wasn’t a soldier then, where the war and the holocaust were something most of its soldiers and its citizens travelled to and came back. i don’t mean to say that there wasn’t something good in the defeat of the nazis, in the freeing of the camps — that there wasn’t evil inherent in the very existence of the camps — but i remember a german friend of mine saying once that the german people spend so much of their lives and their education learning and remembering and trying to figure out how the holocaust happened and how to ensure nothing like that ever happens there again. and in america we spend effectively zero time doing that, at least not as an actual society. we downplay the horrible things we inflicted upon native americans and the lasting effects of that persecution, if the subject comes up at all. we pretend like our treatment of african americans as less than human ended with slavery, like racism ended in the 1960s. in law school, in a class of 80, i was one of three people who had ever heard of or learned about the japanese internment camps, and i certainly didn’t learn about them from a textbook. and yet — i remember expecting jerzy to say they were fighting for justice and freedom, for something noble and good. for something better. i expected there to be truth to the things we tell ourselves to make war less horrific, less senseless.

in the same class with the video, we talked about rudolf höss, the commandant of auschwitz-birkenau, who testified as a defense witness at the first nuremberg trial. my professor told us that when höss — who without qualm claimed to be responsible for the deaths of three million people — was asked whether he had ever taken items from his victims in order to personally profit, he said something to the effect of, ‘what kind of man do you think i am?’ my professor asked us how we thought a man like höss comes to be, whether the ability to make that kind of distinction is an aberration or something that comes of societal conditioning, whether höss was just inherently evil in a way that most people aren’t. and i thought of myself at 19 and 20, of those students in my holocaust class, of jerzy, and i realized that — i don’t think that i could be a höss. i honestly don’t. but i am not so naive as i was at 19, and i can see how — we are conditioned not to question, to go along with things for the ‘collective good’. and for the majority of society, there will always be that question of where to draw the line. when does an injustice become so unjust that you actually do something? and when does that injustice become so deeply embedded into the everyday that you must, or you feel you must, fall in line to survive? how do you say, ‘i will not drive that train’ when it’s a choice between living and feeding your family or dying and possibly relegating your family to that train’s destination?

i’m not sure i believe these questions are unanswerable, but for a long time i would never have thought to ask them. i still believe we have to at least imagine that we can be better if we are ever going to be, but i wonder more and more about the ways in which we, as humans, are reducible. the ways in which we reduce others and allow ourselves to be reduced. the ideas that may or may not be worth that reduction. and bodies are never just bodies, but —

toward the beginning of an iliad, the poet, somehow fated and compelled to wander the world and time and spin his tale, told us, ‘every time i tell this story i hope it’s the last time.’ toward the very end of an iliad, the poet cuts off the tale, refuses to go on. there are too many stories, he says. it’s too much. in a lot of ways, that’s the central tension for me: the stories must be told. but there are so many. and what do we do once we’ve heard them?

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5. ecology-of-delusions said: This is beautiful.
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