tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6811719312494990925.post-87131218296826063952006-11-10T16:11:00.000-08:002006-11-10T16:55:03.305-08:00<br><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger2/5709/831508705138548/1600/arlington_cemetery_unknown2.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger2/5709/831508705138548/400/arlington_cemetery_unknown2.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><blockquote style="font-style: italic;">I think the human race needs to think more about killing...</blockquote><div style="text-align: center;">-- Robert S. McNamara<br /></div><blockquote style="font-style: italic;">Man is matter.</blockquote><div style="text-align: center;">-- Joseph Heller, <span style="font-style: italic;">Catch-22</span><br /></div><br />I suppose McNamara, who by his own admission, along with his old friend General Curtis LeMay, perpetrated war crimes on the vastest of scales, ought to know about such things. Having been deeply involved in the firebombing of Japanese cities, the atomic bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the senseless eradication of both poor Americans and Vietnamese in that more recent conflict, McNamara's conscience bears a good deal of weight -- and it is surely due in some part to this heaviness that such a man can offer, toward the end of his life, such a concise and pointed assessment.<br /><br />But I don't want to talk about McNamara today. Instead, to recognize the holiday, to honor the veterans, especially the thirty thousand newly wounded in the ongoing atrocity that is the "Iraq War," I present you with this poem:<blockquote>From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,<br /> And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.<br /> Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,<br /> I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.<br /> When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose. </blockquote>The poem is Randall Jarrell's "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner." I'm no expert in the poetry of warfare, but this is one that has always stuck with me. The whole thing is spare and unnerving, but I have special feelings for the first and last lines. From his mother's sleep, he says, he "fell into the state." The physical act of falling is evocative enough, but this construction haunts through association. We're all perhaps well enough aware of our collectively "fallen" state, a notion that takes different guises but is not dissimilar in content across the fields of religion, ancient philosophy, the literature of Kafka, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and even basic, intuitive common sense. It is no innovation to suggest we might fall into an abstraction like a State; but there is something in the cold, calculated, political nature of the word itself -- <span style="font-style: italic;">the state</span> -- that sets this one apart. In the so-called Judeo-Christian tradition, we fall from grace, from Paradise through knowledge to death. Lacan has us falling, quite literally, into the symbolic. For Kafka we are always already fallen. These are all abstractions -- but the state, especially in the context of the visceral corporeality that follows, becomes an unsettlingly embodied machine, an abstraction backed up with the amoral violence from which it arose and on which it subsists. This is a state that indeed reduces its men to matter. The final line, in which the matter of the man is hosed away like so much excrement on a shoe, seems to me among the most compact iterations of the biophysical reality described in the epigraph from Heller. The epigraph itself is, I believe, the most compact iteration of all.<br /><br />Next year, hopefully we'll have a more celabratory poem to celebrate the occasion. If I didn't firmly believe that God was the most insidious invention of the Devil, I would pray to him to get our men and women the hell out of there, and leave us more veterans to honor, and less grisly matter to ignore, or wash away.JLBhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10987058554014193721noreply@blogger.com