Old Lies

2 Comments

WilfredOwenMuch of my exposure to literature has come through my daughter. I didn’t really grow up in a literary family. We had a prominent television and not much money for books, so I was headed for a typical American predilection for TV as some form of intelligence. When I began reading, it was what I could discover on my own and the required reading of English classes. Needless to say, I missed a lot. My daughter recently had to analyze a poem of Wilfred Owen. Although my wife had a book of Owen’s poetry, I never really had reason to read it. Like Joyce Kilmer, Wilfred Owen was a poet that was killed in World War One, only one in a long list of poets and dreamers that have been slaughtered in pointless conflicts. The poem that she studied was “Dulce et Decorum Est.” The poem describes a gas attack during which one soldier is unable to get his mask on in time and the gruesome death that follows.

The poem led to a family discussion about the cruelty of chemical weapons, and larger still, the pointlessness of war. Throughout history wars have been waged by the rich and powerful for reasons that may ultimately benefit some of their subjects but which, if not for the pride and prejudice of the powerful, would perhaps have been resolved without recourse to more efficient ways of killing. I always remember the Star Trek episode “A Taste of Armageddon,” where the Enterprise encounters a planet at war waged by computers and those who are calculated as victims report willingly to death chambers. This, they claim, is a more humane way to fight. In a Kirkesque maneuver, the man who gets me cut-rate flights and hotel rooms destroys the machine telling the people of Eminiar VII that if they have to face the grim cruelties of war they will find a way to stop fighting. Futuristic thinking indeed.

Today we have robots that can fly and attack, killing our enemies without putting us at risk. These are the grandchildren of mustard gas and a myriad of creative and horrid ways that people have devised for killing others. Wilfred Owen was killed just days before the war ended. His poem exposes the lie of Horace’s line, “dulce et decorum est pro patria mori”—sweet and decorous it is to die for one’s country. If I hear Owen clearly, it is the “dulce et decorum” to which he objects. Until we find humane ways to solve our differences, even in the Kirk Model, there will be wars. Death fought over effortless solutions of those in power will never be sweet or decorous. Although poets often die young, their lives remain as symbols pointing the direction ahead for the rest of us mortals left to reflect on their words.

Tree Goddess

Leave a comment

If you’re missing a virgin, I suggest you might try West New York. According to the local section of Friday’s New Jersey Star-Ledger an alleged image of the Blessed Virgin Mary has appeared in “an unusual tree” in West New York. The local diocese, no doubt correctly, suggests that the “image” is probably “just some discoloration that resembles Our Lady of Guadalupe.” Those inclined to accept pareidolia as fact, however, have already made up their minds. The tree has been barricaded off and flowers have been laid at its base and cell phone shutters are making their electronically fabricated snapping noises. A Google image search of “Virgin Mary West New York” brought up more than a million hits. People are desperate for a miracle.

Back when I was working on my dissertation, the tree goddess was inevitably Asherah. One of my unspoken speculations from those days was that trees are evocative plants, easily playing to the human imagination. In the right conditions a young tree can be mistaken for a person at a distance. The branches, particularly in late autumn and winter, resemble gnarled fingers reaching for the sky or any unwary passer by. And the natural knots and scars on tree trunks (such as in the current example) readily fire unlikely associations. They can be eyes, mouths, faces, or other anatomical bits—as people we project ourselves onto any likely (sometimes unlikely) avatars in the natural world. If images are to be believed, hundreds of people are devoutly weeping and praying at an entirely natural formation in the wood less than two miles from the most sophisticated city in the country.

Even with the Roman Catholic Church urging caution, blind belief is not dissuaded. What does it say about us that we so deeply desire a sign from above? This is the kind of question those who claim that a reasoned materialism will inevitably trump superstition must ask themselves in profound reflection. The fact is that people always have (and always will) assigned meaning to what they see. It is the gift and curse of evolution. “I think I shall never see / A poem as lovely as a tree,” Joyce Kilmer famously wrote before being killed in World War One. This New Brunswick, New Jersey native, who died at 31 in the killing fields of France, might wonder that so many stop at that first famous stanza. To those thronging in West New York, I would recommend a little Kilmer with their miracle. Let’s leave the last word to the poet: “A tree that looks at God all day, And lifts her leafy arms to pray…”