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Dearest f_minorites
everywhere,
One feature of my cable
TV system is about fifty genre channels of FM-quality continuous music. The
other day I looked up at the screen and noticed that one of its classical
channels was playing a piano piece for orchestra and right hand (sorry I didn't
copy down the title).
From the style and era, I
suspect I knew the naughty little secret about the composition, which wasn't
mentioned in the screen's "fun facts."
In the decade following
World War I, a large body of piano music was composed for one-hand piano,
because a large number of Europe's most promising and gifted young pianists
returned from the war missing a hand or an arm. I've heard quite a few of these
pieces, and surprisingly very few of them are maudlin or somber or funereal or
grim, they're usually quite upbeat and major key, yet none could be described as
Pollyannaesque. Just because you play the piano and have had one of your hands
blown off or amputated is no reason to want to live out the rest of your musical
life playing the blues, and most of the composers were pretty hip to
this.
As much of the Internet has heated up
and boiled over because of this ghastly and (to me) inexplicable war, f_minor
seems to have fallen largely silent. There is a protocol, usually unspoken,
about lists like this, and I suspect most of us with deep feelings about this
grotesque war feel a bit embarrassed about groping around to link it to Glenn
Gould.
And then another difficulty, or oddity,
or embarrassment: this List originates in the USA, and conducts nearly all its
business in the English language. It is just possible that the more polite among
us don't want to hurt anyone's feelings -- Continental Europe has expressed very
different and very heated feelings about this war from the official positions of
the governments of the UK and the USA.
And that's to the wonderful credit of
the highest values of this civilized, educated and cultured bunch. War makes it
seem quirky and odd -- people getting their piano hands shot off in large
numbers, and other people not wanting to hurt anyone's feelings.
Well, I will dutifully provide a link
to the List topic. GG provided the Bach score to the movie version of one of
world literature's most moving first-person testaments of the rain of war death
on civilians from the sky: "Slaughterhouse Five." (It only seems like
a goofy science fiction novel; Vonnegut was a young enlisted American soldier
when he was sent as a prisoner of war just in time to witness and barely survive
the firebombing of Dresden -- a city whose contribution to the war effort was
the manufacture of exquisite porcelain figurines.)
Link provided, I will now speak to this
remarkable crew -- the skimmed cream and the stewards and guardians of whatever
this world can honestly claim to have created of beauty, thought, culture --
about this dreadful war, and war in general.
Perhaps once in a long lifetime,
perhaps no more than once in a century, a war does indeed take place that must
be fought FOR good and decent and human and humane things. I am thinking of one
war in particular; its guns finally fell silent two years before I was born. A
century earlier, for Americans, the shame and scourge of slavery ended because
of a monstrous, ruinous, fratricidal war, although all my reading and all my
visits to its great battlefields cannot convince me that slavery could not have
somehow been ended, nearly as swiftly, through ideas, pursuasion, through the
peaceful arts of a democracy.
Since 1945, the world has been plagued
by a continuing string of wars that I cannot possibly classify as having had any
necessary or possible virtues, except the most primitive virtue of exhausting
and finally ending itself. In recent decades, younger historians have stopped
talking about World War I and World War II, and have just described the unhappy
20th century as the Century of War. To the dead, to the maimed, to the veteran,
to the refugee, the distinctions between wars do indeed seem small, or trivial,
or non-existent.
I myself am a veteran of one of these
meaningless, inexplicable and very long wars, and served two conscripted years
far, I am happy to report, from the sounds of guns, typing dutifully away (you
have probably noticed I am a very verbose typist with few errors), often in
air-conditioned offices; I could not have requested a safer and more inoccuous
soldier experience, though I braved death daily and nightly aboard my beloved
Triumph motorcycle. Many of my friends were not nearly so fortunate, and if I
had the courage, I could find their names engraved on the Vietnam War Memorial
in my hometown of Washington DC; I visit Washington often and have scrupulously
never visited it.
If the wars since 1945 have drifted
into a pattern of meaninglessness and mindless slaughter and waste, this current
war threatens to establish and enshrine a new pattern for the future of America
and the world: America as The New Rome, the world's most powerful military and
economic machine demanding that its will be obeyed throughout the world, or
murderous consequences will be projected to whomever we perceive is defying us.
America in the past has indeed
experimented with "gunboat diplomacy" both actively and theatrically;
when President Theodore Roosevelt sent our new huge warfleet around the world,
not a shot was fired in anger, but a very clear message was delivered in every
port where our cannons boomed a "diplomatic" salute. (One of the
hydrogen bombs dropped on the Soviets in "Dr. Strangelove" is
graffitied "HI THERE.") But I do not think that this was really ever
what most Americans wanted America to do or to represent to our neighbors
throughout the world.
The phrase "Pax Americana" is
being bandied about in the world's newspapers -- a peace designed and maintained
by the threat of the quick projection of overwhelming military force, like the
Pax Romana and Pax Brittanica of old.
If anyone is curious, I do not want to
be a citizen of The New Rome; I do not want a Pax Americana -- except a Jimmy
Carter style of diplomatic American leadership. If we are big, rich and
powerful, let us content ourselves to express it in treaties and peaceful
pursuasion, a vision which just earned Mr. Carter the Nobel Peace Prize. The
"impossible" peace treaty he brokered between Egypt and Israel lasts
to this moment, though no one can promise it will survive President Bush's
actions in the Middle East.
Diplomacy, and the peaceful and verbal
sorting out of sovereign disputes, is so very frustrating and tedious and
time-consuming.
War, on the other hand, is so simple
and emotionally satisfying, and boils away all controversy.
We here should not, I think, feel
embarrassed or fall silent at such moments because our thoughts and loves are of
beauty and the highest achievements of culture. We are the stewards of the only
human-made things which make Earth an interesting and unique place to visit or
eavesdrop on. No matter how many intelligent and advanced civilizations there
exist in our Milky Way galaxy -- tens of thousands is the guess of Sagan and his
expert colleagues -- there is only one Mozart in the whole Universe, and only,
for that matter, one Glenn Gould to interpret him sublimely or
wrong-headedly.
One of my soft spots for World War II
is because, in the 1930s, as he saw the handwriting on the wall, a German labor
union activist buried his beloved treasury of phonograph records of the live
performances of Kurt Weill's and Bertolt Brecht's cabaret and opera music in
oilcloth in his backyard, and then fled one step ahead of the Gestapo. When he
returned in '46, he dug it up again, and I've had the wonderful pleasure of
hearing CD transcriptions of these original squawky recordings from the '20s and
'30s, in German and French, with Lotte Lenya's tremulous and beautiful voice.
Wars are accompanied, far too rarely, by these desperate moments of the
preservation and salvation of beauty. I have been told that the Swedes
authentically revere the historical Baron von Munchausen -- a genuine lecher,
parasite and sociopathic liar -- because he likewise buried and saved some
gorgeous ancient tapestries one step ahead of an advancing army, and they can
still be viewed today in Upsula.
Iraq -- Mesopotamia, Babylonia, Uruk,
Ur -- is honeycombed with ancient treasures; it is one of the cradles of world
civilization. They invented, among other things, writing, the preservation of
records and literature and science, in wedge-shaped marks on soft clay, which
baked in the sun and then proved to be remarkably survivable over millennia.
They could predict solar and lunar eclipses -- an astonishing achievement not to
be matched by our science for 4000 years. And yet we moderns have only begun to get a glimpse of and to translate
these ancient treasures starting around 1880.
Each modern high-explosive war that
descends on this land destroys our own heritage and history unrecoverably and
forever.
George Orwell was only the first
visionary to suggest that a future world that designs itself around perpetual
(and meaningless) war would first strive to erase the history of the world;
knowing our own history intimately always boils up passions to preserve and save
and to know more of our ancient heritage. A world robbed of contact with its
past is a world that can be sold on any idea, however nonsensical or genocidal
or suicidal, however many past times it was tried with terrible results.
And yet I would argue that no one who
has read "Gilgamesh" (I strongly urge Herbert Warren Mason Jr.'s
beautiful translation) can wish MOAB -- America's recently unveiled "Mother
Of All Bombs" -- to fall on this land, to pulverize the treasures that
still remain of our nursery. You will find no apologies from me for Sadaam
Hussein, but at his worst he is a thing of the blink of an eye, but
"Gilgamesh" (there are still many missing sections, though they are
almost certainly waiting somewhere underground) and the rest of Mesopotamia's
yet undiscovered treasures are the fragile things of ages. A huge volume of
these treasures will be reduced to dust by this war.
If we are truly Not Like Him, then we
need to prove that by finding ways to do good and necessary things in the world
in peaceful, diplomatic, broadly supported ways which prove to the world that we
are Not Like Him.
Well, thank you all for suffering
through these words. Quite simply, I did not want this war. I spent a lovely
four hours in jail, with the loveliest and most thoughtful fellow
criminals, protesting the first Iraqi war and perhaps will book myself
into the same jail to protest this one. I am unabashedly a pacifist, stuck in a
very flawed world where perhaps one war per century must just play itself out
and then have some claim that good things were accomplished.
But not this one. A speedy end to it,
and no more of them. I wish us all the preservation of beauty, and of course the
safety of all our sisters and brothers, of every child of God, in any uniform,
in any style of civilian dress.
Bob Merkin
Northampton Massachusetts
USA
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