PAGE 13
NORTH COAST TIMES E A G L E , JULY 2003
EUGENE MIHAESCO, ‘‘THE LONG ROAD TO PEACE" (1973)
WAR & PEACE
A BIBLIOGRAPHIC ESSAY
BY CAROLYN DUNN
INTRODUCTION
What you want, above all things, on a raft, is for
everybody to be satisfied, and feel right and kind toward
the others.”
-MARK TWAIN (from ‘HUCKLEBERRY FINN')
At one time or another we all want to run away. One of
those times is when our country does shameful things. The mind
casts about for a better, more praiseworthy place to be. Such
was my own condition when we invaded Iraq.
When Huck Finn couldn’t stand things anymore, he built
a raft, and with the runaway slave, Jim, he followed the river he
knew well to the source of an understanding about himself in the
world. He came to understand the importance of getting along
with whoever is on the raft with you, of feeling “right and kind"
toward your neighbor. Huck was far from antisocial — he was
fascinated by people both praiseworthy and despicable. He ran
from “sivilization" and its dehumanizing ways, but he learned
about people, one encounter at a time. He found they had to get
along on their rafts and islands, and I suppose it could be argued
that was simply a pragmatic realization. But Twain was careful
to portray Huck as an intelligent and ethical person, one who
relentlessly questioned human institutions and behavior. His
insight — the advantages in “getting along" — is a very old one,
which in ancient Greece might have been called "reverence,"
and which every major world religion, and a good many minor
ones, embrace.
There are antisocial ways to escape, too, and many
attempt them. We read accounts of monks, hermits, or contem-
platives who have taken themselves out of their communities
and away from the heart-wrenching duality of the human world.
Human achievements and failures are both rejected, as is their
own participation in them. This was the case with the remarkable
12th century Japanese monk, Kamo-no-Chomei, who retreated
from the capital city Kyoto in weariness of the world’s violence
and injustice. He built a 10’x10’ hut in the mountains, and made
even that spare living space easily moveable with simple planks
joined with metal hasps so he could “quickly move if something
should displease me." But in the end, he had the honesty to
question his renunciation. His writing in Hojoki reminds us that
the state of the world is chaotic at many points in time— always,
perhaps. Just as we might wish to do now, he retreated, but after
many years of isolation he had thoughts that fleeing the world
constituted a perplexing defeat, and loss of an important part
of his humanity. Our contradictory human condition demands to
be accepted as we live our lives, and a full life means full partic
ipation. We all share in both victimization from violence and the
perpetration of it, in varying degrees. There is no escape from
this, only the task of trying to make that part of us which causes
suffering as small and ineffective as possible. Kamo-no-Chomei
realized that involvement in the material world has positive
meaning in terms of the wholeness of one’s being.
We are rightfully appalled that our country has seemed
to spring the bounds of all humility. Our country’s leaders,
Matthew Rothschild recently said in The Progressive, “ponder
which country to attack next with all the insouciance of a wealthy
couple deciding which fancy restaurant to go to on Saturday
night." Yet here we are. We see that escape is not really possi
ble because we carry our human nature with us wherever we go,
and find it waiting for us wherever we go. There is something
else going on inside of us as we contemplate flight, expressed
clearly by a Mozambican woman as she helped tend victims of
yet another massacre in her town: “I want to get away from all
this, to run from it...But the even stronger feeling is that I can’t
stand to leave my country...(I want) to be a part of my country
and help even in its worst moments." (A Different Kind of War
Story by Carolyn Nordstrom, which chronicles Mozambique’s
15-year war).
Facing the reality of our time with its escalated living out
of the violent side of our nature is a discouraging task. Never (in
my own life anyway) have we had such an unremitting onslaught
of violence worldwide both as victim and perpetrator.The picture
of it has become so screen-filling and the sound of it so deafen
ing, that our senses are almost immune to it, our feelings have
dulled, and the menu of possibilities for dealing with conflict
seems to have dwindled to a pauper's fare: Things are bad?
Shoot somebody, plan a war, haul out the explosives. In The
THE HANDS OF WAR
New York Times Book Review (May 25, 1980), Diana Trilling
says, in discussing Hemingway’s writing, “No character in
Hemingway is inaccessible to strong feeling. None sleepwalks...
The unhappiness of the modern world is measured, in fact, by
its devastating assault upon powerful emotion." But several
decades later — and many wars later — that unending assault
upon powerful emotion has made us, indeed, a population of
sleepwalkers We cannot change our nature, which is divided,
mysterious, and hard to plumb. We sense that the side of us that
produces passion, adventurousness, daring and action, is also
the side that offers up untrammeled violence, which has come
to dominate the world and in its unbelievable weight has very
nearly crushed the spirit.
We must, though, keep looking at our propensity for war
as an answer to everything — and see if we can dredge up from
our anesthetized emotions some proper outrage. For war has
distorted who we are We must look for our “other half,” the
numbed, lost part of us that wants to get along, change brute
force into creativity, and live in peace. One of our tasks at this
point in history is to reclaim our wholeness.
I had to get past the desire to leave my country. Like the
Mozambican woman, I discovered that I wanted to stay, to face
what we as a nation have to endure, and have forced others to
endure. I needed to read what others have thought about war,
and especially about peace. What follows are comments on
three books which formed the basis of my reading — my raft
and my 10’x10' hut — so that hopefully I might return a more
complete person.
The three books are War is a Force That Gives Us
Meaning by Chris Hedges (Public Affairs, 2002, 211 pp., $23);
Reverence: Renewing a Forgotten Virtue by Paul Woodruff
(Oxford University Press, 2001, 248 pp, $11.95 paper); Down in
My Heart: Peace Witness in War Time by William Stafford who
was Oregon’s poet laureate until his death in 1994 (The Bench
Press, 1985, 94 pp, paper).
CONTINUED ON PAGE 14
The hands of war
Hands dripping with blood
Weapons of mass destruction
Still missing
Hands of war
How many people die for power
For nations of the world
How many people die when we
Fight for peace
Hands of war
Hands covered with blood
Whose hands are cleaner
Those that fought the war
Or those of their leaders
-Anna Myers
Anna Myers is a 2003 graduate of Astoria High School
VAN DUSEN BEVERAGES
ASTORIA, OREGON »■ 325-2362
TONY'S TAVERN
1313 MARINE DR., ASTORIA
(503) 325-5069