Expiation of Endless Guilt
An exchange of emails between three of us, friends, each with a different history and a different viewpoint. That is even more complicated than a simple face-value understanding of those words suggest. Are not friends of the same mind? They are not of the same mind, if they dare to speak truthfully with one another, finding words to imperfectly say what is most deeply apprehended.
What is life? Does not life elude us by it’s many layered complexity? Life outfoxes me, and I am unsure if I am the pursuer or if I am the one pursued by life. On some days I press for more of life’s meaning and on other days I am the hunted, pressed by something larger, something ancient.
When I stand before a memorial, a memorial to war dead, hearing taps played by a horn, and then the shattering echo of rifle fire in salute to the dead, I feel mystified, enveloped in something greater, older, more enduring than the episodic last war. The best day of any war is the last day, when by surrender of one side the guns are silent and the soldiers are ordered to stand down. Lately that day comes after protracted exhaustion, when one side recognizes that spending more blood and treasure is pointless. Armistice day, VJ day, the cessation of hostilities is cause for celebration and for the inception of mourning, endless grief by families suffering a lost member, or someone returning with a chronic wound.
In past years I stood with others on the morning of May 10 at the monument to Confederate war dead, on the former site of Camp Douglass on the south side of Chicago. Four thousand two hundred and seventy five Confederate dead are known to be interred beneath the tall monument at Oak Woods Cemetery. Their names and places of birth are inscribed in the bronze plaques fastened to the monuments base. I remember the feeling of having a handful of red dirt from North Carolina fall from my fingers onto the ground, earth from the same ground that sustained these yeoman farmers in their living time.
They died for a cause that deserved to end, one way or another. That does not diminish my duty to remember those that lived and died before me, whose words and deeds constitute the man that writes this.
It is possible to believe, even if one cannot know, that there is something that endures in the fulfillment, the atonement of all of our lost causes, mistaken judgments, and ill advised wars. This poem from Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse is about just such a possibility:
THE IMMORTALS
Ever reeking from the vales of earth
Ascends to us life’s fevered surge,
Wealth’s excess, the rage of dearth,
Smoke of death meals on the gallow’s verge;
Greed without end, imprisoned air;
Murderers’ hands, usurers’ hands, hands of prayer;
Exhales in fetid breath the human swarm
Whipped on by fear and lust, blood raw, blood warm,
Breathing blessedness and savage heats,
Eating itself and spewing what it eats,
Hatching war and lovely art,
Decking out with idiot craze
Bawdy houses while they blaze,
Through the childish fair-time mart
Weltering to its own decay
In the glare of pleasure’s way,
Rising for each newborn and then
Sinking for each to dust again.But we above you ever more residing
In the ether’s star translumined ice
Know not day nor night nor time’s dividing,
Wear nor age nor sex for our device.
All your sins and anguish self-affrighting,
Your murders and lascivious delighting
Are to us but as a show
Like the suns that circling go,
Changing not our day for night;
On your frenzied life we spy,
And refresh ourselves thereafter
With the stars in order fleeing;
Our breath is winter; in our sight
Fawns the dragon of the sky;
Cool and unchanging is our eternal being,
Cool and star bright is our eternal laughter.——–Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse p. 156
