Meditations from A Bridge Across the Pacific

Chengdu by Air

Shuangliu International Airport was founded as a military airport for the Republic of China’s defense against the Japanese assault on China, and especially the deliberate aerial bombing of civilian targets. Chinese pilots paid with their lives in the battles against the superior Japanese planes, but the US Army Air Force joined them in 1942, bringing their famed P-38 Lightnings and P-47 fighter-bombers to drive the Japanese from the air. I pondered the fact that I would be flying into an airport that had been a major base for the liberation of China during that war, immediately thinking back to vivid and uncomfortable childhood memories.

Friends whose fathers had fought in that war often mused over the war stories their fathers had shared, but I was the kid whose dad did not see combat, and thus was left with a sense of some-thing missing. My dad had graduated from Michigan as a metallurgical engineer, and eventually found work helping with the design of weapons and vehicles. At the time, he was deemed more suited to producing the materials that would make victory possible against a ferocious enemy. I would understand his feelings much later, but at the time, I found myself as an awed listener, fascinated and horrified by the books of war photos that one friend brought to school with him. I particularly recall the photos of the Japanese dead, bloated almost beyond recognition, with ripped flesh and gaping bullet holes in their bloody clothing.

Later, I joined the boy scouts, and was quite proud of the fact that I had earned merit badges in Nature and Indian Lore; eventually I would spend a year memorizing passages from the Bible, visiting many different kinds of churches, synagogues, etc., and doing long work in a church garden, raising tomatoes, corn and other vegetables to sell to neighbors—raising money for those in need. Yet in our meetings, my fellow scouts discovered that our scout leader had been a fighter pilot in World War II, and they made themselves nuisances, pestering him for his war stories.

He was a good man, had taught us a remarkable amount about leadership, discipline, respect for the natural world and for other humans, and was plainly uncomfortable with their requests. Finally, after weeks of their badgering, he turned to us all, exasperated, and said, “OK, I will tell you this once, and after that, I never wanted to hear about this again.” He paused a moment, and then in a plaintive voice said, “it is horrifying to drive your plane through the debris and body parts of a man whom you have just killed, to see the blood and flesh streaking your wind screen.” My friends were stunned, and after a brief pause, he continued: “now do you get it?”

That thought has been with me all these years, and I brought up my scout leader’s tale with my community college students when introducing them to Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms and his World War I Nick Adams stories, famed for close observation of what then was known as “shell shock,” and now is understood as post-traumatic stress disorder. Ernest followed the effects of these wounds so closely, detailing the mental and spiritual damage, and I knew that my Vietnam, Gulf War, Afghan War, and the victims of war in Bosnia and Africa would all be moved by this. My thought has always been to give students a space to explore experiences that keep them from reaching fulfillment in their lives, to “clear the decks” as it were, to find their way to intellectual and spiritual lives that can be productive, sane, and thoughtful enough to want to help others. Some needed to write about their experiences; I gave them instant permission to do so, and these students invariably produced work of enormous depth and awareness of what violence can do to each of us. Others came to me sheepishly after class, needing to talk privately, and one came, asking to drop the class. I asked him if I was out of line teaching these stories, and he quickly responded, “no! No, I came back from the war and thought I had put it behind me, but then the stories here made me aware that I was still trapped in what I saw. I need to get counseling, and you’ve made me see what I need to do to get right.” One Bosnian student even went so far as wanting to publish her story in the college’s literary magazine; I asked if she would be troubled to know that thousands of others would be reading her story, and she looked up fiercely and said, “Americans need to know stories like this!”

All this went through my mind as I mused on the history of Chengdu’s airport, and when I researched the city itself, I discovered that it is now a burgeoning center for travel to the west for research facilities as well as to the south, that it is a major business center with nine ring roads outside the main city center—a huge city plainly on the move. It occurred to me that, without the efforts of Chinese and American warriors in the second world war, much of this might look very different now, and many now alive would never have been conceived. I thought, too, of Chen Zi’ang’s horror over the price of war as seen in poems viewing the shattered bones of war-riors and the intense grief of widows and children. I thought too of Du Fu’s retreat to Chengdu in the hope of finding respite from the murderous struggles of his time, and of being driven from his home by violent hordes after only a few years in his thatched cottage.

Silence and Ten Thousand People’s Poem Party at Shehong

The gigantic statue of Chen Zi’ang promised sensitive, clear-eyed poetry that would not flinch from a quiet demand for harmony, and the grief felt by the poet when witnessing the thousands of shattered skeletons on a battlefield, his sense of pain in the hearts of widows and orphans. The gathering crowds were promising, too, and we poets wondered what this event would involve, who would perform their poems, and if those gifted with words could honor the spirit of the poet whose iconic presence stood before us. As it turned out, this event involved fourteen carefully choreographed narrative dance sequences performed expertly by elementary and middle school students, with music so loud and chants shouted in an ear-splitting monotone—and, to top it off, drones flying roughly ten feet over our heads, their engines loud enough to be distracting while simultaneously blowing cold air down directly upon us. The entire event was organized by municipal and county officials, and while Poetry Periodical and the Sichuan Writers Association were listed as sponsors, I had a feeling that they didn’t have much input on the selection of works to be presented. There was certainly a fine set of school presentations for the benefit of friends, family, and the city of Shehong, but there was no poetry at this event. My ears were in pain at the end of this set of performances, but it also had me reflecting on the nature of poetry, especially the art’s insistence on absolute rhythm underlining the emotional tenor of each line, and on subtlety in execution, with an awareness of the power of silence. I reflected long and hard on this, and having had time to think further about it, I turn to the approaches taken by poets whose work fills me with utmost respect.

Barry Miles’ recent essay, “The Beat Goes On: A Century of Lawrence Ferlinghetti,” notes the poet’s insistence on the importance of silence in the making of the poem: his style has been based on “open form,” a term derived from nonobjective painting and by poets Robert Duncan and Charles Olson. “The basis of my typography, the Open Form typography, was if there’s a word isolated by itself on a page, white space is silence.” In poems such as “For Eleanor and Bill Monahan,” William Carlos Williams described his sense of counting a beat for each line, long or short, in terms of the time involved—thus presuming a space of silence with the short line (See his letter to Richard Eberhart on May 13, 1954, in The Selected Letters of William Carlos Williams, pages 326-327).

In those poems of mine that depart from “standard” typography, I have followed their approach to musa meditative space or a moment of emphasis within the poem—important, I think, in that poetry should be an art that not only sings the quiet music of the syllables within lines, but also finds their moments of emotional punctuation, as in Pound’s notion of “absolute rhythm.” One thinks of the two heavy spondees that open each of the first three lines of Inferno III, hammers that could echo the heavy beating of the fearful heart. Such skillful artistry is the grist of great poems, which are carefully constructed to present a piece that opens spaces and selects the variations in spoken rhythms befitting the emotional tenor of the line. The emphasis is often, too, in the subtlety of the variations.

Afterword:

Warfare and Violence, Poetry and Unacknowledged Legislators

The discovery of Chen Zi’ang’s compassionate political activism, his honesty and clear vision re the brutality of war and empathy for its living victims has been an inspiring experience for me. Here was a poet who fearlessly spoke truth to power while reshaping the values of poetry in the T’ang. His work also led to meditations on my own life and that of my American contemporaries.

Perhaps it was the memories of the sufferers and mangled dead among my parents’ generation, already noted here, or possibly those who died horribly in Vietnam or came home to a torturous life-in-death punishment played out in their minds or in obsessive PTSD behaviors. It may be in the continuous litany of violent mass murders in American schools, pubs, churches, public squares, movie houses—or in the police violence against black men, road rage shootings or drug-deals-gone-wrong wrong, but in any case my work in poetry and in political advocacy involves a major thread of empathy for those who suffer and of this massive problem that lives like a cancerous sickness in the very heart of what we fondly call “civilization.” One is tempted to a cynical response to the fool who designated our species as being homo sapiens.

Thus, at the Chen Zi’ang awards ceremony, when one of the children’s dance sequences lit up in fire with a militaristic paean to armed conflict, I was to say the least troubled as I made my way back to my hotel room later. In the Shehong ceremonies, I was again troubled by the enactment of the Long March with its prominent display of automatic weapon props, as I am every year by my own nation’s Fourth of July ceremonies. On reflecting further, I thought of how most nations drag out their veterans on important days of celebration, most memorably noted by Shakespeare’s Henry V in in his pre-battle exhortations on the field of Agincourt:

He that shall see this day and live to old age,

Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbors,

And say, “Tomorrow is Saint Crispian.”

Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars,

And say, “These wounds I had on Crispin’s day.”

. . .

This story shall the good man teach his son,

And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by

From this day to the ending of the world,

But we in it shall be remembered;

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.

(H5 4.3.46-50, 58-62)

I recalled my distaste for the U. S. national holiday, in which every city and country town drags out its veterans and displays them, fires off simulated bombs and fireworks into the night in imitation of the “rockets red glare, the bombs bursting in air” from the drinking song that became our national anthem. Thomas Jefferson, our third president, came to mind: “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants” (Jefferson 166). I’ve thought long and hard about how my nation is immersed in a culture of violence, not only in the already-noted gun violence and nearly continuous warfare that we engage in, but in the violent television shows, games, films that reinforce it, and in the NRA’s grasping influence on legislators. My own work focuses on victims, those forgotten in the public need to celebrate heroes and damn villains.

Still, poetry and literature have played their part in valorizing the horrors of war as normative behaviors, beginning with the Iliad and in Old Testament justifications for the slaughter of enemies, as with the women singing that “Saul has killed thousands, and David tens of thousands,” or in the destruction of cities from Jericho to Sodom, and in the frenzied fantasy of the predicted apocalypse of Revelation. Simone Weil has explored the theme eloquently in her famed essay, “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force”:

The true hero, the true subject matter, the center of the Iliad is force.

The force that men wield, the force that subdues men, in the face of

which human flesh shrinks back. The human soul seems ever condi-

tioned by its ties with force, swept away, blinded by the force it believes

it can control, bowed under the constraint of the force it submits to. . . .

Force is that which makes a thing of whoever submits to it. Exercised

to the extreme, it makes the human being a thing quite literally, that is,

a dead body. . . . As pitilessly as force annihilates, equally without pity

it intoxicates those or possess, or believe they possess it. (Weil 45, 51)

Those involved with a national or tribal agenda may easily ascribe a claim like this to those whom they identify as enemies, yet find it extremely difficult to confront the darkness at the center of our nature as humans: “turn the searchlight inward,” as Gandhi once said. It is also a “memorable fancy” to believe with Shelley that poets are the “unacknowledged legislators of the world,” yet such a claim partakes of hopeful illusion. Most nations also have a long history of literature that exposes, denounces, attempts to transcend the horrors of war as in the case of the Old Testament Lamentations, the famed plays of Aristophanes, Aeschylus and Euripides.

Closer to our time, poems such as Emerson’s “Ode Inscribed to William H. Channing,” Whitman’s compassionate Civil War nursing of maimed and dying soldiers (and eventual withdrawal due to likely PTSD) in Drum Taps, the work of Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen and the already lauded novel and short stories of Ernest Hemingway show war for what it is. One sees it as well in Yevtushenko’s “Babii Yar,” the powerful work of Anna Akhmatova, Andrey Voznesensky, and in the great Polish master, Czeslaw Milosz, as well as in dissident writers such as Vasyl Stus and, recently, Carmen Bugan.

In the U. S., the catalogue is extensive and eloquent, from the poems and activist work of Denise Levertov and Allen Ginsberg (among others) to the testimonies of warriors who do not flinch: Bruce Weigl’s Song of Napalm, Bill Shields’ Post-Vietnam Stress Syndrome, Andrew Gettler’s Footsteps of a Ghost: Poems from Vietnam, Robert Borden’s 32-part fugue, “Meat Dreams,” the Vietnam War poems of Yusef Komunyakaa. The current pattern of middle-eastern war has produced at least one master poet, Brian Turner, whose Here, Bullet and Phantom Noise are historically grounded testimonies of these wars and their effects on all those closely caught up in them.

Poets and writers have been covering what war does to our humanity as long as there have been written words, though there have also been major poems of force, to use Weil’s term, which make a virtue of this form of mass murder. Efforts to spur compassion or awareness and to change national priorities and behaviors have alerted many to the need for a different kind of vision, but acknowledged or not, our eloquence has not given legislators the wisdom or tools to effect the desired change. Marxists would of course say this is because such work is part of the superstructure—the articulated ideology—of human life, that the desired effect must be developed in the economic and material bases of human societies, yet even here the “anarchy of production” and the uncertainties of harvests, the current facts of climate change, the invidious scourge of racism, the deprivations of one class or nation of people and the interior greed or hunger of others make such end goals problematic. One can only strive to address the problem in whatever ways are available, though at this point in history, I believe hope cannot be a factor in the performance of good works. One must stand fast for what is good in our nature without expecting real results, and that is the difficulty in choosing an individual’s path. Yet it is the only way.

Works Cited

Borden, Robert. “Meat Dreams.” Nada Poems. David Cope, ed. Grandville, Mi.: Nada, 1988.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “Ode Inscribed to William H. Channing.” Poetry Foundation. [Source: The Oxford Book of American Poetry. Oxford University Press, 2006.] Online: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45874/ode-inscribed-to-william-h-channing

Ginsberg, Allen. Collected Poems 1947-1980. New York, et al: Harper & Row, 1984.

Jefferson, Thomas. “Thomas Jefferson to W. S. Smith, November 13, 1787.” Jefferson and The Rights of Man. By Dumas Malone. Boston: Little, Brown, 1951. 166.

Komunyakaa, Yusef. Pleasure Dome: New and Collected Poems. Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan U P, 2001.

Levertov, Denise. The Collected Poems of Denise Levertov. New York: New Directions, 2013.

Shakespeare, William. “The Life of Henry the Fifth.” Complete Works. Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen, eds. New York: Modern Library, 2007.

Shields, Bill. Post-Vietnam Stress Syndrome. Brigham, Quebec: Samisdat, 1988.

Stus, Vasyl. Poems. Big Scream 55. Trans. Svitlana Iukhymovych. Ed. David Cope. Grandville, Mi.: Nada, 2017. 8-21.

Turner, Brian. Here, Bullet. Farmington, Maine: Alice James, 2010.

- - - - . Phantom Noise. Farmington, Maine: Alice James, 2005.

Weigl, Bruce. Song of Napalm. New York: Atlantic Monthly, 1988.

Weil, Simone. The Iliad or The Poem of Force. James P. Holoka, ed. and trans. Critical ed. with essay in both French and English. New York: Peter Lang, 2008.

Whitman, Walt. “Drum Taps.” Leaves of Grass and Other Writings. Michael Moon, ed. New York and London: Norton, 2002. 234-285.