Monthly Archives: December 2015

58. God, if he were God

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170px-1099jerusalemMankind has problems, vast, complex and intractable. We pray for help from a wide variety of Gods. But God, if he were God, might well find that all of our problems stem from one excess, which we could correct ourselves, if we only recognized it.

The imagery, of course, comes from  growing up with thrice weekly sermons of hellfire and Armageddon ringing in my ears.

God, if he were God

God, if he were God,
Would call up troops of angels,
Asbestos wings and swords of fire.

And setting out to cleanse the Earth, would stamp
His heavy booted foot upon Jerusalem.
Where men of every race and creed
Cry out his name, while each the other rends.

There God, if he were God,
Would pause and see.

This crowded planet,
Multiplying sorrows,
Where every baby born,
Every ailment cured,
Every life revived,
Compounds the horror
Of numbers grown
Beyond endurance.

One alone is empty.
Two may reside in love,
Three, a family make,
And a hundred make a town.

But the numbers that beset this earth,
Create a taste of Hell.

57. Going to War

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220px-The_USS_Arizona_(BB-39)_burning_after_the_Japanese_attack_on_Pearl_Harbor_-_NARA_195617_-_EditIn 1941, Americans were of two minds about the war in Europe, but after the December seventh attack on Pearl Harbor there were no more questions about whether to fight.

Forty years later, things were not so certain. In March 2003, Bush Two was ready to take America to war and those of us who had seen this movie before were not convinced he was wise.

*****

That year, like every year, I had already taught the story of the space program in eighth grade science. Explaining its origin requires compressing fifty years of history into a forty minute presentation suitable for eighth graders.

World War One left Germany crushed by post-war treaties, the Great Depression made a bad situation worse, Germany rebuilt and, following a madman, set out to take revenge. This drove Russian and America into temporary alliance. During the war, America developed the atomic bomb and Germany perfected the V2 rocket. Russia – and the Russian winter – destroyed German forces on the Eastern front. The rest of the allied forces entered France and fought their way into Germany. Germany was divided among the conquerors; the allies split into two camps, America, France and England on one hand and Russia on the other; and World War Two morphed into the Cold War.

What does that have to do with the space program? Everything; it was both the why and the how. Fear by Russians of American nuclear might, and fear by Americans of Russian nuclear might, led both sides to seek superiority in space. And the same gargantuan descendants of the V2 which brought about the fear, also carried astronauts and cosmonauts into space.

The space program was an offshoot of the Cold War, and the Cold War had shaped my 2003 students’ world before their birth. Now war in Iraq was going to shape their future, and I felt obligated to help them understand the situation. But how do you teach about a war that hasn’t happened yet? And how do you tell the truth impartially to students whose parents are sometimes hawks and sometimes doves?

I chose to present two lessons from history.

I told my students the story of Neville Chamberlain returning from Germany to Britain, waving the agreement that he and Hitler had signed which guaranteed “peace in our time”. I explained that Hitler had only signed it to buy time to complete preparations for war. Then I told them of Kennedy and Johnson fighting a proxy war in a country they did not understand, and sliding down the slippery slope to disaster.

The two historic events presented two very different lessons. From Chamberlain, we learned that if you must fight, then attack before it is too late; from Kennedy and Johnson we learned not to start a war for the wrong reasons in a country you don’t understand.

I explained to my students that those were the lessons of history that our leaders had to consider in choosing whether or not to attack Iraq. No one could know with certainty which lesson would apply to the present situation. Only time would tell.

That was twelve years ago. Now we know.

56. Cinn Sings a Folksong

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Sometimes I write poetry as poetry. Sometimes I write it to fill story needs. This folksong was written for Valley of the Menhir to give Tidac and Cinnabar a romantic moment early in their courtship.

She showed him how to hold the thyril and how to strike the bass strings with his thumb while his fingers touched the trebles. His left hand stopped the trebles; the bass strings rang free. He tried manfully – which is to say, clumsily – to coordinate his two hands and was becoming frustrated when she stopped him with a giggle.

“You try too hard,” she said. “You aren’t trying to overcome an armed opponent; you are trying to coax the music out.”

Next he tried to pick out the simple lullaby which she sang over and over for him. He had not heard her sing before; her voice was small but sweet. After a time the tune came, and still later it came freely. Cinnabar kissed him noisily and congratulated him.

Then Cinnabar picked up the thyril and began to play. The melody was sad, but it brightened slowly. She raised his eyes to his and they were full of promise. She began to croon very softly:

*****

I reach for her, lying in her linen bed;

My fingers draw her forth into my arms.

Her rounded hip against my belly —

Her slender neck is in my hand.

My fingers touch and stroke her strings

     evoking music

          the thrumming that fills my loins

               the dry treble that excites the night.

Sometimes she is cold within my arms

And I must coax her voice to life.

Tonight she is fire,

Yielding to the motion of my hands.

My fingers touch and stroke her strings

     evoking magic

          the crying bittersweetness of the night

               wraps its hands around my heart.

*****

An ambiguous song, equally applicable to the thyril or the woman who held it. Whatever I am, or have been, or wish to be, Tidac thought, is now wound up with her.

Cinnabar smiled up at him and laid aside the thyril.

*****

I wrote that scene about 1978, and it remained in every revision until about 2010 when it was cut as a part of a major push to tighten up the pacing of the early part of the story. Too bad; I always liked it.

55. Voices in the Walls

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220px-Sunnyside,_Tarrytown,_New_YorkIn the 1970s I was an enlisted man, a tech in the oral surgery section of a Naval Hospital in California. It was an interesting position. Like servants in a proper British household, or like house slaves on the plantation, we were seen but ignored when the officers conversed. We knew everything they talked about; they had no idea what we said about them.

Our new Captain, just back from a deployment in the far east and looking forward to retirement, said to his colleagues, “I’m really glad to be back from Japan, but now I can’t wait to get back to America.”

He was joking, but he meant it, too. He was from one of those mythical places like Vermont, and California didn’t look like home to him. I understood him completely. I was born and raised in Oklahoma, but even to me, historical America meant New England. Despite the fact that Washington, Jefferson, and Patrick Henry were all Virginians, and the fact that the Declaration of Independence was written in Pennsylvania, if you say 1776, most Americans will think of New England.

For me, that’s because of textbooks. In the mid-fifties, elementary history textbooks did not contain photographs. No doubt it was a matter of technology and economics, but what those books had instead were beautiful line drawings, frequently sepia toned, which not only showed aspects of the colonial world, but looked like they could have been drawn in 1740. I remember one in particular, representing the tobacco trade. A wagon sized barrel, lying on its side, was hitched directly behind an ox and self-rolling down to the water, where an apple cheeked ship with a single square sail was standing in to receive it. It opened up my landlocked Oklahoma heart and made me love the sea a decade before I saw the sea. I’ve been looking for a copy of that old textbook for many years, but it may be a blessing that I haven’t found it. The reality is unlikely to be as fulfilling as the memory.

As a side note, the thesis I wrote for my second masters degree, thirty years later, was on American maritime history.

I didn’t visit the northeastern part of the United States until I was pushing forty, and it was everything I had dreamed it would be – as long as we avoided the cities. My wife and I spent most of our time in the countryside, and visited cities primarily for the museums. D. C. and Philadelphia were inspiring; Valley Forge and Chadds Ford were beautiful beyond belief, at least at that season. The list could go on.

I also got a gift in New York, in Tarrytown. We were visiting the Washington Irving mansion when a tour guide told us that the house had been a station on the underground railroad, and that the family could sometimes hear noises through the walls when escaping slaves were hiding in the basement.

True, or just a good story? I didn’t know and I didn’t care. I just knew that I had been handed another novel for my to-write list. As of now, I’m 45 pages in and I’ve been stalled there for a long time. I’m not sure if I need to go from first person to third, or if there is some other problem that my subconscious has not yet rolled out into the light, but Voices in the Walls will get finished, eventually. Meanwhile, I will be using it as the centerpiece of an extended discussion of race, starting in mid-January of next year.

54. Bind Not, Be Not Bound

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In Blondel of Arden, now in Backfile, and in post 56, coming Thursday, I produced song lyrics to give my characters a chance to show their attitudes. In the novel Cyan, due out in spring, I went a step further by having the characters themselves write poetry. I’ll cover that in a future post.

Keir Delacroix is the groundside leader of the explorers on Cyan. Because of events in his childhood, he has an aversion to forcing others to his will – especially women. He spells this out in a poem.

Bind Not, Be Not Bound

Speak softly, draw near,
Touch but do not cling,
Bind not!

Share with me your love and laughter,
Smiles and frowns, days and nights.
As a lover, as a friend,
Mine, but free.
(As I am free.)

Remain as you wish,
Depart when you will.
Be not bound.

This attitude leads him to questionable decisions late in his year of exploration. Those decisions come back to haunt him when the explorers return to Earth, massively change the early days of colonization, and ultimately lead Keir to a broader view of human relationships.