Sherry Chandler

Firebombing, revisited

A day or two ago, I did a post about James Dickey’s poem, “The Firebombing,” and I was very pleased when Dickey’s son, Christoper left a comment. Here is part of what Christopher Dickey said:

Back in 2003 I wrote a long essay about “The Firebombing” because it struck me that the poem tried very hard to come to terms with the weird detachment that has come to characterize much of modern warfare. Anyone interested can Google “Firebombings: From My Father’s Wars to Mine.” The direct link to the pdf is http://www.strom.clemson.edu/events/calhoun/guests/dickey.pdf

Christopher Dickey is an excellent war correpondent, a man whose writings we should all have given more heed. Maybe then we would not have gotten ourselves into the mess of Iraq. But as he says himself, mostly Americans just want to forget about the rest of the world.

Dickey also writes well and interestingly about his father. In 2007, I wrote a post here about his article “War and Deliverance.,” which appeared in Newsweek on October 2007 on release of the Deliverance movie to HD DVD.

So naturally I went looking for the article “Firebombings: From My Father’s Wars to Mine.” Here is part of what Christopher Dickey has to say about James Dickey’s poem “The Firebombing:”

At my father’s poetry readings, he’d usually give a pretty long introduction to this poem “which attempts to come to terms with modern warfare and with the fact that for many people engaged in modern warfare there is no guilt, because guilt depends ultimately on contemplating the destruction that one is responsible for.

“So much destruction in modern war takes place miles and miles away from the source of the destruction, the human being who has caused it,” my father would explain to the audience. “The man in this poem has been twenty years ago a bomber pilot and has made firebombing raids on civilian populations over Japan. He is a decent fellow, like most pilots were, and are, and he’s thinking now twenty years later in his pleasant suburban home that he is the same person who burned women and children alive with jellied gasoline called napalm.”

As I have said before, and will probably say again, I was born during the firebombing of Dresden, though I didn’t know that until I was grown. Reading Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five was one of the formative events of my life. And then, of course, there was Viet Nam, which overshadowed my life from ages 15 to 30.

As one who had lived through Viet Nam, I was horrified by the glee with which our nation welcomed George H.W. Bush’s Gulf War, the way we all gathered around our televisions to watch the smart bombs fall, as though this were some virtual reality game. And, in many ways, for us it was all a game.

Here is Christopher Dickey once again:

For more than fifty years after World War II, and more than thirty years after my father wrote that poem, technology, especially American technology, continued to dehumanize the inhumanity of war until, by the late 1990s, we were able to convince ourselves, at our great distance from the destruction, that such a thing could be waged as a war that was humane.

Now, that’s a pretty dangerous concept if you think about it. Because a humane war, especially one waged from a sanitary distance, is implicitly an EASY war. It doesn’t have to be righteous. It doesn’t even have to be memorable.

. . .

Have you ever heard the term “fire and forget”?

“Fire and forget” is a bit of military jargon that describes, say, an anti-tank missile that does the work of tracking and hitting the target by itself once you pull the trigger. The munitions the Air Force and Navy use today, the “smart bombs” and cruise missiles, might also fit into that same category. It’s about guidance systems. But “fire and forget” could just as aptly describe the way the United States makes war and the American people have learned to perceive it in the last quarter century. And it tells us a lot about some of the misguided fights we’ve gotten into of late.

Since 1981, we have carried out an act of war, on average, just about every year.

This article was written early in our current “War on Terror” — terminology that seems blessedly to have been dropped lately — before the “Surge,” before hawks were able to declare something like victory in Iraq, though it was published a few months after George W. Bush’s ridiculous “Mission Accomplished” stunt.

In the meantime, I hope we have learned some difficult lessons about the nature of war. I hope we have learned what Dickey, father and son, kept trying to tell us — that, though we ourselves may be detached from our war making and though we may consider our technological warfare humane, things looks considerably different to the people on the ground being killed and maimed.

As Christopher Dickey says:

If you’ve been on the ground at the receiving end of those American bombs, however, among the people who won’t forget, don’t get closure and can’t just change the channel, you know that much of the hatred of the United States in the world comes not from these leaders who are “jealous” of its strength, as some in Washington would have us believe, and not from people who “hate freedom,” certainly, but from those innocent people who’ve either been victims of America’s awesome, insouciant power, or fear that they might be.

Consider that word insouciant.

Though I have strong reservations about Barack Obama’s decision to try to go back to Afghanistan and “win” that war, I do applaud his willingness to put people on the ground there to help rebuild, to give our country a more human face. Civilians, too. I also have some reservations about using armies as nation builders, not because I’m against nation building, but because it blurs a line that ought not to be blurred.

Like, for example, when our civilian President salutes his military.

But we are still depending on our technological war toys. We’re still using drones that maybe are killing terrorists but definitely are killing their wives and children. We have young soldiers killing in Pakistan now without ever leaving the continental United States. For this work, we recruit the ones who are good at video games.

That is really frightening.

___________
By the way, today is Albert Einstein’s birthday, that man whose hindsight was much better than his foresight. Like all of us, I guess.

Firebombing

We have been having some heated discussions in our household lately over the question of whether an evil means can ever be justified for a good end.

Specifically whether dropping atomic bombs on civilian populations was justified because it put a quick end to the war with Japan and saved, not just American lives, but also Japanese because the Japanese military were gearing up for the kind of guerilla defense involving women and children that we’ve seen in Iraq.

We did not, of course, resolve this discussion. Both sides merely conceded that it is a difficult question, and the men who made the decisions were neither demons nor saints.

I bring this up because today is the 65th anniversary of the firebombing of Tokyo (Wikipedia says tomorrow. My source is the Encyclopedia Britannica), when U.S. B29s dropped napalm that burned a quarter of the city and killed something between 80,000 and 100,000 people. I was blissfully ignorant of this event until I picked up Buckdancer’s Choice in the 1980s and read “The Firebombing,” easily the most horrifying poem I have ever encountered.

Gun down
The engines, the eight blades sighing
For the moment when the roofs will connect
Their flames, and make a town burning with all
American fire.
           Reflections of houses catch;
Fire shuttles from pond to pond
In every direction, till hundreds flash with one death.
With this in the dark of the mind,
Death will not be what it should;
Will not, even now, even when
My exhaled face in the mirror
Of bars, dilates in a cloud like Japan.
The death of children is ponds
Shutter-flashing; responding mirrors; it climbs
The terraces of hills
Smaller and smaller, a mote of red dust
At a hundred feet; at a hundred and one it goes out.
That is what should have got in
To my eye

And shown the insides of houses, the low tables
Catch fire from the floor mats,
Blaze up in gas around their heads
Like a dream of suddenly growing
Too intense for war. Ah, under one’s dark arms
Something strange-scented falls—when those on earth
Die, there is not even sound;
One is cool and enthralled in the cockpit,
Turned blue by the power of beauty,
In a pale treasure-hole of soft light
Deep in aesthetic contemplation,
Seeing the ponds catch fire
And cast it through ring after ring
Of land: O death in the middle
Of acres of inch-deep water!

I should point out that Dickey himself doesn’t seem to have been involved in bombing big cities like Tokyo.

Buckdancer’s Choice and “The Firebombing” and Robert Bly pretty much ruined Dickey as a poet.There’s a nice description of that conflict here at Edward Byrne’s One Poet’s Notes. Dickey didn’t help himself.

But folk are reconsidering the poem. Byrne refers to this statement by Joyce Carol Oates:

In her book about the visionary in literature, Joyce Carol Oates devotes a chapter to James Dickey and regards “The Firebombing” as a crucial poem: “It is unforgettable, and seems to me an important achievement in our contemporary literature, a masterpiece that could only have been written by an American, and only by Dickey. Having shown us so convincingly in his poetry how natural, how inevitable, is man’s love for all things, Dickey now shows us what happens when man is forced to destroy, forced to step down into history and be an American (‘and proud of it’). In so doing he enters a tragic dimension in which few poets indeed have operated.”

Had I read this poem when it was published (1964), I would probably have been thoroughly convinced by Bly. There is much in Dickey’s poetry, especially an espousal of violence, that distresses me. Reading the poem in my middle age, as a mother of sons, I was appalled and frightened but also impressed by the power and honesty. Now, nearly 50 years later, I tend to agree with Oates.

“The Firebombing” does not glorify war.

More from Byrne, whose whole post you ought to read:

Dickey once commented: “To have guilt you’ve got to earn guilt, but sometimes when you earn it, you don’t feel the guilt you ought to have. And that’s what ‘The Firebombing’ is about.”

. . .

In a 1990 Contemporary Literature interview as reported in Henry Hart’s excellent biography of the poet, Dickey explains “the guilt at the inability to feel guilty.” He continues: “You’ve been given medals for doing this. Your country has honored you—but there are those doubts that stay with you. You feel as a family man what all those unseen, forever unseen, people felt that you dropped those bombs on. You did it. The detachment one senses when dropping the bombs is the worst evil of all—yet it doesn’t seem so at the time.” In “The Firebombing” his persona lives in an average American suburb two decades after the war and still seems haunted by the Japanese living in the homes of neighborhoods beneath his plane during those bombing runs so long ago.

And the poem itself ends this way:

Come in, my house is yours, come in
If you can, if you
Can pass this unfired door. It is that I can imagine
At the threshold nothing
with its ears crackling off
Like powdery leaves,
Nothing with children of ashes, nothing not
Amiable, gentle, well-meaning,
A little nervous for no
Reason        a little worried        a little too loud
Or too easygoing        nothing I haven’t lived with
For twenty years, still nothing not as
American as I am, and proud of it.

Absolution? Sentence? No matter;
The thing itself is in that.

I am American, and sometimes, though not always, proud of it, and I stand firm in my conviction that you don’t make war to bring peace or set fire to cities to save lives. Though once a nation is in a war, it has to fight to win. But is winning by evil means — torture, for example — ever a real victory? We have not left off firebombing in the last 60 years and the legacy of the atomic bomb drop has been dark. Not that the men who made that decision in 1945 could see that dark future.

All my reservations, however, do not diminish the power of Dickey’s poem.

Mr. Longfellow had a birthday yesterday

I had intended to post this yesterday, which was Longfellow’s birthday. But I got distracted, so I’m going to let it go out today

A Psalm of Life

TELL me not, in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream!—
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.

Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.

Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,
Is our destined end or way;
But to act, that each to-morrow
Find us farther than to-day.

Art is long, and Time is fleeting,
And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
Funeral marches to the grave.

In the world’s broad field of battle,
In the bivouac of Life,
Be not like dumb, driven cattle!
Be a hero in the strife!

Trust no Future, howe’er pleasant!
Let the dead Past bury its dead!
Act,—act in the living Present!
Heart within, and God o’erhead!

Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time;

Footprints, that perhaps another,
Sailing o’er life’s solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
Seeing, shall take heart again.

Let us, then, be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and to wait.

&mdash Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, from Lounsbury, Thomas R., ed. Yale Book of American Verse. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1912; Bartleby.com, 1999

I had to memorize this one in high school. I’ll bet Jim Bunning and Mitch McConnell did too. Maybe they should revisit the penultimate and the antepenultimate stanzas.

Smelly cat

IV

catpiss smell,
the pink bloom open:
I press a leaf
of the flowering currant
on the back of your hand
for the tight slow burn
of its sticky juice
to prime your skin,
and your veins to be crossed
criss-cross with leaf-veins.

— Seamus Heaney, “from Field Work” in Selected Poems 1966-1987 (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1990)

A salmagundi

Harry Rutherford, of Heraclitean Fire, has started a new blog interprise called A London Salmagundi: Being a Hotchpotch or Gallimaufry of Divers Things etc. It’s the place to go to find your photo of the Common Potoo (which I think is a bird) or a photomicrograph of a dinosaur bone. or a YouTube of Jerry Lee Lewis on the Steve Allen show in 1957.

It was through Harry’s Salmagundi that I discovered F*ck Yeah, Victorians, a tumblr site that has been fascinating my husband for about a week now. it’s not a site for the squeamish, but it is certainly a window into the wierder side of Victorian culture.

If you think you might prefer to do something wholesome, like crochet, look to Pocahontas County Fare for your links to Free Crochet Patterns, Especially Old Ones .

Thinking about old crochet, old lace, I thought I might go looking for an old poem on the subject. Here’s what I found:

Old Flemish Lace

A LONG, rich breadth of Holland lace,
A window by a Flemish sea;
Huge men go by with mighty pace,—
Great Anne was Queen these days, may be,
And strange ships prowled for spoil the sea—
For you—old lace!

Stitch after stitch enwrought with grace,
The mist falls cold on Zuyder-Zee;
The silver tankards hang in place
Along the wall; across her knee
Dame Snuyder spreads her square of lace,
A veil—for me?

The Holland dames put by their lace,
The bells of Bruges ring out in glee;
The mill-wheels move in sluggish race:—
Farewell, sweet bells! Then down the sea
The slow ship brings the bridal grace—
The veil—for me!

Manhattan shores—a New World place,
The Pinxter-blows their sweetest be:
And now—come close, O love-bright face—
Bend low—…
        Nay, not old Trinity,
To Olde Sainte Marke’s i’ the Bowerie,
Dear Hal,—with thee!

—Amelia Walstien Carpenter, Stedman, Edmund Clarence, ed. An American Anthology, 1787–1900. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1900; Bartleby.com, 2001

Dear Hal, I’m guessing, is the proposed bridegroom. And a pinxter here, I think may be the pinxter azalea.

And then I found this, which sort of pulls it all together, except maybe for the bawdy Victorians:

That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection

CLOUD-PUFFBALL, torn tufts, tossed pillows ‘ flaunt forth, then chevy on an air-
built thoroughfare: heaven-roysterers, in gay-gangs ‘ they throng; they glitter in marches.
Down roughcast, down dazzling whitewash, ‘ wherever an elm arches,
Shivelights and shadowtackle in long ‘ lashes lace, lance, and pair.
Delightfully the bright wind boisterous ‘ ropes, wrestles, beats earth bare
Of yestertempest’s creases; in pool and rut peel parches
Squandering ooze to squeezed ‘ dough, crust, dust; stanches, starches
Squadroned masks and manmarks ‘ treadmire toil there
Footfretted in it. Million-fuelèd, ‘ nature’s bonfire burns on.
But quench her bonniest, dearest ‘ to her, her clearest-selvèd spark
Man, how fast his firedint, ‘ his mark on mind, is gone!
Both are in an unfathomable, all is in an enormous dark
Drowned. O pity and indig ‘ nation! Manshape, that shone
Sheer off, disseveral, a star, ‘ death blots black out; nor mark
Is any of him at all so stark
But vastness blurs and time ‘ beats level. Enough! the Resurrection,
A heart’s-clarion! Away grief’s gasping, ‘ joyless days, dejection.
Across my foundering deck shone
A beacon, an eternal beam. ‘ Flesh fade, and mortal trash
Fall to the residuary worm; ‘ world’s wildfire, leave but ash:
In a flash, at a trumpet crash,
I am all at once what Christ is, ‘ since he was what I am, and
This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, ‘ patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,
Is immortal diamond.

— Gerard Manley Hopkins, Poems. London: Humphrey Milford, 1918; Bartleby.com, 1999.

An invocation

Snow is in the forecast again but I’m with Robert Frost here:

To the Thawing Wind

COME with rain, O loud Southwester!
Bring the singer, bring the nester;
Give the buried flower a dream;
Make the settled snow-bank steam;
Find the brown beneath the white;
But whate’er you do to-night,
Bathe my window, make it flow,
Melt it as the ices go;
Melt the glass and leave the sticks
Like a hermit’s crucifix;
Burst into my narrow stall;
Swing the picture on the wall;
Run the rattling pages o’er;
Scatter poems on the floor;
Turn the poet out of door.

— Robert Frost, A Boy’s Will. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1915; Bartleby.com, 1999.

Or here’s one from Katherine Mansfield that I picked up this morning from Your Daily Poem:

Winter Song

Rain and wind, and wind and rain.
Will the Summer come again?
Rain on houses, on the street,
Wetting all the people’s feet,
Though they run with might and main.
Rain and wind, and wind and rain.

Snow and sleet, and sleet and snow.
Will the Winter never go?
What do beggar children do
With no fire to cuddle to,
P’raps with nowhere warm to go?
Snow and sleet, and sleet and snow.

Hail and ice, and ice and hail,
Water frozen in the pail.
See the robins, brown and red,
They are waiting to be fed.
Poor dears, battling in the gale!
Hail and ice, and ice and hail.

— Katherine Mansfield

“My Life had stood – a Loaded Gun -”

Lyndall Gordon has written a new biography of Emily Dickinson.

Here is Jeanette Winterson’s review from the Times Online:

Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and her Family’s Feuds:

The eccentric poet, the dressy adventuress, the top man in town, his outraged wife, his vulnerable son, a cache of poems and letters hidden in trunks and chests … it could be the plot line for a potboiler; it is the Emily Dickinson story.

This most reclusive of poets, unmarried, virtually unpublished in her lifetime, knew who she was and fired that knowing through her poetry. Everyone had a stake in inventing her, including her brother, sister and sister-in-law. Her wild truthfulness was unsettling; it was easier to turn from the authenticity of the poetic blast towards a fictional person who could be offered up as a softer, simpler explanation.

While Emily Dickinson was alive there was at least a physical presence that had to be reckoned with — as time passed almost no one saw her, but she was fiercely there — refusing, for instance, to aid her brother in a gift of family land to his mistress. When Dickinson died in 1886, at 55, the invention of Emily Dickinson became an industry — and a feud.

And here is an article from the Guardian written by Lyndall Gordon herself,
A bomb in her bosom: Emily Dickinson’s secret life

It was Emily herself who helped to devise the blueprint for her legend, starting at the age of 23 when she declined an invitation from a friend: “I’m so old-fashioned, Darling, that all your friends would stare.” In place of the tart young woman she was, she adopted this retiring posture. Born in 1830 into the leading family of Amherst, a college town in Massachusetts, she never left what she always called “my father’s house”. Townsfolk spoke of her as “the Myth”.

On the face of it, the life of this New England poet seems uneventful and largely invisible, but there’s a forceful, even overwhelming character belied by her still surface. She called it a “still – Volcano – Life”, and that volcano rumbles beneath the domestic surface of her poetry and a thousand letters. Stillness was not a retreat from life (as legend would have it) but her form of control. Far from the helplessness she played up at times, she was uncompromising; until the explosion in her family, she lived on her own terms.

For one such as I, educated in a time when poets like Elizabeth Barret Browning and even Dickinson herself were sniffed at as neurotic poetesses, not quite up to canonical standards — Browning got a particularly bad rap, portrayed as a silly leech on the superior powers of her husband — the most refreshing idea put forward in these newspaper articles is that illness was not a weakness for these creative women so much as a tool. From the Times:

Gordon is right, though, in her argument that cites illness as control. A writer needs time and solitude, necessities not available to women of any class at that time, without some special circumstances overriding convention.

Like Elizabeth Barrett Browning and, later, Virginia Woolf, Dickinson was able to use her vulnerability to excuse herself from domestic duties and tiresome entertaining. Her father sanctioned her “withdrawal” on medical grounds, and this gave her time to write. She began at about 3am, and kept herself to herself until noon. Later, she did not engage in family life at all.

Or, as Elizabeth Oakes expresses it in her excellent poetry collection The Luminescence of All Things Emily (Wind Publications, 2009)

Emily’s niece tells this story.
Emily stood before her bedroom
door, mimicked turning a key,
and said, “Freedom, Mattie.”

Going up the stairs was like leaving
the eye of a storm. . . .

As the WomPonies, from whom I stole these links, particularly Louisa Howerow, point out, much of this material is known, though it may not be widely known. Certainly Oakes has already covered it, though in poetic, not analytic form.

I am not so sure about Gordon’s argument that Dickinson was epileptic. I am not all that certain that such diagnoses can be made after the fact, though it seems to be a modern temptation. Nevertheless, such retroactive diagnoses at least treat the disease as real, rather than dismissing it as hysteria.

For an excellent consideration of retro diagnoses in the case of Mary Todd Lincoln, another of history’s crazy women, see Diagnosing history at I See Invisible People. As Terry says, “it is possible to be both feminist and bipolar, or schizophrenic as some have said, at the same time.”

The value of these retro discussions of diagnosis may lie in recognizing that a woman can be both brilliant and ill, just as a man can. Abraham Lincoln famously experienced depression and Doestoevsky had epilepsy. The discussion may also allow us to contemplate these women as fully adult human beings who were able to turn a liability into an asset. So establishing whether Gordon is correct or not in her diagnosis may not be as important as the discussion it engenders.

At any rate, Gordon is an excellent writer, so I look forward to reading this volume.