is the word 'diary' better than the word 'blog'? probably not.
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Unmaking, Coming Home.
I�m teaching a course on pain right now. It�s about how philosophers talk about pain, how doctors and medical researchers talk about pain, and how various writers have reflected on how pain affects us, and how we are affected when we witness the pain of others. And it�s about what, if anything, all that has to do with how we come to be the kinds of beings that we are. Fun, right? Well, I do have excellent students, and so far we�ve been having a good time thinking through some hard questions. Anyway, right now I�m teaching a book that I have a lot of disagreement with even though I also admire what it accomplishes. The book is Elaine Scarry�s The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. Perhaps you�ve read it; it�s a fairly famous book. And, coincidentally, Scarry is the person who gave the plenary address that I �discussed� (in my role as discussant) at APSA this year. I think the intense structural bent of her thinking is a strength and a weakness: she finds structures where many might miss them. But then she gets stuck in them and ends up making arguments based on the structures when her aim should be to escape them. In addition I think she has a deep understanding of how language works but hasn�t given much thought to how unspoken communication underlies all our attempts at language. However, the book is full of amazing insights. It is inspiring to watch the students try to grapple with them, and either embrace them or rebel against them, and discuss them in class. Today I was reading through her entirely too long chapter on what war is (you think you know, don�t you? well you don�t, not really, and her points in this regard are illuminating), and I encountered this remarkable paragraph, which I�ll transcribe for you right here, right now. It�s long, but it pays off in the end:
�Thus the roll call of death should always be taken as it was first taken by Homer in the record of war that stands at the beginning of western civilization. Here each death, whether Trojan or Greek, comes before one�s eyes in four aspects: the name of the person; the weapon (�freighted with dark pains�) as it approaches the body; the site of entry and the slow motion progress of the widening wound (for we are to understand that it is the deconstruction of sentient tissue that is taking place, and that this deconstruction always occurs along a specific path); and fourth and finally, one attribute of civilization as it is embodied in that person, or in that person�s parent or comrade, for the capacity for parenting and camaraderie are themselves essential attributes of civilization. Each attribute is invoked into the center of the wound, for each is implicated there and itself unmade: so the spear that cuts through the sinew of Pedeaus�s head, passing through his teeth and severing his tongue, passes also through the work of goodly Theano who �reared him carefully even as her own children�; the bronze point that enters Phereclus through the right buttock, pierces bladder and bone, and pierces as well the shipbuilding and craftsmanship bodied forth in this son of Tecton, Harmon�s son; in the lethal fall of Axylus from his car is the fall of well-built Arisbe, a home by the high road where entertainment was given to all; the huge jagged rock that cuts and crushes through the great-souled head of Epicles cuts its way too through his gradually shattered camaraderie with Sarpedon. So, too, the 20th century litany of war deaths occurs in the same way: for the United States, the Vietnam War is not 57,000 names but names, bodies, and embodied cultures�not Robert Gilray but Robert Gilray, from the left the artillery shell approached, entered his body and began its dark explosion, expoding there, too, the image of the standing crowd that each week watched his swift run across the playing fields of Chatham; not Manuel Font but Manuel Font, around his fragile frame the fire closed in, burning into his skin, and skull and brain, burning even into the deep, shy corners where he studied at school. So the list would continue through tens of thousands of others. That the war deaths occurred on behalf of a terrain in which pianos could be played and bicycles could be pedaled, where schools would each day be entered by restrained and extravagantly gesturing children alike, must be indicated by appending the direction of motive, �for my country,� since deaths themselves are the unmaking of the embodied terrain of pianos and bicycles, classmates, comrades, and schools.�
The passage is beautifully evocative of the real human costs of war. Every death is not just the death of one person but the end of the hopes and dreams of so many people whose lives are interconnected with that person. Each death is the unmaking of a world. This is true of Iraqi lives, too. I could go on about what it would mean to say �for my country� about a country that tortures and that keeps people who aren�t charged with any crimes in captivity for five years and counting. Instead I�ll simply ask the question that currently has me feeling the most sad for the future: what happens when all the soldiers who don�t get killed come back to the United States? We may have learned some things from what happened post-Viet Nam, but I�m guessing that most people have no idea how to deal with post-traumatic stress disorder�and most probably don�t think they should have to. But there is no way that a person can go through the conditioning training soldiers are put through in order to up their kill numbers, and live through what life is like in Baghdad and elsewhere right now, and then come home to Walnut Creek or Conshohocken or New York or Caspar, and return to life as usual. The war may seem like it�s happening somewhere else right now. But it will come home.
11:55 p.m. - September 23, 2006
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