Spencer Selby, Island (2006) (click
to enlarge)
**
How does war affect your ability to enjoy your personal life?
There are times moments really of plaintiveness caused by
the needless deaths in the specious war in Iraq; this fact
doesn't affect me enjoying my personal life per se, but it does
cause sad moments thinking of the young men and women who will
never have families; it often leads to feelings of helplessness.
I once followed a web link to the New England Journal of
Medicine that showed operating rooms at battalion aid stations,
and the sight of young men with their bodies torn open was
nearly too much to bear. It reminded me of the awful photos of
soldiers disfigured in World war One in the German anti-war book
Krieg dem Krieg (War against War). At times like
that, personal enjoyment of anything takes a back seat in
life, to say the least. Do artists have a duty to acknowledge
war in their work during wartime? I would say in general,
yes, but it is not for every artist to react with his or her
art; that is, I think of the late poet Richard Hugo's advice to
be wary of any event that appears that it should have a poem
written about it. That is, any art cannot be forced, and perhaps
that's why Billy Collins refused to write a poem based on 9/11;
I wrote a few myself, but discarded them all because they were
basically lousy the writing forced and vague. If so, to
what extent? Must artists be consumed by war? I have read
works by poets such as John Ciardi, who wrote excellently about
the exigency such as war; however, when they write of other
things, they seem poor. Of course this is a subjective
observation. Still, I think of poets such as many of the British
'trench poets' of World War One, or poets who wrote of the
Holocaust, who wrote beautifully of the pathos of war and its
related horrors, and that appears to be the only subjects they
wrote poetry about. I recently wrote a review of Brian Turner's
book Here, Bullet (Alice James Books 2005) a collection
of poems based on Turner's war experience in Iraq in 2003. His
poems are ineloquent but remain important just like many of the
early poems written by veterans of the Vietnam War.
So the issues are problematic and tied to the quality of art in
general. I must say that the best war poetry I've seen and I
am mostly thinking of Vietnam War soldier poets who only
wrote of their combat experience years, if not decades after,
the war. I think of Yusef Komunyakaa who wrote his volume of
Vietnam War poems, Dien Cai Dau, fourteen years after he
left Vietnam, Doug Anderson's The Moon Reflected Fire,
written in 1994, and Bruce Weigl's later Vietnam war poems
included in his book The Unraveling Strangeness (better,
in my opinion, than his earlier collection, A Song of Napalm).
The late Simone Weil once said that "distance is the soul of
beauty," and indeed, time has that refining quality that
contemporaneous moments don't seem to have. Of course there are
obvious exceptions to this: Wilfred Owen comes immediately to
mind: a soldier-poet who wrote his great war/anti-war poems of
World War One all before he was killed in 1918. Can art not
dealing with war matter during wartime? Yes, it must go on,
as life in general must, or as major league baseball continued
during World War II. We find a lot of instances where art
whether painting, fiction, poetry, drama, and even plays, is
often about contemporaneous wars but in an oblique way. Thus
they expand our knowledge and appreciation of how deeply war,
and particularly the loss of life, become embedded in the pathos
of wider humanity. But even if the art has nothing to say about
war it should still go on; If not, then an enemy wins in a
gratuitously pernicious way by robbing us of more than loved
ones it reaches in and takes even more of our existence,
hence giving the enemy's guns a synergy we needn't allow them to
have.
Jeffrey C. Alfier
**
Ah, the questions of war. War and art. Art versus War. What
aspect of life does war not effect? What moment in time has some
war not raged plaguing citizens of this earth with its
tribulations? Art throughout the civilized time span reflects
whatever socializing aspects humanity's leaders burden upon us.
When one country lives in peace and another in fear of
persecution by the evil war mongers we can truthfully determine
that art imitates life by the creative product of it's artists.
Yet, does the artist have a social responsibility to incorporate
war into their art or become consumed by the politics of
governing bodies? Can we still feel the joys of a sexual culture
overwrought by violence? Perhaps, it is our duty to create the
beauty that rivals the human nature to inflict suffering upon
each other.
The artist always represents the freedom in creation. Are
artists ever bound to thinking a certain way, acting according
to set standards, or obliged to give into the box? Great artists
have existed to represent all sections of life. Unbound to
anything except the motive of what fuels the passion to express
the creation in no certain terms. Artists come from all walks of
life and therefore present view points that span the gamut. No
artist in any genre is obligated to create anything at any point
in time that they do not feel is relevant to the art within
despite the loathsome acts of those around us that affect us in
one way or another.
Sex in art, in the media, in our beds is not a sin nor should it
ever be a source of guilt within consent even in the most
immoral of war times. Our sexual nature as human beings
instinctively drives us to intercourse when it is cold outside,
in sweltering heat, at anytime we feel aroused. Sex is the one
escape nature gave us without causing harm to our bodies. The
orgasm is the only release we are equipped to accomplish that
clears our minds momentarily from the grief that surrounds us.
From innuendo in art to close up crotch shots in pornography
sexual stimulation exists to free the orgasm. Masturbation is
universal proving also that art imitates life, while life
imitates art.
Wartime in this great American machine will influence many
aspects of our lives. Will the artist be the conduit for it or
against it or the conduit at all? Will sex always be a part of
culture regardless of popular opinion or associated guilt?
Aren't we still free to express ourselves as people and artists
and sexual beings as long as we do not endanger those around us?
It is a gift to be a free American. It is a greater gift to be a
free American artist. We can choose our subject matter. We can
put our hearts and minds into it. Our duty as artists is to
influence life for the better dependent only upon the
conditioning that forms our perspective from the point in
existence that we call our own. This is our purpose, our reason
to create.
Ariel Shafer
**
We live in a country of vivid entropy and where once artists
began or led the sound of outrage, we say and hear nothing. We
have fallen into this reverse mirror image of what we were.
Mothers are alone in their grief, and the suburbs seem to be
immune to any of the war's violence. I never hear it spoken
about. Even my writing groups have fallen silent. I worry about
this a great deal, how to become alive like we once were, how to
fight the good fight of nonviolent protest. ... words and sense
are covered by canned music, by instantaneous gratification, and
we all live lives of quiet desperation. We have forgotten our
past. Even in reading a two year old copy of the New Yorker,
I can see how quickly we forget.
Mary C. O'Malley
**
War happens. Bombs fall. Children run screaming bleeding. Women
are raped at gun point. People die and turn into statistics.
Sometimes it happens outside your door or millions of miles
away. Everyday you turn on the TV or read the paper your senses
are beaten into submission by visions of death and dying, pain
and suffering. Should I as a common man a bystander really
with no power to change the course of things react in anger,
in pain, in sheer helplessness? Is my reaction going to make a
difference? My life is defined by the things around me. I react
to what impacts my life directly. If am living in a war zone I
would be running for cover not thinking about sex or art. But
let's say there is a war happening in Iraq and though it would
effect my life in this connected world, my reaction would be
much more impersonal. To the media like any other agent of big
business, sex is sex and war is war. It's a matter of rating and
readership. War happens. And there is nothing I can do to stop
it. All i can do is get out of the way and save my sorry ass.
M.M. Siraj
**
war sex = fast, or forced and unlimited access to what doesnt
exist (example = religion, morals)
art or a certain creative effort, is kind of the opposite: a
slow road to very little of something very real, but maybe less
graphic, less verifiable. in some way, art often appears to be
waiting for nothing. the image of a naked body instead looks
like a very convincing shortcut to something that might
otherwise be close to impossible (which i think is what reality
actually is all about, it avoids those guarantees that wars
often supply in order to render the blood acceptable.
i think that the artist's mind, and especially his work, has no
access to the idea of war, because the understanding of war
implies some sort of complete lack, or absence, of creativity in
order for that mechanism of violence to grow. the amount of
people who believe that rumsfeld is an intelligent american is
at the core of war going. it's hard not to be lured by the power
of that most available idea of what intelligence might look
like.
organization of art is in some way harder to survive in, than
organization of war is, because there has always been a strange
desire in all societies to invest in acceleration. in that way,
sex and war make societies look like they're moving, whereas the
passive, slow response of art, its unavailability, and its lack
of enemies, make things look like they're slowing down. the
action in a shakespeare play or in a cave painting is enormous,
but the lives of those involved in the representation, and its
process, is something very remote, obscure and questionable, in
comparison.
whether it's art or war, though, it promises the same thing to
those who have decided to embrace it. both roads promise answers
in exchange of extreme courage, and equally charge unaffordable
prices for those answers or make them almost impossible to find.
the parallel of despair, in war and in art, is probably the one
thing that gives this whole question a certain meaning.
Erik Rosdahl
**
War time?
One of the most interesting and valuable of the traditional
military arts draws its inspiration in part from the natural
world. Camouflage. I say in part, because there are two very
different aspects to camouflage. The first that comes to mind
is the element of hiding or concealing. In
evolutionary-biological terms this has led to moths that blend
in with tree trunks, caterpillars that look leaves, frogs that
look like grass, fish that look like rocks, etc. Militarily,
one thinks of disguising assets or facilities from attack-the
weapons depot that's made to look like a hospital.
But there is another equally important aspect to camouflage
which has more to do with artifice and therefore the sneaky
species, humans CREATING THE PERCEPTION OF TARGETS WHERE NONE
EXIST. This strategy serves a dual purpose of provoking the
enemy to waste ordnance and resources (thereby further revealing
overall capability), but perhaps more importantly, it helps to
undermine the opponent's confidence in their intelligence
gathering and campaign planning ability.
Unlike the task of concealing or protecting true targets, the
creation of illusive targets has a clear and strangely insidious
psychological component. Indeed, while it may require the same
or even a greater level of physical theatricality, it may be
more properly thought of in terms of "psych ops" and the art of
propaganda (it's worthwhile reviewing the origin of this term).
Taking a larger view, one could argue that these strategies are
constantly in play whether open aggression or formal military
action is under way or not, therefore in a very real sense, war
is always in progress.
One could go still further and make the case, that so-called
"war time," as in the case of what is happening in Iraq, is the
ultimate example of camouflage, for it serves both to hide and
conceal a broad range of government activities which might
otherwise be more closely scrutinized, as well as to distract
attention away from the continuous nature of implicit conflict.
Most significantly of all, "war time" creates the consensus
illusion of opposition and therefore strengthens internal
purpose. Indeed, there can be no Us without Them. There can be
no USA without Them.
The bodies of the dead are very real and no disrespect is meant
to anyone on any side, if sides there are. But if we see a
flag-draped coffin and draw some conclusion about what is
happening "now," than we have fallen for an illusion. We have
focused on an isolated product or event and ignored a vast,
historic and self-sustaining industry upon which so many of our
faiths and privileges uncomfortably depend.
So, in answer to any question about how we should feel in "war
time," I say, do not ask for whom the bell tolls, the clock has
no hands. It is a bomb that keeps exploding, whether it
shatters our complacency from time to time. Or not.
Kris Saknussemm
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