by Lorrie Goldensohn
In A FAREWELL TO ARMS, Ernest Hemingway famously wrote about the dim possibility of adequate commemoration for those lost in the slaughter of World War I:
"I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it. There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Certain numbers were the same way and certain dates and these with the names of places were all you could say and have them mean anything. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the number of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates."
When Hemingway wrote, war poetry was still poised between the old and durable need to honor the dead and acknowledge with both regret and proper gratitude the dire nature of their civic contribution, and the second and more unsettling need to voice the sometimes dishonored and dishonoring terms of that sacrifice -- the anguished appearance of war guilt for crimes perpetrated during the course of war by some of these sacrificial victims, the soldiers.
By the second half of the last century, war poetry came to embody an antiwar ideology. Judgments about politics and history have thoroughly rearranged the conventions of the war poem and have changed the way we look at courage and honor, as well as sacrifice. Part of what has happened is also an awareness of the bastardizing of public language, although I shrink from any judgment that things are any worse now for words than they ever were. It has never been easy to speak well about the moving target of difficult issues like war. There are certainly always new problems and new situations, as we think about justifying war and are faced with the horrifying results...Any war, no matter how victoriously prosecuted, is of course always a defeat for the civilized impulse, for the need to come up with other than violent resolution of conflict. And then there is the deadening of language that happens with the incessant barrage of public communication -- "compassion fatigue," in journalism professor Susan Moeller's phrase.
But here I like to think of Maya Lin's serene and wise description of how language is subverted, and memory served, by her brilliant memorial for the American dead of Vietnam:
"I always saw the wall as pure surface, an interface between light and dark, where I cut the earth and polished its open edge. The wall dematerializes as a form and allows the names to become the object, a pure and reflective surface that would allow visitors the chance to see themselves with the names. I do not think I thought of the color black as a color, more as the idea of a dark mirror into a shadowed mirror image of the space, a space we cannot enter and from which the names separate us, an interface between the world of the living and the world of the dead."
