I, too, saw God through mud -
The mud that cracked
on cheeks when wretches smiled.
War brought more
glory to their eyes than blood,
And gave their
laughs more glee than shakes a child.
-- Wilfred
Owen,
"Apologia Pro Poemate Meo"
If
you're looking to prove that destiny exists, you'll find no greater
example than Wilfred
Owen.
Owen was a British of noble birth, educated, insightful. One of the early 20th century's "best and brightest." Poetry was his passion. As a young man, he wrote lilting verse about women and nature. It was the work of an intelligent and sensitive mind, but it lacked gravitas, and if his life hadn't been overtaken by events, we likely wouldn't give him a second thought today.
He might have continued in that pastoral poetic vein, writing about the hills and fields populated by summer lovelies. He might have been happier and less interesting. Instead, he went to war.
In the trenches of World War I, Owen quickly began producing works of chilling beauty and eerie horror. For fifteen months he willed the world's finest war poems into being. It's shocked and surreal, revolted and alluring, angry and unflinching.
For decades, the first World War was the standard for human brutality. Historians know that from their studies. The rest of us, many of us anyway, know it from Owen's poetry. The grisly description of a poison gas attack you remember from high school? That's "Dulce et Decorum Est." You know that the war "slew half the seed of Europe" from "The Parable of the Old Man and the Young." Maybe you had an edgy teacher and read "S.I.W," the one about a soldier's suicide with the jarring, sardonic end.
What does this have to do with Okinawa? Well, you think about war a lot when you're in a place with dozens of memorial sites everywhere you look. Owen's poetry reflects sympathy for the other side, as in Strange Meeting, which includes the unforgettable line "I am the enemy you killed, my friend." Given that this prefecture hosts a peace park memorializing everyone who died during the Battle of Okinawa -- no matter what side they fought on -- you might say that this is an especially Okinawan sentiment.
Also, the talk at bars here is replete with who is getting shipped and who is not, so it's hard not to think about armed conflict. Every day brings news about whose boyfriend doesn't have to go to Afghanistan after all, or who is headed to Iraq. Despite having multiple family members in the service -- both grandparents were World War II veterans -- the day-to-day of war is not something I know a lot about. True understanding, I think, requires personal experience and personal testimony. This is why Wilfred Owen's poems are so valuable.
And so timely. We're losing American veterans of World War II at a rate of more than 1,000 a day. Holocaust survivors continue to pass away. The people that can tell us firsthand what is was like are priceless, and rare, and growing ever rarer. Japan's hibakusha are also expiring at a time when Japan's prime minister insists on attempting to subvert the pacifist element of this nation's constitution (and on placing Okinawa in the middle). These people are treasures, and the insights they can offer precious.
There's another side to this. We can learn from the experiences of others, but there are limits to what our listening can achieve. Moreover, there are limits to what even a dedicated poet can -- or chooses to -- express.
The lines opening this post come from Owen's "Apologia Pro Poemate Meo." An apologia is a defense, a justification. As Owen watched men -- his friends, his comrades, the ones he'd dub "the seed of Europe" -- be slain one by one, he must have had doubts about the act of writing, its worth. The last lines of this poem express why he won't be repeating the jokes soldiers share in the "sorrowful dark of hell":
You shall not hear their mirth:You shall not come to think them well content
By any jest of mine. These men are worth
Your tears: You are not worth their merriment.
Bitterness is all over those lines. Also, love.
Knowing full well their likely shared fate, Owen says of his men, There is something you do not know, reader, something you cannot know, about this shared bond in the face of extinction; something that even at the height of my poetic powers I will never try to describe, because if it were possible for you to understand, it is still not a gift you deserve. Not so different from what the Holocaust survivor Primo Levi wrote in a different context, that "our language lacks words to express this offense, the demolition of man."
The demolition of, in this case, particular men that Owen particularly loved. The final words he ever wrote home, in a letter from Nov. 1918, were these: "Of this I am certain: you could not be visited by a band of friends half so fine as surround me here."
Fitting last words. And as far as public expressions go, they were his last words.
Owen was killed a week before the armistice was signed. When the cataclysm that his poetic career chronicled came to an end, so did his life. This is what I mean about destiny. Time spent as a minor poet prepared him for a time when, for a little over a year, he would channel the unspeakable into high art. He endured the near entirety of his generation's gravest disaster and having writ, moved on.
Fate's not something I put much stock in. We make choices. Choices have outcomes. The world limits our options, and we pick from what's left, hoping for the best. That's it.
On
the other hand, if there was ever an example of a person being meant
to do something, being born for it, this is the one. Maybe that's
destiny. Maybe it's just an exceptional person being worthy of an
exceptional challenge. Either way, the world is richer for Owen's
work. Either way, we need more art that reminds us of what he called
"the pity of war."
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