[lit-ideas] Re: Warrior world.
- From: David Ritchie <ritchierd@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 23 May 2010 22:38:23 -0700
On May 23, 2010, at 9:39 PM, Mike Geary wrote:
I should have written "men are those who are willing to do what has
to be done..."
I can't tell you all the back story to the back story. But suffice
it to say that the person to whom I was writing has cancer and was
thinking of comparing that disease to the weed, Creeping Charlie. My
note went:
I have two responses, one of which has a bit of a backstory. I got
all teary last night while watching a PBS program about Joan Baez.
There she was, certain that resistance to the draft was the right
thing, standing outside the Oakland depot, getting arrested and sent
to jail. Then, fresh out of jail, back to get arrested again. And
here she was in Hanoi, underneath the densest carpet bombing since
the Second World War. You can see how shaken she is, how pleased to
be alive. Right at the end of the movie they showed her singing a
duet with her sister, Mimi, who was yet more beautiful and who had a
lovely voice. The two of them must have been in their early
twenties. And after bravery and non-violence and oral and visual
beauty...here comes the punch line, "Mimi died of cancer." So what
happened when I read "Creeping Charlie"? My mind skipped to
Vietnam. Probably wouldn't happen to most people on most days.
The second response is that many people in my neighborhood aim at
total eradication of weeds, the final solution, by chemical means.
Personally I reduce the weeds' density, and live with the rest.
One supplemental memory of the Baez program, one which for me
resolves the whole violence-male/female thing. Baez says she was
promiscuous and that she wanted to mold Dylan into an activist that
he just wasn't ready to be. She portrayed herself as a sexual
aggressor in the cause of non-violence. And she said that she was an
inattentive mother, interrupting reading to her son when the phone
rang with a call to setting the world a'right.
Late in the program she appeared on stage with her son, who has
turned out fine (by documentary film standards). Then she agreed to
go to Sarajevo. Here, then, was the climax of the narrative, Sniper
Alley. I thought, "How on earth is this the climax? What's she
going to do, sing "The Night They Drove Ol' Dixie Down" to the
besieged population, who are getting picked off by shells and
snipers?" No. She met up with 'the Cellist of Sarajevo,' and I'm
sorry if it's a trite scene but it worked for me. A shell had killed
people lining up at a bakery. The cellist decided that he would don
his tuxedo and play, in full view of the enemy, at the place where
they'd last had "success." Baez watched the re-creation of this
moment and then, with flak jacket on--wisdom comes but slowly, but it
comes-- sat in his chair, in that exact spot, to sing "Amazing
Grace," knowing that one guy with one command could eradicate her.
What a voice.
Possibly some Serb men were not willing to do what had to be done,
or, through their contemporary sights they saw full well that it was
Joan Baez?
I am convinced that there is a spectrum of male and female brains.
How the traits are distributed and how they are shaped by
circumstance, that is for experts in Fields to parcel out. I have
studied bravery and violence, women and history, and still I
understand very little. I do know, however, that if I have any kind
of courage at all--and I hope I do--it isn't her kind.
David Ritchie,
Portland, Oregon
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