I haven’t slept, which tends to distort emotions and things get taken out of context. Still it was necessary, after staying up later and later distracted with this and that, to reset my internal clock. I’ve done it several times now. It’s not a problem, except for that strange sense of approaching morning from the wrong side, as if time is upside down. It makes one uneasy. Gaining insight is the key, I see it. I’m trying to very deliberately reject emotion, to deconstruct it, if truth be told; because for me most of my emotions, insomnia related or not, are largely baseless and self destructive. It’s not a piteous thing. I have an inner horizon which I couldn’t live without. But as an inward looking fellow my enemy is inertia - and this is usually born of a lukewarm concoction of fear, disgust, anger and often guilt. Base emotions, shameful ones. It’s hard to explain. Also my perception of time is unusual. Time for me has always been distorted, irrelevant, counter-factual. I’ve never felt as old as I am; always an old man in a young man’s skin or vice versa, a naive man ungrateful for experience. I need to feel time passing in a recognisable way, not the numbers on the clock or a weird sounding cycle of days which repeats endlessly. Isn’t it funny how we usually measure time? I feel I could put my hand out and watch a spider string its web from it before I made even one motion to make my life better. If we’re eternal beings and time is, ultimately, infinite then I’ll be alright. I’ll be inclined to be at ease with that, I think. If not then I don’t belong here, and I need to change how my machine operates or get off the bus.
11am. Armistice day. I’m giving my own private moment of contemplation, whether that’s a good thing for me, personally, or not. I’ve always had a curious reverence for it - the silence, the ceremonious interruption of life. I’ve had friction with a couple of employers who were either slow to observe it or who were the focus of a convenient expression of discontent: the larger issue being that something is wrong with the world (and so forth), the pace of life being absurd, my egotistical outlook on a culture which is no longer fully awake to history as I of course am. I become conscious of a kind of moral vanity. I try to cleans myself because it no longer seems appropriate.
A man’s politics change. Death is permanent. My moral approbations are often, I know, vile. Even pornographic. I must stop crutching on absolutes, on hyperbole. It’s juvenile. I’m drawn to bold, arch metaphors, you can read it in my scribbling, the things I say. Hence I become necessarily wary of labouring the macabre or the horrific - images of the faces of the dead, reaching hands and the like - because its impolite. It’s naive.
But thinking of death, on a day of remembrance, I want to stop and stand; in the path of my life. (As if I haven’t been doing that for long enough already! In a different way maybe, for a different end.) I’ve been on a journey, as we all are as we grow up, of trying not to think about history like a fairytale. Of course I have to admit that in so far as the past can be known a story weaves itself naturally, and indeed facts arranged in a sequence infer cause and effect; the agency of man; good and evil. Hence I don’t want to get to thinking about the injustice of war. Its not a useful thing at the beginning. I think the pertinent fact about the Great War, about which I know very little, is that young men, a good deal younger than me now, died in their millions and every one was a private, intimate tragedy and a story of their own, cut short.
Any rhetoric beyond that and I’m taking a step back. Anything beyond that simple fact is a candidate for scepticism - the meagre fact that in the 20th Century young men were butchered on an industrial scale. What I mean is the corruption of remembrance into something else; more akin to ancestor worship or hero worship; very solemn and dignified, yes, and perhaps comforting to some, but primitive also. Natural, yes, but morally questionable: not perfect. You might see it as very benign, I don’t know. But I don’t think it’s any disrespect to the fallen to refrain from using words for “bravery” and words for “sacrifice” when we’re talking about the loss of life. Especially loss of life on such an unimaginable scale. Indeed I’m sure men and women in war are often brave and the sacrifice they make can be meaningful, but lets divorce the two things - the virtue and the tragedy. The facts, the facts of the war dead, speak for themselves I think. I don’t want to get on a soap box but one way to look at the first world war is that it was just a stupid, stupid folly perpetrated on humankind by Queen Victoria’s grand-kids who were jealous of each other’s toys. That being said you might agree that the second world war was indisputably about ideology and freedom, or that both of the wars were to a greater or lesser extent about defending our homes against aggression; but how far can you take that? Are all wars not justified in these terms? Where does that sense of righteousness belong and does it belong on remembrance day necessarily? To consider it a different way is it ever wise to set aside reason and scepticism about history on a day of remembrance?
I think the way the nation celebrates armistice day can sometimes be quietly jingoistic and nationalistic; though I emphasise it’s born out of noble enough intentions. I see a small problem with commemorating the war dead of WW1, in particular, by men and women in uniform marching to and fro, firing salutes, as somehow inappropriate. Professional soldiers, royalty, pageantry - all this ceremony to honour millions of conscripts who would have gone to a firing squad if they tried to desert? You’ll see some 17 year old boy on a wall of a church commemorated as “Private John Smith" and I can’t help but think that he was only “Private John Smith” at the very end of his life. Before that, who knows what he was? Who knows what he would have been? Indeed putting on that uniform, whether it was out of bravery or through propaganda and deception, was what killed him. I want to know what he’d say if we could somehow wake him up and ask him how he felt about becoming a soldier and being ordered to kill young men like him and ultimately to die himself. Would he have volunteered again, given the same choice? Of the nation I simply want to ask the following moral question - while a great many of these men and women were hero’s in every sense, I’m sure, and died for a good cause and freely sacrificed themselves for the good of mankind, and bought our freedom, can we not admit that some of them, indeed perhaps many, or perhaps all of them, were simply wasted? Could we stand to admit that? Could we face it if a generation of young men were, in fact, murdered in muddy fields?
I believe that many wars, perhaps all wars, do waste lives, which is to say the names on the memorials could rightly be thought of as murder victims. Victims of our leaders’ ignorance, hubris or greed, and of the enemy. But I’d suggest that they were murdered not by these powerful men necessarily, the Kings, Prime Ministers and Generals. Not totally anyway. But by political machinery for which, given the choice, they would not have agreed to die instead of staying at home with their families and seeing their kids grow up. If you think of the war dead that way, as the victims of a kind of a gentile holocaust, does that make Remembrance Day more difficult? Do the ceremonies we’ve chosen seem as appropriate? I think those thoughts are understandably difficult to live with because they raise the possibility that another, equally wasteful set of wars are going on right now, and that there’ll likely be fresh ones for our children and grandchildren to be wasted in too.
11am. Armistice day. I’m giving my own private moment of contemplation, whether that’s a good thing for me, personally, or not. I’ve always had a curious reverence for it - the silence, the ceremonious interruption of life. I’ve had friction with a couple of employers who were either slow to observe it or who were the focus of a convenient expression of discontent: the larger issue being that something is wrong with the world (and so forth), the pace of life being absurd, my egotistical outlook on a culture which is no longer fully awake to history as I of course am. I become conscious of a kind of moral vanity. I try to cleans myself because it no longer seems appropriate.
A man’s politics change. Death is permanent. My moral approbations are often, I know, vile. Even pornographic. I must stop crutching on absolutes, on hyperbole. It’s juvenile. I’m drawn to bold, arch metaphors, you can read it in my scribbling, the things I say. Hence I become necessarily wary of labouring the macabre or the horrific - images of the faces of the dead, reaching hands and the like - because its impolite. It’s naive.
But thinking of death, on a day of remembrance, I want to stop and stand; in the path of my life. (As if I haven’t been doing that for long enough already! In a different way maybe, for a different end.) I’ve been on a journey, as we all are as we grow up, of trying not to think about history like a fairytale. Of course I have to admit that in so far as the past can be known a story weaves itself naturally, and indeed facts arranged in a sequence infer cause and effect; the agency of man; good and evil. Hence I don’t want to get to thinking about the injustice of war. Its not a useful thing at the beginning. I think the pertinent fact about the Great War, about which I know very little, is that young men, a good deal younger than me now, died in their millions and every one was a private, intimate tragedy and a story of their own, cut short.
Any rhetoric beyond that and I’m taking a step back. Anything beyond that simple fact is a candidate for scepticism - the meagre fact that in the 20th Century young men were butchered on an industrial scale. What I mean is the corruption of remembrance into something else; more akin to ancestor worship or hero worship; very solemn and dignified, yes, and perhaps comforting to some, but primitive also. Natural, yes, but morally questionable: not perfect. You might see it as very benign, I don’t know. But I don’t think it’s any disrespect to the fallen to refrain from using words for “bravery” and words for “sacrifice” when we’re talking about the loss of life. Especially loss of life on such an unimaginable scale. Indeed I’m sure men and women in war are often brave and the sacrifice they make can be meaningful, but lets divorce the two things - the virtue and the tragedy. The facts, the facts of the war dead, speak for themselves I think. I don’t want to get on a soap box but one way to look at the first world war is that it was just a stupid, stupid folly perpetrated on humankind by Queen Victoria’s grand-kids who were jealous of each other’s toys. That being said you might agree that the second world war was indisputably about ideology and freedom, or that both of the wars were to a greater or lesser extent about defending our homes against aggression; but how far can you take that? Are all wars not justified in these terms? Where does that sense of righteousness belong and does it belong on remembrance day necessarily? To consider it a different way is it ever wise to set aside reason and scepticism about history on a day of remembrance?
I think the way the nation celebrates armistice day can sometimes be quietly jingoistic and nationalistic; though I emphasise it’s born out of noble enough intentions. I see a small problem with commemorating the war dead of WW1, in particular, by men and women in uniform marching to and fro, firing salutes, as somehow inappropriate. Professional soldiers, royalty, pageantry - all this ceremony to honour millions of conscripts who would have gone to a firing squad if they tried to desert? You’ll see some 17 year old boy on a wall of a church commemorated as “Private John Smith" and I can’t help but think that he was only “Private John Smith” at the very end of his life. Before that, who knows what he was? Who knows what he would have been? Indeed putting on that uniform, whether it was out of bravery or through propaganda and deception, was what killed him. I want to know what he’d say if we could somehow wake him up and ask him how he felt about becoming a soldier and being ordered to kill young men like him and ultimately to die himself. Would he have volunteered again, given the same choice? Of the nation I simply want to ask the following moral question - while a great many of these men and women were hero’s in every sense, I’m sure, and died for a good cause and freely sacrificed themselves for the good of mankind, and bought our freedom, can we not admit that some of them, indeed perhaps many, or perhaps all of them, were simply wasted? Could we stand to admit that? Could we face it if a generation of young men were, in fact, murdered in muddy fields?
I believe that many wars, perhaps all wars, do waste lives, which is to say the names on the memorials could rightly be thought of as murder victims. Victims of our leaders’ ignorance, hubris or greed, and of the enemy. But I’d suggest that they were murdered not by these powerful men necessarily, the Kings, Prime Ministers and Generals. Not totally anyway. But by political machinery for which, given the choice, they would not have agreed to die instead of staying at home with their families and seeing their kids grow up. If you think of the war dead that way, as the victims of a kind of a gentile holocaust, does that make Remembrance Day more difficult? Do the ceremonies we’ve chosen seem as appropriate? I think those thoughts are understandably difficult to live with because they raise the possibility that another, equally wasteful set of wars are going on right now, and that there’ll likely be fresh ones for our children and grandchildren to be wasted in too.
