full fathom five

The power of vengeance

I just finished an article in the New Yorker (Apr. 21) by Pulitzer prize-winning author Jared Diamond (Guns, Germs, and Steel).  He contrasts tribal societies' behavior around revenge with that of countries with stronger government control.  New Guinea is his example of a society where tribal disputes are settled personally, with each killing demanding a revenge-killing by the victim's relative.  This causes an endless state of war, with people demonizing enemy tribes and constantly fearing for their lives. 

In contrast, more developed countries' meting out of justice by an impersonal government allows us the luxury of peace, and allegiance to that is ingrained in us from an early age by religion and law.  While New Guinea children are taught that to die avenging one's enemy is the most honorable death one can have, American kids are taught to rise above revenge by sayings like "Two wrongs don't make a right;" "Love thy neighbor as thyself," "Do unto others....," and "Sticks and stones will break your bones...".   

However, Diamond shows that we're not so different from tribal societies once we go to war.  Then we do our share of demonizing and dehumanizing the enemy to take our revenge.  And once war is over, we go back to curtailing our desire for revenge and again trying to rise above it.  Diamond says this is deeply confusing, not least because vengeance is a very powerful emotion.  Equally powerful emotions of grief, anger, and love are amply aired in our society, but we don't talk about our desire for revenge.  This is an emotion that has been made shameful by our laws and religion.   

I think Diamond has put his finger on why those who fought WWII were so quiet about it when they came back.  There was such a disparity between the savagery they'd experienced and what was expected of them when they returned: to paste on a smile and build the peace, make up for lost time, that they couldn't talk about their sorrow or anger for lost comrades, the hatred of the enemy that was necessary for them to fight, and other dark thoughts.  Our Christian ethics made these thoughts unseemly.   

And another thing that reduced our returning soldiers to silence was the euphemistic way WWII was purveyed to civilians by the media.  Newspapers thought their readers wanted heroes, so stories of men taking out Japanese singlehandedly led the headlines. The gruesome side of war was left out, so that returning soldiers felt their experience of savagery was untranslatable to folks back home.  And that made them despair of ever telling it. 

Everyone I've ever talked with whose parents went through the war said the same thing: there was almost no talk about it except in very general terms for the rest of their parents' lives.  And because WWII was probably the most cataclysmic experience of their parents' lives, this silence was doubly strange.   

Our opposite stance to vengeance in war vs. peace still causes hesitance between military personnel and civilians.  At least I experience this when I talk with today's soldiers and sailors.  We don't talk freely about provocative subjects of war, vengeance, and what it takes to maintain peace.  But we should.   

One of the best things about researching my dad's service was beginning to have this dialogue.  I realized that people who have served have thought long and hard about these subjects.  They've had to.  They've lived it, and come home to silence.                      

The toll of secrecy and spring-cleaning

Last weekend I was down in Marblehead, Mass. giving a book-talk to a submarine veterans group.  I'd known that WWII was a time of great secrecy for the submarine service, christened "The Silent Service" for its tightlipped policies.  Submariners weren't even allowed to mention the names of their boats or their destinations, much less what they were doing on their patrols.  So when a submarine was overdue or lost, families had no idea what area of the world to even imagine their men in, much less research what might have happened. 

     I found out last weekend that the service is still this way, swearing its members to silence about specifics of their active duty even years after retirement.  The toll this secrecy has taken is that the submarine service has gotten short shrift in naval histories and other military literature.  Their sacrifices and achievements have gone unheralded. 

     There are some writers actively trying to redress this balance, but much information is forever lost.  Silence doesn't just take a toll on documented fact, but it seems to corrode memory and quash inspiration.

     There's another toll I've become aware of this morning.  My husband and I carried trash-bags on our 5:30am walk this morning, to do our part in our town's spring pickup of roadside trash.  I now have to clean the house before our upcoming long-weekend's trip to North Carolina.  I don't mind spring cleaning of our own private space, but this morning's roadside pickup made me despair of human nature by the time we got home with two full bags of roadside trash.  As in the past fifteen years we've lived here, our bags are dominated by cigarette packs, beer cans, fast-food wrappers and coffee cups, tic-tac boxes, and the weird signature mixed-drink droppings of rural motorists: individual-serving-sized bottles of coffee brandy and coffee-flavored milk cartons.    

               

Finding Lost Subs

In the last few years, three lost WWII submarines have been found, thanks to remotely operated vehicles (R.O.V.s).  These are robots developed in the mid-eighties equipped with lights, cameras, steering thrusters, and other technology that can find objects as deep as a mile underwater.  These were used to locate the Lagarto in May, 2005 - in the Gulf of Thailand in about 225 feet of water; the Wahoo in 2006 - in the La Perouse Strait South of Sakhalin Island in about 213 feet of water, and - most recently - the Grunion.  The Grunion, lost in May of 1942 on its first patrol, was found last August on a slope 3000 feet down in the Bering Sea ten miles northeast of Kiska Island, the Aleutians.   

The three sons of Grunion's commander, Lt. Cmdr. Mannert L. "Jim" Abele, launched the expedition to find their father's lost sub.  Its discovery combined dogged persistence and determination by the Abele brothers, international cooperation by volunteer and professional search teams, the latest high-tech equipment, and a massive research effort to locate the descendants of all seventy crewmen lost on the sub.  John Abele, who was five when his father was lost, sent vials of seawater from the discovery site to all seventy families of the missing men.   

These families were united by wonder, old and new.  When seventy men simply disappear without a trace, their loved ones cling to the hope they're alive somewhere, wondering when they'll walk through the kitchen door.  One of the Grunion's widows would often go down to the local train station to wait for her lost husband to return.  And then, in 2007 when the families got the call that the Grunion had been discovered, they were bonded by wonder at the discovery itself, and the feeling of having found their lost tribe: others who had wondered with them for some or all of the last sixty-five years. 

Read all about it here: http://www.rd.com/stories/action-adventure/recovered-navy-submarine-grunion-photos/article51160.html         

Forthcoming Book

At last, I can announce what's been going on behind the scenes here for about a year and a half: the acceptance and publication of my memoir uncovering the fate and character of my submarine-commander father, lost in WWII before I was born.   I couldn't let myself talk about it till now, for fear of over-exposure.  Even now, I've had to hold myself back from republishing the whole book in the excerpts at the sidebar!  To breathe a word about it opens the floodgates. 

The official publication date is April 29, but you can order it now from Amazon at a substantial pre-publication discount.  Meanwhile, I'm scheduling book talks, compiling mailing lists, and doing all the other marketing tasks that writers are now expected to do to promote their books.  This requires a full 180-degree Janus-like turn from a writer's to marketer's stance.  EEEEK!  or IIIIIIck!   The Maine Writers and Publisher's Alliance has written in their newsletter over and over again words I've always ignored until this past year: "Your real work doesn't begin till after you've written and placed your book with a publisher."  That's when you start marketing.   And I'm here to say, now that I've gone through it, starting a year before your book will be published is not soon enough.  It's one of those inchoate jobs that expands to fill any time you have.

     But I'm not complaining.  I know that this is just temporary, the arrangements to what I really have been wanting to do ever since I started this project way back in 1999: to shout it from the rooftops!  In a few weeks, I'll be able to do just that.  And as of today, blog about it here.          

   

Eat the Document

James Wood, in the March 3 issue of the New Yorker, reviewed two novels about radical anti-war groups of the late sixties/early seventies: Peter Carey's His Illegal Self and Hari Kunzru's My Revolutions. Because I have a stake in the subject, having made formative choices of my adulthood (my life-partner, career-path, lifestyle, politics, etc.) based on opposition to the Vietnam War, I ordered both books from my local library's interlibrary loan.   

    Meanwhile, I read a related novel, Dana Spiotta's 2006 Eat the Document, that Wood also mentioned in his review with the rare encomniums of "brittle elegance" and "spectacular."  It certainly deserves the praise. (And by the way, there are surprisingly few books on this era; it takes objective, clear-eyed reporting, at a distance of a few decades, to accurately render this tumultuous period, and frankly, many of its would-be authors were too stoned at the time to remember much).   

    Dana Spiotta, by contrast, was only a child during this period, so she approaches it as a historian.  She also uses an alternative culture closer to her own generation, the nineties, to contrast and thus characterize the earlier dissidents, intercutting chapters between the two eras.  Nineties disaffected adolescents gather in "infoshops" to organize what they call "tests," events such as Reclaim-the-Parking-Lot that showcase reactions of the public, thus reinforcing who's in on the joke, irony, or sarcasm, and - most important to the organizers - who's out.  Unlike their forebears, who were suspicious of technology and the media, these "testers" fearlessly use both as tools to ridicule the dominant culture.  They sit in the safety of their parents' suburban houses behind their computers and hack their way into corporate websites to subvert products with alternative ad-campaigns, whereas their forebears followed their alienation physically into anti-war protests, sit-ins, and back-to-the-land communes. 

    Intercutting these two eras throughout the book is a brilliant device, and Spiotta clarifies their differences by embodying the most radical fringes of both in her characters.  Mary and Bobby have gone into hiding after their 1972 bombings of Dow Chemical executives' ostensibly unoccupied vacation-homes goes awry and kills an innocent housekeeper.  This pair is contrasted with Josh, who so effectively subverts corporate websites that he's hired by his chief nemesis, a huge pharmaceutical company, to create a gated-community fashioned on a wired version of utopia that is really a subtle system of consumer control.  Josh is taken in by the irony of the outcome and the technological challenge of getting there.  He thrives, as Mary and Bobby, forced by their underground existence to jettison each other and their entire past and to minimize their engagement with the present, shrivel before our eyes. 

     Spiotta is so gifted it's literally scary.  The feeling of foreboding gathers as Mary spots her face on a wanted poster in yet another bar and flees in the middle of the night, hitching to another small town in another state where she dyes her hair a new color and changes her name.  Mary is in a prison of her own vigilance, and we inadvertently root for her -despite the heinous act she committed - because she's a perpetual underdog.  Her greatness of heart, which is apparent in her empathy for other trapped people, is the source of her undoing, what made her give her all to stop the Vietnam War.  And so we are conflicted as we read, turning pages to find a way out of our own moral ambiguity.          

High Sun

Even though yesterday's storm dumped another eight inches of snow on us, making the snowbanks on the sides of the roads so high that we can't see around them at stop-signs, the midday sun is breaking winter's back.  There's a steady dripping or cracking sound all around our house, as icicles melt and crash to the deck and front and back door-stoops.  The sun is straight over the house now at midday, beaming down on the roof snow till it slides slowly down the skylights and glass roof of our sunroom, dropping with a whump to the foundation of the house.  The resulting four-foot high snowbanks surrounding the sunroom have protected it from the below-zero winter nights, keeping our plants thriving.  The other night when it was about five below, my husband and I remembered that we'd forgotten to bring the auxilliary heater up from the basement to plug in in the sunroom, as we've had to do every November or December since we've lived here.  This year it hasn't been necessary, and we're sure it's because of those four-foot banks of snow tight up against the foundation all around. 

    And because the sun's so high, the dark blue shadows of trees have shortened across the meadow, showing more clean white stretches of sunlit snow lightening the landscape.  This makes it feel almost warm as we strike out across our back meadow on cross-country skis, wearing sunscreen to keep the sun coming off the snow from burning our faces.   

    The sun's stretching the days dramatically now.  When we head out on our walks at 5:30 am, we only have to have the flashlight on for the first twenty minutes.  After that, the road lightens to a beautiful medium-blue facing west, violet to the east.  And yesterday, dusk didn't come till after 5:30. 

     Our dog Cody loves to lie on the highest snowbank surrounding our house, right off the kitchen.  He looks down the driveway to the road, surveying his domain.  I watch him out the window as I do the dishes; his eyes close against the warm sun, and his head droops as he struggles to stay awake.  Chickadees dart back and forth over his head from lilac bush to bird-feeder, calling their two-noted spring song.   

    More snow is forecast for the coming week, but winter is on the wane.      

Cyber-hygiene

I got an unsolicited e-mail from an organization wanting to advertise on my blog the other day.  I imagine that my blog was picked by robot, because I don't post often enough for advertisers to be interested.   

    I told my husband about it on our morning walk, and he asked if I'd clicked any links in the e-mail.  I said yes, that I'd wanted to check out the advertiser's website, but when I got there you had to register to browse it, and registration required "signing" a fine-print agreement a mile long.  So I got out of there and deleted the e-mail.   

    By this point, my husband had stopped walking, turning to stare at me in the road.  "Never click a link in an unsolicited e-mail!"  he said.  "It's just simple hygiene, like washing your hands after you go to the bathroom." 

    I felt my eyes widen.  "No," he said, "don't worry," and started to walk again.  "But from now on, go to your browser and type in whatever link you want to check out.  Don't ever click unsolicited links directly.  That's just like not giving financial info. over the phone when someone calls you."   

    So now I've got a list taped to the side of my computer.  Is there anything I should add to it besides the above? Or any site you know of where these rules that everyone should know are gathered?     

Cross Country Skiing

Today in the lull between snowstorms, on our first day of sun after about five of constant snow, sleet, wind, and gray skies alternating with white-out, I cross-countried down the power-line corridors with my dog.  I went about 1pm, when I figured sun and temperature to be highest, and I found myself thinking that this is the lemonade we're making of the fiercest winter I can remember, and it's not so bad.  Our Cody frisked ahead, lunging at occasional dead beech leaves that strayed across our trail or lodged in the snowy borders.  The power-line poles laid shadows of french-blue stripes across the blinding-white snow.  My skis scritched through the mealy snowmobile tracks with long schuss-sounds that broke at the ends, more like shutch-shutch.  Level stretches allowed for long strides that gave a feeling of authentic nordic mastery for a few fleeting moments before one edge strays into a deeper groove or I wobble over a patch of pebbled ice.  Conditions are tame enough, though, to glide across the power-line field quickly, and I work up a sweat in fifteen minutes, with Cody lying down in the snow to chew snowballs out of his paws.  In forty-five, we've looped the perimeter, and I'm happy to get back to the car with warm, loose limbs and no falls.          

Winslow Park

Here's the view from Winslow Park, a summer campground whose owners graciously open their gates to dog owners in winter.  We can run our dogs there without leashes, and dog owners have taken to meeting every morning at the point at 8:30 for a dog playtime and confab.  We're surrounded by water on three sides. 

Across the water, below, is South Freeport.

And here, above, are benches facing out to the water.  Some are memorials, as we'll see below.

  Our dog Cody looks for playmates, but we've come late today, and the road coming up to the point is encrusted with ice, discouraging the usual visitors.  My husband and I had to put ice-grippers on the soles of our boots in order to make it here.

Being alone at the point gives us time to read the memorial benches for the first time.  The words above on the pale, top line are: "Forever young, spirited, beautiful, and loved."  And the bottom line reads: "Still waters run deep."   

    The bench's words below are clear.      

Memorials inspired by the sea are always especially haunting and poignant.  They all share the spirit of the first one I ever saw, atop a hill on Butter Island overlooking Penobscot Bay.  It's a marble bench dedicated to the memory of the island's owner, who bought up many islands in the bay for preservation, so that sailors and hikers can enjoy them forever.  On the bench's back is a line from Tennyson's Ulysses: "Come, my friends.  'Tis not too late to seek a newer world." 

Blogs vs books

I'm noticing that blogs are not held to the same standards of logic and coherence that books and other printed matter - articles, essays, columns, etc. - are.  Commenters on blogs don't complain about inconsistencies in writers' arguments or attitudes, the way letters to the editor do in newspapers and magazines, or the way reviewers do for books.  In wondering why, the only thing I could come up with is the difference in organizing principles.  Blogs are chronological; they are divided up by days or - in the case of this blog -weeks.  Print material, on the other hand, is more often divided up by ideas, values, attitudes, events, etc.  Even a biography, or fiction that's a chronological life, has a coherence given by the author arranging the material into some kind of meaningful or consistent whole.  Even a diary is edited to achieve shape, meaning, and a sense of progression before going into print.   

    But blogs can be unedited, unshaped, and as rife with inconsistencies and contradictions as human life is. We live it and then move on.  Bloggers post, and then move on to new things, seemingly beyond the pull or influence or weight of former ideas.  I know that this is part of the appeal of blogs, that they are informal and raw, like life.  But I think the intangibility or virtual nature of the medium encourages this as well.  Blog posts seem to be gone after we click them off, simply because they're out of sight.  Whereas with books or other print forms that we can hold in our hands, there's more of a sense of wholeness.  Everything is there.  If we come upon a contradiction or something that doesn't correspond to what we read earlier, we can flip back to previous pages and check.   

    It's harder to do this with blogs.  We have to go back a few posts or into archives and hunt through entire posts to find whatever idea or attitude doesn't sit right with today's post.   

    What does this add up to?  I'm thinking that perhaps blogging is more given to the pure recording of daily events, like what I've heard of Reagan's diary: what I had for breakfast, who came to see me, etc. Just the straight facts.  Or, perhaps anecdotes: what I did today, what happened to so-and-so, as opposed to stories, which require shape and consistency.   

    Or if describing how to do something, like how to plant seedlings or make fudge, or if they are musings, such as this post - that they have to stand on their own, be wholes, so that readers don't have to wonder about loose threads, or go searching through archives to tie them up.   

     I don't read many blogs, so I don't have experience with those, for instance political commentary, that perhaps have the same expectations of consistency by readers that print forms do.  So these are just my observations from a limited sampling of the medium.  What's your reaction?  Do you think being able to hold a whole work - like a book or article - in our hands so that we can easily flip back and check something that doesn't add up, makes a difference in our standards of consistency, what we expect from a piece of writing?