It has been on my mind to write about so many things – generosity, simplicity, the coming of spring – but my thoughts keep returning to Ukraine, the destruction, the suffering, the senselessness, the lives destroyed, the ruination of cities and the devastation of the land. I wonder what it does to a person to live in such constant fear, on high alert, or utterly immobilized with shock and overwhelming grief. I wonder what it does to peace-loving people going about their normal lives suddenly to be handed weapons and told to shoot to kill, to make Molotov cocktails where once they made food, to be armored in body and soul. I wonder what shapes the psyche of a madman.
I find myself continuing to reflect on Susan Griffin’s masterpiece, A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War. In it, among other things, she crafts a tale of how we have been misled to believe in the inevitability of war, and that the evolving nature of warfare is never just one thing, but a series of small decisions incubated in the private lives of individuals that bear their consequences in the public life of the world and the private lives of millions. She traces the genesis of the bombing of civilian populations – from the first use of a ballista as a weapon in the 1st century CE; to the trebuchet of the Middle Ages used to hurl stones great distances; to the 14th-century invention of the breech-loading cannon -- the first weapon strong enough to destroy fortifications and render cities vulnerable; to the 19th century invention of the Gatling gun and its “enhancement” in the 20th with an electric motor that can fire 5800 rounds per minute; to the 20th century inventions of the airplane, the rocket, the missile, the atomic bomb. So many ways human creativity and genius have been enlisted for the destruction of humanity and the earth. How might the world have been different had such brilliance been enjoined toward good – toward the uplift of humanity, beyond our need for the creation of enemies, of Others, and toward the creation of art, music, poetry, libraries, sustainable food, shelter, and transportation systems, community, generosity, beauty, peace.
Griffin goes on to relay how the first aerial bombing campaign of the Germans against the British in WWI inspired Hugh Trenchard, the “father” of the British Royal Air Force, to equip British planes with machine guns and bombs to engage in retaliatory bombings against the Germans over dozens of cities. Finding a letter retrieved from an anonymous German who wrote, “One feels as if one is no longer a human being . . . one is daily, hourly prepared for the worst” (Chorus, 256), Trenchard was gratified to learn that his campaign to terrorize German citizens was working. Needing to prove the continuing usefulness of the Royal Air Force after the end of World War I, Trenchard invented a new target – the mullah of Somaliland, who had theretofore resisted British attempts at control. Successful in his campaign, Trenchard went on to establish an RAF base in Egypt in order to police and eventually bomb Iraq, creating the very conditions that decades later led to the US bombing of Iraq. And so it goes, as if we had neither the courage nor the wisdom to say, “enough.”
During this time, Lieutenant General Jan Christian Smuts, a Dutch colonizer of South Africa, had come to England to witness and study this new form of warfare, and in his now infamous “Smuts Report,” predicted that the destruction of cities through aerial bombardment would become the main way that war would be waged from then on. However, the first prediction of the destruction of cities in war predates Smuts by thousands of years. Cassandra, the Trojan priestess condemned to utter true prophecies that no one will believe, foretold it millennia ago. As given voice by Euripides[i], she cries out in warning to us all: “The agony, agony of the city utterly ruined. . . . Only a madman depopulates and plunders cities. . . . He who does so creates a desert in which he’ll perish” (Chorus, 252, 254). The war being waged on Ukraine is Cassandra’s war. We hear her cries in the weeping of old women with nowhere to go, in the wails of thousands slowly starving in the streets of Mariupol, in sobs of young men over the bodies of their mothers, in the whimpers of babes dying as they are born, in the quiet sobs of mothers after their children fall asleep while seeking refuge in bomb shelters. Only a madman indeed.
Of all the tragic and heart wrenching stories and images that are coming to us from this war, the one that has moved me most deeply is that of the young mother, who as her family packs to leave their bombed home, takes the cover off the only thing left standing – her beloved piano – dusts off the keys, and sits down to play Chopin’s Etude, Op. 25, No. 1 in A flat major.[ii] Written while Chopin was expatriated in Paris from a Russian-occupied Poland, the piece carries within it all the hope, angst, and soft release of the human heart exiled from its home. The strains continue as the camera pans the bombed-out ruins of room after room, the last notes fading as they bid farewell to the home and life they have known. It is a piece I have always treasured, played on an instrument I love. Perhaps that is why it touches me so deeply. I have fingered those same notes on the keys of my own piano many times before and since. My heart and hands feel with her as she plays. But what moves me most is the way she evokes beauty, tenderness, and love in the midst of such destruction, that she gives such a gift of life in the midst of death, that even as the very shelter around her is destroyed, she graces us with her testimony to the resilience of the human spirit. In the midst of war, she bestows on us a glimpse of a world in which brilliance is used for the creation of beauty, the enhancement of life, and the possibility of peace.
Notes
Griffin, Susan. A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War. New York: Anchor Books, 1992.
[i] Euripides, c. 480-c.406 BCE, gave voice to Cassandra’s story in his play, The Trojan Women.
[ii] One last song: Ukrainian musician plays grand piano in her bombed-out family home (firstpost.com)