Warriors
I dipped again this morning into Glenn Gray's Warriors. He tries to write in the most detached and impersonal way, the author, but it's his voice that first drew me into this book and that I remembered best: quiet, even-keeled, warm, the voice of a reader rather than that of a story-teller. In that group of men sitting around a fire, listening as intently as they watch the blaze.
The story-teller in the book is him as he was when a young man, writing alone to himself in his journal. Old enough to talk but not old enough yet to understand what he's said. Summer 1944: 'What do I think of this new adventure looming before me? Today I have thought about it for the first time. It will be dangerous, that is certain. It will also be difficult. But somehow I am unable to anticipate. I simply await -- and dream of the end of the war. I daydream more than I used to.'
Out of the sequence on love in war, friendship and camaraderie:'Comradeship wants to break down the walls of self, friendship seeks to expand these walls and keep them intact. The one relationship is ecstatic, the other is wholly individual. Comrades are content to be what they are and to rest in their emotional bliss. Friends must always explore and probe each other, in the attempt to make each one complete through drawing out the secrets of another's being. Yet each recognizes that the inner fountain of the other is inexhaustible. Friends are not satiable, as comrades so often are when danger is past.'
I writing next to this, once, The wilderness of solitude expanding crossing each by each -- And then, how one can hardly say what one person can be for another. It's not enough to call it love or friendship. It's the other's closeness that makes our solitude each other's and all the country spanning us, past open summits and ravines, a bridge as much ours as it is theirs. Good company amplifies these open places -- here, where we walk together. Here the solitude, dark and wooded and rugged, we make by being together.
The west, too dark by now with clouds, and the fog rising up and spreading over the grass, the fields (a warm night coming and the grass cold to meet it), and tilting still into unphotographable night, the public in me growing increasingly private, pensive --
What can't be photographed I can still see. And my thoughts like the falling leaves and the mist rising up from within, in the shining and the visible dark --
The intermediate hour when thoughts ripen and grow as heavy as fruit, as fallen apples in wet grass, and one feels the night transparent, the crickets alive as the deep hush of blood, in silence. There's a fire blazing in the dark, and men are sitting around it -- and how soft the fire shimmering where it holds against the night, and where I'm passing through.
Of love, and the naiveté of love in wartime, as though all the war were in spring, and all winter past so long as the blood continue to shed. He talks of the 'sensualist' soldier, but pivots and dodges here a bit more carefully than elsewhere. I remember Rosenberg and his 'Joy! Joy! Strange Joy!' and the 'dark hair' of the girl, night falling, as the poem closes and the bombs touch down in some other place.
And in one of his other letters, the one that opens the book: 'I shall go on. Plato wrote of the wise man caught in an evil time who refuses to take part in the crimes of his fellow citizens and takes refuge behind a wall until the storm is past. Plato understood. But I am too deeply involved.' And if there's one thread I could pull through this book, it's that war touches everything and everyone with a terrible simplicity like that of love. 'I shall always be guilty as long as I belong to a nation at all,' he says, and remembers Nietzsche's image of the modern nation-state as a cold snake. Rather perish than hate and fear, and twice rather perish than make oneself hated and feared!
The story-teller in the book is him as he was when a young man, writing alone to himself in his journal. Old enough to talk but not old enough yet to understand what he's said. Summer 1944: 'What do I think of this new adventure looming before me? Today I have thought about it for the first time. It will be dangerous, that is certain. It will also be difficult. But somehow I am unable to anticipate. I simply await -- and dream of the end of the war. I daydream more than I used to.'
Out of the sequence on love in war, friendship and camaraderie:'Comradeship wants to break down the walls of self, friendship seeks to expand these walls and keep them intact. The one relationship is ecstatic, the other is wholly individual. Comrades are content to be what they are and to rest in their emotional bliss. Friends must always explore and probe each other, in the attempt to make each one complete through drawing out the secrets of another's being. Yet each recognizes that the inner fountain of the other is inexhaustible. Friends are not satiable, as comrades so often are when danger is past.'
I writing next to this, once, The wilderness of solitude expanding crossing each by each -- And then, how one can hardly say what one person can be for another. It's not enough to call it love or friendship. It's the other's closeness that makes our solitude each other's and all the country spanning us, past open summits and ravines, a bridge as much ours as it is theirs. Good company amplifies these open places -- here, where we walk together. Here the solitude, dark and wooded and rugged, we make by being together.
The west, too dark by now with clouds, and the fog rising up and spreading over the grass, the fields (a warm night coming and the grass cold to meet it), and tilting still into unphotographable night, the public in me growing increasingly private, pensive --
What can't be photographed I can still see. And my thoughts like the falling leaves and the mist rising up from within, in the shining and the visible dark --
The intermediate hour when thoughts ripen and grow as heavy as fruit, as fallen apples in wet grass, and one feels the night transparent, the crickets alive as the deep hush of blood, in silence. There's a fire blazing in the dark, and men are sitting around it -- and how soft the fire shimmering where it holds against the night, and where I'm passing through.
Of love, and the naiveté of love in wartime, as though all the war were in spring, and all winter past so long as the blood continue to shed. He talks of the 'sensualist' soldier, but pivots and dodges here a bit more carefully than elsewhere. I remember Rosenberg and his 'Joy! Joy! Strange Joy!' and the 'dark hair' of the girl, night falling, as the poem closes and the bombs touch down in some other place.
And in one of his other letters, the one that opens the book: 'I shall go on. Plato wrote of the wise man caught in an evil time who refuses to take part in the crimes of his fellow citizens and takes refuge behind a wall until the storm is past. Plato understood. But I am too deeply involved.' And if there's one thread I could pull through this book, it's that war touches everything and everyone with a terrible simplicity like that of love. 'I shall always be guilty as long as I belong to a nation at all,' he says, and remembers Nietzsche's image of the modern nation-state as a cold snake. Rather perish than hate and fear, and twice rather perish than make oneself hated and feared!