My previous post exhibits the poem "Violets from Plug Street Wood," which was written by a soldier in WWI for a British nurse. I ran across this poem in the book Testament of Youth, which is the memoirs of Vera Brittain, the recipient of the poem. (I read the book as a choice reading assignment for AP Euro; maybe Justin's not that far off in claiming that AP Comp borders on being a history class.)
I read Testament in November, and couldn't help comparing it to The Things They Carried. The two books are incredibly, completely different: one is a bitter, laconic loose collection of fiction stories about American soldiers in the Vietnam War, the other is a 660-page tome of precise chronological recollections based exactingly on the journal entries of a British V.A.D. in WWI. Two vastly different wars, two different times, countries, positions, sexes, approaches. Here comes the depressing part: they both end in almost exactly the same place.
Vera's memoirs go on to describe her return to England after the war and her work there, and it is clear that she and others of her generation suffered from a condition of horrible disconnect and sickening isolation. She says that, quite literally, "all her friends are dead." The older and younger generations, and those of her generation who stayed behind, seem smug, distant, and cruel; One professor said to a soldier returning to Oxford simply, "...you've been away a long time....It's a pity--a great pity; you'll have to work very hard to catch up with the others!" The general opinion, as Vera experienced it, had switched from the 1914 view that the War was more important than anything else to the view that the War was a useless waste of resources, and that those who participated were fools. Those of the War Generation were alone, disenfranchised, psychologically and emotionally scarred. Vera Brittain cannot have been the only one who had trouble forming new relationships because she was, as she said, "afraid of giving life the means wherewith to deal me another of its major blows."
Perhaps because she was publishing under her own name a work that was meant to be a historical record, and not allowing herself the slight separation that O'Brien did when he published "fiction," she seems loath to discuss certain personal aspects of her experiences. Brittain does, however, make it quite clear that she suffered for some time from psychosis and later had a second, shorter but complete mental breakdown. She was not at the font lines, but she suffered incredible strain, illness, trauma from attack and the sometimes constant sound of nearby shelling, and experience with an "inundation of blood and pus," with stuffing men's intestines back in their bellies and watching others die from mustard gas, opening a Christmastime package to find her love's shirt, still stained and with a hole torn in it, hearing his pointless last words, and meeting all of this with the ultimate disapproval of her war-weary country.
Most heartbreaking of all, she recovered enough from it to lead a creative life in journalism and dedicated her energies to the support of peace efforts and the League of Nations so that she could with fresh optimism and life do all her small part in preventing the similar suffering of others, then she married and had children, who would have been exactly the right age to be drafted into WWII.
If her children survived to reproduce, their children probably would have been a bit young to be drafted into Vietnam.
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
Sunday, February 21, 2010
Violets from Plug Street Wood
I've been trying to read this poem at the beginning of class for a couple of weeks now, but it never seems like the right time, or else Kunkle's already got something in mind, so I'm going to do a blog post on it instead.
Sour Grapes: I can get in more background information: This poem was written by Roland Leighton in 1915 for Vera Brittain. The two of them were been sweethearts, or lovers, or something--it's difficult to settle on a word. Had they remained together, they certainly would have married, because they were madly in love with each other's beautiful intellects and sexy Oxford English degrees (no joke). As it was, they never even became engaged because when WWI broke out they both thought it was more important that Roland enlist with the British forces and Vera sign up as a nurse.
Roland was a poet long before the war and wrote Vera many poems over the course of their relationship. This is a poem he sent to her in England while he was stationed in Ploegsteert Wood in Belgium. The envelope contained actual violets, whose color, she claimed, was still blue when she received them.
R.A.L.
Ploegsteert Wood, April 1915
I chose this poem for this class because it reminds me, distantly, of "The Man I Killed" from Tim O'Brien's book. Think of the phrase "dear, far, forgetting land." More on this later.
Sour Grapes: I can get in more background information: This poem was written by Roland Leighton in 1915 for Vera Brittain. The two of them were been sweethearts, or lovers, or something--it's difficult to settle on a word. Had they remained together, they certainly would have married, because they were madly in love with each other's beautiful intellects and sexy Oxford English degrees (no joke). As it was, they never even became engaged because when WWI broke out they both thought it was more important that Roland enlist with the British forces and Vera sign up as a nurse.
Roland was a poet long before the war and wrote Vera many poems over the course of their relationship. This is a poem he sent to her in England while he was stationed in Ploegsteert Wood in Belgium. The envelope contained actual violets, whose color, she claimed, was still blue when she received them.
VILLANELLEViolets from Plug Street Wood,
Sweet, I send you oversea.
(It is strange they should be blue,
Blue when his soaked blood was red,
For they grew around his head ;
It is strange they should be blue.)Violets from Plug Street Wood---
Violets from oversea,
Think what they have meant to me---
Life and Hope and Love and You
(And you did not see them grow
Where his mangled body lay,
Hiding horror from the day ;
Sweetest, it was better so.)
To your dear, far, forgetting land
These I send in memory,
Knowing You will understand.
R.A.L.
Ploegsteert Wood, April 1915
I chose this poem for this class because it reminds me, distantly, of "The Man I Killed" from Tim O'Brien's book. Think of the phrase "dear, far, forgetting land." More on this later.
Aren't You Lucky
Since I've been sick I've spent some of my more mindless minutes doing what any good middle-class American teenager of today would do: watching lots of YouTube videos. On Friday I came across this one:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgAU5XQ2HnY
Maybe it's a bit thin for a blog post, and the sentiment certainly isn't an original one, but I enjoyed the simplicity of the satire. The message is worded into a children's song of few words, each of the first three lines beginning with a rhetorical "Aren't you lucky." It is a phrase we're all used to hearing, and it is delivered with the kind of assured earnestness every child hears from at least one or two adults along the way.
I remember hearing these specific words from a long line of family members and teachers, and I think I believed all of them to some extent. The bizarre thing is that now I'm also used to hearing people my age repeat it back to me.
So what do we think of it now? There are lots of ways to take it. You would think that certainly in those awful countries where everyone is being treated so poorly they don't feel lucky, and it does "suck" to be born over there, but those people also have their own cultures and ideals that seem like the only right ones to them. And you can argue that there are people who are really, truly dissatisfied with their situations and find them unjust, but we have those people here in the U.S. too.
Of course I can't help but think that my version of Western culture is generally right, and therefore that other cultures must be wrong where they contradict my own beliefs. At least I don't take it for granted anymore that the U.S. is always infallible, though, or assume that it's the only place where anyone can be happy.
I apologize for this weakish post; I didn't really know where I was going with it, but I'm hoping that at least it might get you thinking. Also, you should know that WKUK, or "Whitest Kids U Know," has produced several more sketches which include irreverent criticisms of European and American history. You can find them on YouTube if you are feeling dispatriotic, but many, though hilarious, are inappropriate for incorporation in a school assignment. I just want to give you some context.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgAU5XQ2HnY
Maybe it's a bit thin for a blog post, and the sentiment certainly isn't an original one, but I enjoyed the simplicity of the satire. The message is worded into a children's song of few words, each of the first three lines beginning with a rhetorical "Aren't you lucky." It is a phrase we're all used to hearing, and it is delivered with the kind of assured earnestness every child hears from at least one or two adults along the way.
I remember hearing these specific words from a long line of family members and teachers, and I think I believed all of them to some extent. The bizarre thing is that now I'm also used to hearing people my age repeat it back to me.
So what do we think of it now? There are lots of ways to take it. You would think that certainly in those awful countries where everyone is being treated so poorly they don't feel lucky, and it does "suck" to be born over there, but those people also have their own cultures and ideals that seem like the only right ones to them. And you can argue that there are people who are really, truly dissatisfied with their situations and find them unjust, but we have those people here in the U.S. too.
Of course I can't help but think that my version of Western culture is generally right, and therefore that other cultures must be wrong where they contradict my own beliefs. At least I don't take it for granted anymore that the U.S. is always infallible, though, or assume that it's the only place where anyone can be happy.
I apologize for this weakish post; I didn't really know where I was going with it, but I'm hoping that at least it might get you thinking. Also, you should know that WKUK, or "Whitest Kids U Know," has produced several more sketches which include irreverent criticisms of European and American history. You can find them on YouTube if you are feeling dispatriotic, but many, though hilarious, are inappropriate for incorporation in a school assignment. I just want to give you some context.
Sunday, February 7, 2010
"We"
Several times during the past two weeks of discussion I noticed that people sometimes use the first person "we" when they are referring to European colonists. Logically, this does not make sense. None of us, in fact, nobody alive today, was one of those colonists.
Usually when we say "we" we are talking about the degradation/displacement/killing of Native Americans. This makes sense on a psychological level: we want to release ourselves from social culpability by accepting guilt for actions of members of our race against members of another race (none of the [originally] subjugated Native Americans are alive today either, though their descendants have to live with the consequences.).
So I have a question. Is it right or necessary for us, modern Americans European descent, to identify ourselves with the European conquerors of the 1600s?
On one hand, we shouldn't need to. None of us have killed Indians, most or all of us have never done anything to directly harm Native Americans individually or as a race, culture, or nation. A great many of us are not the descendants of "original" English colonists; I for one am mostly non-English, and both sides of my family came to America long after the colonial period.
On the other hand, we cannot deny that English colonists through force established themselves as the dominant social order on the North American continent, and that perhaps all of us who have inherited that social order and its dominance through the virtue of our race only have responsibility for it by virtue of our race only.
On the third hand, identifying ourselves so closely with the colonists simply because of our race must reinforce the concept of our race as a whole and revive its status as subjugator. By accepting responsibility for the actions of historical white Europeans, we are to some degree taking on the racial role and transferring it to modern times.
Usually when we say "we" we are talking about the degradation/displacement/killing of Native Americans. This makes sense on a psychological level: we want to release ourselves from social culpability by accepting guilt for actions of members of our race against members of another race (none of the [originally] subjugated Native Americans are alive today either, though their descendants have to live with the consequences.).
So I have a question. Is it right or necessary for us, modern Americans European descent, to identify ourselves with the European conquerors of the 1600s?
On one hand, we shouldn't need to. None of us have killed Indians, most or all of us have never done anything to directly harm Native Americans individually or as a race, culture, or nation. A great many of us are not the descendants of "original" English colonists; I for one am mostly non-English, and both sides of my family came to America long after the colonial period.
On the other hand, we cannot deny that English colonists through force established themselves as the dominant social order on the North American continent, and that perhaps all of us who have inherited that social order and its dominance through the virtue of our race only have responsibility for it by virtue of our race only.
On the third hand, identifying ourselves so closely with the colonists simply because of our race must reinforce the concept of our race as a whole and revive its status as subjugator. By accepting responsibility for the actions of historical white Europeans, we are to some degree taking on the racial role and transferring it to modern times.
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