On Not Talking About It

[I delivered this piece at Lucky Pierre’s “What We Don’t Talk About,” a 12-hour continuous presentation on the War in Afghanistan, in Chicago, on November 5, 2011. Have a read, you might learn something.]

If the basic story of the Afghanistaniad is to be believed, the facts are as follows:  some 3,200 years ago, in October 2001 by the old Gregorian calendar, a prince of the Kingdom of Wilusa, named Alaksandu, came over the seas to a land called The United States to claim the lesbian daughter of the Viceroy Dick Cheney. This daughter had been promised to Alaksandu by the goddess Ishtar, or Ashtar, in exchange for a golden apple, the present-day whereabouts of which are currently unknown.

Thus began a bloody 14-year war that claimed many of the most promising warriors and princes of both sides, laying waste to vast and ancient olive groves and opium poppy plantations, and driving terror into the hearts of villagers and townspeople across the Hindu Kush. Terror became a fact of life, perhaps the defining fact of life, perpetrated by a people trying to put up a barricade against their own terror, the terror of having a Babylonian goddess give away your daughters for no reason--or worse than no reason: vain, reactive, thoughtless reason. The terror of vicissitude, of bad luck, or of immortal sociopaths who can neither be stopped nor succored.

Today you have heard many stories from that epic war, how George Bush, the son of George Bush, sacker of cities, poured salt into the furrows of his mesquite plantation, so that the war council would surmise he was unfit for battle, How the boastful General Stanley McChrystal pouted in his tent for days after Barack Obama, deadly archer, seized for himself the war prize slave girl Briseus. You have heard of the conversation that strong-greaved Pat Tillman had with his horse, Xanthus, before leading the Myrmidons into battle, during which Xanthus prophesied the warrior's death from friendly fire, and how the Furies punished Xanthus by striking him dumb on the spot. How in the battle of Wanat, the Waigal River became so affronted by the number of dead piling up between her banks, that she personally appealed to the United Nations for relief, forcing David Petreus, son of Sixtus, to order the destruction of the United Nations with Hellfire missiles launched from rosy-fingered drones, killing everyone inside, including the Waigal River herself. Once considered fanciful, these tales are today regarded as perhaps the best historical document of this period. And yet, even as history, these stories must be given a kind of context. Why should we care—we, with our teleportation machines, our rocket ship public transportation systems, our single unit washer and dryers, our climate controlled pantsuits, our tricorders and phasers—why should we care what happened in a war that ended over three millennia ago?

A contemporary writer from around the time the Afghanistaniad was composed, Simone Weil, who we believe may have been a Queen or regent of a state called either “DeGaulle” or “Bon Appetit,” had this to say. Please note that while we don't know with certainty what this work she calls "the Iliad" refers to, the best scholarship suggests it must have been some kind of precursor to the Afghanistaniad that all of our children know so well today. Queen Simone writes:

The true hero, the real subject, the core of the Iliad, is force. That force which is wielded by men rules over them, and before it man’s flesh cringes. The human soul never ceases to be modified by its encounter with force, swept on, blinded by that which it believes itself able to handle, bowed beneath the power of that which it suffers. Those who dreamt that force, thanks to progress, belonged henceforth to the past, have been able to see its living witness in this poem: those who know how to discern force throughout the ages, there at the heart of every human testament, find here its most beautiful, most pure of mirrors.

If I may enter a side note from my own research, later in the text, the Queen refers to a book or series of books she calls "The Gospels." These, too have been lost to us, and while most scholars today regard “The Gospels” as some kind of sex manual or pillow book, it is our belief that these manuals were never actually written down at all, but were rather a loose, orally transmitted song cycle, performed by wandering bards and troubadours, each of whom added his or her own signature feats of sexual congress to the recitation.

The text continues:

The progress of war in the Iliad is simply a continual game of seesaw. The victor of the moment feels himself invincible, even though only a few hours before he may have experienced defeat; he forgets to treat victory as a transitory thing. At the end of the first day of combat described in the Iliad, the victorious Greeks were in a position to obtain the object of all their efforts, i.e. Helen and her riches. That evening, the Greeks are no longer interested in her or her possessions.

“For the present, let us not accept the riches of Paris
Nor Helen; everybody sees, even the most ignorant,
That Troy stands on the verge of ruin,”
He spoke and all the Acheans acclaimed him.

What they want is, in fact, everything. For booty, all the riches of Troy; for their bonfires, all the palaces, temples, houses; for slaves, all the women and children, for corpses, all the men.

The auditors of the Iliad knew that the death of Hector would be but a brief joy to Achilles, and the death of Achilles a brief joy to the Trojans, and the destruction of Troy but a brief joy to the Achaeans. Thus violence obliterates anybody who feels its touch. The conquered brings misfortune to the conqueror, and vice versa.

How tragically this echoes the themes we see treated in that much more famous poem, the Afghanistaniad, not to mention—for those unable to ignore them—recent developments of our own war-torn time, some three millennia later.

We believe that the year Queen Simone wrote these words, the year 1940 by the Gregorian Calendar, was a time of great peace for the nation of Bon Appetit and her neighbors. But we know from fragments of another epic poem called the Annamiad or Vietnamiad, that this could not last. I would like to close with a recently discovered musical fragment of that latter poem—please excuse me while I see if I I can get this ancient 3,000 year old technology to operate properly. This device was called “Your Tube,” which we believe refers to the Eustachian tube in the middle ear, reflecting the fashion of the time for music to sound as though one was hearing it from deep within a long hallway, warm and dark, and covered with fine and sensitive hairs.  

Song for the Corpses
Trinh Cong Son

Dead bodies float along the river
They lie in the rice fields, soaked in sunlight
On the rooftops of the city
On the winding, tortuous streets

Dead bodies lying around aimlessly
Beneath the verandas of pagodas
Within the churches of the city
At the doorstep of deserted houses

Oh, Spring, the corpses deliver a scent to the rice paddies
Oh, Vietnam, the corpses breathe life into tomorrow’s soil
The path forward, though full of treacherous obstacles
Because humans have already resided here

Dead bodies lying around here
Beneath the cold, pattering rain
Beside the dead bodies of the old and weak
Lie the dead bodies of the young and innocent

Which body is the body of my sibling?
Within this dark cave
Within the scorched areas
Beside the maize and sweet potato fields.