Sentimentality excuses so much – focus, hard truths, complicity.
Reading Doris Lessing on her father, who lost a leg in WWI: 'His childhood and young man's memories, kept fluid, were added to, grew, as living memories do. But his war memories were congealed in stories that he told again and again, with the same words and gestures, in stereotyped phrases. They were anonymous, general, as if they had come out of a communal war memoir.'
In Lessing's telling they were all about comradeship, brave Tommies – sentiments of belonging to a great and heroic venture. This isn't quite sentimental, but more like a shield to prevent feeling, to excuse a lack of focus, to embed all that horrific reality in concrete.
Ever year we celebrated our collective inhumanity . In 2014 I made a video called erasure, and included a quote by …Harry Patch
Not long before he died in 2009 at 111, Harry Patch, the last British veteran, spoke
about the war (WW1) in raw, shocking terms. He recalled the appalling stench in the
trenches – soldiers’ latrines, rotting cadavers, sodden clothes – and rats as big as cats,
having gorged on the eyes and livers of the dead. Even what he thought of Remembrance
Day was unsettling: “just show business.” To him, war was “organized murder, and
nothing else.1
.
I felt a Funeral, in my Brain, (340)
BY EMILY DICKINSON
I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,
And Mourners to and fro
Kept treading - treading - till it seemed
That Sense was breaking through –
And when they all were seated,
A Service, like a Drum -
Kept beating - beating - till I thought
My mind was going numb –
And then I heard them lift a Box
And creak across my Soul
With those same Boots of Lead, again,
Then Space - began to toll,
As all the Heavens were a Bell,
And Being, but an Ear,
And I, and Silence, some strange Race,
Wrecked, solitary, here –
And then a Plank in Reason, broke,
And I dropped down, and down -
And hit a World, at every plunge,
And Finished knowing - then -
erasure
War, barriers, borders, race, sex, gender, slavery, mans inhumanity lives under our skin.
erasure is a project about historical amnesia.
Erasure list all (as many as were documented) wars conflicts, internal and external since
1902 to March of 2014. I am now starting again.
What I am constantly struck by is how so little changes from the Romans to Syria to Gaza
1. 1. First World War: How do we remember it meaningfully, a century later? SARAH
HAMPSON, Globe and Mail Update (includes correction)
Published Friday, Aug. 01 2014, 2:11 PM EDT.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/first-world-war-how-do-werememberit-
meaningfully-a-century-later/article19888613/?page=2
thank you Anne, for this.
I was born in 1944 in war. My daughter was born in peace on November 11, 1968.
Stephanie your post and anne o'callaghan's reflect the shocking horror and reality of war...nothing sentimental there
Sentimentality excuses so much – focus, hard truths, complicity.
Reading Doris Lessing on her father, who lost a leg in WWI: 'His childhood and young man's memories, kept fluid, were added to, grew, as living memories do. But his war memories were congealed in stories that he told again and again, with the same words and gestures, in stereotyped phrases. They were anonymous, general, as if they had come out of a communal war memoir.'
In Lessing's telling they were all about comradeship, brave Tommies – sentiments of belonging to a great and heroic venture. This isn't quite sentimental, but more like a shield to prevent feeling, to excuse a lack of focus, to embed all that horrific reality in concrete.