Notes on war and youth

(Image: Total Eclipse of the Sun, Étienne Léopold Trouvelot, 1878.)

The voices of so many anguished reach pinnacles of timbre, crowding one another out, in a desperate reach for air that fails them. So many hands reach toward the sun in empty prayer. Prayers themselves are forgotten at the ends of verse. The grace of intention lies abandoned, for there is no-one who would tend the bitter soil into abundance.

. . . . .

To paraphrase Antoine de Saint-Exupéry in Wind, Sand and Stars, all wars are truly with our own selves. From the front-lines of the Spanish civil war, witnessing the bloodthirst, confusion and ignorance among the fascists and anti-fascists alike, Saint-Exupéry described war as evidence of a deeply intimate disease. “Those men were not going up to the front in the exaltation of certain victory, they were struggling blindly against infection. And the same thing was going on in the enemy camp,” he wrote. “The purpose of this struggle was not to rid the country of an invading foreigner but to eradicate the plague. It attacks from within. It propagates in the invisible. Walking the streets, whoever belongs to a Party feels himself surrounded by secretly infected men.”

In his 1984 speech, Politics and Conscience, Vaclav Havel invoked a politics “growing from the heart, not from a thesis.” Such language reaches into this moment as a profound appeal beyond the divides of ideology and geopolitical strategy — beyond the maneuvers of Cold Wars and New Cold Wars — that necessitates a maturation of human being that begins not in an idealistic ‘innocence’, but in facing the fecundating darkness that unites humanity. Such movement begins, as he describes, with “an international community of the shaken”.

“We must not be ashamed that we are capable of love, friendship, solidarity, sympathy, and tolerance, but just the opposite: we must set these fundamental dimensions of our humanity free from their “private” exile and accept them as the only genuine starting point of meaningful human community. […] It is not an accident that this hopeful experience has to be lived just here, on this grim battlement. Under the “rule of everydayness” we have to descend to the very bottom of a well before we can see the stars.”

The hope that lingers at the bottom of Pandora’s box, following José Martí’s image, has always been placed on the shoulders of the young. With a world that is always arriving instantaneously through electronic devices, social networks, infrastructures of knowledge that know no boundaries of privacy or age, is there still childhood on this planet? In The Time of the Assassins, Henry Miller portrays the suffering of Rimbaud as the Passion facing every artist, poet, who stands as eternal witness to the human condition, the profound wrestling with existential despair as a mediumistic expression. Miller depicts Rimbaud’s anguished flight from life, through life, as a reflection, a transit for an era whose cruelty begins to surpass the edges of humanity. What grief attends to the young, to the artists of this age.

As Miller writes in 1946, transporting his insight from the echoes of the Second World War into the long, sustained chord of despair that grips the planet now: “How can one know the splendor and fullness of youth if one’s energies are consumed in combating the errors and falsities of parents and ancestors? Is youth to waste its strength unlocking the grip of death? Is youth’s only mission on earth to rebel, to destroy, to assassinate? Is youth only to be offered up for sacrifice?”