Glossing Sons and Lovers

Paul Morel, the hero of D. H. Lawrence's autobiographical 1913 novel—he started writing it when he was just 24—is an artistic young man who frees himself from the love of three women so he can devote himself to his one true love: Paul Morel.

In the first half of the book, there is a slow unfolding of the experiences that shape Paul's development. We, along with the young Paul, watch his drunken working class father brutalize and humiliate his more refined, educated mother. But old Morel isn't all bad. While unconscious of "higher things," he enjoys simple, physical pleasures with gusto. He likes to get up early and, while the rest of the family is still in bed, make his own breakfast:

He made the tea, packed the bottom of the doors with rugs to shut out the draught, piled a big fire, and sat down to an hour of joy. He toasted his bacon on a fork and caught the drops of fat on his bread; then he put the rasher on his thick slice of bread, and cut off chunks with a clasp-knife, poured his tea into his saucer, and was happy.

Meanwhile, the mother's thwarted desires are channeled into her son. When one of Paul's paintings wins a prize, he brings it home to her and she exclaims, in tears:

Didn't I say we should do it!

Paul rather enjoys being a star. One day he has his mother, sister, and girlfriend all competing for his favor as he reads them a poem:

He was in very high feather...everybody thought it clever. He thought so too...he was master of the party; his father was no good.

This harem of admiring women makes him feel that he is someone extraordinary, someone important. Too important to waste his life on ordinary things:

Damn your happiness!—he cries—so long as life's full, it doesn't matter whether it's happy or not. I'm afraid your happiness would bore me.

Paul doesn't find the fullness that he requires from life in Miriam, his first girlfriend. Miriam's limits are foreshadowed in an early scene in which she cannot let herself go sufficiently to enjoy a swing in the barn:

"No higher!" she cries in fear as Paul pushes her. Her heart melted in hot pain when the moment came for him to thrust her forward again. But he left her alone. She began to breathe.

About half way through the book, Lawrence gets tired of showing and begins telling. Paul, for example, explains (via a subjective third person narrator) his fear of sex as a fear of hurting the woman—an attitude that, he says, resulted from his exposure to the violence in his parents' relationship:

He did not feel that he wanted marriage with Miriam. He wished he did. He would have given his head to have felt a joyous desire to marry her and to have her. Then why couldn't he bring it off? There was some obstacle; and what was the obstacle? It lay in the physical bondage. He shrank from the physical contact. But why? With her he felt bound up inside himself. He could not go out to her. Something struggled in him, but he could not get to her. Why? She loved him...she even wanted him; then why couldn't he go to her, make love to her, kiss her?

He looked round. A good many of the nicest men he knew were like himself, bound in by their own virginity, which they could not break out of. They were so sensitive to their women that they would go without them forever rather than do them a hurt, an injustice. Being the sons of mothers whose husbands had blundered rather brutally through their feminine sanctities, they were themselves too diffident and shy. They could easier deny themselves than incur any reproach from a woman; for a woman was like their mother, and they were full of the sense of their mother. They preferred themselves to suffer the misery of celibacy, rather than risk the other person.

So sex equals marriage equals bondage equals torture and enslavement. Why struggle for freedom from parents, religion, and society, only to throw away that freedom by creating another family, another cycle of bondage?

Especially if the woman is afraid of sex too. A few pages later, it's Miriam's turn to explain why:

All my life...Mother said to me: "There is one thing in marriage that is always dreadful, but you have to bear it." And I believed it.

So what do two sexually frustrated young people do? Turn to religion?

As Paul was growing up, his churchgoing mother enjoyed an intellectual friendship with her pastor, but she was essentially rational. When the clergyman spoke to her about how love elevates a man's spirit, filling it with the Holy Ghost, so that "almost his form is altered," she would dismiss such ideas as "quaint and fantastic." Paul took after his mother—smart, loving any kind of an argument, no matter if it dealt with religion, philosophy, or politics—though when he was little, he had a "fervent private religion":

'Lord, let my father die,' he prayed very often.

But when, during his adolescence, he begins to spend a lot of time with Miriam and her family, Paul becomes intrigued—both attracted and repelled—by the mysterious religious atmosphere that Miriam and her mother exude, an atmosphere in which every emotion is intensified by its holiness. Partly through their inspiration, he begins to express an appreciation for "something in Nature," a kind of universal life force, a force that is the "shimmer" in the leaves that he tries to capture in his painting:

It's as if I'd painted the shimmering protoplasm in the leaves and everywhere, and not the stiffness of the shape. That seems dead to me. Only the shimmeriness is the real living. The shape is a dead crust.

He and Miriam spend a lot of time in the woods, swooning over flowers:

It was very still...in bosses of ivory and in large splashed stars the roses gleamed on the darkness of foliage and stems and grass... Paul looked into Miriam's eyes. She was pale and expectant with wonder, her lips were parted, and her dark eyes lay open to him. His look seemed to travel down into her. Her soul quivered. It was the communion she wanted.

For Paul, this flirtation with mysticism is one more step away from the orthodox creed of the church. "He was setting now full sail towards Agnosticism," Lawrence writes. Paul discusses all of this with Miriam. He "bled her beliefs till she almost lost consciousness." His next step is to let religious questions fade into the background:

He had shoveled away all the beliefs that would hamper him, had cleared the ground, and come more or less to the bedrock of belief that one should feel inside oneself for right and wrong, and should have the patience to gradually realise one's God.

When the self becomes a God, it can yield to the universal life force without fear of losing its own power and identity. And so Paul moves on to Clara, to his "baptism of fire in passion."

Paul endured one such baptism, of a sort, when he suffered through his parents' quarrels as a boy. Then, as a young man, he looks for it again. He finds it, fleetingly, in sexual love—although the woman he uses as a vehicle turns out to be unimportant:

All the while the peewits were screaming in the field. When he came to, he wondered what was near his eyes, curving and strong with life in the dark, and what voice it was speaking. Then he realised it was the grass, and the peewit was calling. The warmth was Clara's breath heaving. He lifted his head, and looked into her eyes. They were dark and shining and strange, life wild at the source staring into his life, stranger to him, yet meeting him; and he put his face down on her throat, afraid. What was she? A strong, strange, wild life, that breathed with his in the darkness through this hour. It was all so much bigger than themselves that he was hushed. They had met, and included in their meeting the thrust of the manifold grass stems, the cry of the peewit, the wheel of the stars...

In the morning he had considerable peace, and was happy in himself. It seemed almost as if he had known the baptism of fire in passion, and it left him at rest. But it was not Clara. It was something that happened because of her, but it was not her. They were scarcely any nearer each other. It was as if they had been blind agents of a great force.

Clara, conveniently, is a married woman. After Paul's fiery baptism, he returns Clara to her husband. About this time, Paul's mother begins a long, slow death from cancer. Paul is infuriated that she is no longer young and pretty. He gives her an overdose of morphine to hasten the end.

At last, Paul is free. Free from Clara. Free from Miriam. Free from...

"Mother!" he whispered—"mother!"

She was the only thing that held him up, himself, amid all this. And she was gone, intermingled herself. He wanted her to touch him, have him alongside with her.

But no, he would not give in. Turning sharply, he walked towards the city's gold phosphorescence. His fists were shut, his mouth set fast. He would not take that direction, to the darkness, to follow her. He walked towards the faintly humming, glowing town, quickly.

Frans de Waal's 'Peacemaking Among Primates'

In his book Peacemaking Among Primates, Dutch ethologist Frans de Waal reports his observations of a broad pattern of primate social behavior that he terms "reconciliation." Reconciliation, as de Waal defines it for non-human primates, is the occurrence of "friendly" body contact between former adversaries. In order for it to be measured scientifically, reconciliation must occur within a certain time period after an aggressive encounter. The time limits in two of de Waal's studies, both of primate groups in captivity, were 10 and 30 minutes, although he suspects that chimpanzees sometimes take hours or even up to a day to reconcile. In the four species that de Waal observed (common chimpanzees, bonobos, Rhesus monkeys, and stump-tailed monkeys), there was a wide variety of both aggressive and conciliatory acts. Aggressive acts included chasing, hitting, biting, trampling, screaming, and threatening displays, while reconciliation was expressed by gentler physical contact, ranging from a brief brushing together of fur as one animal passed another to mutual sexual stimulation.

Reconciliation in non-human primates reaches its peak of subtlety and complexity in the chimpanzees, Pan troglodytes (the common chimp) and Pan paniscus (the bonobo). The highly developed intelligence and social awareness of these species give rise to intricate dramas of conflict and peacemaking. Observation of a group of captive common chimps over a period of several years revealed that 40% of their aggressive encounters were followed by reconciliation within half an hour. Males reconciled with males 47% of the time, while the rate for females with females was 18%. The incidence of reconciliation between the sexes was intermediate between those two values. The characteristic conciliatory act in this species is the mouth-to-mouth kiss, although an outstretched arm and hand, eye contact, vocalization, grooming, hugging, mounting, and genital touching are also seen. Social groups of common chimpanzees maintain a dominance hierarchy, especially noticeable among males, and, while aggression is usually initiated by a more dominant individual, the initiative for reconciliation is divided equally between dominants and subordinates. Often a dominant will require submissive behavior from a former adversary before consenting to reconcile. Many other variations on the basic theme of reconciliation have been observed in common chimps. On several occasions, de Waal saw one chimp invite a former opponent to reconcile, only to renew the attack when the other chimp approached. Sometimes a female will act as mediator between two males who, although they seem to want reconciliation, are reluctant to make the first move. Another way males may "save face" is to pretend interest in an imaginary or insignificant object. This allows them to approach each other without having to explicitly acknowledge their recent conflict.

Bonobos have not been studied as much as common chimps, but a few differences have been observed in their styles of reconciliation. Peacemaking in bonobos occurs in the context of a somewhat different social structure. In contrast to chimpanzee society, bonobos have no central group of bonded males, and there is no clear dominance of males over females. Bonobos, at least in captivity, are on the whole more gentle than common chimps. Their aggressive encounters are usually very short-lived, and do not escalate into the serious violence sometimes seen in P. troglodytes. In de Waal's observations, reconciliation occurred at a higher rate among bonobos than it did among common chimps. Also, bonobo reconciliations were initiated primarily by the more dominant individual, which is different than the pattern mentioned above. Since, in both species, it's usually the dominant who started the fight in the first place, bonobos are like humans in that it is the "guilty" party who pleads forgiveness, not the victim. But the most characteristic aspect of bonobo reconciliation is its incorporation of sexual activity, which occurs between individuals of every combination of sex and age. Bonobos are much more sexually active in general than are common chimps, and they seem to use sex as a release of tension in competitive situations. In fact, de Waal thinks that they have gone one step beyond reconciliation, in that they actually use sex to forestall violence, rather than just to repair it.

De Waal concludes that the complexity and diversity of chimpanzee and bonobo behavior are evidence that these animals are not mere automatons obeying instinctual drives—on the contrary, they are aware of themselves, of the past and future, of who their friends, relatives, and enemies are, and of the importance of maintaining good relationships with others. This high level of consciousness must have evolved slowly, step by step, as, over the millennia, early primates who tried group living had greater reproductive success than less social individuals. There are benefits to social life, but there are also costs. A major cost is the greater competition for mates and resources that results from increased population density. Aggression helps an individual compete, but unchecked aggression would lead to disruption of the social structure and dispersal of the group. Therefore, techniques of controlling aggression are important. Reconciliation is just one pattern of aggression management. Other methods include restraint by a third party, the maintenance of dominance hierarchies, pre-conflict appeasement, and attacks on outsiders. Sometimes aggression escapes management and escalates into fatal violence. But, for the most part, when the inevitable clashes arise, this extreme is avoided, and it appears that the primate ability to kiss and make up may be one of the more important reasons why.

Judge me.

We had a dachshund when I was six. A little wiener-shaped dog. My pretentious father named it 'Truth'. My mother ran over it while backing out of the driveway. Truth was buried beneath a pine tree. My sisters made me feel guilty, because I had tied my red wagon to the passenger side of the car (it was unseen by my mother as she entered on the driver's side), and they thought the noise of the banging wagon confused Truth so she couldn't escape.

This has haunted me ever since.

So what do you think? Am I guilty of mangling Truth, or not?

A little Sunday soil science

In Jewish tradition, or at least so I've heard, a butcher knife was purified by burying it in the ground for several weeks. This seemingly paradoxical use of dirt to clean is evidence that humans long ago recognized a mysterious transforming power in soil, "that element where," as a poet said, "life and death are exquisitely balanced." When we study the chemistry and biology of soil, we can see examples of the soil's transforming power.

The soil taken as a whole can be looked on as a catalytic system. This system has many interrelated subsystems, some biological, some abiotic. The abiotic catalysts are surfaces. Soil is a region where surfaces, or interfaces between phases, are dominant. The ocean is all wet. Rocks are merely solid. The atmosphere is fairly homogeneous. But in soil, the three phases are intimately commingled. The solid surfaces grow and dissolve, bind species from the liquid phase, and release them again, exchanging them for other ones. In these processes, electrons sometimes jump from one species to another. For example, certain organic molecules trade electrons fairly readily with iron and manganese ions. The organics can lose electrons to solid iron and manganese oxides, which become reduced to soluble Fe²⁺ and Mn²⁺. Thus, the oxides are gradually dissolved. If oxygen is present, it may be able to reoxidize the metal cations (even though it was unable to directly oxidize the original organic molecule). In this case, the oxides do not dissolve, but act strictly as catalysts for the oxidation of the organic compounds.

Life has elaborated on the theme of surface reactions. Cells are full of membranes, which are a kind of surface, although a liquid-liquid one, made possible by the immiscibility of polar and non-polar molecules. And enzymes are protein molecules that form a surface of just the right shape and charge distribution to catalyze a particular reaction. Many soil transformations depend on these biological catalysts. Nitrogen and oxygen are shy strangers going their separate ways in the well-lit atmosphere, but once they are pulled into the dark nightclub of the soil, they lose their inhibitions and are lured into an intricate dance of combination and recombination, fueled by the energy in reduced carbon and lubricated by enzymes of the soil bacteria Nitrosomonas and Nitrobacter. Nitrogen may lose as many as five of its electrons, but its innocence can be redeemed if oxygen becomes depleted and the denitrifying bacteria—like cops to the rescue, or priests dispensing absolution—arrive on the scene and restore what was lost. Nitrogen limps back to its home in the sky, but is no wiser for the experience, for the next day the whole thing happens again...and again...and again, in an endless cycle.

The surfaces in the soil are stages on which chemical and biochemical dramas are played out.

Confession of a soul searcher

I was raised in California by communists from Texas. Actually, my father was the one who railed against the opiate of the people. My mother tried, once or twice, to sneak my four sisters and me into the Methodist church, where she had grown up (my father was raised Episcopalian, and his grandfather was one of the early Jehovah's Witnesses), but my father stopped her. So I grew up without the concept of "the soul." It was just another one of those mysterious words, like "god" and "love," that other people made a lot of fuss about. I could see clearly right through myself, and I was sure that I didn't have a soul. Interestingly, my three youngest sisters were equally sure that they did have souls, and, who knows, maybe they did. They were all a lot louder than I was. Maybe their souls were the source of all that jabbering.

What I believed in, when I was a boy, were Science and Revolution. My father was a physician and scientist as well as a political activist. As children, my sisters and I were happy, both because it's the nature of children to be happy, and because we thought we were, somehow, at the vanguard of history. Let the other kids talk about what they'd seen on TV the night before...we didn't have a television because TV was bourgeois, and it, along with the rest of the establishment, was going to be swept away soon anyhow and be replaced by an idyllic new world of selfless love and selfless work. Or so we believed. But the solidarity of our family proved to be an illusion. As we children entered adolescence, the family dissolved into a chaos of betrayal and madness. My father left us. My oldest sister married, at 16, a much older man and moved away to the east coast. My next two sisters had mental breakdowns and were hospitalized. I started writing poetry and took a long detour from science (I had been doing pre-med at Berkeley). I did little but read for many years, supporting myself with various short-term laboring jobs. Finally I concluded that nature was wiser than man. My ideal was to live in such a way that doctors and lawyers, symbols of man's authority, were unnecessary. This I proposed to do by becoming a peasant, living within nature as much as I could. I worked on farms, met and married a woman, we had a child, and then my wife left me to go back to the comfort of her suburban family. I realized that my peasant life was too limiting. I was a happy animal, but I wasn't a man. I returned to school at the age of 39 and got bachelor's and master's degrees in agronomy. I found that I could get along with agronomy students, many of whom were from other countries. So now I travel the world, planting my seeds. A couple of years ago, not long after my oldest sister hung herself, I started praying every morning. I still don't have a church (the closest thing is Sunday morning yoga class), but I find that I have to do something to express my awe at the infinite power that is creating the universe.

In memoriam

My father's ashes were buried last month in Arlington National Cemetery. His grave overlooks the Pentagon. Across the Potomac River, you can see monuments to our great Presidents and Commanders-in-Chief. The service was led by one of his childhood friends, now an Episcopalian lay reader. We said the Lord's Prayer, and then Mr. Kittrell continued:

In sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life through our Lord Jesus Christ, we commend to Almighty God our friend Tom; and we commit his remains to the ground; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. The Lord bless him and keep him, the Lord make his face to shine upon him and be gracious unto him, the Lord lift up his countenance upon him and give him peace.

I never expected him to end up there. In all of the 50 years I'd known him, he had been an ardent pacifist, atheist, and self-professed communist. But evidently, before he died he had told one or two other family members that he wanted to be buried in a military cemetery. "To save money," one of them said he'd told her, though who knows what his real reason was. He wasn't very rational near the end, in any case. Perhaps the two or three years he'd spent in the army during the Second World War, from age 18 to 20, were the crucially formative years of his life, and his symbolic return to the military at death was an acknowledgement of his true identity. He certainly lived much of his life with images from those years clearly in his sight.

He was born in 1925 in Houston, Texas, the son of two bookkeepers at a lumber company. They had some hard times during the Depression, but eventually my grandfather became a partner in the company, which prospered building big houses in Houston during the post-war boom. My grandparents were Episcopalians. My grandmother had chosen that church for its respectability. (Her father, in a fit of enthusiasm, had become a Jehovah's Witness. But Mamie thought that sort of people weren't the right sort of people.)

So anyway, these two upright Christian Texas businesspeople got together and had a child, a son. They had great expectations of him. And he didn't disappoint, at first. He was athletic, an outstanding student, a model churchgoer, a Boy Scout, a leader. He thought about becoming a minister when he grew up. In 1942, when he was 17 years old and a freshman at the University of Colorado, he volunteered for the Army. He turned down an invitation to attend West Point, and went in as a private. He took part in two difficult campaigns: Leyte (October '44 to July '45—3,500 U.S. forces killed in action, 12,000 wounded) and Okinawa (April '45 to July '45—12,000 U.S. forces killed in action, 36,000 wounded). When he got back home, he was a different person. He decided to devote his life to the abolition of war. In 1963, he wrote a story describing some of the experiences he'd had as a soldier that helped shape that decision. This is his story:


It is mid-April, 1945, and the infantry battle is in full swing on Okinawa. The nights are cool and crisp; the days usually clear and sunny. We are under Japanese howitzer fire, dug in on a hillside overlooking a small Okinawan coastal village which has been razed for weeks by our naval air bombardment. We are attacking toward the south, slowly driving the Japanese into the sea. We overpower them.

The Japanese still manage to maintain artillery fire from their positions in the caves in spite of our heavy artillery, air and naval bombardments. Their batteries can be heard firing: boom, boom, boom, boom, a low muffled series of explosions and then in a few seconds the huge shells fall among us with a whistling crescendo ending in a loud shattering burst of sound as their steel jackets are torn into many high velocity, jagged pieces of potential death and injury. One shell goes over our heads; another lands in front, another to our left and so on. It is nerve-wracking.

We are maintaining an infantry battalion telephone switchboard in our foxhole. We have been under this barrage for almost a week. My sergeant is jittery; I'm fairly calm. I am religious, and I believe God wants me to fight the un-Christian Japanese. I believe that if I am killed I will go to heaven. After the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, I volunteered at the age of 17 to serve my country and to die for it if necessary.

"Cassidy," I said to my sergeant, "just think, those Jap gunners may find a particular setting on their instruments that will put one of those babies right in our foxhole."

"Shut up!" he bellows. He's older and married and has a couple of children. Perhaps it's a bit harder for him to die for his country. There is another salvo coming, coming close; the whistling turns into a high-pitched screech and one lands up the hill about 30 feet right in a foxhole. I think we've lost the radio crew. There is an eruption of canvas, canteens, raincoats, earth from the hole. I keep looking after the dust and debris settle, and I see the radio crew intact peeking from another hole. Two of them had just left the ill-fated hole before the shell hit it. (I saw later a foxhole hit directly by one of those big shells with the men still in it.)

I glance down the hill and see a young man jump out of a hole and start running down the dirt road. Weaponless, he is running toward the rear in panic. It's Harrington, still a teen-ager like myself. He always seemed so tough in pre-combat training, talked so tough—a muscular physical culturist who admired his own well-built body. I hear another rumble as the howitzer batteries blast off again. Again the shells fall close in. When I lift my head to look out, I see no sign of Harrington. It's quiet for ten minutes; they may not fire for an hour or two.

"I'm going back to see if Harrington made it," I tell my sergeant.

He's still shaking and says, "O.K."

I move fast down the road carrying my M1 rifle. I run about 300 yards around a turn in the road, and I find Harrington, or what's left of him. He has been hit directly and terribly mutilated by the big shell. One arm and one leg are blown off, and he is very bloody and warm and dead. I have to leave him there at the roadside and return to the safety of my hole.

I think about his death, so sudden and final. The shell did what it was designed to do: it murdered a 19-year-old boy who was running away from war like a frightened child running to his mother. He was my friend. No, I don't hate the Japanese for doing it; they were told to do it. But I'm beginning to wonder why we have to kill each other.

The next morning I see a dark figure moving about in the rubble of the blasted village below. "Cassidy, nobody's supposed to be down there!"

"No, let's go down and see who it is."

The barrage has lifted temporarily. Our battalion is sitting behind the front lines in reserve. Three of us go down into the village. We find a small, middle-aged Okinawan woman there beside a stone well. She is trying to pull up a bucket of water. She is in a ragged, torn and dirty kimono. She is crying softly, whimpering. Her face is bruised, one eye black, swollen shut, and her left thumb has been lacerated, seems to be hanging by the tendon. There is a heavy sliver of wood driven through her left flank; she points to this. Her wounds all look several days old and dusty. She seems frightened of us armed men. Her home has been destroyed, her family killed or hiding in the caves.

We lead her back up the hill and prepare to send her back to the medics. I bring her a steel helmet full of clean water I pour from a five-gallon can. She stoops and begins to make ineffectual efforts to straighten her hair and to tidy up her appearance using both hands. My eyes fill with tears. These gestures are so feminine and remind me of my mother and sweetheart at home; these gestures are so universally human. Perhaps people in different countries are really not so much different after all, even if they aren't Christians or Americans. I am beginning to hate the war.

We are getting ready to move up to the front. Several days pass, and the enemy barrage is less frequent. I am on guard at 2:00 a.m.; I hear footsteps down the hill below me. I hear a burst from one of our heavy machine guns dug in down there. Then there is silence.

At dawn I look out and see two figures lying on a path along the hillside. It is cold. I approach the figures out of curiosity. An Okinawan girl about ten years old lies on her back with her dress pulled up over her face; she is dead. An older woman, possibly her mother, lies at her side face down in the path. They are both cold and stiff. The two woven rice baskets they were carrying spill rice about them. I am sickened by this sight. In the fighting on Leyte I never saw a child killed....I want to bury them. My sergeant says people from the regiment will do it. We will soon move up.

It is Sunday morning. The word is passed that the chaplain will have communion service at 10:00 a.m. before we leave for the front. I always go to church services; I have since before I can remember. I used to come in on Sunday mornings from Boy Scout camp so I wouldn't miss Sunday school. I got a medal and a wreath around it and at least five bars hanging below to show that I had gone seven years without missing a Sunday. I was an acolyte, too, and sang in the Sunday school choir.

The service is held in a little group of trees further up the hill. I swing my M1 rifle over my shoulder by its strap (you are trained never to go anywhere on the battlefield without taking your rifle—it's supposed to become "part of you" like another appendage) and walk up to join the group of soldiers gathering there. We are all armed; some have grenades in their belts, pistols, bayonets, as well as rifles and carbines on their shoulders. Everybody has on a steel hat.

I can see the blue ocean and down the hillside I can catch a glimpse of the girl-child lying face up with her mother at her side. They are small specks from here and no one else recognizes them or knows they are there. I feel uneasy, almost sick at my stomach. A group of 35 or 40 gather.

The chaplain arrives. He keeps his steel hat on. He begins the ritual of The Lord's Supper with a prayer:

Almighty God, unto whom all hearts are open, all desires known and from whom no secrets are hid, cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of Thy Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love Thee, and worthily magnify Thy Holy Name, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen."

We then say the Lord's Prayer together, and I keep looking at the specks down the hill....

Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven....forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us....but deliver us from evil. For Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory....

A great wave of doubt and confusion begins to engulf me. I hear the chaplain reciting:

Hear what our Lord Jesus Christ saith: Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment and the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.

I look about me at the grimy men with bowed helmets, at the weapons designed to kill men, weapons which will kill men in the days ahead, and I look back at the specks. Am I mad? Are these only words, meaningless phrases passed on generation after generation? Is there really a kind Father-God who cares for people, who hears their adult prayers? Does God care for us, the Americans, more than for the Japanese or Okinawans? Didn't a man ask Jesus, "Who is my neighbor?" Did God care for the specks? What about Harrington? Did God love him?

I hear the chaplain's voice break into my thoughts:

....and bring us to everlasting life through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

I wonder who is included in the "us"? I know the chaplain can't see my specks lying dead in the path, but I want him to include them in his prayers. I look out over the village laid flat by weeks of shelling from our off-shore navy guns and planes. I wonder how many "civilians" were killed. I look dimly ahead into the next few weeks, and I wonder how many of us here will still be alive....

The body of our Lord Jesus Christ which was given for thee preserve thy soul and body into everlasting life. Take and eat this in remembrance that Christ died for thee, and feed on him in thy heart by faith with thanksgiving.

The wafers are passed and then the grape juice:

The blood of our Lord Jesus Christ which was shed for thee, preserve thy soul and body into everlasting life. Drink this in remembrance that Christ's blood was shed for thee, and be thankful.

The comfort of the ritual has somehow left my mind for the first time in the seven years since I was confirmed in the church and started taking communion. I feel like a total stranger, like a Jewish person might feel at the same Christian ceremony. For the first time I don't want to drink Jesus's blood nor to eat his body. I keep looking at the stiff, cold bodies down the hillside....

....humbly beseeching Thee that all we who are partakers of this Holy Communion may be filled with Thy grace and heavenly benediction.

Then the chaplain prays for the safety of each man about to go into combat and he prays for our victory over the enemy. I still hope he'll somehow mention the specks but he doesn't. And then the benediction:

May the peace of God which passeth all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in the knowledge and love of God, and of his son Jesus Christ our Lord, and the blessing of God Almighty, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit be among you and remain with you always.

In two days filled with the peace of God which passeth all understanding and the Holy Spirit among us, and the blessing of God Almighty secured for us by the Christian clergyman, we are on the front killing Japanese, Koreans, and Okinawans. I see a second Okinawan child in a cave; it had been roasted to a black crisp by our flamethrower. I see my sergeant shoot a Korean worker four times in the face and chest. He lay hiding unarmed in the grass. He was a young man near my age. My sergeant stands over him and shoots him. He is face up and I can see the blood spurting from his wounds and hear his gurgling groans. I can hear my sergeant back in camp telling his fellows how he shot his first Jap, almost boasting.

A first date

I asked a girl I'd met two weeks before to go to the Telluride Bluegrass Festival. It was a couple of hundred miles away, across a mountain range and a desert. I stuffed my little '74 Toyota station wagon with a tent, a big foam mattress, and a guitar, and we headed off. At the top of the mountain range there was some snow lingering on the side of the road (this was in July), so we pulled over and made a little snowman. Then, down in the desert, we stopped at a reservoir and built a sand castle on the shore. We dug a tunnel beneath it, me on one side and her on the other, and when we got to the middle, our fingers touched. It got dark before we got to Telluride, so I drove a little way up a side road and we set up the tent in the middle of nowhere and spent the night.

When we got to Telluride, I discovered that tickets to the festival were $50 each, a lot of money in those days (at least for me). I had it, barely, and we sat on the grass and listened to the fiddlers. For lunch, I fried up some homemade tofu (she was a vegetarian) on my Svea. We camped out another night, and then headed for home the next evening. Driving through the dark, we could see, off on the horizon, the lightning of distant thunderstorms.