ARTicles vol. 1 i.3: A Selection of Texts

The myth of war is essential to justify the horrible sacrifices required in war, the destruction and the death of innocents. It can be formed only by denying the reality of war, by turning the lies, the manipulation, the inhumanness of war into the heroic ideal. Homer did this for the Greeks, Virgil for the Augustan age, and Shakespeare for the English in his history plays. But these great writers also understood what they were doing, and thus in the canon of their works come moments when war is laid bare.

– Chris Hedges, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning

I have never set foot in Vietnam. Yet I consider myself a veteran also. Most Vietnam vets only served for 13 months. I lived, breathed, slept, and fought with that war for 13 years.

– Lorraine, formerly battered wife of a Vietnam combat vet, from Vietnam Wives by Aphrodite Matsakis

If one thinks of The Odyssey as the rehabilitation of a veteran after a long and terrible war in the course of which the justice of the cause has been betrayed, as is so often the case, by the methods of the crusaders; if one sees the hero’s long voyage home as an exploration of his identity as man; if one feels that he cannot arrive home in the profoundest sense until he has discovered the metaphysical order of the human community, the deepest significance of this great poem will not, I am convinced, be violated.”

– George Lord, “The Odyssey and the Western World”

Acts of war generate a profound gulf between the combatant and the community he left behind. The veteran carries the taint of a killer, of blood pollution . . . that many cultures respond to with purification rituals. Our culture today denies the need for purification and provides none, even though in the past it has done so.

– Dr. Jonathan Shay, Odysseus in America

In the beginning, the hero’s intelligence is intermittent and limited to his role as a slayer of monsters. But when he manages to break the frame of this role, without abandoning it, when he learns to be a traitor, a liar, a seducer, a traveler, a castaway, a narrator, then the hero becomes Odysseus. . . .

– Roberto Calasso, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

[The Odyssey] submits what passes for honor to a searching inspection and shows that heroic deeds are often motivated by greed, accomplished with terror, and indistinguishable from piracy.

– George Lord, “The Odyssey and the Western World”

There is among many who fight in war a sense of shame, one that is made worse by the patriotic drivel used to justify the act of killing in war. Those who seek meaning in patriotism do not want to hear the truth of war, wary of bursting the bubble. The tensions between those who were there and those who were not, those who refuse to let go of the myth and those that know it to be a lie feed into the dislocation and malaise after war. In the end, neither side cares to speak to the other. The shame and alienation of combat soldiers, coupled with the indifference to the truth of war by those who were not there, reduces many societies to silence. It seems better to forget.

– Chris Hedges, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning

I was eight months pregnant and sick with the flu when my husband shot the phones, barricaded the house, and threatened to kill the first person in uniform who tried to enter the door.

– Laura, wife of a Vietnam combat veteran. From Vietnam Wives by Aphrodite Matsakis

The wind that carried west from Ilion

Brought me to Ismaros, on the far shore,

A strongpoint on the Coast of the Kikones.

I stormed that place and killed the men who fought.

Plunder we took, and we enslaved the women,

To make division, equal shares to all. . . .

– Odysseus speaking in The Odyssey, translated by Robert Fitzgerald

The Old Dog

And the old dog knew well

The scent of his old master

The dog could recognize the smell

No matter how tainted by disaster

The dog could tell

He raised his frail body to its feet

And limped across to where the master slept

And as in expectation of some promised meat

Shoved his nose into his master’s lap

And there they sat

The master sleeping like the innocent or just

The dog contented now and dying there beside him in the dust

One small ruin, man and dog, an ancient circle

Of bruised stones, the broken but not forgotten trust

-Rinde Eckhert

Whoever gets around you must be sharp

and guileful as a snake; even a god

might bow to you in ways of dissimulation.

You! You chameleon!

Bottomless bag of tricks! Here in your own country

would you not give your stratagems a rest

or stop spellbinding for an instant?

– Athena speaking to Odysseus upon his return to Ithaca in The Odyssey, translated by Robert Fitzgerald

For always roaming with a hungry heart

Much have I seen and known; cities of men

And manners, climates, councils, governments,

Myself not least, but honour’d of them all;

And drunk delight of battle with my peers,

Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.

I am a part of all that I have met;

Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’

Gleams that untravell’d world,

whose margin fades

For ever and for ever when I move.

How dull it is to pause, to make an end,

To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use!

– Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “Ulysses”