Theater of War

 

28 March 2022

A old man and an old woman walk through a destroyed town in the Ukraine. They say Ukrainians destroyed it to pretend Russians had. A Russian theater, or the one bombed in Mariupol. War as put-on, every act the last act of a tragedy. You believe it, even if you see it.

When between slivers of a conversation about kindness, you sense a different politics from your own. What you see as incoherence, or the line between feeling and thought. A rational kindness once seemed possible, but now it shakes you, like a scene in an Alzheimer's “home.” Not that any of us is demented, but we can't live in the same rooms any more. Some of us are locked behind doors to save them; others don’t know how to save ourselves. We see the last photo as a last photo, knowing what came after, but that hardly helps us to make meaning of it. “I love poetry, not my own words,” he wrote to his daughter, who wrote him back.

We resent the rational actor behind the iPhone, because he appeals to our emotions. We don’t want such appeals, because they might result in WW3. We think maybe the irrational actor had his reasons, though he can’t express his feelings except in analogies as broken as tanks by the road. He is JK Rowling to someone else's cancel culture. Bombs don't cancel; people do.

So much depends on a red dirt devil against a blue wall in a rain forest. So much destroyed by a vacuum bomb of no color but what it leaves ruined. No red devil can clean that up.

We want our weapons slow. The rifles, the tanks, the transport vehicles, these make us feel, if not safe, then as if war has a protocol, an ethics even. The quicker ones, those that fall from the sky, or those whose agency is separate, like drones or missiles, those make us queasy. It’s not that they kill, but how they kill and how quickly. Yet, in war as entertainment, we crave the opposite. Not the lingering pan of bodies on the street, their red blossoming through cloth, but quick edits, the warp of software. Cris’s images resemble Hollywood’s, while unmasking them, and that's what makes them hurt. The loveliness of words can't be slapped away. An investigation has been launched.

On my way back to my computer, I seek out distractions. On twitter someone writes that the war is a distraction from climate change and COVID. The president was an actor, therefore the war entertains us. Sentences can make anything make sense; it’s not the best thing about them, just the scariest. Line up those nouns and verbs like artillery pieces and let fly. A no fly zone might help, but we wouldn't find the response entertaining because it would be directed against us. Shoo fly don’t go away, we need your noun transgendered to verb.

Is war the ultimate form of not-knowing, or the opposite? We’re Kantians, Carla tells me, though I hardly know what that means. Perhaps it's that we crave consistency: thought and feeling, the deer and the dachsund. We want suffering to make us think better, and thinking to help us feel. The chain gang commences to sing.

Note: the first anecdote related by Yevgenia Belarusets in her "War Diary"