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January 26, 2003
ARTICLES: Will peace come dropping slow?
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a-glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.
The stanza above, from Yeats’ “Lake Isle of Innisfree”, has long numbered among my favourite lines of poetry, with a tendency to come to mind in any languorous moment. I have to admit that the chirping of crickets has always had a limited appeal for me, so the sound I hear in my head when I read the second line of the stanza is of a cricket ball firmly struck — in my ideal lake-isle Don Bradman is somewhere off in the distance turning Larwood’s bodyline deliveries into boundaries, leather and willow singing in perfect harmony.
But sometimes, and particularly so of late, the lines re-configure themselves for me in an entirely different way: Peace comes dropping slow/ Dropping from the veils of the mourning. When morning becomes mourning the poem ceases to be of beauty and becomes a vision of terror — lines of veiled widows in black stretching from one end of the isle to another, peace the only possibility in a world when everyone is either dead or burying the dead. In this reading, which recalls that Yeats is the man who wrote that most apocalyptic of poems, “The second coming”, peace is the teardrops of the bereaved, it is what happens — dropping slow — when the world is consumed with loss, sickened by it.
When people talk of war as being the means to a moral end, the means to an ultimate peace, it is that peace of veiled widows, the peace of a “Vale of Mourning”, to which they refer. The truly peaceful peace, the one that drops from the veil of the morning, that cannot exist where there is the afterecho of gunfire. Peace bought with bombs and bullets teaches us that bombs and bullets are the currency through which disputes are settled. ‘Peace’ written in blood is nothing but irony.
There is no shortage of anti-war talk at the moment, but too little of that anti-war talk seems truly opposed to the idea of war, too much of it opposed only to a particular war. And as I write this, it’s obvious why even the people who oppose the mere idea of war don’t want to get themselves into an argument about the fundamental barbarity of war but would rather focus on a limited set of facts and keep the argument contained.
We live in a world that believes so strongly in the idea of necessary wars and of dialogues in the language of violence that to attempt to deny these things is to mark yourself as naove, or a bleeding-heart liberal, or some outdated flowerchild who should have learnt long ago to cut your hair and become a banker, or maybe just some head-in-the-cloud artsy sort with no idea about how the real world works.
And so out trot the ‘should Hitler have been allowed to march through Europe?’ and ‘should NATO have allowed the Serbs to continue their slaughter in Kosovo?’ questions. Peculiar questions, really, since as far as I’m concerned wars are begun when leaders of a nation send their tanks into another nation, or an army starts to slaughter civilians. So I’d say, take a step back. Hitler should not have. The Serbs should not have.
For the record, I’m anti-war, but I’m not necessarily a pacifist. Which is to say, if someone else starts a fight, I don’t know that I’ll drop all weapons at hand. But I will object, with my last breath, to the start of the fight, and to the decision to engage in violence in order to solve a problem. Of course, this is a slightly difficult position since we can constantly re-define what exactly defines ‘starting a war’. Firing the first shot? Building up your weapons of mass destruction? Threatening to use them? Thinking about using them? Or merely, continuing to stay in power, acting the tyrant over your people long after your enemies wish you’d slipped away without a trace?
At the risk of sounding like the head-in-the-cloud artsy sort, let me say — those questions are just details. Significant details, certainly, but they can in no way take precedence over the larger matter of the respect we accord violence, and the ease with which we are able to confer glory or honour upon it or simply say (and this may be the most dangerous lie) that it’s just a practical matter of necessity.
Fact is, there is no greater necessity in today’s world than that of correcting the disjuncture between our mediaeval mindsets and our modern machines. Today, the powerful are more powerful than ever before because they have the capacity to wreak havoc of a sort that was unimaginable in a pre-atomic age. Yet, around the world stage, we still hear the rhetoric of centuries ago. When really we should be hearing a mumbling Prospero.
I remember seeing a production of The tempest a few years ago, in which I was initially disappointed by the actor who played Prospero. Instead of a straight-backed man who bellowed out commands, this Prospero was slightly stooped and soft-spoken. It was about halfway through the play that I realized, this is true power — not to have to bellow, or wave your wand around, but to know that power means you can mutter and still be heard.
And when Prospero breaks his staff and buries his book at the end of the play it seemed to me (and here I think I departed from the actor’s portrayal of the character) that Prospero was displaying ultimate power — the power to forgo power. In that, he became the finest prototype of the modern ruler, making a total break with mediaeval ideas of how to rule. There are no Prospero’s among us today, and they certainly won’t appear until we start demanding them, and realizing they are a necessity.
And the benefit to us of making such demands, knowing that the likelihood of their being heard in our lifetimes is depressingly low? Perhaps no more than this: that we have earned the right to dream of Yeats’ lake-isle, and of our place in it.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavement’s grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.
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