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Tuesday, September 20, 2022

Fall of 2022 the Summer of 1914?

As published at SubStack, 9/20/22:





[Belgrade, 8/2/20]

“At the end you’re sick of this ancient world” [“À la fin tu es las de ce monde ancien”], begins Guillaume Apollinaire’s 1913 poem, “Zone,” a modern classic.

Two lines later, Gui also groans, “You’ve had enough of living in Greek and Roman antiquity” [“Tu en as assez de vivre dans l’antiquité grecque et romaine”].

The word “modern,” though, appears just once in 164 lines, to make this odd assertion:

Alone in Europe you are not ancient O Christianity
The most modern European is you Pope Pius X

[Seul en Europe tu n’es pas antique ô Christianisme
L’Européen le plus moderne c’est vous Pape Pie X]

Roaming not just all over Paris, but Europe, Apollinaire recalls direct experiences of the French Riviera, Prague, Marseilles, Koblenz, Rome, Amsterdam, Leiden and Gouda. The world is also brought to him, for he speaks of sleeping among South Sea and Guinean fetishes. A key feature of modernity is access. We’re enjoying the last of it, dude!

Just a year after “Zone,” World War I arrived to unleash unprecedented destruction, thanks to modern means of massacre. The first aerial bomb had only been flung with one hand in 1911. The pilot cum bombardier, Giulio Gavotti, had to be careful not to hit his own wing. Wouldn’t that be something, an airplane bombing itself! Baedeker raids were still decades away, to raze more of the ancient world. This progress has only accelerated, and we, living in 2022, are its smug beneficiaries.

Even as war loomed, the living wasn’t just easy, but practically paradisal, though it’s not quite true jumping fish turned into sushi before diving into your mouth. That didn’t happen. In The Great War and Modern Memory, Paul Fussell encapsulates:

Although some memories of the benign last summer before the war can be discounted as standard romantic retrospection turned even rosier by egregious contrast with what followed, all agree that the prewar summer was the most idyllic for many years. It was warm and sunny, eminently pastoral. One lolled outside on a folding canvas chaise, or swam, or walked in the countryside. One read outdoors, went on picnics, had tea served from a white wicker table under the trees. You could leave your books on the table all night without fear of rain. Siegfried Sassoon was busy fox hunting and playing serious county cricket. Robert Graves went climbing in the Welsh mountains. Edmund Blunden took country walks near Oxford, read Classics and English, and refined his pastoral diction. Wilfred Owen was teaching English to the boys of a French family living near Bordeaux. David Jones was studying illustration at Camberwell Art School. And for those like Strachey who preferred the pleasures of the West End, there were splendid evening parties, as well as a superb season for concerts, theater, and the Russian ballet.

Though mountain climbing, fox hunting and Russian ballet were certainly upper class pleasures, us cheap beer guzzlers can also recall a more pleasant time, when 1st graders weren’t entertained by ghastly drag queens and taught about homosexuality and gender identities, when 4th graders, boys and girls, weren’t instructed on how to put on a condom, when there was freedom of speech so that disagreeing with the brainwashed masses didn’t mean you were a Nazi, when you didn’t have to be Jewjabbed to keep your job, be educated or travel, when living in cars and tents hasn’t become widespread, when English hasn’t been so degraded, so that “immigrant,” “illegal alien” and “civilian casualties” become “migrant,” “undocumented worker” and “collateral damage,” etc., when a he was just that, and not she, they, zie, sie, ey, ve, tey or e, when Joe Sixpacks might have read short stories by Poe or Hemingway.

Now, many Americans can’t tell you when was the War of 1812. Hey, is that a trick question?! Left alone not that long ago, we could sit in some dive to shoot the shit or watch a baseball game without dreading the immediate future, for us or our cursed children. That was our consolation.

Even well into WWI, it still felt somehow unreal. Just before the Battle of the Somme began on 7/1/16, Wilfred Neville wrote to his sister:

As I write, the shells are fairly haring over; you know one gets just sort of bemused after a few million, still it’ll be a great experience to tell one’s children about. So long, old thing, don’t worry if you don't hear for a bit. I'm as happy as ever. Yrs ever, Bill.

In case you think it’s false nonchalance to reassure a loved one, Captain Neville came up with the idea of kicking soccer balls towards the Gemans, as the English climbed out of their trench. In just one day, the British suffered 19,240 deaths and the French 1,590, as they slaughtered roughly 6,000 Germans, to gain three square miles. That’s more than twice the size of Central Park, though without zoo, jivey castle and ice skating ring. The only surviving soccer ball is in a museum. Just 21-years-old, Neville was killed almost instantly. At Cambridge, Neville read Greek and Roman classics.

At least 16 million people were butchered during WWI, with at least a third civilians. At least 40 million died during WWII. In this age of industrialized total war, estimates of deaths can vary by millions, but at least there were honest efforts to count them.

How many millions have died from Jewjabs? How many will starve or freeze to death in coming months? Our weather is being messed with, farmland wasted, livestock culled and small businesses, especially in the West, destroyed. Still pushing Jewjabs, Walensky is turning Mengele into Florence Nightingale.

I’m getting hysterical again, you may think. On flat screens, balls are still being kicked, Satanic songs still sung, so all must be well. Just now, a white American emailed me a YouTube video about Vietnamese paper making, with this note, “See if you can write something positive with this, instead of focusing on the negative.” So cute, he’s waiting to vote for DeSantis or Trump.

Despite its mostly exuberant tone, there are dark notes in “Zone,” such as:

Today I walk in Paris the women are bloodsoaked
It was and I would rather not remember it was the wane of beauty

[Aujourd’hui tu marches dans Paris les femmes sont ensanglantées
C’était et je voudrais ne pas m’en souvenir c’était au déclin de la beauté]

The poem ends:

Goodbye Goodbye

Decapitated sun

[Adieu Adieu

Soleil cou coupé]

George Meredith came up with “wane of beauty” and “Decapitated sun,” I’m pretty sure, though I haven’t seen his translation in 39 years. Fascinating, isn’t it, the wane of beauty? We’re steeped in it, the vertiginious fall of the civilized and sane, much less the sublime. In this climate, art must be plowed under.

Lastly, this article’s title might be falsely positive. We’re lucky if this fall is only the summer of 1914.

[detail of "The Warhol Effect" by Jonathan van der Walt, Cape Town, 9/21/21]





3 comments:

Linh Dinh said...

Hi all,

Sorry about the formatting glitches where "Zone" was quoted. They are fixed.


Linh

traducteur said...

Apollinaire was a poet of the first order. I have always particularly enjoyed his "Chanson du mal-aimé" and "Les colchiques". The former is too long to quote, but here's the first stanza of "Les colchiques":

Le pré est vénéneux mais joli en automne
Les vaches y paissant
Lentement s'empoisonnent
Le colchique couleur de cerne et de lilas
Y fleurit tes yeux sont comme cette fleur-là
Violâtres comme leur cerne et comme cet automne
Et ma vie pour tes yeux lentement s'empoisonne

Jimbobla said...

I do so like it when you exercise your writing skills Linh. Real artistry.