Memorial Day

On the coat rack, there are a pair of pilly mittens, a pale blue angora hat with a hemlock twig stuck to it, and a black-and-white knit scarf.  Hat on scarf, mittens on hat.  They are piled on top of one another like the Bremen friends – the donkey, dog, cat, and rooster of the old fable.  They have the initial forlornness of those animals, though not (yet) the wild and wily freedom.  It is Memorial Day – a cool one, after a few days of relentless heat.  It is a forlorn time to be an abandoned woolen thing on the coat rack in a café in Vermont, though if these things stick around a scant five months more, they will once again have a chance to be of use in the world.

Memorial Day pisses me off.  It feels like an essential part of the mechanisms of war.  Cow everybody into sacred gratitude, and then you can be doing whatever you like, under the table, in the dungeon, raiding the public treasury, safe from all resistance.  You can be siphoning young lives into your machinery, using them up, training them to deploy your weapons, and then to carry the awful consequences of your unfelt plans.  You can be righteous and brazen.  You can make anyone who questions you into a worm.

If you’re going to live in my country,
You had better respect my flag.
(or else…)

I know all about this dynamic, of course, because it’s the one that turns me virulent towards Memorial Day, and towards my husband as an outpost of the patriarchy.  Which in some sense he might be, but he’s also someone tenderhearted, whose feelings are easily hurt, and he takes time, feeding our two beloved dogs their breakfast, and hoping this time, their tremendous powers of farting will settle down.

Ideas and ideals are difficult. They form the frameworks through which we see the world, and they make us blind.  No feminism, no way of sniffing out the craziness that places a publicly-funded shrine to war on the town green, insisting on it as revered sacred space, meanwhile harassing homeless veterans who have set up camp on public land.  Too much feminism, no way of sensing into the shrine-makers’ need to make sense of hardship and violence.  There’s a middle way. There’s a way of toggling between seeing the scarf, mittens, and hat, lurking around in late May, as just piles of fibers; and seeing the forlornness of what we no longer need, in its refusal to simply dissolve and be gone.

Those we send to war refuse to dissolve and be gone. Those whose countries we make war in also refuse this. Instead, they stack up, and remind us.  Here I am, the donkey who brought your sacks to market, till I grew lame.  Here I am, the dog who guarded your house, till I grew deaf.   Here I am, the cat who chased your mice, till I lost my sight.  Here I am, the rooster who knocked up your hens, till you decided I was too ornery.  Here we are, a cook from Mosul, a teacher from Kirkuk, a mother from Sulaymaniyah.  You left us to stack up among the rubble you made in our cities, but instead we moved into your robbers’ house.  Boo!  Here we are, stacked up at your borders, and you can’t say you don’t know how we got here.

I can’t say I don’t know how my back pain, my rage, my distracted exhaustion got here.  I know the solution isn’t indefinitely to go away from the world of ideas, but I am grateful to have to develop the capacity to do just that.  I drop out of horror and ire, into the body, where I can recognize this is what horror and ire feel like. I can feel, I and all beings, experiencing fear, anger, and self-righteousness, making ironclad US and THEM into the shape of the whole world.

Pale blue angora hat the color of a cloudy horizon, you seem very innocent, and I worry a little bit about you, hanging around in cafés.  Where did your girl go?  Didn’t she need your warmth? She left you when the spring arrived, between 10 and 11:15 AM on March 15th.  She let the new breeze ruffle her short cut hair, and hasn’t thought about you one time since then. Here you are, the color of a cloudy horizon.

Putty-colored mittens, you’re a different kind of story, knit row by row by some lecture-attending woman, who thought mostly of her son, as resolutions made and unmade themselves, in the hardback pews of the town meeting hall.  Like most knit mittens, you’re awkward – warm enough for maybe November, but no match for the deeper cold of February.  You’re bulky, and you’re honest; and now, you’re infused with weeks of tasteful James-Brown-inflected soundtracks, kebab-miasma, and coffee-aroma. You’re pretty neutral about waiting, not even counting it as waiting.  Just being.  The son and the knitter carry on, elsewhere.

Scarf, I don’t know what to think of you.  It’s conceivable there’s a school name worked into your pattern.  You have that look.  Cheerful student flying around the ice.  She comes in here for a cappuccino, and, suitably warmed, leaves you on the slat-backed chair.  Everything I owned in college has evaporated, or more likely, stacked up in some thrift-store-dump netherplace.

Memorial Day is about deciding the way things are stacked up, and telling everyone, it’s like this, dammit.
If you’re going to live in my country,
You’d better respect my stacks and fit my stories.

Yesterday, I took my husband to church.  It was a crazy idea, of course, sitting through the children’s storytime and the announcements, just for the chance to hear a young woman who served in the Army say, When people thank me for my service, I die a little bit inside. She talked about moral injury – the injury sustained by those who go to war, and by those who send them.

She said, It’s not enough to say the line and walk away, absolved of all injury. I have very mixed feelings about what I did, would you like to hear about that? I have very mixed feelings about Memorial Day, would you like to hear about that, or would you prefer to post Facebook gifs of waving flags, and go eat some pulverized animals? It’s all up to you. It’s all up to me, also.

In this world, it’s wrong to stay stuck in any fixed identity. The Bremen friends were themselves once bullies, and the robbers will grow old, learning for themselves what it is to be discarded.  In my feminist outrage, I can easily (and often) become a bully.  When I identify fixedly as a woman, I ignore the masculine in myself.  I fail to see the stack of beings that I am, and that we all are.

Five hooks down from the woolen stack there’s a blue bandanna hanging, and in between, a dark green fringed velvet scarf.  Remember: we are all everything, stacked up in unique and recognizable configurations.  When we war with one another, we do so in denial of the basic fact of our own inseparable connection.  Remember this next time you turn to excise another, or some part of yourself.  None of it ever goes away.  It can only be transformed through recognition, collaboration, and love; through the soulful braying of abandoned animals joined together to make this found planet our home.
 
My thumb twitches with the effort of writing, and I am done.

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{Thanks to Wikipedia for the image used above, and also to Gerhard Marcks, for making this beautiful rendering of the Bremen Town Musicians.}