AMERICA
By Walt Whitman
Centre of equal daughters, equal sons,
All, all alike endear’d, grown, ungrown, young or old,
Strong, ample, fair, enduring, capable, rich,
Perennial with the Earth, with Freedom, Law and Love,
A grand, sane, towering, seated Mother,
Chair’d in the adamant of Time.
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| Veterans memorial park & Hamilton Military Museum. |
There was something astray in the last post on the first venture into the Healing Waters Trail. The clueless tourist, decked out as she may be with her gadgetry and what not, unable to locate a trail head, is a thoughtless trope. It was a piece written in what I imagined good fun. But buried somewhere in these ultimately futile efforts to describe the journey to new places, my destination became the center and it did not hold very well. I started at the end of things. I meant to start at beginning of things. The journey, not the destination. This realization hit me as I spent the day at the Veterans Memorial Park & Hamilton Military Museum the following week. Emerson said that "life is a journey, not a destination." This is favored quote, much like the quote this project began with in my very first writing. Places are both our beginning and end, because they are our journey, in mind and body, in fancy and fiction, when we flee and when we return. We are nothing without the land, but land is not always physical. How and why we fight for it is not really about the earth underfoot, but about a myriad of other things, from wealth to security to freedom to love, as pure and real as dirt. Pretty much all creation stories have us coming from the earth. For you were made from dust, and to dust you will return Genisus 3:19 And when we do not return, there is the unbearable desire to bring a body home to rest to the familiar grounds of home.
"We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our journeying
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time."
By T. S. Eliot
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At the end of all of their brief journeying many these soldiers never did arrive again. Or maybe they do come to the place as home when all traces of the physical world have fallen away. In lands so distant from the pretty little town of Hot Springs, at the very start of their exploring, these were not tourists. But we know enough from books and films and movies to glean the thrill of the far-flung places out military members ventured. In the midst of the horror and carnage and suffering there was laughter and comradeship, adventure and delight. They do tours of duty. They are, to many accounts, dastardly tourists. Walking through the museum is a strange mix of joyful sadness.Each family was given a board to put together to honor their loved ones, and you There is so much to see of the world in these simple white boards with pictures and momentos. There are so many people who would would have liked to have met. Of course many are still around, although the greatest generation is rapidly vanishing . Many are waiting to come home as I write. Many are already home, but out of place.
The museum is meticulous. When I arrived on a Tuesday morning I met Lucille Bjorkman, who was watering ferns and other robust plants outside the museum. A quick and vivacious red head, she was busy the entire time I wandered around. She keeps the museum meticulous. She lost both of her brothers to WWII, and when she passes will will her land to the Museum for a Chapel. We were to interview the next week, but I came down with pneumonia and so am a few weeks behind on everything now. But I have had lots of time to think, especially about the threads that are weaving together for my dissertation. I am less and less convinced that chronology is what ties places together, although it is a handy organizational tool. It is the stories that weave places together, and if we imagine time marching on in some linear fashion, we miss the storied landscapes that makes places. Stories may follow years, but they come back around, meander here and there, repeat themselves endlessly.
In a recent column in the New York Times, Nick Kristof pointed out a startling statistic: for every American soldier killed in combat this year, 25 will commit suicide. A report from the Center for a New American Security says that from 2005 to 2010, service members took their own lives at a rate of one every 36 hours, and the Department of Veterans Affairs says that 18 veterans commit suicide every day. We are not meant for this horror.The marble tablet for out most recent veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan is smooth and blank, waiting to be filled by name upon name upon names, familiar all.
The spark of life is like the spark of fire; it flashes forth its beauty and is gone;
So dies the minstrel, leaving Fancy's lyre
Bereft of heart, and chords and song and tune;
Silent because it cannot sing alone. Meanwhile all those who loved it morn and weep
For loss of him with whom it could not sleep.
Yet leaves he pearls behind-a glorious name.
That time would fear to kill so passeth by;
A dearly cherished memory, a fame.
Forbid by immortality to die.
The crown for which a world of poets sigh;
A fairy tree, which he alone could find.
From whence he plucked the bay leaves of the mind.
Favorite poems: selected from English and American authors. By Anon
The museum has a fine small library. There are random books, encyclopedias, bulging binders with the names of the fallen, movies and all sorts of collections. There is one small odd shelf that captures me. I pull out a book entitled Favorite poems and like the bible game of picking a verse I let the book fall open it as it will. The books flattens gracefully with no hesitation to a poem called life. Back on the shelf I grab another, Walt Whitman. It opens to "Starting from Paumanok" from Leaves of Grass, and it is an epic thing. It is startling and vast. I wonder at page marked by a leaflet proclaiming Whitman to be the greatest of American poets, albeit not realized in his own tome, which is what made the book open to this particular opus. It is pages and pages and pages. And I sit, the scholarly specter of this battlefield all around me, and I read.
...
The indissoluble compacts, riches, mystery,
Eternal progress, the kosmos, and the modern reports.
This, then, is life;
Here is what has come to the surface after so many throes and convulsions.
How curious! how real! 20
Underfoot the divine soil—overhead the sun.
See, revolving, the globe;
The ancestor-continents, away, group’d together;
The present and future continents, north and south, with the isthmus between.
See, vast, trackless spaces; 25
As in a dream, they change, they swiftly fill;
Countless masses debouch upon them;
They are now cover’d with the foremost people, arts, institutions, known.
See, projected, through time,
For me, an audience interminable. 30
With firm and regular step they wend—they never stop,
Successions of men, Americanos, a hundred millions;
One generation playing its part, and passing on;
Another generation playing its part, and passing on in its turn,
With faces turn’d sideways or backward towards me, to listen, 35
With eyes retrospective towards me,
3
Americanos! conquerors! marches humanitarian;
Foremost! century marches! Libertad! masses!
For you a programme of chants.
Chants of the prairies; 40
Chants of the long-running Mississippi, and down to the Mexican sea;
Chants of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Wisconsin and Minnesota;
Chants going forth from the centre, from Kansas, and thence, equi-distant,
Shooting in pulses of fire, ceaseless, to vivify all.
...
6
Dead poets, philosophs, priests,
Martyrs, artists, inventors, governments long since,
Language-shapers, on other shores, 65
Nations once powerful, now reduced, withdrawn, or desolate,
I dare not proceed till I respectfully credit what you have left, wafted hither:
I have perused it—own it is admirable, (moving awhile among it;)
Think nothing can ever be greater—nothing can ever deserve more than it deserves;
Regarding it all intently a long while—then dismissing it, 70
I stand in my place, with my own day, here.
....
Toward the male of The States, and toward the female of The States,
Live words—words to the lands. 205
O the lands! interlink’d, food-yielding lands!
Land of coal and iron! Land of gold! Lands of cotton, sugar, rice!
Land of wheat, beef, pork! Land of wool and hemp! Land of the apple and grape!
Land of the pastoral plains, the grass-fields of the world! Land of those sweet-air’d interminable plateaus!
Land of the herd, the garden, the healthy house of adobie! 210
Lands where the northwest Columbia winds, and where the southwest Colorado winds!
Land of the eastern Chesapeake! Land of the Delaware!
Land of Ontario, Erie, Huron, Michigan!
Land of the Old Thirteen! Massachusetts land! Land of Vermont and Connecticut!
Land of the ocean shores! Land of sierras and peaks! 215
Land of boatmen and sailors! Fishermen’s land!
Inextricable lands! the clutch’d together! the passionate ones!
The side by side! the elder and younger brothers! the bony-limb’d!
The great women’s land! the feminine! the experienced sisters and the inexperienced sisters!
Far breath’d land! Arctic braced! Mexican breez’d! the diverse! the compact! 220
The Pennsylvanian! the Virginian! the double Carolinian!
O all and each well-loved by me! my intrepid nations! O I at any rate include you all with perfect love!
I cannot be discharged from you! not from one, any sooner than another!
O Death! O for all that, I am yet of you, unseen, this hour, with irrepressible love,
Walking New England, a friend, a traveler, 225
Splashing my bare feet in the edge of the summer ripples, on Paumanok’s sands,
Crossing the prairies—dwelling again in Chicago—dwelling in every town,
Observing shows, births, improvements, structures, arts,
Listening to the orators and the oratresses in public halls,
Of and through The States, as during life—each man and woman my neighbor, 230
The Louisianian, the Georgian, as near to me, and I as near to him and her,
The Mississippian and Arkansian yet with me—and I yet with any of them;
Yet upon the plains west of the spinal river—yet in my house of adobie,
Yet returning eastward—yet in the Sea-Side State, or in Maryland,
Yet Kanadian, cheerily braving the winter—the snow and ice welcome to me, 235
Yet a true son either of Maine, or of the Granite State, or of the Narragansett Bay State, or of the Empire State;
Yet sailing to other shores to annex the same—yet welcoming every new brother;
Hereby applying these leaves to the new ones, from the hour they unite with the old ones;
Coming among the new ones myself, to be their companion and equal—coming personally to you now;
Enjoining you to acts, characters, spectacles, with me.
When I leave the library I wander around the grounds. It is a breathtaking view. But eventually it is too much for me, and I have to walk away from all of these memories, down the Healing Water Trail, over the wooden bridge, where I sit for a while and look at a pile of rocks someone has sculpted into a tidy little tower of desert zen. The sun is on my face and I am melancholy angry, hopeful, confused, proud, wondering what I know about anything and amazed at how much I am learning. A good memorial will do that. I am lucky. Is all that sacrifice just for us and ours alone? Is there some greater thing we are striving for? What part we should never forget? Where do we built?
I do not know what to believe, not that my beliefs are anything compared to the power of this place. The Healing Waters Trail has a fine beginning. When I said that good places-places where people want to come and stay awhile-needed to be places for the tourists and the townies alike, what I meant was that there are plenty of make-believe places in America that are facade and fancy, but more and more people are trying to be, well, real. To be in a place that is a real place, forged together and standing together. That does not mean that the 1970s fun-loving facades of western towns need to be maligned, but they do need to be realized as fashion and farce, which is okay. Or that everybody needs to get along. It does mean what needs to be honored is all of the good work that people do to honor one another, and to honor our homes, and our towns, and ourselves, and our sacred places. We want people to visit, and maybe even stay long while, because there is something here that is real and worthy. Even if we disagree with the means and the ends, we can at least agree that the intent was coming from the right place.
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| Hamilton Military Museum Mural by Jia Apple |
