Easter: I dont know what the hell happened

Seven Stanzas  for Easter
by John Updike

Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled
eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His flesh: ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that–pierced–died, withered, paused, and then
regathered out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping, transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mâché,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow
grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.

And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair,
opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are
embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.

I posted this poem by Updike on Easter Sunday, wanting mainly to put something up for Easter—then got lost in some very academic maunderings about the Biblical accounts of the resurrection. Later, it felt inauthentic—the truth is, I don’t know what the hell to think about the resurrection story—and I was probably in over my head anyway. So I deleted it.

But I’m re-posting the Updike poem—it’s a good one, regardless of the theology. I had wanted to post something about Updike on the anniversary of his death in January, but I failed to do it. I may still—he was a towering writer, and though I have read only one of his novels I admire him greatly. A friend of mine suggests, wisely, that the poem might in fact be arguing against Biblical literalism—that’s a keen insight because Updike is clearly expressing that the wish for literalism, for a “real angel” and the “vast rock of materiality,” is just that: a wish. Another wise friend of mine says only that Easter is evidence of the “appalling naivete of Christians.” She says: “one DOES die, one doesn't go on and on, looking down from Heaven, sitting at the right hand of whomever.”

Yes, possibly. Who knows? And no one can “know” any better what precisely happened, in an historical sense, on the third day after a Palestinian Jewish mystic itinerant preacher was murdered on a cross two thousand years ago. But my original posting was an attempt to assert that there is a way to read the resurrection stories without recourse to cartoon science fiction imagery of bodies floating up from graves, that may not even be about the “next life” but about a renewed birth of vitality in this one; not about certainty regarding the afterlife, but a new freedom to live fearlessly in the face of uncertainty, death and ambiguity.

Light Through Windows: The Conspirator

Fans of painterly cinematography, of the conscious manipulation of images to create an effect, will want to see “The Conspirator,” Robert Redford’s new dramatization of the trial of Mary Surratt. A very painterly film, this one—think, maybe, of Johannes Vermeer and his pictures of light pouring through windows.

There is a lot of light through windows in “The Conspirator.” Scene after scene of light pouring through windows. But here the light is harsh—characters squint into it, uneasily—and the subjects are not the graceful maidens of Vermeer. They are tense soldiers and lawyers, angry and calculating politicians, frightened witnesses and family members. And there is Mary Surratt, played by Robin Wright, looking alternately serene and devout (when at prayer in her jail cell), or pained and distrustful and trapped (when she is in the trial court).

Mary Surratt was a confessed supporter of the Confederacy and the owner of the boardinghouse where John Wilkes Booth met from time to time with others who conspired to strike a blow against the government by killing not only Lincoln, but Vice President Andrew Johnson and Secretary of State William Seward. Mary’s son John was heavily implicated in the plot (but never convicted) and in “The Conspirator” Mary is portrayed as being used by the government as bait to ensnare the son. She is eventually hung after a military tribunal, in which witnesses are traduced and the outcome appears to be pre-ordained by a government hungry for revenge and eager to douse, forever, the dying embers of southern rebellion.

The parallel to the controversy today over the legal status of detainees in the war on terror is evident enough. But anyone expecting standard-issue Hollywood liberal polemic will not find it in this movie. There is, first of all, plenty of room to doubt Mary Surratt’s innocence. And the rational for a military tribunal—which roughly parallels that for detainees in Guantanamo—is given a full hearing: the full dimensions of conspiracy against the government were not known and a civilian trial could compromise security.

And, too, the drama bristles with the seething grievances of a nation that has been severely traumatized. Just ended was an exhausting war, the bloodiest ever seen anywhere in history, one that was instigated—from the northern perspective—by rebels in pursuit of a morally besmirched cause. Explicit reference is made to the treatment of Union prisoners by the rebels, a reference surely to the infamous prison at Andersonville where more than 12,000 Union soldiers died of starvation, malnutrition, diarrhea and disease. The Confederate officer in charge of the prison was convicted of war crimes, and news of the conditions at the prison stoked Northern instincts for retribution. And after all of this, the President is shot in a conspiracy that was believed by many to be widespread. There were those in the North, and in the President’s cabinet (especially Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, played by Kevin Kline) who were determined to put the screws to the South.

And on the other side the argument in Mary Surratt’s favor that makes itself felt most strongly, though it is insinuated rather than stated, is one that might discomfit Redford and others of contemporary liberal disposition.  Because the entire conduct of the rigged trial would seem to be, in its way, a vindication of the Confederate cause. I was waiting for Mary to say to her lawyer, something like this: “Look at what is happening. Don’t you see it? This is what we were fighting against. You flatter yourself that you were fighting to end slavery or to preserve your precious Union. But what you have succeeded in preserving is the right of distant power to exercise its will, to have its way and to claim it is doing it for the general good. Now your side has won and we are all—you, me, everyone everywhere— going to have to pay the piper. Because now this power---it is located in Washington, but it might as well be on the moon for all it knows about me or my life and my family, or about you and yours—will always have its way, and will rationalize what it is doing, and later it will write the history that says it was doing the Lord's work because it was for the greater good.” 

The characters are trapped in their own necessarily thwarted understanding of their historical circumstances, an entrapment captured during the trial scenes with a kind of staccato imagery so that one glimpses the agonized faces of the participants as they might look in faded black and white photographs. The light from outside, from all of those windows, might be the light of the truths we would like to think are self-evident—about how individuals are innocent until proven guilty, about the  right to a trial before a jury of peers--the truths that persist outside, above and beyond our own limited understanding of our circumstances.

Except that in times such as those depicted in “The Conspirator,” or in such fraught times as our own, those truths can be too harsh to bear. The film would seem to dare us to condemn the men behind the trial of Mary Surratt. Americans today have largely acquiesced without great protest to the idea that detainees at Guantanamo, some of whom have been held for years now without legal counsel, are too dangerous to risk being set free, even if evidence against them might not stand up in a civil trial. And they have acquiesced, too, to a greatly enlarged government invasion of their own privacy.

Well, so we live in dangerous times, and conceivably the tribunals are a necessary concession to an extreme situation. However, I believe the torture of some of those detainees at Guantanamo is another matter, an unambiguous wrong, and a great stain on American honor. And the two issues--torture and the conduct of legal proceedings against the detainees--now cannot be separated since undoubtedly one of the reasons the authorities recoil from a civil trial is because much or all of the evidence they have against these men has been garnered through methods that would make the information inadmissable in a civil court.

No one thought to waterboard Mary Surratt or her confederates. And the movie makes clear that in her day, as in ours, fear is the real enemy of reason and sanity when the world seems dangerous. What is needed are clear heads, sober minds and sharp eyes to discern what truth we can in the ambiguous shadows of our own murky history. Armchair warriors, gossip merchants with megaphones, the politically shameless who would exploit legitimate fears for partisan ends—these all only make it harder to see the light.

"The Judgments of the Lord": On the 150th Anniversary of the Start of the American Civil War

My twelve year old daughter believes I am “obsessed” with the American Civil War. I have explained to her that out of the vast, vast library of words written about the war—battlefield reports, interpretations from every conceivable angle, biographies, plays, fictional novels—I have read only a small handful. I have told her there are individuals whose idea of a summer vacation is to tramp about the battlefields of the great conflict, and that I have visited, years ago, only one of those fields. And I have tried to convey a portrait of the thriving subculture of Civil War “re-enactors,” of which I have no part.  I am not what anyone would call a “buff.”

But I suppose my interest would qualify as at least a “fascination.” Today marks the 150^th anniversary of the first shots of the Civil War when Confederate forces attacked Fort Sumter, in South Carolina in 1861, so possibly the war is on other minds. The Washington Post has been “tweeting” the events leading up to the conflagration, public television is reprising Ken Burn’s masterful public television series, and the New York Times began, in October, a blog called “Disunion” (http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/category/disunion/) to  chronicle the unfolding of the war in honor of the sesquecentential.

My own small homage to the anniversary is to have read Bruce Catton’s Pulitzer Prize winning 1954 work, “A Stillness at Appomattox.” It is a remarkable read. Catton is, I believe, the grand poo-bah  of Civil War historians, rivaled only by Shelby Foote (who played such a large part in the Ken Burns series). Catton wrote three grand trilogies—The Army of the Potomac (of which “Stillness” is the third), A Centennial History of the Civil War, and a trilogy of Ulysses S. Grant—and a great many other single-volume works on the war (as well as a few stray texts on historical subjects other than war).

“Stillness” chronicles the last campaign of the war, the bitter and savage battles of the Wildnerness, Spotsylvania Courthouse, Cold Harbor, and the Battle of the Crater during the Siege of Petersburg, up to the exhaustion of the Confederate forces and the somber surrender at Appomattox. Catton was a forerunner of today’s “narrative historians” making use of the diaries and unpublished letters of everyday soldiers to give a graphic description of the fight from the ground up. Some quaint, slightly anachronistic rhetorical flourishes give his writing a slightly dated quality, but his work remains definitive. 

What stands out most from the story and constitutes the theme of “Stillness” is that this campaign was, finally, “war with the varnish taken off.” Up to that point, the North had been, in Shelby Foote’s words, “fighting with one hand behind its back.” Robert E. Lee had humiliated one Union general after another and the war had about it the slightly perfumed scent of a gentleman’s gallant dueling match.

Uunburied dead at the Battle of the Wilderness

That would end with Grant’s campaign of 1864-65. Lincoln had finally found, in Grant, a general willing to use the North’s industrial and numerical advantage to pummel the rebels to death, and after the South’s decisive loss the year before at Gettysburg, Grant was determined to do it. From Wilderness to the end at Appomattox, the war would be a slugfest, a bloodletting, vicious and unrelenting and unrefined and very, very, very un-pretty. With each successive battle, Grant moved south and east hoping to cut Lee off from Richmond and finish him off; accordingly Lee kept going in the same direction, hoping to keep ahead of Grant, so that the two armies were in close proximity for the rest of the war, following each other throughout central Virginia and bumping into each other in a series of savage brawls.  

What also stands out from the work is how much earlier the war might have been won, and how many lives saved, were it not for the nearly criminal and certainly heartbreaking and positively shocking ineptitude of the Northern army.  Grant himself is reported by Catton to have wondered at one point, “What is wrong with this army?”

In fact, as Grant and his men would prove many times the Union army was much better than it had come to believe about itself after so many defeats at the hands of Robert E. Lee. But that there was “something wrong” in the Union war machine is clear from Catton’s account. One of the things wrong, surely, was the role played by bureaucrats in the War Department in Washington, which directed the Union effort in a way not notable for efficiency, decisiveness, and a capacity to respond quickly to changing circumstances. And which invariably infected military decisions with politics and personal ambition.

The other trouble was that in addition to the many brave and ferocious warriors in the Union ranks, there were also shirkers, laggards, criminals, and mercenaries of dubious conviction—or, at least, there were many more than the South fielded. However weird and unholy we may think of the Southern “cause” today, the rebels were fighting for what they considered their property—their slaves and their land—and for a way of life that they believed was mortally threatened. These were tangible assets, the kind that are bound always to inspire conviction and a willingness to die; though far smaller, the rebel army was, by Catton’s and every other report, remarkably, uniquely fierce and committed, and  composed almost wholly of boys who were true believers in the cause. The Union, on the other hand, was fighting to end slavery or to preserve the Union—these were more abstract moral imperatives. The men who understood these imperatives deeply, like Joshua Chamberlain, the theology professor from Bowdoin College in Maine and the hero of Little Round Top at Gettysburg, were among the most “American” of Americans, and real heroes of the war. But they were bound to be outnumbered by the many whose major motivation was to finish their service and return home.

The combination of bureaucratic and individual ineptitude—even if the individuals were a minority—created an army that was error prone. At the Battle of the Crater, a plan was undertaken by engineers in the Union army to dig a tunnel underneath the Southern trenches during the siege of Petersburg and mine the tunnel with explosives, blowing a hole in the defenses and opening the way to capture the city. It was not an entirely fantastical plan. The explosion went off blowing a gaping hole in the southern defenses. But, inexplicably, the order for the Union forces to move into the breach was never given until the rebel army had time to regroup. And when the union did move, there was no plan for scaling the walls of dirt created by the explosion, so that the men were trapped. One entire division of black soldiers was slaughtered. The officer who was supposed to be responsible for the assault was said to be far away from the fighting, getting drunk. Grant called it the “saddest affair I have witnessed in this war.”

Catton’s narrative is heavy on battlefield maneuvers, which can be difficult to envision and a slog to read. I will venture to say, hoping the thought police aren’t watching, that this book does not find a lot of female eyes. And I wonder if in fact what my daughter calls an “obsession” isn’t a peculiarly male one. War has always been an affair of men, the less brilliant of the sexes.

But in the case of the American Civil War, this is unfortunate if it’s true (that women don’t take as much interest in it). It was the defining event in our history, and its reverberations are everywhere today, from racial politics to the Tea Party movement. In a funny, but deeply thoughtful work, “Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War,” Tony Horwitz explored this subject. It is primarily a portrait of “re-enactors,” the folks who show up on battle anniversaries to re-fight the war in battle garb, but it is ultimately a meditation on the ways in which the Civil War continues in our day. (Incidentally, Christopher Hitchens also wrote a funny and interesting piece about re-enactors called “Rebel Ghosts.” It can probably be found online somewhere, but it’s included in his collection of essays, “Love, Poverty and War.”)

Certainly in slavery the war engaged a grave moral issue for which men were willing to die. And for this American, much of the fascination of the war derives from the fact that the dying was done, in terrible numbers, on fields that Americans can drive to or past¸ and beside which some Americans live.  The proximity of the enormous, enormous carnage that was the war lends to these spaces—these prosaic fields and farms and woods and valleys, dirt roads and creeks and rivers—something sacred, something that should, if we were paying attention, give us continual reason to be reverential. Actually, if we were paying attention we might be utterly ashamed of the smallness and shrillness of our politics today, which amounts to a squabbling over the takings of a privilege that has largely been handed to us by previous generations.

Because something happened in the war that went beyond what was expected or realized at the time by the men who fought it. It’s this that Lincoln, with his literary genius, captured.  Certainly it is possible to be cynical about the Civil War—that it was about economics and power politics and about keeping a big country big. And reading Catton’s book about the last military campaign will certainly dispel any sentimentality about the war—it was brutal, even vicious, sometimes (as at the Crater) squalid and disgustingly wasteful, and always filled with misery. But it took Lincoln to articulate, in his second inaugural address, that in this all too human affair something beyond what humans could have wrought alone was at work.

Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address

“Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained….Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding....If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."