plots and fiascos—financial, military, social—spiral into oblivion. How many times in one’s life, I would shout at Bo Ling, can a man claim innocence? Can a nation get away with saying “We had no idea how bad things were. Let us punish those responsible, and so preserve the innocent”? What depth of experience with evil does it take, I would demand, how much of the world’s history of goons needs to be taken in, before a person ceases to participate?
I can still, you see, be yanked into a gyre, circling back to the war, to the core of deception that lay at its heart. I can grasp this much: it has ever been this way, from the invasions of Macedonia forty centuries ago by Anatolians to the Wehrmacht’s blitzkrieg across Poland. Deceit, hypocrisy, self-delusion, breast-beating, greedy designs, the forbidden pleasure of violence running through wars that were sanctioned and ones that were not. Wars without beginnings, wars with pauses but without ends.
War is an appetite. It is its own reason for being.
Unfortunately, with every war the dead must come, the maimed, the deranged, the frustrated, the guilt ridden, all those for whom war’s champions, its believers, even its grateful survivors have no adequate answer. What is the question to which I am the answer, a blind eunuch with a face of melted wax?
How often, I ask myself, do these memories snare me? How hard do I go down? How long before I get up? Most of the bile is gone now. With Bo Ling, with my sheets of folded paper—here, young lady, a chrysanthemum and a tiger—I circle back less and less. I cannot undo the past, but I can make a present that will diminish its size, see to it that my experience of darkness does not take up more room than its due. My goal is no longer to ensure that the names of those who sent me to die are not forgotten, but to reach a place where I can recall their names only with difficulty.
Bo Ling has a plan to help us both. She wants to raise a child. She thinks we can adopt. I’m not strongly behind her on this, but she says this is because I cannot let go of enough of my anger. She may have something. Another goal, then: the loss of enough anger to become a father.
In my own terms—accepting the risk that comes with a loss of innocence, not knowing whether you are preparing yourself for darkness or for the realm of light—for
me
to choose parenthood has some heft. It will be loaded with consequence. But not to follow it out, not to take the risk, wouldn’t that finally leave you an isolate, your own grim island? Further, I tell myself, wouldn’t love, the plunge with the greatest risk of all, fall short of its final loss of innocence if it did not take this step, if I never said to a small child, I give you my life?
It’s this sort of thinking that makes me believe one day I will turn the putative tragedy of the world inside out. Having killed others, including a child, and been maimed, I might now raise a child I would never ask to compensate me for what I cannot resolve. I might love the child freely, asking no more from him—or her—than that he become highly discerning about the loss of the great pool of innocence with which he was born.
I would be vigilant, as once my father urged.
The wages of trauma, as I have written it out in my life, is anger. The resolution of that anger, say the therapists, breaks the grip of the traumatic event. But to resolve the anger—and this I got on my own—it’s necessary to love. It’s not enough just to arrive at a place where no one, not even yourself, is to blame.
You have to go further.
For several years now Bo Ling, from her own perspective, has also been telling me this. To wash out the anger, she says, fall in love. Be in love with a peach, she says, its summer juice running down your bare chest. Be in love with the sound of your brother’s truck as it pulls up to the curb on a summer night with supper just ready on the table. Be in love with me, she says, when my
I can still, you see, be yanked into a gyre, circling back to the war, to the core of deception that lay at its heart. I can grasp this much: it has ever been this way, from the invasions of Macedonia forty centuries ago by Anatolians to the Wehrmacht’s blitzkrieg across Poland. Deceit, hypocrisy, self-delusion, breast-beating, greedy designs, the forbidden pleasure of violence running through wars that were sanctioned and ones that were not. Wars without beginnings, wars with pauses but without ends.
War is an appetite. It is its own reason for being.
Unfortunately, with every war the dead must come, the maimed, the deranged, the frustrated, the guilt ridden, all those for whom war’s champions, its believers, even its grateful survivors have no adequate answer. What is the question to which I am the answer, a blind eunuch with a face of melted wax?
How often, I ask myself, do these memories snare me? How hard do I go down? How long before I get up? Most of the bile is gone now. With Bo Ling, with my sheets of folded paper—here, young lady, a chrysanthemum and a tiger—I circle back less and less. I cannot undo the past, but I can make a present that will diminish its size, see to it that my experience of darkness does not take up more room than its due. My goal is no longer to ensure that the names of those who sent me to die are not forgotten, but to reach a place where I can recall their names only with difficulty.
Bo Ling has a plan to help us both. She wants to raise a child. She thinks we can adopt. I’m not strongly behind her on this, but she says this is because I cannot let go of enough of my anger. She may have something. Another goal, then: the loss of enough anger to become a father.
In my own terms—accepting the risk that comes with a loss of innocence, not knowing whether you are preparing yourself for darkness or for the realm of light—for
me
to choose parenthood has some heft. It will be loaded with consequence. But not to follow it out, not to take the risk, wouldn’t that finally leave you an isolate, your own grim island? Further, I tell myself, wouldn’t love, the plunge with the greatest risk of all, fall short of its final loss of innocence if it did not take this step, if I never said to a small child, I give you my life?
It’s this sort of thinking that makes me believe one day I will turn the putative tragedy of the world inside out. Having killed others, including a child, and been maimed, I might now raise a child I would never ask to compensate me for what I cannot resolve. I might love the child freely, asking no more from him—or her—than that he become highly discerning about the loss of the great pool of innocence with which he was born.
I would be vigilant, as once my father urged.
The wages of trauma, as I have written it out in my life, is anger. The resolution of that anger, say the therapists, breaks the grip of the traumatic event. But to resolve the anger—and this I got on my own—it’s necessary to love. It’s not enough just to arrive at a place where no one, not even yourself, is to blame.
You have to go further.
For several years now Bo Ling, from her own perspective, has also been telling me this. To wash out the anger, she says, fall in love. Be in love with a peach, she says, its summer juice running down your bare chest. Be in love with the sound of your brother’s truck as it pulls up to the curb on a summer night with supper just ready on the table. Be in love with me, she says, when my
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