Poppies for oblivion
Nov. 11th, 2018 10:57 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustHere we are at last, at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the hundredth year, and I am pretty much poppied out. I have been genuinely touched by many moments of commemoration and reflection during the past four years, and some of them have involved the imagery of the poppy (I wish I had seen the Weeping Window in one of its manifestations...). But as the hour approached, and the crocheted poppies have spread across the country, and FB group for the local paper's camera club has become more and more speckled with red and the declaration "We will remember them..." is appended to every photoshopped image... I'm sure it's all very sincere (even the 'poppy run' which I initially thought was an ultimate piece of cashing in, turns out to be a British Legion fundraiser, so I guess they are entitled) but I think more and more bitterly of that 'war to end all wars', and how it didn't.
I must already have been starting to feel this way last month, at the Lakes Comics Festival launch for the Traces of the Great War anthology, because I was particular attracted by the invitation not just to "remember" but to consider what came after, what marks the war has left on us today. It opens with a challenge from Robbie Morrison and Charlie Adlard. They have written before about White Death, the use of avalanches in mountain warfare, which continues to release the bodies of its dead: how would today's teenagers react to this very material trace of war? Mary and Bryan Talbot examine the demand for Germany to make reparation for the past war, and how this helped cause the next one (reflected in Mikiko's depiction of the German side of remembrance: there are no winners in war... only hunger, suffering, death, grief...). Other contributions point out that in Russia the war is eclipsed by the revolution it surely helped to trigger; Orijit Sen, meanwhile, chooses to remind us of the pressures that sent a 'Ship of Liberty' from India to Canada, and back.
Perversely, among all this internationalism, the two pages which most move me are the double page spread in which Simon Armitage and Dave McKean consider that most parochial residue of the war, the village memorial, with its list of names:
As a counter to this intensely local meditation of the act of memory, and again perversely, contradicting anything I may have said about welcoming the book's emphasis of traces, residue, looking back, I am particularly grateful for the contribution of Riff Reb's, which introduced me to the haikus of Julien Vocance. I know that it's too much to ask that a book published simultaneously in English and French should also produce a bilingual edition, just for me: but here, more than with any other contribution, I wished that was possible. Three cheers for the internet: here are the original haikus, one hundred visions of war, written on the moment in the trenches, panoramas of ruined countryside and tiny close-ups, moments of horror and moments of rest. (This essay on haiku in the Great War gives some examples with English translations.)
There's only one way to conclude this incoherent collection of thoughts and emotions:
I must already have been starting to feel this way last month, at the Lakes Comics Festival launch for the Traces of the Great War anthology, because I was particular attracted by the invitation not just to "remember" but to consider what came after, what marks the war has left on us today. It opens with a challenge from Robbie Morrison and Charlie Adlard. They have written before about White Death, the use of avalanches in mountain warfare, which continues to release the bodies of its dead: how would today's teenagers react to this very material trace of war? Mary and Bryan Talbot examine the demand for Germany to make reparation for the past war, and how this helped cause the next one (reflected in Mikiko's depiction of the German side of remembrance: there are no winners in war... only hunger, suffering, death, grief...). Other contributions point out that in Russia the war is eclipsed by the revolution it surely helped to trigger; Orijit Sen, meanwhile, chooses to remind us of the pressures that sent a 'Ship of Liberty' from India to Canada, and back.
Perversely, among all this internationalism, the two pages which most move me are the double page spread in which Simon Armitage and Dave McKean consider that most parochial residue of the war, the village memorial, with its list of names:
...what better way
to monumentalise
the dead and lost
within the clockwork
of the mind
than honour them
with stone and time
As a counter to this intensely local meditation of the act of memory, and again perversely, contradicting anything I may have said about welcoming the book's emphasis of traces, residue, looking back, I am particularly grateful for the contribution of Riff Reb's, which introduced me to the haikus of Julien Vocance. I know that it's too much to ask that a book published simultaneously in English and French should also produce a bilingual edition, just for me: but here, more than with any other contribution, I wished that was possible. Three cheers for the internet: here are the original haikus, one hundred visions of war, written on the moment in the trenches, panoramas of ruined countryside and tiny close-ups, moments of horror and moments of rest. (This essay on haiku in the Great War gives some examples with English translations.)
There's only one way to conclude this incoherent collection of thoughts and emotions:
no subject
Date: 2018-11-11 02:13 pm (UTC)Thanks also for pointing me towards Traces of the Great War and the haiku. (Now I know what I want for Christmas!)
no subject
Date: 2018-11-11 03:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-11-12 06:35 pm (UTC)Yes.
Thank you for even the parts of this post that aren't Phil Ochs. [edit] The haiku are terrific.
no subject
Date: 2018-11-13 09:42 am (UTC)