Last week, there was an anecdote offered in class about a holocaust survivor who became extremely successful and stayed with his wife in spirit, who was also a holocaust survivor, always keeping a photograph of her on the desktop even after her death. Being esteemed for his incredible fire to rise from nothing and become so economically triumphant and well regarded within the community gave all the appearances of heroism. But in a confession to a friend, he revealed that he had become such a seemingly great man in response to finding out that in a troubled time after the war, his wife had had an affair with another man. The details, which will only sound like equivocations or excuses, of her affair are irrelevant. He was fueled for half a century by spite, keeping her photograph on the desk to remind him daily that work would forevermore be more important than her.
We spoke about the need for vengeance on the part of the wronged, the victim. With predictable contrariness, I felt sad about the story. Probable or not, I cannot reconcile myself to the notion of vengeance; it is too much a dilution and a disservice to justice. It is a perversion when those who know the reality of malice or the unrelenting nature of indifference become those monsters. But there is something more to it. And then on the train, I came upon the following passage in “The Things They Carried”, by Tim O’Brien:
“He opened a can of C rations, pork and beans, but the baby buffalo wasn’t interested.
“Rat shrugged.
“He stepped back and shot it through the right front knee. The animal did not make a sound. It went down hard, then got up again, and Rat took careful aim and shot off an ear. He shot the hindquarters and in the little hump at its back. He shot it twice in the flanks. It wasn’t to kill; it was to hurt. He put the rifle muzzle up against the mouth and shot the mouth away. Nobody said much. The whole platoon stood there watching, feeling all kinds of things, but there wasn’t a great deal of pity for the baby water buffalo. Curt Lemon was dead. Rat Kiley had lost his best friend in the world. Later in the week he would write a long personal leter to the guy’s sister, who would not write back, but for now it was a question of pain. He shot off the tail. He shot away chunks of meat below the ribs. All around us there was the smell of smoke and filth and deep greenery, and the evening was humid and very hot. Rat went to automatic. He shot randomly, almost casually, quick little spurts in the belly and butt. Then he reloaded, squatted down, and shot it in the left front knee. Again the animal fell hard and tried to get up, but this time it couldn’t quite make it. It wobbled and went down sideways. Rat shot it in the nose. He bent forward and whispered something, as if talking to a pet, then he shot it in the throat. All the while the baby buffalo was silent, or almost silent, just a light bubbling sound where the nose had been. It lay very still. Nothing moved except the eyes, which were enormous, the pupils shiny black and dumb.
“Rat Kiley was crying. He tried to say something, but then cradled his rifle and went off my himself.”
The passage makes me shake; it makes me upset in a way that reminds me of that so-called successful man who was once hope and love, who turned fidelity into a ritual of loneliness and perpetual enmity. He did not let his heart break, scream out against the gods of irony, hurt and eventually forgive and/or fall in love. That is not the pathos of his success; there is not the inversion of grief into triumph unless we’re counting finances and faith as equal. Sure, when someone experiences injustice, they may rise from the rubble to fight for the very possibility of right.
O’Brien continues after the story to tell the reader that everyone misses the point. They feel sad for the baby buffalo and horror at the grisly and perverse stories that come out of the war. In his head, he corrects them. He says, “I’ll picture Rat Kiley’s face, his grief, and I’ll think, You dumb cooze.// Because she wasn’t listening.// It wasn’t a war story. It was a love story.” And I would like to point out that it is not “war” that O’Brien emphasizes; it is wasn’t. It wasn’t a war story he was talking about it was a story about how Rat Kiley loved someone named Lemon Curt and watched him get blown to bit, all his parts hanging from a tree. It was a story about how Rat Kiley dealt with that experience, how he tortured this baby bison while a whole group of people watched, not doing anything, thinking their own thoughts, knowing that in some fucked up way it was sense. Not making sense; it was sense. Because sometimes even love is not good, it just is. This was not an anecdote about bad guys.
Aside the sociopath, no one feels comfortable with the above passage. But I wonder what about it is upsetting? Is it the killing that distinguishes it as morally unconscionable? Is it the hurt becoming the killer? Is it the pain played out of the innocent (though ironically, the actual death of this ‘dumb’ animal will prevent it paying its pain forward)? How is this story so different? The only justification I can see is that very gruesomeness and distance comforts the audience. If it is the death, the physical extreme of harm to the body, that alone distinguishes this piece as unacceptable… If we want more sanitized forms of vengeful anger, ones that will allow us to pretend that there is no violence in retribution, then we are already monsters. All we are doing is arguing about the quotient of cruelty we will allow, one that pretends that it is a reasonable mind that can prefer and mete vengeance instead of justice. We are in a time of refined psychological torture, pretending that taking away the means of suicide can compensate for destroying the will to live. Who are we? What distinguishes us from our monsters, is that the giant howling “no” wants to believe that things should be different. It grieves even when tears are powerless.
~ Cristina
Pneumatic Devotion 