(no subject)

[leahbobet]

On and off, this year, I've been reading about WWI and the effects of it into the 1920s: memoirs, letters, social histories, more theoretical and thesis-driven histories, poetry. Photographs. Mostly memoirs, which tell me with a more limited amount of self-censorship what people saw and thought and felt. I paid a visit to the War Museum a few weeks ago and stood in the room they've done up like a trench, eyes half-closed, ignoring everyone else in there and trying to soak it in down to the bone.

This is for a book. It won't even be about the First World War as it happened, not really. I'm reading for the emotions, and to find what I need to change to make my idea work.

Thing is, wading sleeves-rolled into a topic does things to how you think.

I have caught myself unaccountably angry this year when someone uses lightly the phrase "in the trenches"; as in, "for those strikers in the trenches, that's not good enough." I want to shake that person: Really? They're in the trenches? Are they eighteen years old, sleeping with the rats in churned up mud, and under consistent artillery assault? No? So shut your face. Yes, it's a colloquialism of our language as spoken. I know. I have caught myself passing my first pair of hand-knit socks over and over through my hands, thinking about how they took me three months to knit up, how women must have done it better and faster and with so much more practice to be able to send socks for entire navy ships. What it was like when they thought about where their socks went. What it would feel like if what I do for a hobby was one of my only mechanisms of control over something terrifying.

This year, I read the articles and hear the speeches and see the photographs and I cry. Yeah, it's a trite thing to say. But there you go. I cry.

I'm not even halfway into the kind of research I'll need to do to get this right. Tip of the iceberg, kids. Tip of the iceberg.

---

Today is strange. Today's a bit of a paradox for me right now. Sometimes you think you know what a thing means until you start doing your reading, and you realize the edges of what it means. We all know poppies. We all know In Flanders Fields the poppies grow between the crosses row on row, mostly heard internally as the kind of singsong recitation kids do when they've been made to memorize. Remembrance Day is most definitely those things, and wreath-layings, and these kindly aging people, fewer and fewer of them each year, who come out in uniforms that seem so anachronistic on them. And I wonder what we're actually remembering. If those things haven't, in some ways, become not just the means but the ends of the whole affair.

The connections between symbols and referents inherently get loose, with time; it happens to words too. With words it's called semantic bleaching, when a thing stops meaning what it means and drifts toward a general good or bad. It's a human tendency: People's ideas of a thing, through repetition, start to spin and drift, and all symbols need to be redefined, be personalized, be ultimately co-opted in a million million little ways to stay at all socially relevant. It's the peril of traditions. After a while, you do a thing because you do, not because of whatever started it. Not because you don't care or are a bad person or something, but because that's the human tendency. That's semantic bleaching: that's what happens. We're here because we're here because we're here because we're here.

When I've started the research; when I've looked at the photographs and read the letters and tried to immerse myself in it, tried to think about what I'm not seeing and will never see, that upsets the hell out of me.

(And no, I am not expressing this right to get it clear across. I've rewritten in three times, and half the logic's still in my head and not on the page here. But I'm all dragged down in my own symbols and referents too, and it's unfortunately the best I can do.)

Comments

[sksperry.livejournal.com]

I think I know what you mean.

I remember listening to kids chanting "Ring around the Rosie" and thinking that those words have just become phonetic mouthings without meaning, but at one time...

[leahbobet.livejournal.com]

Yes.

That.

[csecooney.livejournal.com]

You know "Sunday in the Park with George" by Sondheim?
She sings, "Tell us how to see - notice every tree."

I think, when our symbols start bleaching out, it's time for someone with passion and and thought and wit (however unprepared she feels, or how floundering she thinks her words and ways are) to... take up the banner? Repaint the slogans? Set some war, somewhere, in a trench so true we can smell the gangrene and know horror and maybe watch our words a little better the next time we feel reckless. Oh, I don't know. I loved this entry, though. Socks. You've made me re-think socks.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

One of my eventual goals for knitting is to knit socks for the troops, as there is still a group (at least in the U.S.) for doing that.

[leahbobet.livejournal.com]

I suspect by the time I finished a pair of socks for a soldier, we'd be out of Afghanistan. Which would be lovely were that sympathetic magic, and worked the other way...

[michaeldthomas.livejournal.com]

I've been thinking a lot about semantic bleaching recently after another friend complained about the misuse of words from WWII like holocaust, Nazi, and Deathmarch. It's fascinating how human beings end up minimizing the severly tragic.

[leahbobet.livejournal.com]

It...I don't know. It is and it isn't? I mean, there's a degree to which we need that fading; we can't live in constant horror forever. But there's also a degree to which it gets so casual, so fast.

[michaeldthomas.livejournal.com]

The casual-so-fast thing frightens me. On one hand, I understand that people no longer have a strong emotional reaction to the horrors of WWI. It's become a part of history. People see no difference between those young men and the 50,000 Persian soldiers that archaeologists just found. They all belong to the past.

On the other hand, it frightens me how people have already forgotten the 2004 tsunami or the genocide in Darfur. I have cans in my cabinets older than those tragedies.

Even more disturbing is how people can turn these horrible events into jokes. I remember Ethiopian famine and Shuttle Challenger jokes happening in my childhood only days after those terrible tragedies. Apparently, holocaust jokes were very popular in West and East Germany in the years after WWII.

One of the most powerful cognitive functions is the ability to forget. As you said, we can't live in constant horror. Unfortunately, this means that humanity keeps makingthe same terrible mistakes over and over again.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

The trivialization bothers me (I've been known to object loudly to terms like feminazi or to ridiculous Holocaust comparisons). The jokes, not so much, because black humor is so often used by people who know *exactly* how bad things are, as a way to get through it. I guess there are different types of jokes, though; a joke about stone soup might be grimly hilarious in a refugee camp or concentration camp, not so funny used about, say, the menu of an Ethiopian restaurant in the US in the 1980s.

[maradydd.livejournal.com]

Weird same-wavelength thing: about two hours before I saw this post, I read the Project Gutenberg version of Rilla of Ingleside. Canadian women knitting socks for their relatives on the Western Front is a major theme, and for all the reasons you describe.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

I just looked it up (I was quoting Walter's letter elsewhere). There's also a bit in there where Susan finally gives in and knits on a Sunday, on the Sabbath - because the news is so bad she can't get through the day otherwise. I'd been thinking of it as just something to *do* - I knit, too - bt I hadn't realized that to her, then, it would also have been something constructive to do that would help any of the boys who survived Vimy Ridge.

[davidlevine]

I found myself doing the same sort of thing after a couple of months of quite obsessive research about the Cuban Missile Crisis. I spent a long time (still ongoing, to a lesser extent) connecting everything I saw to it, or seeing connections that were there in the first place but unnoticed.