Innocence is Gone, and It's Not OK

essaysbysean.blogspot.com   

Reminder: Back when the communists and nazis were friends they divided Poland between them, down the middle.

Hello Reader

Got knowledge of fragility?

Sources:

Anna and the Swallow Man by Gavriel Savit,

Ember, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, 2017

Poppies of Iraq, by Brigitte Fndakly and Lewis Trondheim, Drawn and Quarterly, originally published in French, with help from the Canada Council, 2017

A writer once pointed out that most people move through the world gingerly. That sounds right, based on the ordinary folks I have known, including writers. Then again, my writer peers would never be blazing oblivious extroverts. How could they be? And still do the art they do? 

This week I was with a small circle of writers to discuss our latest book club selection: Anna and the Swallow Man by. Gavriel Savit. Highly recommended. In wartime Poland, the two title characters, innocent girl and mysterious wise man, are trying to survive the holocaust by keeping on the move through forests and towns, using their wits to get past Russians and Germans. Call the bad guys bears and wolves, as the Swallow Man does, in this book of magical realism and flowing literary sentences. It’s marketed as YA, young adult.

My peers thought the novel could be for any age group. This despite dead bodies delicately described. As for readers too young, we thought they wouldn’t “get” the sexual assault scene, and thus wouldn’t be harmed. My peers were mothers and school teachers: They would know children, and they hastened to assure a sensitive lady who had not read the book yet, that the assault scene would be OK. Here’s the aftermath, on page 212-213:

“She cried, of course…Though she would not have been able to tell you so at the time, Anna had broken a part of herself like a piggy bank to pay the (person’s) price, and it felt to her as if she had already failed to…”

The book’s cover, by Laura Carlin, is inspired: A far off view: Under the shadow of a passing swallow, a girl is walking all alone in the snow. The problem with your losing innocence, or even worse, gaining unspeakable knowledge, is you then walk through life always a little cold, a little alone. I can relate. A writer once told me that I was looking out of a mask, through little eye holes, at people. Maybe she was quite mistaken, and only “perceived” so because we knew of each other’s past. It was all so long ago… This year, if I rail against teachers being documented as allowing school bullying, then it’s because I am certain assaults and bullying are a form of losing innocence, and it’s not OK. (as archived February 2019, Bullies and Teachers)

An actual example of an entire society changing its innocence would be here in Canada. We still believe in our sacred freedom of speech, of course, but now we also have laws censoring hate speech, as we are conscious of living in a post-holocaust world. We realize at last that “human rights”are the canary in the coal mine; and we know now that evil unchecked anywhere threatens the world. 

One of my favorite writers knew about the existence of PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder) long before Veterans Affairs did. In fact, HG Wells knew back in the 19th century. His hero in War of the Worlds, years after the passing of the Martians, is still having flashbacks. Wells knew that, just like individuals, a whole society can be affected. (Like today how folks of continental Europe sees the EU as way to prevent having enemy boots on the ground, while folks of the British Isles, having never been invaded since 1066, sees the EU as merely a trade organization) In Well’s novel, once the Martians had left, people no longer saw a friendly night sky. 

In my opinion it’s OK to face reality, and also to say that reality does not feel OK.

Breaking News regarding assaults and bullying
Being returned to a sixth form bullying environment can (link) cause PTSD-like trauma for a wife and mother (God bless society for slow-w-w-ly becoming ready to begin to face the effects of child bullying)

SIDEBAR

Documented loss of mental health on a national level, in the graphic memoir Poppies of Iraq:

Besides people under oppressive censorship gradually losing their freedom of conversation, until all they had left was trivial gossip, I was struck by this:

Quote

It’s 2016. For a long time my cousins hoped things would get better. They stayed until their parents died, and then, to give their children a normal future, almost all of them left, emigrating to the four corners of the earth. Australia, NewZealand, Canada, the U.S., Sweden, France…… And all have become Islamophobic. 

I won’t try to argue. I’ll continue to love them as they are, as people I care about.

Unquote.

As for Arabians becoming Islamophobic, to paraphrase what a “good German” said after Europe was reduced to rubble: 

“All that is needed for Islam to cause phobia is for “good Arabs” to do nothing.”

Here are two old poems, by Lutheran Pastor and former U-boat commander, Martin Neimoller which I would wager have never been translated into Arabic (as Arabs do surprisingly little translating)

"Thus, whenever I chance to meet a Jew known to me before, then, as a Christian, I cannot but tell him: 'Dear Friend, I stand in front of you, but we can not get together, for there is guilt between us. I have sinned and my people has sinned against thy people and against thyself.'" 

And this poem,
which, after being recited live with different versions, (like Bob Dylan's live presentations of All Along the Watchtower) is now classic:

First they came for the Jews

and I did not speak out

because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for the Communists

and I did not speak out

because I was not a Communist.

Then they came for the trade unionists

and I did not speak out

because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for me

and there was no one left

to speak out for me. 

Link

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/martin-niemoeller-first-they-came-for-the-socialists

As for my knowledge of horror: My perspective, in this world of woe, means I don’t get paralysed. Not me. I feel it’s perfectly OK to do like the missionaries, 

working in starving nations, when back here on vacation, 

who would “eat, drink and be merry,” without guilt, 

who would gladly embrace our “merely first world problems,’ 

…and maybe embrace a nice Mars poem too:

Poem

The Martians are Gone, and It’s Not OK

Martians gone, six years past.

Rubble cold, red weed dust.

Mother is gone, and it’s not OK.

If I look up at the starry night,

it’s not friendly.

If I contemplate the cosmos,

there’s no God.

The planets revolve unheeding;

they’re not for us.

I never taught my mother

to honor me

or know my friends were not bad,

not stupid.

Mother is gone,

and it will never be OK.

Sean Crawford

August

2019

Calgary