War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning - Chris Hedges [66]
“We can put it back together,” he said softly to Zeljko Kneževic, one of the grave diggers. “Please do it for me. I will give you all the money I have. It is not a lot, but it is all that is left.”
Kneževic pounded nails into the three planks of wood that once formed the lid. The corpse, wrapped in a gray, damp blanket, faced the open sky. Ljesić, as if he were putting his son to bed, gently laid a clean blanket over the remains. An American Chinook helicopter passed overhead.
“I will put this plastic around the coffin,” he explained to the gravediggers. “We will tie it up with string.”
When the coffin was repaired, Ljesić embraced Kneževic.
“I will never forget what you did for me,” the father said.
The end of the coffin, covered with the milky white plastic sheeting, stuck out from the back of the van as it drove away.
Kneževic, seated on another grave, lit a cigarette.
“We have to do five graves tomorrow,” he said. “I was here when they put the first body in the ground. It looks like I will be here when they pull the last one out. When the cemetery is empty, my job will be done and I will leave with everyone else.”
7
EROS AND THANATOS
Beyond all this, the wish to be alone
However the sky grows dark with invitation-cards
However we follow the printed directions of sex
However the family is photographed under the
flagstaff—
Beyond all this, the wish to be alone
Beneath it all desire of oblivion runs
Despite the artful tensions of the calendar,
The life insurance, the tabled fertility rites,
The costly aversion of the eyes from death —
Beneath it all desire of oblivion runs.
•
PHILIP LARKIN
DURING THE WAR IN EL SALVADOR I WORKED WITH A photographer who had a slew of close calls and then called it quits. He moved to Miami. He took pictures of tepid domestic stories for one of the newsweeklies. But life in Florida was flat, dull, uninteresting. He could not adjust and soon came back. From the moment he stepped off the plane it was clear he had returned to die. Just as there are some soldiers or war correspondents who seem to us immortal and whose loss comes as a sobering reminder that death has no favorites, there are also those in war who are locked in a grim embrace with death from which they cannot escape. He was frightening to behold, a walking corpse. He was shot a few months later through the back in a firefight. It took him less than a minute to die.
Sigmund Freud divided the forces in human nature between the Eros instinct, the impulse within us that propels us to become close to others, to preserve and conserve, and the Thanatos, or death instinct, the impulse that works towards the annihilation of all living things, including ourselves. For Freud these forces were in eternal conflict. He was pessimistic about ever eradicating war. All human history, he argued, is a tug-of-war between these two instincts.
“The meaning of the evolution of civilization is no longer obscure to us,” Freud wrote in Civilization and Its Discontents. “It must present the struggle between Eros and Death, between the instinct of life and the instinct of destruction, as it works itself out in the human species. This struggle is what all life essentially consists of.”1
We believe in the nobility and self-sacrifice demanded by war, especially when we are blinded by the narcotic of war. We discover in the communal struggle, the shared sense of meaning and purpose, a cause. War fills our spiritual void. I do not miss war, but I miss what it brought. I can never say I was happy in the midst of the fighting in El Salvador, or Bosnia, or Kosovo, but I had a sense of purpose, of calling. And this is a quality war shares with love, for we are, in love, also able to choose fealty and self-sacrifice over security.
Happiness is elusive and protean. And it is sterile when devoid of meaning. But meaning, when it is set in the vast arena of war with its high stakes, its adrenaline-driven rushes, its bold sweeps and drama, is heartless and self-destructive. The initial selflessness