Retreats of the live creature

In A Chorus of Stones, Susan Griffin writes about how Hemingway so much wants war to elicit the heroic, how he works to reconstruct and fabricate the experience of war toward this end. But, she continues, "he is telling another more crucial truth. How the war was not heroic. How there was fear and failure and a flatness in the end, a sickness of heart because 'the things that were glorious had no glory ... and the sacrifices were like the stockyards of Chicago'."

War as the circumstance, beyond all others, at least in the world of collective activity, in which the human sensorium attempts to withdraw, pull inwards or retreat physically, from a world of harm. Like the echidna  we helped that was stranded midway across a wide west Australian desert highway, terrified of passing vehicles, pulled inwards into a tight ball, spines instinctively defending it against the tons of metal and plastic whirling by.

David Grossman in The Yellow Wind - his discussions with Palestinians and Israeli "settlers" in the West Bank, amidst such deeply embedded mutual violence, mistrust and hatred - ends the 2002 Afterword with his need for hope, and then says: "The very fact of writing these words, of expressing a hope of any sort, already threatens to crack the hard protective membrane each of us has now generated to ward off hurt, and to prevent us feeling too much." Or, he says elsewhere, thinking and speaking in ways that are seen as unrealistic, naive, inhumane, suspect, even tantamount to treason.

I have remembered Griffin telling a story told her by an Israeli friend: A young Israeli soldier is sent to Gaza. One day he picks up stones thrown at him by Palestinian children, then begins to juggle the stones. In the days following, the children again gather nearby, but instead of throwing stones, they watch the juggler with pleasure. A counter-story, perhaps wishful, perhaps one of those hopeful exceptions, to modern retreat, warding off and "sickness of heart" amidst a world of learned, embedded "enemies."

Another story (possibly from Griffin's book, but not sure) .... A child in Chernobyl is told by her mother: "You are not supposed to touch the grass. You must not touch the soil. You cannot touch the flowers, the vegetables." And so on. And so the child learns to hold back her hands, her steps, her body, and over time to ask, sometimes aloud, sometimes to herself, sometimes deep inside beyond conscious hearing: "Is this safe? Is this? Is this?"

I think of Kafka's retreating, burrowing, hyper-nervous, sometimes paranoid creaturely animals. Or the young Palestinian girl, running from one family member's house to another during a curfew in Qalqilia, described by Grossman:  "like a hair crossing an open field, she rushes, slightly bowed, and disappears." Or civilians hiding in underground bunkers during bombardments. Or the childhood experience of my generation in North America of hiding under school desks and the fashion of "fallout shelters." Or, on city streets, the eyes turned away - or appearing to look but not actually seeing. Hands over ears. That "sickness of heart." That modern, cynical disinterest in patient, empathetic reflection. The so-called "siege mentality" as now normal psychology.

The Chernobyl story reminds me of how William Morris understood the ugliness (filth, crowdedness, noise, cramped and cluttered urban design) of 19th urban-industrializing England in terms of the experience of the creaturely human. You come upon in Morris what to our long-modernized conscious thoughts seem to be the most outlandish suggestions. Imagining a new, freer, more just and more beautiful (sense-receptive) society, he suggests that "perhaps mankind will regain their eyesight, which they have at present lost to a great extent" - and by eyesight he means both the "mechanical" thing (because of new forms of factor and office labour) and the ability to "take in mental impressions through the eyes; whereas in times past the eyes were the great feeders of the fancy and imagination."

Or, referring to the late 19thC "grimy, disorderly uncomfortable world," of urban-industrial-commercial Europe, Morris writes how this world "offends the senses at every turn ... forces us unconsciously to blunt their keenness. The man who notices the external form of things much nowadays must suffer in South Lancashire or London, must live in a state of perpetual combat and anger; and he really must try to blunt his sensibility, or he will go mad, or kill some obnoxious person ...."  ("The Society of the Future," 1887)

These examples make me wonder how the senses - the live creature - experience the many dimensions of modernity's special aggressiveness: the modern's felt-unsafe and ugly, unpleasing qualities as experienced by the living organism. How it can drive the sensing creature back into herself, that pulling back or away from the more natural expressive impulse to embrace surroundings and life with which all life begins. The need for a kind of physiology of modern-era withdrawal and retreat on behalf of self-protectiveness, expressed as caution, guardedness, nervousness, fear.

To the extent that these examples reveal something about modern human being, what is then happening in the creaturely human to enable it, over time and generations, to return daily to the "normal" routines of modern urban workplace, production, commuting, leisure? Kafka imagines, in The Metamorphosis, a person who is conscientiously eager to rise and face the day of work and responsibility, and another, the live creature, for whom this same conscientiousness has been leading towards a night of involuntary transformation, like the dream-work become real in the body, waking in a morning immobile, or rather only mobile like an utterly unwieldy, dyfunctional machine - in effect, the live creature as now alien-seeming and refusing (incapable really) to rise and face the day as offered us?

Counter experiences: - My excitement and great pleasure, amidst each day's end exhaustion, of traveling the streets of India. That overwhelming cacophony of sounds, awful disabilities and humiliations, jumbles of signs, savage power, moving objects of every sort, overpowering odours, thick crowds, moments of such beauty. The pleasure of embracing this again, although perhaps best felt not immediately on foot but from a passing trishaw.

Or - another counter-experience - the pleasure of a certain dance floor perhaps twenty years ago now: crowded with gyrating people-ghosts, our bodies discontinuous, now here, now there, now nowhere under strobe lights, all of us moving in something like a pit circled with rising tiers of bystanders in the half-light, the base notes battering our hearts, thud, thud, thud. Painful, actually, as I remember now and even at the time - but also pleasurable, exciting, especially I think because of how the place created a kind of heightened eroticism. All of us, women and men, all energy and movement, all expressive pulsing limbs and torso, and anonymous as well. Without this I would have fled. The pull/attractiveness and push/repulsiveness of such a place. A kind of modern urbanism in the form of an intense caricature?