| M | T | W | T | F | S | S |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| « Jan | ||||||
| 1 | 2 | |||||
| 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 |
| 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 |
| 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 |
| 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 |
Slaughterhouse Five response
I’m not sure where to start. I was too much of a coward to enlarge some of the thumbnail images in the Goya collection, and one of the more gruesome pieces of the photograph compiled by Jeff Wall. When I was younger, I watched the movie The Mummy and found it very difficult to sleep for the next few nights. I couldn’t get the image of the corpse out of my head. Every time I turned out the lights, I saw it. There is just something that isn’t right about animating the dead. My mom’s uncle just died two days ago. It was sad, of course, that his wife and friends were left without him, but he was suffering from Alzheimer’s. There is something peaceful and beautiful about death- even if a healthy child is killed during a war, at least he doesn’t have to spend the rest of his life knowing that such horrors as those that occurred during the war that he witnessed exist. I just don’t like the idea of bringing back to life a person who has been scarred by his death, or, in the case of the mummy, who has been dead long enough to rot. I don’t mean to say that everyone who dies brutally during a war wouldn’t be better off injured but alive, but it was horrifying to see the look on the soldier’s faces when they were brought back to life to see their horribly marred bodies. Am I making any sense at all?
It was really disturbing to me to see the soldiers in Wall’s photograph responding to their injuries. It reminded me of a play I saw when we hosted the MIFA competition over midwinter break: it was called Bury the Dead. it was about a group of animated dead soldiers who refused to be buried. The president of the US had the wives of the dead soldiers go try to persuade them to be buried. I had such a problem with the way the wives reacted and agreed to persuade their husbands. Every one of their various reactions seemed so unreal (and it wasn’t just because they were bad high school actors). But then I thought: How are they supposed to react? How am I supposed to react? What should I feel when I look at those paintings and photographs, or film clips of war on the news. I don’t think I’m desensitized to them yet, or else I could look at them without a problem; I just can’t imagine what it would feel like to see my husband dead, to see other people dismembered, or hanged. It’s too unreal to me- when I see them in print or on the tv or on the computer, sitting in my pjs, under a down blanked with the heat on in my cozy little house, eating a piece of red licorice, I can’t help but think of them as happening in any place other than in a movie or book. That’s the only place I’ve every experienced those horrors. And (in response to the question Mr. Kreinbring has posed) yes, I do feel powerless in the face of war; not necessarily because I can’t do anything to help, but because I know I’m not willing to do anything that would really be effective. I’m too selfish to put my own life in danger, or to expose myself to horrors that will haunt me the rest of my life. I suppose war is inevitable, because there are, and probably always will be, people who can think of no better or more efficient solution than to fight over it. If animals use violence to solve their problems, why shouldn’t we? We are, after all, animals. Maybe it’s our nature to use violence. But we aren’t just animals. If we can think and reason and invent wonderfully complex machines and medicine, can we think of no other method of resolving disputes than to resort to our animal instincts?
I also wanted to mention a point that Sontag made about Goya’s paintings: she thought Goya’s captions added a lot to the effect they had on the viewer, and I agree. (Luckily, they were in Spanish, so I could understand the majority of them) They were so simple… just by saying “yo lo veo” (I saw it), (which Vonnegut does in SH5 as well), it makes the painting seem a bit more real. It made me think, “wow- somebody actually saw this in real life?” which is completely ridiculous, but it was my honest reaction. I suppose that is basically my reaction to most war films, books and images: it’s really hard to imagine that crap like that actually happens. I guess people must become desensitized– how could someone do any of it?
