Myth, Madness and the National Mall, Part Six of Seven

Part Six

The fires of war are ritual fires. Once they are set, they can only be put out by healing rituals of an equal intensity. – Michael Meade

All victories are to be celebrated as funerals. – Tao Te Ching

The Viet Nam Veterans’ Memorial has received over 200 million visitors (over 4.5 million/year) since it was dedicated in 1982, and four replicas of it have toured the country since 1990. Over time, it has come to serve several purposes. First, in making no political statement about the war, it counters the flood of belligerent media noise by offering a silent place for people who have no common political or cultural language to share public sorrow. It doesn’t mention the ranks of the dead, and it lists them not alphabetically (there are nearly 700 Smiths, 38 of them named James or Jim) but in chronological order of their death or disappearance, making them individuals rather than statistics.

Its designer Maya Lin envisioned a “giant knife cutting America open”.

As Jeffrey Ochsner explains in A Space of Loss: the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the walk alongside the wall is meant to be experienced as a procession. Because the path is paved only to a width of ten feet, one experiences it sequentially in a dramatic but gradual change in height. The panels don’t get taller, they get deeper, and so does one’s sense of how the human cost of the war grew. A threshold is eventually met when the height of the wall overtakes the height of the person, enclosing them within the memorial space. Although this point differs depending on the height of the individual, each person reaches it in their own time. Some have seen the wings of the memorial as a mother’s arms welcoming her children.

Thus, the visitor is drawn into the story of the war itself, the one known only by the veterans, where patriotism gives way to uncontrollable death. We feel helpless before the staggering numbers, where individuals turn back into statistics. After the high point, we follow the wall back toward its low point, just as American soldiers were gradually withdrawn. But this is no linear narrative: The earliest fatalities are inscribed at the memorial’s central hinge and loop around, so that the last dead are listed next to them. The chronological list of names follows the wall in a cyclical way – beginning in the middle of the wall, receding into the earth to the right, and emerging from the earth with the other side of the wall to the left. The war’s beginning and end meet; the war is complete, coming full circle, yet broken by the earth that bounds the angle’s open side, and contained within the earth itself.

The hinge between the two walls is a pivotal – and thus sacred – space, a liminal place, a hard and permanent barrier between the living and the dead. Blocking out the urban noise, it is a place of temporary peace.

Second, as a receptacle for thousands of photographs, poems and memorabilia (and through the ritual of making rubbings of the names), the memorial invites us to conduct emotions from one world to the other, to enter an active, ritual conversation with the dead. By 1995, over 500,000 non-perishable items had been left there. In addition, since visitors must look up the names in a printed index to locate them on the wall, they must be even more active. Because no one is allowed on the grass surrounding the wall, all these behaviors occur within the single v-shaped pathway. On the exterior paths, benches face away from the memorial, further accentuating this separation; either one interacts intimately with the memorial, or one is removed from it; there is no in-between.

A third purpose is revealed in its low, anti-heroic design. The black granite (in a city of mostly white marble) standing within the earth is an interface between the sunny world of the father-gods and the dark abode of their children.

Sinking gradually like blood soaking into soil, it subtly reminds us of our collective responsibility to the dead and of the knowledge that can be found in the dark earth. It “…coaxes everyone into the same ritual of descent,” writes Michael Ventura, “a ritual that the psyche can’t help but recognize”.

At some point, we realize that the polished surface is reflecting our faces behind the inscribed names, as if we were among the dead, looking back into our own eyes, as if we were finally acknowledging that we as a nation bear the responsibility for having sent them to be sacrificed on the altar of American innocence. The veil between the worlds is very thin here. (It is worth noting again that apocalypse means “to lift the veil.”)

Its fourth purpose is to encourage an imagination of reconciliation. A veteran left this note, along with a photograph:

Dear Sir:

For 22 years I have carried your picture in my wallet. I was only eighteen years old that day that we faced one another on that trail in Chu Lai…Why you didn’t take my life I’ll never know. You stared at me for so long, armed with your AK-47, and yet you did not fire. Forgive me for taking your life. I was reacting just the way I was trained, to kill V.C…So many times over the years I have stared at your picture and your daughter, I suspect. Each time my heart and guts would burn with the pain of guilt. I have two daughters myself now…I perceive you as a brave soldier defending his homeland. Above all else, I can now respect the importance that life held for you…that is why I am able to be here today…It is time for me to continue the life process and release my pain and guilt. Forgive me, sir.

Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved uses the phrase “disremembered past” to describe that which is neither remembered nor forgotten, but haunts the living as a ghost. The path to closure, for the soul and for the soul of the culture, goes directly through the recovery of memory and mourning rather than through forgetting. Only then can the “corpses” of a life – all one’s losses and disappointments – receive proper burial. Chapter Twelve of my book describes how in other, older cultures, authentic grief rituals align the ego’s wish for closure with the deeper intentions of the soul to know itself. This is depicted toward the end of the Iliad, our oldest war story, when the Trojan King Priam begs the Greek hero Achilles to return the body of his son Hector. The king must confront both the corpse and the cause of his son’s death. Acceptance of the truth at this level may lead to real closure, while grieving together, as Priam and Achilles eventually do, unites people, even enemies, like nothing else.

In Vietnamese Buddhism, souls are said to linger near their families for four generations. But without proper burial rites, they can’t continue to the spirit world. With 300,000 missing from the war (compared to much fewer than the 1,500 soldiers claimed by the POW/MIA community), many rural Vietnamese consider their country to be full of wandering souls (co hon). When relatives finally accept that a loved one’s body will never be found, they build an empty “windy tomb” (ma gio) in the family plot. On their national holiday, the Day of Wandering Souls, they tend these tombs praying that all souls might remember the way home.

If we can endure the sight and the implications of our own reflections in the black granite, the Wall invites us to remember that all of us – simply by being Americans – suffer from unhealed trauma. PTSD occurs within a much wider syndrome: our endemic numbing, our unwillingness to mourn, our denial of death, our racial and sexual hatreds, our economic disparities, our religious fundamentalisms, our knowledge of a dying ecosystem, our drug abuse and our addiction to innocence, which leads us to repeat the tragedy of Viet Nam endlessly. We suffer from a profound and dangerous loss of the indigenous imagination.

The passing on of the family curse need not be, very often isn’t a conscious, deliberate choice. In positing the notion of epistemic trauma, psychology has begun to consider much older thinking. Martin Prechtel writes:

…grief when shunned or unattended can easily hide for years, even generations, in the skeletal structure of the family collective psyche…grief will eventually manifest even among those in the future who did not consciously experience the loss…(it will) resurface in an overly rigid individual or their family, appearing later as a difficult addiction, usually alcoholism…It is the sorrows and losses that happen during and after wars that go utterly ungrieved at the time of their occurrence and are therefore passed down for generations…The unwillingness to grieve makes people search for someone upon which to project blame for the feeling of the loss they bear. This turns all losses into wars of revenge…The greatest loss of all from war is one that is only rarely properly grieved: the loss of the intact soul of the soldier who kills.

The wound can sometimes point in the direction of the gift. One’s need to make meaningful narrative out of trauma can lead to the search for authentic community, for art, and for the ability to think mythologically. The nine Muses served their mother Mnemosyne by rendering her essence – history – into art. It was only Memory, giving birth to art, who could defeat Time.