In the first days of the war, it is hard to defend oneself against ugliness. On the TV screen, the pronouncements of
military leaders and embedded journalists have a flat quality, whether
from indifference to suffering, or indifference to truth, one cannot
say. Only that as the blithe dispatch of continual contradictions,
lies, and hypocrisies morphs into chillingly banal accounts of cruelty,
an ugly state of mind prevails. Even the anger one feels in response
feels corrosive. A corrosion that aligns itself to fear of all kinds.
One fears the use of nuclear weapons, biological weapons, chemical
weapons by either side. One fears everything and anything from the
start of World War III to a fierce new wave of terrorist attacks,
economic collapse, one's own demise, the loss of all one loves.
How can I write about fearlessness in such a time? Before March 8 of
this year, when I willingly committed an act of civil disobedience
against the war, I would not have imagined choosing this subject. The
very notion of lacking fear has always distressed me. I associate this
state of mind with ignorance and foolhardiness, not courage. Seasoned
warriors apparently agree. Describing the psychology of combat, Glenn
Grey has written that experienced soldiers learn to distrust whoever
among them knows no fear. Grey sees such fearlessness and eagerness for
battle as a symptom of psychosis. Those without fear are distrusted by
other soldiers because their behavior is not only suicidal but
dangerous to their compatriots.
Yet as I have come to understand only recently, there is more than one
kind of fearlessness. Just before the start of the war, on
International Women's Day, after speaking at a Code Pink for Peace
rally against the war, and then marching through Washington, DC, to the
police barricades formed around the public park that skirts the White
House, for a few blessed hours, I encountered the other side of
fearlessness.
A landscape of beauty
I do not think of myself as particularly brave. Ordinarily I worry
about more safety and health issues than can be listed, including
whether I will get enough sleep on a given night or if I will have
enough to eat or money to pay my bills. I am not drawn to challenging
sports such as downhill skiing. I like to swim in calm waters and enjoy
a comfortable hotel.
I was grateful to have a chance to speak at the rally. Though some
consider speaking out to be courageous, for me, since it is as natural
as breathing, I do not feel particularly brave when I speak. I am
simply propelled by the force of what I want to say.
In a speech crafted from shards of phrases and ideas that would not let
me sleep one night until I recorded them in the journal beside my bed,
I spoke of civilian deaths. The thought of these deaths had troubled my
sleep. Dreams are a door through which many poems come to me. From some
region beyond my daily knowledge come siren songs with a force that is
at times seductive, other times compelling, and this time filled with
an undeniable anguish, carrying the tone of a cry for help and a
warning all at once.
For months, as with most of my friends, I would be seized at night or
early in the morning with weeping, thinking about the course my country
was taking and the suffering war would cause. But if throughout this
day, tears welled up in my eyes, these were not just tears of sorrow.
We are all familiar with the words from Ecclesiastes, “There is a time
to weep and a time to laugh.” One might add to this register of
emotions that there are also many different kinds of tears, appropriate
to different times. Though it came originally from a midnight sorrow
and alarm, when I read my speech at the rally—just as when later I
readied myself with 25 others to break the law—it was another kind of
tears that came to me, another emotion I felt, one kindred to both
sorrow and joy, but in the territory of emotions a landscape unto
itself. The word that comes to mind here is beauty.
A beautiful landscape, though if I am thinking more of the beauty of
music now, it is because as Alice Walker and I, who had come together
to Washington, DC, were brought into the capital, we saw the Washington
and Lincoln monuments light up against the night sky just as we chanced
to hear the voice of Mahalia Jackson on the radio. And when I think of
the landscape of feelings we were just beginning to enter that night,
the beauty that comes to mind reminds me of the music sung in
sanctuaries of all kinds, and even of the beauty of these structures,
built to serve the resonance of congregations, places whose walls echo
and thereby intensify the collective sound of choirs, chants, and
choruses.
Together with the brilliant activists Medea Benjamin and Jodie Evans,
who planned this event, those of us who had come that day to protest
the war found ourselves creating a similar architecture, resonant with
our very presence. Whether because of the profound commitment to
nonviolence we shared or because of our respect for the more tender
emotional realms usually assigned to women, or for the same mysterious
reasons that some recipes work and others do not, miraculously this
ethereal structure seemed to be holding, if even for a short time, the
full dimensionality of the terrible song that had in myriad ways been
keeping us all awake at night. Yet now all our nervous voices of
harrying worries, our muffled sounds of doubt, the ragged shrieks of
nightmare and horror that hounded us, mixed and mutated into something
beautiful. That is one of the reasons why tears kept coming into my
eyes.
And there was another reason. This beauty made of realistic fears, hard
truths, anger, resistance, uncensored speech, compassion, good will
(and even the playful, erotic, irreverent use of the color pink)
reached into a quiet within me as deep as any I have ever known. I was
calm. And because one thing leads to another, that in turn is probably
why, despite my hunger and fatigue and the fact that I could no longer
bend my 60-year-old arthritic knees, all during our arrest and the
three hours it took to get us paddy wagons, according to the friends
who witnessed me, I had such a fearless expression on my face.
Though in truth there were other reasons too for my fearlessness. I
felt joyous. The sun was out and we were all in good humor. Maxine Hong
Kingston's face was radiant. Alice Walker was smiling in a famously
whimsical way, as if the air itself had just whispered a delightful
secret to her. Nina Utne's eyes were glistening. When Terry Tempest
Williams started to leave, she lingered, had trouble tearing herself
away, and then stayed. We were enjoying each other.
Fearlessness—the ground of peace
And then, besides the good mood we created, the day had comic aspects
of its own. When we were chosen by the march organizers to pass the
barricades and enter the park, we were asked if we were willing to risk
arrest. All of us were, so after we assembled on Pennsylvania Avenue in
front of the White House, when asked by a police officer to leave, we
did not. A flurry of police activity followed. Brigades appeared;
uniformed men stood in columns, feet apart, shoulders back. The officer
returned to give us a five-minute warning. Still we did not move except
back and forth, swaying as we sang, “Give peace a chance,” helped in
our harmonies by the writer and singer Rachel Bagby's glorious voice.
Because many of us were feeling in a greater state of peacefulness than
we had during the many prior months of near war, we smiled as we waited
to be arrested. Smiled and sang, as we waited. And waited, and waited
five minutes, 10, 20, 40 minutes. Until finally we realized there were
no more columns; in fact there were hardly any police there at all.
But by now, because we were not only willing but resolved to be
arrested, very slowly we began to move past the yellow tape that
cordoned off Pennsylvania Avenue from the sidewalk in front of the
White House. Once on the sidewalk, the whole program was repeated,
warnings and columns, this time with police in different, slightly more
menacing regalia, warning again, and then another five-minute deadline
that stretched out to more than 40 minutes, and finally, the police had
once again dispersed.
It was only after we moved still further, right in front of the fence,
to the zone that has been illegal since 9-11, that without fanfare and
with the greatest politeness and consideration, the arrests finally
began.
In the annals of resistance, we were not especially heroic. We were not
mistreated. There was of course discomfort. It was 6 p.m. We had spoken
and given interviews and marched two miles, and we were all tired. The
sun was going down. Alice had left her coat with someone and was cold.
Being on California time, neither of us had had more than two or three
bites of food to eat, or anything to drink since early in the morning.
Beginning to suffer the symptoms of a chronic illness I have had for
years, my hands and face were turning numb. Nevertheless we were happy
and, it is true, we were fearless.
What I learned that day was that the other side of fearlessness does
not come from any concept, no matter how noble. Yes, we believed that
we are all connected, that the world is one, that peace and compassion
are better than war and hatred. But what made me fearless that day was
that for a few hours I was living in a state of peace. And thus a
protest I had joined to express my opinions brought me to a deeper
understanding than I ever expected to have, the knowledge that
fearlessness of this kind is not exclusive, belongs to neither heroes
nor saints alone but to all of us. It is a mood, a cast of mind, that
can be created in any assembly. It is a mood of which all the world is
capable. Fearlessness is the ground of peace. A mood, a species of
beauty, and perhaps also a birthright.
Is it grandiose to conclude from this brief experience that the
ugliness that dogs our days is not inevitable? Or does the grandiosity
lie elsewhere—in plans designed to force others toward a world order we
claim will be peaceful? Is it far-fetched to think beauty belongs to us
still, just as it did in the 11th century, when Japanese poet Izumi
Shikibu wrote,
Watching the moon,
at midnight
solitary, mid-sky
I knew myself completely,
no part left out.
The war starts. The activist Jodie Evans, my friend, writes to me, “My
heart is broken and there is so much to do.” The violence continues.
Children, soldiers just barely grown, start to die, while so much
beauty waits within us.
Susan Griffin is author of "Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War
and other works of prose and poems". Translation of Shikibu by Jane
Hirshfield and Mariko Aratani as published in Women in Praise of the
Sacred, ed. Jane Hirshfield (Harper Collins, 1994).
Reprints/Reposts :: Contact Us :: 206-842-0216 :: Toll-Free Subscriptions 1-800-937-4451
YES! is published by the Positive Futures Network, 284 Madrona Way NE, Ste 116, Bainbridge Island, WA 98110-2870
