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The Evolving Music

 

        We are.  But are what? 
 
        In spite of being created by forces beyond our control -- e.g., genetics, economies, cultures, geographies, bigotries, etc.  -- we are not merely passive creations.  We are creators.  Of things.  And of ourselves.  The master who turns another human being into a slave, then becomes enslaved to his need to hear the slave call him master, is a self-creation.  As is the girl born into Missouri poverty who then migrates with her family to a Colorado mining town and years later ends up working as a free-lance journalist in China during WWII.  And the domestic at the Pembroke Park estate in North Carolina who draws lush gardens and biblical looking women on the backs of old pieces of stationary may be a self-creation but she also is a creator of things -- in her case, hypnotizing art works.  
 
        But creativity is only one part of history.  There’s more.  For instance, as the television sports show tells us, “the thrill of victory and the tragedy of defeat.”
 
        It is victory that interests me now.  Its etiology.  What it leads to, both autobiographically and otherwise.   
 
        Like others of my generation, I am victory’s child.  Born in 1943 during WWII, I was a product of the times.  Too young to remember anything firsthand later on, I still grew up “remembering” the war.  It was impossible not too.  Too many people -- family, friends’ dads, the man at the train station with a missing leg -- had stories to tell.  And they told them.  I listened, not always comprehending, yet still curious.  There was a rhythm to what these people said, a narration that lifted you up and threw you down and stuck in your mind for days.  These stories, supplemented by snatches of radio talk and, later, images from televised newsreels about the conflict, became my war memories.  I was a combatant of sorts, a runt aching to be brave but frightened of Nazis and the Japanese.  When at a family gathering I heard my Uncle Bill, an ex-Seabee, talk about corpses afloat in water, “little guys who woulda killed you as soon as look at you if they had lived,” I saw them and imagined one of them opening his eyes.  In my war, the dead didn’t always stay dead.  Sometimes they came back to life, hunting for me.  Eventually, when tormented by such fantasies or nightmares, I would remember the war was over.  “Everything’s okay,” I told myself, although I wasn’t always sure I believed it. 
 
        But for the most part, I accepted WWII for what it was: a bunch of stories and movie-like pictures in my mind.  History was a gush of words and images spilling this way and that.  Maybe it didn’t make sense, but it sure had a beat.  
 
        “Hell, it was just a goddamn USO show!” someone shouted drunkenly in a Yonkers apartment.  
 
        I knew what that meant.  When in the film footage the blond bombshell wiggled and giggled onto the stage, she wanted to make dogfaces’ brains jiggle.  She was their night’s entertainment, their dream cream.  “Ooh, I want you!” she moaned into the microphone.  Inside their unified collective mind, the men responded, “Ooh‑la‑LA, I’d like to get my mouth inside your bra!”
 
        Somebody ruffled my hair and said, “Jesus, kid, whata time ‑‑ it made you dizzy in the head.”
 
        But it wasn’t all peaches and cream.  Everybody knew that.
 
        In ‘41 and long into '42, nothing went right.  Piles of dead bodies multiplied on beaches in the Pacific.  The string of defeats was staggering:  Borneo, Singapore, Guam, the Philippines.  Horrendous stories of failure drifted to the mainland.  The stories were like surrealistic fairytales muttered by psychotic old ladies who enjoyed shocking children with the black magic of the taboo language of nightmares.  Monsoon rains, mud, bugs, malaria.  And around every corner was the disconcerting sound of an approaching marauder:  small-boned, uncanny, death-loving, Asian.  The Japanese emperor’s henchmen wanted your ass, they wanted to kamikaze it into the grass.
 
        But then the war’s rhythm changed.  There were victories.
 
        The U.S. stalled and crippled Japanese power at Midway, fifteen hundred miles west of Hawaii.  The battle for Guadalcanal was fought and won.  Japanese blood glittered and dried in the sun.
 
        Meanwhile in northern Africa and southern Europe, the stage was set for world‑transforming monumental conflicts between large masses of human beings.  The western allies inched toward success.  From Africa up into Sicily was the pattern.  Simultaneously, another military vision was formed.  Out of it, a plan developed:  troops would congregate in Britain and prepare for an invasion across the English Channel into German‑occupied France.
 
        The planet’s craw would be crammed with corpses, but afterwards, with victory, it would be time to sing and dance.
 
        But there were problems on the local turf.  Hometown, U.S.A.
 
        According to the most jubilant flag-wavers, some people wouldn’t cooperate and instead were spitting in the winds of fate.
 
        Everywhere there were rumors of treachery, pigheadedness, deceit. 
 
        Ohio coal miners broke their No Strike Pledge, sabotaged industrial unity, walked off the job and self‑centeredly demanded a “decent day’s wage for a decent day’s work.” 
 
        In Philadelphia, a black truck driver was arrested for hysterically ordering another black, a soldier, to get out of uniform because “This is a white man’s government and war, not yours!”
 
        In NY off Long Island’s eastern shore, four saboteurs, ex‑U.S. residents who’d fled to Nazi‑land at the war’s outset, were disgorged one night in a rubber boat from a Kraut sub.  They landed on a beach, lugging with them a cargo of explosives.  Their plan:  to give America a taste of sabotage on the sly.  They intended to re‑establish residence, sneak around and blow a few buildings into the sky.    
 
        In Harlem, there was a riot.  Bands of roving blacks battled police.  Smashed windows.   Looted stores.  Wounded bodies strewn in the streets. 
 
        In Detroit, autoworkers rampaged, waging war against auto magnates instead of against Nazis, Fascists, Japs.
 
        “YOU’LL GET YOURS, YOU TRAITORS AND SABOTEURS!” the nation’s most famous patriots shrieked.  A lot of people thought the strikers were nuts.  “FUCK YOU!” somebody’s Aunt Gertrude shouted back, “YOU’RE JUST A BUNCH OF IDIOTS WHO LICK THE DICKS OF THOSE IN POWER!”
 
        When the war was over, back in the States somebody commented, “Them goddamn A‑bombs are somethin.  That’s why we can’t let them Russies figger out how ta make em.  Like Truman says, 'The secret of the atom is a gift to us from God.’  A little bit of  insurance, so to speak.”
 
        “Yeah, I guess so,” his friend answered.
 
        The two men sat across from each other at a table in a luncheonette.  The one who’d mentioned insurance drank black coffee from a white cup.  The other sipped iced tea from a sweating glass.  A lemon slice floated in the bark‑colored liquid.  A little kid sat next to each man.  Boys.  Maybe seven or eight years old.  They sipped cherry cokes through straws. 
 
        “Sometimes when I think about it, the war,” the iced‑tea‑drinker continued, "I says to myself:  what a fuckin bloodbath.”
 
        “Sure, sure, but at least we won it,” his buddy replied.
 
        “You can say that again,” the other man agreed, his mood changing.  "That Hitler really was a shit and so was that dumb Japanese emperor.”
 
        “Well, we got em alright.”
 
        “Yeah, I guess we did.  Still, sometimes I wonder if --”
 
        One of the kids, Billy, cut in, “Can we go now?  Me and Bobby wanna . . .”
 
        The coffee drinker was Billy’s dad.  “Yeah, why not?” he answered, not in a particularly good mood.  “But you better learn to be more polite,” he advised his son, referring to the way the boy had butt in. 
 
        “He’s just a kid, leave him be,” the other man, Babe, said.  “These fellas got stuff to do other than hang with us.  Ain’t that right, Bobby?”  He laughed and nudged the boy with his elbow in the ribs.
 
        Babe was Billy’s dad’s friend.  Bobby laughed.  “Yeah, we got a war to fight,” he said.   “He” was me.  I was Bobby. 
 
        A war?  What did I understand about wars?  Anyway, although I didn’t know it then, sometimes in war there are moments that are strangely serene.  Calm in an almost mystical way.
 
        Years later somebody told me about one such moment. 
 
        There was a boy, nine years old.  With friends, he played a diving game in a pond.  They’d tossed a small silver bell into the water and now, one by one, according to a certain order they’d chosen, they took turns diving in and trying to find the bell.
 
        Finally the nine‑year‑old had his chance.  He was a good swimmer and as he dove off the bank, arms stretched out straight in front of him, his body broke the water’s surface cleanly.  Once underwater, he swam dreamlike and in slow‑motion toward the bottom.  It was a world of dark twisted roots, slimy weeds, black muck.  Eyes aching for sight of the bell, the boy pulled himself along the bottom until his chest hurt from holding his breath so long.  Just as he was ready to give up, however, he located the bell, grabbed it and kicked himself up toward sunlight.  As his head fractured the water’s surface, he gasped for breath and then, treading water, raised the bell in the air, yelling, “I got it!  I got it!”
 
        But his companions, teasing him, refused to respond.  Instead they remained silently stretched out in various humorous positions on the pond’s embankment.  Irked because they wouldn’t acknowledge he’d won the game, he swam to the pond’s edge and pulled himself from the water.  “Okay!” he poutingly shouted at his friends, “That’s it, I have the bell!”
 
        But they still didn’t answer.
 
        Tired, the boy gazed into the distance across slightly rolling, sunlight‑washed fields.  Everything was so . . . bewilderingly tranquil.  He couldn’t put his finger on it, but, as his eyes roamed the landscape, he felt . . .
 
        (Earlier, underwater, he hadn’t noticed it:  a strange motion in the air above him.  It had swept forward ‑‑ undetectable, silent.  He, of course, had been protected from the radiation wave.  But not his friends.  And in the distance, beyond his range of vision, Hiroshima was in flames.  The first atomic bomb in history had been dropped.)
 
        “Wake up!” he shrieked at his comrades.  “Wake up!”
 
        They didn’t.
 
        Three days later, half a planet away, it was my second birthday.  The candles on my birthday cake were as bright in my little eyes as Nagasaki burning after a U.S. plane dropped  another atomic bomb.
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