Days of the Dead...and a Labyrinth

I don’t know when I first discovered the celebration of Dia de los Muertos, but it seems now as if I've always celebrated it, was born into the tradition.  

Day of the Dead is a Mexican Holiday that takes place on the Catholic holidays of All Saints’ Day (November 1) and All Souls’ Day (November 2). There is probably a connection to an Aztec festival dedicated to the goddess called Mictecacihuatl.

One of the traditions is to build a private altar honoring those you’ve known who have died, using sugar skulls, marigolds, and favorite foods and drink of the dead. There is also a visit to graves - eating, drinking, and talking with the dead.  

John Berger once said in a conversation with Michael Ondaatje (Lannan Foundation Podcast): ‘What makes us human is the ability to live with the dead.’  The dead are all around us.  How is it possible NOT to see them?  

Where mega-capitalism and micro-technology meet there is incredible speed. The combination promises a fast ride to a glorious future. Much of mainstream US culture is about the future. The future - a favorite word of US politicians. Everything will be fine...IN THE FUTURE (an example would be Obama’s last State of the Union address and his stunningly vacuous rallying cry of 'winning the future'). The joke everyone already knows is this: the future will always be 'in the future'. A race to the future is futile - you constantly have to pick up the pace because it’s forever receding into the distance. 

Speaking and listening to the dead is something that happens outside that swirl of chaos. The dead are outside of time. 'Racing toward the future' is just another attempt to outpace death. There is such a pathological fear of death in mainstream US culture that acknowledging the dead in this way – not in some untouchable past, but as peers, living in the here-and-now – can help alleviate a bit of that culturally-induced paranoia. Eating, drinking, and talking with the dead puts me in touch with a continuum, helps me understand that I am in a lineage – there are those who have gone before me, those who will go after me. It helps me understand that I am involved in an ‘unsolvable’ mystery that is constantly going on all around me. Birth, death, birth, death...the continual turning of the wheel…

With that in mind, I leave you with a seven part prose poem written in Santa Fe, New Mexico, the week after Dia de los Muertos in 2006. It’s an odd piece. So, a bit of background: 

I worked at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Santa Fe (if you’re from Santa Fe, it's known as Saint Victim’s), and from the back parking lot you can see the Jemez mountain range (where Los Alamos is located). For two years I spent a couple of minutes every morning looking at that range before going into the hospital. Over time, I began to feel that my paternal grandmother, a great storyteller who had died in the early 90’s, had become part of that mountain range. Or maybe she was that mountain range. I don’t know why.  Later that year, when burning dried herbs on All Souls’ Day, I felt that same presence in the area around my apartment. She was no longer a mountain range, had become something different (those spirits…always changing, shape-shifting...go figure).  

Santa Fe is located near many of the facilities involved in the making of nuclear weapons: Los Alamos, Sandia Labs, Kirtland Air Force Base, and, much further south, the White Sands missile range. What is so frightening about the production of these weapons is that it is so invisible. Much of the economy in the surrounding area, and all over the country, is intricately linked with Department of Defense weapons production. 

Santa Fe is a town of Labyrinths. Literally. There’s a labyrinth in front of the Cathedral, one out at the museum of international folk art, and there is a Labyrinth Resource Group that has built labyrinths at eight different elementary schools in Santa Fe (how can you not love a town that does that?). Whenever I walked down Griffin Street in the evening, I would always walk the three-circuit labyrinth at Carlos Gilbert Elementary school.

The poem is meant to be somewhat like walking a three-circuit labyrinth. In a three-circuit labyrinth the way in is the same as the way out - there is only one path. In the poem, the labyrinth is Santa Fe, the labyrinth is my mind; my mind and Santa Fe, linked. 

So, three turns in, arrival at the center, and three turns out. Sections 1 and 7 are the entrance and exit, echoing each other (there is a play between my grandmother as ‘guide’ and the final spider in the hospital bathroom - a reference to Spider Woman or Spider Grandmother, the one who weaves the stories that hold all the worlds together).

Sections 2 and 6 are the same turnings – but one is going in and the other going out (nuclear weapons production in contrast with a storm). Sections 3 and 5 are related in the same way, so there are echoes between them also (the ‘chatter’ mentioned in Section 3 comes from a moment when I was sitting in the park next to the cathedral and a businessman walked by, talking into a headset, and, because the technology was new and I had not seen it before, it looked as if he was just another crazy in the park muttering to himself).   

Section 4 is the center, taking place at Heron Lake, a small lake on the New Mexico/Colorado border, north of Santa Fe.

Enough. It begins with the burning of dried herbs. A spirit appears out of the smoke…

Labyrinth: Days of the Dead

The way out is the way in

1. Entrance

Sage-smoke weaves around yellow leaves, wraps a black trunk. Heat-crack from a hollow stem. You appear, half-blind (but this is not you as I once knew you, this is you as you are now - half-formed, half-smoke).

I want to return to that dim-lit kitchen, watch your bent hands knead dough; white dust down your apron (but this is not you as I once knew you, this is you as you are now - vague guide, weaving something new).

Tonight, I’ll follow you anywhere. Back through the dead elm leaves that follow me home (I don’t care if it’s not you as I once knew you, I know only you – whoever you are – can thread this world together now – merge dry leaf, burning leaf, crack of the heated space inside a hollow stem).

2. Dark Corridors

It moves around here at night, a thief over dry leaves in dream. Los Alamos, Sandia, Kirtland, White Sands. Through the bathroom vent, a sucking wind, cluck of an old woman, fingers boiled phosphor-blue. Beneath her nails, a shock of black in the blood. Daedalus: Copernicus: convoluted folds of the brain, a map through: the solution moves away, gets close: Galileo. Newton. Fascinating hole that creates itself. Crush and release. Einstein: suture of time, space: Oppenheimer, Teller, Szilard: inertial confinement fusion: rune of angular momentum: a new world safe: nonlinear tantra equation:

                                              To reveal the secret at the heart by making it.

The razor wire fence walks through the night. A hum behind the wall. No source. How it continues with or without you…

3. Lost Cells

Chatter into headsets the schizophrenic’s dream of eternal ethereal partners for all perpetual motion jaws no bird call no wind against dead leaf no symmetry of cathedral stone

No one will miss stone

Chatter laugh chatter text chatter lights chatter button chatter pricks the chatter skull aluminum foil chatter hat can’t stop chatter signals nothing but chatter across stars lost inside chatter

I will miss stone

(there’s a high, thin rattle of leaves, like mouse bone chimes or dried sugar-skulls, rolling toward their own kind. Can you hear it? Leave the last pay phone receiver dangling. Let the dead talk to the dead:

Hello?)

4. Circle of Scrub Oaks, Edge of Heron Lake

Auburn-gold leaves soon-to-be-brown they ring

a bleached juniper trunk they ring

wind in waves down the dry hillside swallowing broken stone they ring

the half-moon beat of black wings beneath the heart they ring

her empty sockets watching red soak up the last light they ring

my hands holding a tiny mouse bone they ring

her promise of death so close against my cheeks flamed by cold they ring

the dead silence after waking suddenly from a deafening dream of coyotes they ring

a sepulcher of shale reeds fossilized nail-polish bottles they ring

three blue birds in the morning squirting juniper seed shit into the cooking pot they ring

her empty eyes her blessed empty eyes haloes of dark matter giving birth:

an osprey dives

into the blue

sky

5. Salvation Army

Football radio-chatter cuts off. All of us suddenly dropped through the silence between jean-rack and rack of old sweaters, past macramé plant hangers, flower plate patterns, discarded corporate team-building seminar T-shirts, and faux-gold candle-holders (so many candle-holders).

His thin brown fingers slow-cinch a cracked leather belt around a tiny, shrunken waist. Her face, a face that will never close (cracked open, revealing black ash swirling through falling snow).

The born-again woman behind the register (pancake make-up, heavy rouge) smiles at a woman with four children in tow, coming in from the cold.

Hello.

6. Storm

Soft white flash folds the city in half, south-end pressed north. Rune of angular momentum. An audience of shock-blue faces stare through the bedroom window: lost ancestors who will still not accept the end. Water drums the roof loud as coyotes keening Time back to its origin:

chaos (non-linear tantra equation of lips at the back of the neck)

chaos (fingers curl, uncurl)

chaos (a new syllable startled out of the mouth)

A terrible skeleton tapdance: snakeskins clang against yellow leaves, mouse bones slip into the mouth of rolling broken bottles, condoms swallow spider husks - all the forgotten scattered things gathered into one swift river

cheek to thigh

  Thunder against the wall vibrates like ginger on the tongue

                                                    how it burns   

                                                 

                                                                          sweet

7. Spider in the Hospital Bathroom

She clings to tile, feels the table-flat underside of desert clouds, juniper hills, last yellow chamisa bloom on the road’s shoulder, cold web-shadow across sandstone

         (there is no water in the way she moves

                                quick down white strands to his throat

             

                        she is a necklace of quills.

           

          the end of his abdomen a bobbing mouth,

                                                                        empty gourd

                  his one free backleg struggles, kicks

             she pulls him deeper, 

                                             underneath the white canopy, 

                                                 and they hang together)

                                        

 The entire world inside her. The old secret, again and again:

                                           a trickle of sandstone dust sifts over sun-cracked green lichen

                                                                                      into my hands

November 2-8, 2006

Santa Fe, New Mexico

**********************************************************************

 

Meanwhile:

Booklist Starred Review for 

                        A Fish Trapped Inside the Wind

A Fish Trapped inside the Wind. Gholson, Christien (author). Oct. 2011. 268p. Parthian, paperback, $14.95 (9781906998905).  REVIEW. First published October 15, 2011 (Booklist).

  

Like the most finely cadenced, beautifully fanciful works of surrealism, this novel beckons with its subtle nuances before it leaps into a dazzling mastery that will ensnare even the casual reader. The town of Villon, Belgium, is experiencing an extremely odd phenomenon. Dead fish are strewn everywhere. Flung over yards and stoops and fields, the fish puzzle the residents no end as they speculate on the significance of such a bizarre happening. Other intersecting events include a rally meant to protest a decision to use local quarries as toxic dumps and the festival of St. Woelfred, who fled into the wilderness in the seventh century to live out her days reflecting in prayer. A rumored set of lost Rimbaud poems propels the action in ways unimaginable at the start yet utterly convincing by the conclusion. Gholson skillfully interweaves the individual stories of six main characters: a magician, a priest, a Rimbaud scholar, a journalist, a seer, and an aging lothario, who connect and conflict with one another in ways that ring true as each grapples with the choice of “walking through the mirror” of illusion—or not. Building to an extraordinary crescendo of an ending, Gholson’s poetic, purely magical, yet resoundingly human tale deserves a wide audience. — Julie Trevelyan

On the Side of the Crow Redux

At the beginning of October my book of loosely connected prose poems, On the Side of the Crow, was released here in the UK by Parthian Books.  

Oddly enough, considering the current occupation of Wall Street, a narrative thread running through a number of the poems in this volume contains the character of Mae Sistore - a mysterious revolutionary who was, perhaps, the catalyst for a silent revolution. Throughout the book, people are crowding into the streets of capitals across America - without signs, without slogans.  An occupation of silence.  

No one seems to know what they want. No one in authority, that is. 

I wrote the initial draft of Crow in 1994, in Des Moines, Iowa.  When I revised it in Sacramento, California, in the summer of 2001, the Mae Sistore character appeared and demanded to be let into the volume, along with her strange, silent revolution.  She could have been my antidote to the frustration I felt over the complacency that had settled over America during the Nineties.  As Mike McDonough said in Coldfront Magazine about the Mae Sistore character, she is “a mysterious, goddess-like underground radical hiding from the FBI. Though incognito, she has inspired a huge gathering of protesters protesting nothing.  TV pictures are beamed worldwide, but each person must find out the meaning of this protest for themselves.”

Of course, they weren't protesting 'nothing'.  Back then, I imagined a movement of silence because I felt the issues were so complex, on such a vast scale, that any media-friendly slogan or sound-bite could easily be appropriated and re-packaged for consumer consumption - and so ignored.  A massive vigil of silence seemed more powerful than any slogan I could come up with.  

Hanging Loose Press, 2006

 On the Side of the Crow was eventually published in the United States by Hanging Loose Press in 2006.  

The original intention behind the book was for it to be like a walk through a gallery - but a moving gallery, a gallery without walls, a gallery of stories rising from the faces I passed every day on the street.  So each individual piece in the book echoes a work of visual art. 

When I finished the book I called these pieces prose poems. Some of them could easily fit into the category of flash fiction.  Some might even label them ekphrastic poems (Ekphrasis: a literary description of or commentary on a visual work of art).  You can call them whatever you want. They are what they are.


A Joseph Cornell box is less a box and more of a window, I think.  









 Below are four sections from the book.  

PROLOGUE

Mandala Depicting the Secret Life of Worms

Some say worms are able to rise with evaporating water.  It happens with frogs, toads, puppet heads, horse hooves, shark teeth, and fish, why not worms?  I've seen fish swim out of the rain, flop onto the streets of a Florida marsh town, and die.  No time for even one question.  

I say worms are able to rise into the sky with the ghost of water.  They ascend through the bitter caverns of chicory weed stems, past the shadow-wash of sycamore leaves, into skies thick with the gaunt drunk faces of those who refuse to enter the afterlife because they're afraid it's just like this world - more empty labor. The refuseniks of heaven huddle in groups, wait for pieces of the world they came from to rise up into their hands on the invisible wings of evaporating water.  Frogs, worms, fingernails, fish.  If they're lucky, an occasional bottle of gin.

Some say worms sleep through it all, victims of chance, pure bait.  I say worms created hunger in the clouds and endlessly sacrifice themselves to their creation.   

The worms freefall through transparent mouths, ride the rain down, beat against lonely umbrellas, tumble past faces wincing in the mudwater spray of car tires, hang over petal-cups of new blossoms, stretch long on macadam.  Their bodies glisten over the thirst-driven world.

How many times can a worm rise, drop, rise again?  Some say there's a worm who's been riding the waterwheel since before lightning struck emptiness.  They call that worm "Intelligence Arising From Appetite."  I say that worm is your mother, your Uncle Lester watching TV, your next door neighbor bending over - just this minute - poking a worm stretched out on the sidewalk after the first warm rain, steam rising from the pavement around his shoes.

Violet Skies the Night before Fall's Victory:

  Junk Sculpture

There's a ceiling of blue-cloud in the first sun-gone minutes.  The blue deepens.  Eddie Slivic sits on a torn couch, looks over his junkyard.  Rusted washers, dryers; a sea of cars without teeth, eyes, feet.  Violet furrows darken above the humid air.  Through the violet, the dim pale blue of the moon.

Eddie looks up at the moon, hears Dick Carver's horse somewhere out in the sea of cars, munching something.  "What that fucking horse finds to eat out there is beyond me."  He gets up, goes into the kitchen, brings a bottle of whiskey and two shot glasses back to the couch.  Every time Dick comes looking for his skeleton-horse he sits on Eddie's porch all night, talking and drinking.  When he's drunk enough to cry, the old man looks out over Eddie's junk and shouts, "A holy view!  A magnificent view!"  Then he turns to Eddie and says, "It's true.  You'll see it soon enough.  All the failed, fucked up things we've done with our lives become magnificent when taken whole."   

Eddie hates tears.  Doesn't know what to do around them.   No one's ever told him he doesn't have to do anything.  "It's an epic created by this flesh!" Dick sometimes shouts.  "Magnificent love lost!  Magnificent impatience!  Magnificent wrecked marriages!  Magnificent scattered, angry children!" 

Dick drives his pickup into Eddie Slivic's yard, stops.  Eddie smiles, raises the bottle with one hand, holds up two glasses with the other. 

In the morning the air is sharp as sun on water.

Driftwood in Moonlight: 

Articles from The New York Times Spliced Into

A Sumi-e Brush Painting 

Mae Sistore stands on the beach, staring at a long white twist of driftwood.  She is saying: "...body by white salt and silence...body by moon tide and silence...body by wind, body by water..."

 

All these years working for something to move, to change - and now - suddenly - today - seeing the huge crowds on television, gathering in front of every state capitol, surrounding banks, schools, blocking intersections, all silent, some smiling, arms linked.  It was beyond anything she’d ever imagined.  And it had nothing to do with her.

 

She is saying:  "...body by sharp sand and turmoil...body by sun-scorch and turmoil... body by wind, body by water..."

 

She looks beyond the bleached sweep of the driftwood limb, at the ghost crabs searching the night coast for food.  Moon reflected off wood blinds the crabs, penetrates their shells, illuminates their soft whispery meat. 

 

She is saying:  "...body by wind-wheel and sorrow...body by moon-funnel and laughter...body by wind, body by water..."

A coiled string of seaweed lifts, reborn.  A sand breeze blows through its dry brown body and it moves like a tumbleweed along the moonlit rise of dunes, following the imprints of a huge crab.  It catches up to the crab, veils him, marries him, and they move off together, back down to the rhythm-black water. 

 

She repeats the chant:  "...body by white salt and silence...body by moon tide and silence...body by wind, body by water..." 

 

Seaweed trails the crab, follows him into his hole.  Tomorrow morning someone will look at the swish and arc the seaweed made in the sand and think "snake."

 Sculpture of a Desert Town in the Manner Of

Giacometti's Dog

I stopped at The Desert Star Motel in Winnemucca.  They gave me a coupon for a free cocktail with dinner at the casino across the street.  Inside, a man in bright green shorts held a baby in his arms while he played the slots.

           

Outside, the white-hot sun.  Casting perfect right-angle doorframe shadows onto doors.  I walked off the main strip.  One block over, there was a residential street.  Palms in front yards.  Where all the casino workers lived, I guessed.  Behind the houses on the north side of the street was a field of burnt gold grass sloping up to the highway.  Gold hills beyond.  When the traffic died down, you could hear the sound of snakes moving through straw.   

A kid with a burnt, peeling face, wearing his shirt over his head like a hood, wandered up to me.  "Hey," he said, "you don't look like you're from around here."  I shook my head.   "You heading north?" he said. "I'm heading to the Rainbow Gathering in Idaho.  Greyhound wanted to take me through Salt Lake, but that's too far out of the way, so I jumped."  "I'm heading to Sacramento," I said.  "I just came through there," he said.  "Bad town.  They found some burnt heads in a trashcan.  It was in the papers."  I looked out at the hills, nodded.  "Well, have a good trip anyway," he said, and wandered off.  

A couple doors down, there was a little girl sitting on her front steps, staring into the hills.  "What's it like living here?" I said.  "It's alright," she said and shrugged.  "You gonna stay when you grow up?" I asked.  "Might."  The front window curtains caught the hot wind, blew back into the dark living room.  I didn't know what else to say.  I'm not good with kids.  She pointed at the hills.  "There's mountain lions up there," she said.  "Sometimes they come down, kill a dog."

That night, I turned off the air-conditioner, opened the windows.  Around 3 a.m. I woke. Two coyotes were prowling around the pool.  Their fur glistened blue.

 
***

In the UK, the book is available through 

Parthian Books

or from 

Amazon.co.uk

 

If you are in the United States and suddenly feel the urge to buy this book, thinking to yourself, “Holy crap! How could I have missed this book the first time around!  I didn’t realize something so…uh…interesting...was out there!  I need it NOW!" 

Order it from:

Small Press Distribution

Amazon.com

or

Hanging Loose Press

Don’t delay.  Operators are standing by.

**********************************************************************************

In other news, my novel A Fish Trapped Inside the Wind was released in the United States & Canada at the beginning of October.

It is currently available at:

Amazon.com

 Amazon.ca

"What is at first unusual may be followed with legend. 'A Fish Trapped Inside the Wind' is a unique story of a small Belgian town who are pelted with dead fish by the wind. As the town deals with its dead fish problem, the people ponder what it means. Blending in folk legend of small European towns and the effect it will have on their lives, 'A Fish Trapped Inside the Wind' is a moving and thoughtful read, very much recommended."

Midwest Book Review

Dying in peace, dying in an endless war, and making the imaginative leap to empathy

I was in the United States for the past two months, from mid-July to mid-September, helping take care of my father, who was dying of cancer.  He died in late August.  In my time, I have known people who died of cancer, and have friends who have gone through the daily process of dying with loved ones, but I have never gone through it so intimately myself. 

When I say 'the daily process of dying with loved ones’ it is because I think dying is rarely done alone.  The person dying obviously lets go of that last breath alone, yes, but the entire process - the tending to the feed tube, constant attention to adjusting the pain controlling narcotics, the cleaning and bandaging, and, more importantly, the words said here and there, the final stories told, the sitting in silence, the living in the paradox of wanting them to die quickly to alleviate their suffering while still desperately wanting them to live one more good day, the deep sorrow and the final letting go (for both the living and the one who is dying) – are all included in one person’s death.  A form of death is going on for everyone who knows and cares about the person dying - whether they are sitting at the bedside or living a thousand miles away. 

 There was also, for me, the sadness and beauty of being in such close proximity to a story that was ending.  And the realization that a story – for that is a large part of what we are - is not really complete until it comes to an end (most writers know that a story is not really a story until the end has been reached).

In those two months, I gained an insight into the incredible work hospice caregivers do every day, and found a deeper connection to the hundreds of thousands, the millions, of people who have gone through, and are, at this moment, going through this process (the hopelessness, frustration, and – sometimes – crazy dark humor and joy).

Two weeks after my father’s death I watched on television for an hour or so the ten year memorial service for the victims of 9/11 in New York City.  The ceremony was intense and beautiful because of its simplicity.  The family members of those who had been killed read aloud the names of the dead, sometimes adding a very brief personal note.  The loss these people had suffered was palpable in their voices, ten years later.  Unlike my father, who was 79 years old when he died, the lives of the people who died when the twin towers were attacked had been – no matter what their age – suddenly cut short.  In an instant, thousands of people had no father, no mother, no aunt, no uncle, no sister, no brother.  I remember the despair and feeling of dread during those first two days after the towers fell, all the photos of the missing against the walls near what is now called ‘ground zero’. 

In Praise of Grief

On September 11, 2001, I was living in Sacramento. For days afterwards, as in all other cities, the sky was emptied of aircraft.  A few military helicopters made sporadic passes over the city.  I lived very close to the convergence of two major highways – Route 5 and Route 80 – and to a set of freight train tracks.  There was a constant dull roar twenty four hours a day from the trucks and cars constantly passing, and the steel clatter of trains backing up and coupling, or shooting by, blaring night horns for no one.  Because I lived surrounded by such constant noise, the silence that followed in the days after the attack became thick, almost claustrophobic, a wall of sorts, surrounding everything, trapping everything.  In retrospect, maybe the feeling of being trapped inside that silence was a kind of prophecy.  Walking through the city before the no-fly ban had been lifted and few cars were back on the road, I found these words sprayed in a shaky purple script at the northeast corner of 11^th and S Streets:

I’M SCARED FOR THE FUTURE. 

Looking down at that graffiti I thought that 9/11 would give all of us Americans, as a unified nation, a glimpse into similar things that were happening, on a daily basis, around the world.  Bombs going off in public places, war crimes committed, mass executions, massacres…  

I went home and put on John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme.  It starts with a soft cymbal clash, reverberating into the opening strains of a saxophone; tentative, searching.  The saxophone and cymbals give way to a droning bass.  Duh-duh Duh-dah.  A simple line.  When the saxophone enters again, it wanders around the room for several minutes before finding its way back to that same simple line: duh-duh duh-dah.  Eventually the bass line dissolves into a deep voice (Coltrane’s) repeating “A love supreme, a love supreme, a love supreme...”  Duh-duh duh-dah.  Duh-duh duh-dah.    

The music is not happy.  It’s not sad.  It somehow ascends and descends at the same time.  It is…praise.  For grief.

A Love Supreme is praise for grief.  That’s the best I can do to describe this music.  The voice, the saxophone, the bass, all come from deep inside the earth, repeating the same words:  A love supreme, a love supreme.  As I sat there listening, ten long years ago, I could feel that something was being coaxed out of the dark silence in the bedroom, out of the silence beyond the bedroom walls.  The music pushes right to the edge (of what, I can’t say), where words – where even music – reach a point of submission, of release.  

(I read somewhere – or maybe I heard it on some radio program – that sometimes Coltrane would reach a point in a solo where he would stop playing, beat his chest and scream.  When someone asked him why he did this, he answered that he had simply run out of horn.)   

At the end of A Love Supreme, the drums and saxophone merge, move fast, faster, begin to chase something.  They reach out and touch that terrible, transcendent grief, but, surprisingly, almost menacingly, they continue to reach, to keep exploring, showing me every time I listen that there is something else, deeper, close – 

             

Listening to the family members read the names of the dead at the 9/11 ceremony, how could I not make the leap to all those civilians who have been killed in the decade-long war?  The nameless dead (in the US press, at least), labeled by the military (US, UK, or other NATO forces) ‘collateral damage’; how not make the leap to all those people who got caught in the cross-fire in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in Pakistan?  How not sympathize with those in Afghanistan who have been killed because, ten years ago, their government gave sanctuary to al Qaeda?   

In the early years of the war, many civilians were killed by indiscriminate bombing.  Some of you may remember an independent study conducted by Marc Herold, a US economics professor at the University of New Hampshire, who accumulated data from aid agencies, the UN, eyewitnesses, TV stations and newspapers around the world, posting his information at Cursor.org.  He estimated that at least 3,787 civilians were killed by American bombing between October 7^th and December 10^th of 2001 alone. 

According to Iraq Body Count the death toll among civilians in Iraq is now between 102, 868 and 112,419.  There are those who dispute the IBC methods of tallying the dead, saying the count is more in the range of 864,531 – which I tend to agree with – but what I’m trying to get at here is that, whether it's 100,000 or 800,000 –  every count is terrifyingly high.  There are people – real people – behind all these numbers.  Brothers, sisters, fathers, mothers.  And none of these statistics include those that have been seriously injured or those that have been displaced, become refugees because of the violence (A UN estimate from 2007 claimed that at least five million people had fled Iraq between 2003 and 2007, to Syria, Jordan, Egypt and other countries in the Gulf region).    

Who are all these dead?  Each one has a story.  I remember walking past an open door in my neighborhood in Sacramento in late October of 2001, overhearing someone talking on the phone, exclaiming “They’re dropping bombs on the bad ones and food on the good ones!”  This was the US government line that autumn.  It still is.  Does anyone still believe this?  The awe and enthusiasm in the voice I heard through that open door is the belief of a five year old being told about Santa Claus.  Meanwhile, the ‘good ones’ and the ‘bad ones’ (whatever that meant - it seemed to change month by month, year by year) were both beneath that rain of bombs.  

In recent years, in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, there has been an increase in the use of drones to do the hunting and killing of Taliban leaders.  One particular attack stands out for me.  In June 2009 a US drone launched an attack on a compound in South Waziristan, Pakistan. When locals rushed to the scene to rescue survivors, more missiles were launched.  The next day, drones fired on a funeral

procession for those killed in the initial attacks.  The missiles were intended for Taliban chief Baitullah Mehsud, though officials later acknowledged that he had not been killed in the attacks. 

The reported overall death toll over the course of two days was at least 80. 

I remember being in canyon country in Utah when I heard the horrific news of the Hellfire Missile shot into the funeral procession.  Inside one of those coffins was a young boy, killed the day before.  Looking out over the canyons beyond the Green River, mesa after crumbling mesa on the horizon, I tried to imagine what it must feel like to carry a coffin so small.  What is the weight?  How do you feel it?  Who was that boy?  What was his name? 

 These drone strikes continue unabated.  A recent study by London’s Bureau of Investigative Journalism revealed that at least 168 children have died in the Pakistan drone war (and between 386 and 775 civilians in total). 

My father was a naval officer, an aircraft carrier pilot.  He led a squadron in air strikes over Vietnam in the late sixties.  We are talking about dropping bombs on buildings, bridges, trucks...and people.  Although he may have suffered from PTSD from his experience, and, in the end, felt he'd been lied to by the government about the reasons for the war, he never thought of himself as a victim.  Many years later, he wrote blogs and letters against the invasion of Iraq.  He stood on street corners with signs in protest.  He gave a Memorial Day address once where he said: “The only really good thing would be a future devoid of wars requiring us to memorialize such sacrifices.  That would be the only thing that would make those who died or suffered horrific injuries to feel any sense that they had not been pawns of power brokers.  Most of the wars did not have to happen.”

To hear the sorrow in the voices of the 9/11 family members is to hear its echo - the sorrow of those who have been killed (in our name) for the last ten years in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and beyond; to hear the sorrow of those who have lost loved ones fighting on either side; to hear the sorrow for all the lost minds, for all the displaced, for all the injured.  For all the dead.  For all the waste.

 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows

While many in the nation were fixed on revenge and war in those early months after the 9/11 attacks, there were those who chose a very different way of dealing with the terror.  In November of 2001, a group of relatives of some of those killed on 9/11 began a march from Washington DC to New York City, advocating for peace, calling for an end to military action in Afghanistan.  An extremely brave act at the time.  While there was a tremendous groundswell of opposition to the invasion of Iraq, the bombing of Afghanistan met with very little resistance in the US, coming as it did so quickly after the September attacks.  Vengeance and blind patriotism ruled the day.  The families marched under the banner "Our Grief is not a Cry for War".


They went on to form a group called "Families for Peaceful Tomorrows" united to turn their grief into action for peace.  These are people who suffered directly from the terrorist attack.  On September 8^th, 2011, anticipating the coming tenth year anniversary they released the following statement:

“The members of September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows are grateful for the expressions of remembrance and concern being offered on the 10th anniversary of the events which took the lives of our loved ones.  On this day we ask those who feel compassion for our loss to expand their compassion to include others who continue to experience loss ten years later: innocent families in Afghanistan and Iraq experiencing the loss of their loved ones and displacement  from their communities as the result of war and political strife; Muslim-Americans subjected to bias and violence at home; those denied the protections of our Constitution and law, whether in Guantanamo or in our own country; those suffering from job loss and economic dislocation related to the cost of war and rising military budgets; and those who have seen their civil liberties and freedoms exchanged for the false promise of security.

"The lesson of 9/11 is that we live in a connected world. We rise or fall together. As Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., said, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” On this 10^th anniversary, let us honor those we lost by recognizing our kinship with people all over the world, and affirming the values and principles that will guarantee peaceful tomorrows for everyone."

The Pentagon has projected remaining in Afghanistan through to the end of the decade, at least.  This war costs 12 million dollars an hour.  It’s time to end all this needless suffering. Time to bring the war money home.  

                                           (All images by Kathe Kollwitz)

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There is going to be a Mass Assembly against the war in Trafalgar Square on Saturday, October 8^th.

The “Occupy Wall Street” movement that started on September 17^th is gaining momentum, spreading across the US (Coverage of Occupy Wall Street from Democracy Now!).

Occupy DC protestors are currently rallying in Freedom Plaza in DC. 


Work for Peace.