Wednesday, June 10, 2009

A Harvest of Death

My header photograph is a cropped version of one of a series taken by Timothy O'Sullivan on the Gettysburg battlefield on July 5th, 1863. Beginning in the early afternoon of Independence Day, the day after the battle at last came to an end, a steady rain drenched the fields. A long wagon train-- a "vast procession of misery"-- some seventeen miles long and carrying 8,00 Confederate wounded, made its exodus from that crossroads town in Pennsylvania. In their wake came the photographers--Alexander Gardner, Timothy O'Sullivan, and James F. Gibson--and for the next several days they composed their images of the dead.

Gettysburg was not the first American battlefield to be covered by cameramen. In October of 1862 a series of photographs were exhibited in a New York gallery owned by Mathew Brady. "The Dead of Antietam" was a unprecedented success.  The photographs had an uncanny ability to "bring home" the war. As a result of confronting these images of bodies left on the field of battle, northern citizens could finally get a glimpse of what so many of them had been reading about: the horrors of warfare. A New York Times reporter wrote: If Brady "has not brought bodies and laid them in our dooryards and along the streets, he has done something very like it."

In his accompanying commentary to O'Sullivan's photograph in Gardner's Photographic Sketchbook of the War, Gardner writes:

Slowly, over the misty fields of Gettysburg--as all reluctant to expose their ghastly horrors to the light--came the sunless morn, after the retreat by Lee's broken army. Through the shadowy vapors, it was, indeed, a "harvest of death" that was presented; hundreds and thousands of torn Union and rebel soldiers--although many of the former were already interred--strewed the now quiet fighting ground, soaked by the rain, which for two days had drenched the country with its fitful showers.

In This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, Drew Gilpin Faust has said that the "work of death" was the most fundamental and demanding undertaking of the American Civil War. "Americans North and South would be compelled to confront--and resist--the war's assault on their conceptions of how life should end, an assault that challenged their most fundamental assumptions about life's value and meaning. As they faced horrors that forced them to question their ability to cope, their commitment to the war, even their faith in a righteous God, soldiers and civilians alike struggled to retain their most cherished beliefs, to make them work in the dramatically altered world that war had introduced."

Drew suggests that this struggle for meaning in the face of the mass slaughter of modern warfare that the Civil War instigated is an ongoing process: "We still struggle to understand how to preserve our humanity and our selves within such a world. We still seek to use our deaths to create meaning where we are not sure any exists."

To a great extent, this blog is intended to be an ongoing investigation of that struggle for understanding and meaning.


Geoff said...

Here's an approach worth thinking about...

On the level of an individual, pain obviously acts to protect us from harm. "No. Putting your hand on a hot wood stove is NOT a good idea." I think the same holds for other sorts of pain--"psychological" pain (as you might call it)--which exist not as an internal form of punishment (at least not in their purest form), but as a notice that something needs attention, for your own good. It's pain that urges us to grow and to evolve as people. It's pain that urges us to see have we've wandered away from "the truth" of things, as they operate. The more widely we've wandered, the greater the pain.

As it is for an individual, so it can be for a nation. The pain inflicted by the Civil War HAS to have seered the soul of anyone who lived in that time. I'm pretty confident of this because I can feel that seering right now, so far away from the events in time and place--and I'm making no special claim to being a "sensitive soul". It may be the reverberating echo of this pain that draws so many people to this war in endless fascination.

Horrible as this war was (like those before and since) it stands for something. It stands for that pain, and the shove it gives us to move away from violence. This is an incremental thing, obviously. The slow turn of the evolutionary wheel as that pain works on us over time. The people who fought and died in that war did so not only for the litany of immediate reasons each one carried into battle, but also this larger, evolutionary purpose of moving us forward.

I've wondered a time or two about a moment--God deciding whether to grant free will as life is blown into the dust of the universe--will it be free will, or no free will. You sight along the line of that decision to go with free will and you see the appointed role pain plays immediately. It's inescapable, and a mighty foundation of a vast evolutionary plan.

David Heald said...

Amazing comment. Thanks. And keep 'em coming!