Boy, do I hate to be right.

When I ended my blog about the symbolic underpinnings of last week’s heartbreaking Nevada school shooting with the words “more to come”, I had no idea how soon “more” would turn out to be. As it turned out, the day after the Nevada shootings, a California policeman shot a teenager to death because the boy was carrying a toy gun.

While this second tragedy doesn’t seem to meet the usual standards for a “copycat” killing, the link between the two events is hard to miss. Let me spell it out. Repeated media coverage of teenagers shooting up their own schools has altered the “symbolic arsenal” of police officers. Whereas in an earlier time a child with a gun would have been treated with more restraint than a similarly armed adult, this is no longer true. The benefit of the doubt when it’s “only a kid” is gone. Just the opposite - the California police may well have reacted with deadly force out of fear that the young man in front of them was on his way to carry out his own “copycat” of the Nevada shooting.

There’s a lot going on here, but it’s not complicated. Like I said before, it’s all about bad symbolism. The depressed boy sees killing his schoolmates as a way to deal with his depression, the terrorist sees blowing up buildings full of people he doesn’t know as a way of solving his own sense of purposelessness and the policeman sees shooting a child in the street as a way of saving other children, not to mention himself – the Nevada child fatally shot a teacher who tried to talk him down and now that’s part of the California cop’s symbolic arsenal too. All territory is becoming enemy territory – and he who hesitates dies. That’s a hard symbol to shake.

But there’s another layer of bad symbolism going on here as well. The on-line coverage included a picture of the gun the boy was holding. It wasn’t a water pistol. It was an assault rifle. It looked like an assault rifle - adult size, polished wood, dark metal, sites in place –primed and ready to go– just aim, squeeze and spray. Not a gun anybody would mess with. Tax-paying companies that employ church-going people are making these toys and parents are buying them for their children. Those children are playing video games where the objective is to kill enemies in the high three figures (or four plus on the advanced levels). The symbols are driving the market and the fear is driving the symbols. And when the movie stops a couple of sick to their stomachs cops are standing over a kid’s body on the sidewalk a couple of blocks from his house, where his video game player is probably still plugged in.

The oldest rule of war is that it’s easier to kill a hundred people than it is to kill one. The more the enemy becomes a symbol the less he is someone with a mother like yours and the easier he is to send home to his mother in a bag. The problem is, on a flat screen TV everybody’s a symbol.

The genie’s out of the bottle - time can’t go backwards. We can’t not hear about these things. If it’s not on the news it will be on Facebook. We’re not going back to flintlock rifles and there’s no market for cap guns - though there probably will be for bullet proof vests in children’s sizes very soon, if there isn’t already. So what can we do?

First, we can stop wasting our time asking “why?”. We know why. Our primal urges (fear, self-protection, rage –that sort of thing) have been given a lot of new ways to express themselves by our technology and things have gotten out of hand. It’s not the technology’s fault. It got us out of the caves. We just didn’t come all the way with it. We need to stop forgetting that. Whether it’s weapons technology or communications technology doesn’t make much difference – they’re both tools in human hands. And from the beginning of the human experience, our tools have been more than just tools – they’ve been the symbols we use to deal with our reality, our emotional protection from a world we didn’t make. My club is not just a stick, it’s my sense of power. An assault rifle is only a better club. My enemy, real or imagined, is a symbol of everything I’m afraid of. Whether I get my information about who my enemy is from my tribal chief, CNN or my PlayStation,  I’ll react the same way when I see him coming, even if he’s a thirteen year old boy.

When war becomes game, human beings win, and live to play again. When game becomes war, human beings lose, and die before their time. Telling the difference is getting harder.

None of us are immune. Ask any cop in the country, what he would give to have encountered the Newtown shooter walking down the street with a visible firearm in his hands five minutes before the killer entered the Sandy Hook school. And if you follow that up with the question, “And what would you have done if you had?” you will only get one answer – “Shoot the bastard dead” - from every cop you ask. I know that’s the answer they’d give because it’s the same answer I’d give.

We have a lot of work to do.

One of the saddest and clearest indications of the existence of the “big black hole we all need to fill” in contemporary life is the fact that the term “school shooting” exists at all. In the post-Columbine era, we all know exactly what it means. Our first reaction on hearing it is always the same: “Oh no, not again.” The definition of the term keeps expanding as the number of incidents mount up: at this point it can be any grade from kindergarten through college, the shooter or shooters can be anyone from a kid in your daughter’s class to a person from the outside with no obvious connection to the school. The common factor is the location (school), the targets (children and teachers) and the fact that people die.

What “school shooting” incidents also have in common is being a subset in a larger category we could call “acts of violence against random persons, usually resulting in multiple fatalities, frequently (but not always) resulting in the death of the perpetrator or perpetrators”. This larger group includes the growing number of attacks in shopping center parking lots, movie theaters, restaurants, public events like the Boston Marathon and even on military bases, where you’d think they’d be ready for it.

They aren’t. None of us are. We can’t hide all the guns and we can’t build walls high enough. Half the time, the killers are already inside. The other half they walk in like ordinary citizens – because they are ordinary citizens. The sad fact is we can’t protect us from us.

If I come off sounding a bit technical, it’s because we need to be. We need to understand what we’re dealing with. In all these events, questions of “who” and “how” tend to get answered in the first twenty four hours, a few days longer if it takes some time to run down the killers – but they get answered. “Why?” doesn’t get answered and keeps coming back for more.

As I spent a lot of time going over in “The Holy Bluff”, “Why?” is different from other questions. “Why?” can’t be answered by “just the facts”. “Why?” isn’t about the facts. It’s about the reasons behind the facts. And on this planet, only a human being can answer this particular question, since we’re the only ones who have individually created reasons for the things we do. If a wolf attacked a school child, no one would ask it why. They’d just shoot it and give out more hunting licenses. It’s not that easy with human beings, especially those who kill other human beings for no apparent reason. Frequently the answers die with the killers. The sad fact, though, is that we don’t get much better answers from the killers who survive to come to trial – a lot of background and speculation, reports from doctors, but no clear statements that make a whole lot of sense to anybody but the killers, if even to them.

It’s time to take the gloves off. We know what’s going on. It’s been going on for as long as there have been human beings. The only difference is that the weapons are better and now it’s on television, which makes a big difference – because what we’re talking about here is symbolism, plain and simple – symbolism gone wrong – and in our world mass media is the language of our symbols, both external and internal.

Let’s take a look at another subset of our larger group – the terrorist attack. Take away the political/religious underpinnings and it’s no different from a school shooting. A lot of people with no personal responsibility for a problem end up paying for it because they happen to be in the wrong symbolic place at the wrong real time. The terrorist and the depressed teenager have more in common than might meet the eye. Both are looking for symbols to make sense of their lives. Finding no positive symbols that keep the darkness at bay, they turn to negative symbols.

What mass media has to do with it is in some ways obvious. The amount of information constantly coming at us about random acts of violence has had the unavoidable effect of increasing the “symbolic arsenal” available to the depressed person or the potential fanatic. What’s not so obvious is that Newspaper coverage of Lindberg’s flight across the Atlantic had the same effect on the general public’s arsenal of potential transportation options. Something that had not been heard of before was now possible. 9/11 presupposed the Wright brothers. Today’s school shooting presupposed the Alamo. One symbol leads to another. Positive and negative get mixed up in the symbolic soup, the movie ends - and the shooting begins.

Perhaps the most chilling part of today’s coverage from Nevada was the line “he didn't seem like the school shooter type” at the top of one of the press releases. We expect the killer to look a certain way, to have certain predictable problems – broken home, history of mental illness, difficulties at school or in the community. We need to remember that we all fit the profile. We all need positive symbols to keep going. Life is more like a movie than we imagine. We need to pay better attention to the script, for everybody’s sake.

More to come.

Anyone who thinks of poetry as something for timid little people with their heads in the clouds hasn’t been reading the good stuff. The problem with the poetry we’re taught in school is that it gets taught in school. They make you memorize it or answer questions about it, questions that are supposed to have right or wrong answers. I remember getting in trouble once in English class for reading Dylan Thomas’ poem about a child killed in the World War II London bombing with so much emotion that I missed the line breaks. The poem was an exercise in controlled fury. Dylan Thomas wouldn’t have given a damn about the line breaks. He’d have probably bought me a drink. Poetry has no right answers - though in some ways it’s the best answer we’ve got, maybe the only answer we’ve got.

Poetry is how we make sense of our lives. Poetry in books is the least of it. Every move we make, every word we say, is a poem in its own right. The closer what gets written down comes to reflecting what we actually do with our lives, the better it is. Life doesn’t rhyme. Pretty little poems about trees are only worth reading if you’re willing to die for the tree.

A poem is a tool, a map, and in the right hands, a weapon. Think of Sylvia Plath hurling poems in the face of her oncoming suicide like a child throwing rocks at a charging Tyrannosaurus Rex. Think of Milton’s Lucifer, choosing hell over heaven, inventing the bad attitude for all time.  Think of Bukowski’s “Small Talk”, where a man who knows he’s only got a few years to live sits down for a friendly chat with death and winds up feeling sorry for the poor bastard. And then there’s the poetry that happens all the time, that gets said once and doesn’t need to get written down. 

Like that time in Queens a few minutes after sundown when everybody was scurrying around for last minute supplies because the weather report said a giant winter storm was on its way. Just as I got to the corner with my bag of groceries the wind carried in a long, smooth stream of
crystallized confetti, gleaming in the streetlights like weightless diamonds.  Everybody stopped dead in their tracks and looked up at it. Across the corner  from me, this big guy in a hooded sweatshirt, Queens incarnate, raised both his beefy hands to the sky and intoned, in a voice loud and clear enough to put the weather gods on notice, with just a touch of the kind of humor that makes defiance unnecessary, “Here it comes!” 

Now that’s poetry. That’s what Shakespeare was trying for, and occasionally hit, when he got lucky. And the guy on the corner had much better props. Poetry is us putting the weather gods, the time gods, the hunger gods and even their big brother the death god on notice that we’re not gonna take this shit quietly - that we’re ready for it, that they can keep it coming, that we’d miss it if they didn’t, that we can take the mess we’ve been handed and turn it into something beautiful. They’ve got the cancer, we’ve got the words. They may or may not be enough – every one of us is a jury of one on that one. The point is, no matter what the gods throw at us, they’re not gonna shut us up. Only we can do that.

When we stop talking, when we stop drawing, when we stop writing this stuff down for other people to see, when we stop singing, in short, when we stop creating, we start destroying. We drop bombs on each other thinking that’s going to get the  gods’ attention. It does, and they’re laughing at us. The storm didn’t laugh at that guy on the corner in Queens. In fact, I thought I saw a snowflake tip its hat. And Dylan Thomas wasn’t laughing when he stood over that child’s grave with his hat in his hands. And then he went home, put down his hat and picked up his pen. He didn’t go out and try to bomb the other guys. If they’d asked him, there wouldn’t have been a war in the first place – a fistfight in a bar maybe, but no war. War is poetry gone wrong. We need as much of the good stuff as we can get.

And that’s why poetry matters. 


 
Readers are urged to check out the good stuff: 

A Refusal the Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London - Dylan Thomas

The Ariel Poems- Sylvia Plath

Paradise Lost - John Milton (forget what your English teacher said about it,  it’s a hell of a story)

 Small Talk (the one from "The Pleasures of  the Damned") - Charles Bukowski


 

Perhaps none of the ancient myths has come true with more of a vengeance than the story of Tithonus, the mortal whom the gods granted eternal life but neglected to give eternal youth. In the original tale, Tithonus was loved by Eos, the goddess of the dawn, who asked Jove, the king of the gods, to grant her lover immortality so she could have him with her forever. In a classic example of the “other side of the coin” phenomena that seems to occur in most if not all human dealings with the gods, she neglected to ask Jove to give him eternal youth, and her poor lover went on living forever, but wasted away both physically and mentally. The story ends with Eos shutting Tithonus away behind “shining doors” so as not to see his decayed features or hear his endless babbling. 

Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s well known poem on the theme portrays Tithonus as having asked the gods for immortality himself, and as pleading with Eos to take it back, allowing him to rejoin the brotherhood of “happy men who have the power to die” – the ultimate example of “be careful what you wish for.”

In our day, the ability to medically sustain life past a person’s ability to participate in or enjoy it, as well as the heartbreaking ravages of Alzheimer’s disease, echo the myth with chilling resonance. Like Tithonus, our yearnings for immortality have inspired us, with considerable success, to devise means to extend our lives. The unnamed poet who first created the Tithonus story would  have been considered to have reached a ripe old age if he had managed to pull fifty years out of nature’s capricious hands. Modern medicine suggests that my grandchildren may consider themselves cheated if they don’t make it to a hundred. The flip side of the modern coin is of course no more attractive than it was for Tithonus. The thought of a slow, humiliating death drawn out over years of diminished capacity and awareness is not an attractive prospect - no doubt contributing to the success of the hang gliding and sky diving industries. Given a choice, most of us would rather die on our feet.

The difference between us and Tithonus is that the gods didn’t do this to us - we did. 

The myth invokes the god’s customary dirty trick: there’s no going back to the  drawing board, no opportunity to correct for oversights at the planning stage. This myth, as do they all, reflects life’s dirty trick – one year, a hundred or a thousand, sooner or later we’re outa here and there’s no correcting it, not then, not now not ever. We can try to bargain with the gods, but they hold the
upper hand –and once the gods have spoken, that’s it. Eos couldn’t make a follow up phone call to Jove and expect to find Tithonus’ eternal youth coupon in the  next day’s Fed Ex from the Capitoline Hill.  

She couldn’t - but we can. 

We do it all the time. We can’t fix the big picture, but in the meantime we’re very good at picking off the little ones. We learn from our mistakes. The most valuable word in the human vocabulary is “oops!”.

The entire history of mankind’s attempts to defy our mortality by “fixing” things,  not to mention the process by which this planet and everything on it, living or otherwise, has come into being is a result of our access to a resource beyond the god’s capacities: trial and error. Divine entities, by virtue of being abstract and “complete”, are stuck with what they’ve got. We’re not. We’ll crack
this Alzheimer’s thing – people are working on it right now, a lot of people, smart people, with money and resources behind them. The first one to crack it will make a fortune, and you know how that motivates humans. And while we’re at it, we’ll find ways of having supple joints and health in general last as long as we do. It’s what we do. We’re good at it. It may take a while, but we’ve got all the time in the world. We just got here. The fact that survival without health annoys us puts a target on its chest that the human race has never missed. 

We’re still stuck with the big picture – mortal is mortal – and with the little  picture - “Sure they’ll fix it someday, but what about me ?” [1] – as well as with several intermediate pictures – medical advances are expensive and are never available to everybody, for instance.   But that’s the game we’re in - this life thing we’re so fond of. It’s a  moving target, on ongoing process, trial and error. 
 
In the contemporary version, Tithonus goes on Medicare, gets put on a macro-biotic diet, is assigned a personal trainer and goes to the top of the list for trials of the next big breakthrough in brain cell rejuvenation medication. Talk about  availability for long-term study. Eos will get rich just renting him out - as  long as she remembered to get those power of attorney forms signed while he still had his marbles.  Hopefully, she learned from her first mistake. There may be hope, even for the gods.

None of it will change the game. The more we fix, the more we know what we can’t fix. When the time comes, we’ll still have to show our pair of twos against the  house’s royal flush. The trick, as ever, will be to keep our dignity and our sense of humor when they take away our few last remaining chips and throw us out in the street.







[1]This example is particularly personal for the author. My
father’s older brother died of an infection from an insect bite just a few
months before the development of penicillin.