In this round of the telling, it is still four years before the Great War. Yet the subject of the loss of manhood is present even now. This is, however, a topic of conversation over which one lowers one’s voice or uses veiled reference. Does this derive from a Victorian reticence about sexual matters, or is there something more here too? A kind of force field of fear, as if a direct approach might bring danger or collapse. For the topic of masculine strength which dominates the shared imagination does not have to be mentioned. Rather the ground of this obsession is as if a part of the natural foundation of existence. Metaphors of manly performance permeate language. But, like the image of Teddy Roosevelt’s big stick, they are used naively. As we move forward in time, is this obsession perhaps beginning to be at least partly visible?
In the following year, 1911, Sigmund Freud publishes his analysis of Daniel Paul Schreber. Unable to meet with his subject, Freud reads The Memoirs of a Neurotic. In these pages he learns that Judge Schreber believes himself to have been castrated, first by the director of the clinic and then by God.
Beneath these interpretations Freud discovers what he calls a father complex. It is a complex that runs through many illnesses, he says. The subject suffers an erotic love for his father but he cannot admit this even to himself. Freud fails to notice the remarkable similarity between the tortures Schreber imagines and the famous child-rearing methods of Dr. Schreber, the judge’s father.
Nor does he see the judge’s case as symbolic of any social condition. Through his study of Daniel Paul Schreber, he elucidates the condition known as paranoia, a classic pathology, engraved forever as part of a universal human condition, a pitfall in the private life of the psyche. In this way, the figure of the Senatspräsident, displaying what he calls his voluptuous femininity, dressed in necklaces and lace, moving languorously about the rooms of the Sonnestein clinic, enters our imagination as an emblem of insanity, a wild and curious exception to the normal development of masculinity.
But here, in the present, after the two world wars have already occurred, and in another frame of mind entirely, I ask, is it possible, dreams, irrational thoughts, the ravings of lunatics, can these be auguries of a shared future we have not yet considered? Viewed in a certain cast of light, and over the divide of time, the effeminate madman is an odd double for the masculine warrior, a lithe and sensuous shadow stepping as if suddenly from behind a mirror.
Thinking now about the Ibo story of the wrestler, I begin to wonder if chi is not something like what we have learned to call the unconscious. But there is more, isn’t there, in this telling? Another world, the world of spirits, not in the least immaterial, for the Ibo world of spirits is not like our heaven. It is a world equally material and, at the same time, existing beside us. Only in some unexplained way, what is unconscious in us grows more powerful in this neighboring world and waits to meet us.
I have read of, and more recently had some direct experience with, cultures in which a man or woman who sees what others do not see, or who moves across and beyond the boundaries of gender, is understood to have a kind of power. This is the one who will learn how to travel back and forth from the next world to this one, who can forge an access to the spirits and bring back their knowledge.
Could this explain why certain lines of poetry seem to foretell the future? Yet each man kills the thing he loves, Oscar Wilde wrote in The Ballad of Reading Gaol during his imprisonment for homosexuality. Perhaps at times a wider scope of vision appears to one who has wandered outside powerful social proscriptions.
1911. In the same year that Sigmund Freud publishes his famous case study of paranoia, Ernest Rutherford delivers a significant paper to the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society. Here, he explains his theory that the mass of the atom is concentrated in a nucleus. The thought first comes to him as a fleeting half image glimpsed out of the corner of his eye. Something phantasmagorical, and hardly possible in reality.
An experiment with alpha particles has eluded perfection. Unaccountably, stray particles cloud the results. All attempts to control this have failed. Where did they come from? Was it possible that the scintillation of these particles could be created by aiming them at a metal surface? The thought seems absurd. The atom, being a void within a void, would not impede the passage of these particles. They should pass through metal as easily as a bullet passes through tissue paper. But something, a sudden electrifying turn of mind, pointing in an uncertain direction, leads him to construct the experiment anyway. Contrary to every known model, the particles are reflected back at ninety degrees and even sharper angles. Rutherford’s conclusion is accepted: the nucleus of the atom exists. But this conclusion is just a beginning. It has upset the established laws, and an older idea of the nature of space must yield now to another kind of void.
In the same year still, as if existing in another world and wholly unrelated to Rutherford’s work in the laboratory, which has to date yielded no weapons, Lieutenant Myron S. Crissy of the United States Army drops a live bomb on an experimental target in San Francisco from a biplane designed by the Wright brothers. In the following year, 1912, in Great Britain, both the Royal Flying Corps and the Naval Flying Corps are officially instituted. The German Aviation Experimental Establishment is founded at Berlin-Adershof, and the French Service de l’Aéronautique de la Marine is formed. The age of flight has begun.
The moment nearly eludes Hugh Trenchard. After a slow convalescence, he has aged. His face bears an unhealthy pallor and he is thinner. The War Office assigns him to a peacetime regiment in Londonderry. To entertain himself he builds another polo team. But he is bored. He longs for Africa. In this life, he is a shadow of his former self, clocking time until retirement. Trying to regain the old ground, he applies to the Egyptian Army, the International Gendarmerie in Macedonia, the British mounted defense forces in South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, but without success. Nearing middle age, he is too old.
It is still 1912. Can the approach of the Great War be felt even as a tremor in the earth is felt by an animal before an earthquake? The mood is not one of regret and apprehension. Instead, on both sides of what will become a great divide one senses a restless boredom. Ernst Jünger, who is to become a famous German soldier in the approaching war, feels this restlessness. Just seventeen and finding the comfortable bourgeois world of his elders suffocating, he longs for Africa too. Carrying a guidebook to this mysterious continent which he imagines to be full of excitement for him, he sets off for Verdun, where he plans to join the Foreign Legion. But his career as a soldier is temporarily halted. Jünger’s father, a successful German businessman, arranges with the German Foreign Office for the prompt return of his son.
Jünger must be a boy in his father’s house for two more years. The passage, however, is inevitable. Childhood ends. One must move on. One has a life. The body ages. And then, before one suspects it even approaching, middle age begins. An old way of life loses its vitality, becomes even impossible. At these moments of change, one reaches out, even if unknowingly, for some slight shift in perspective.
Is it perhaps then a new point of view hovering like a faint scent of fresh air from other rooms in a mansion whose windows and doors will open to different worlds that draw these two men, Trenchard and Jünger, one British, one German, one younger, one older, toward a common course? I can feel it now as I write. For months now, in the presence of this other possibility, language itself has grown past certain confined chambers and moves even now with the suggestion of joy.
One suspects that in these crucial, incipient years a similar impulse is shared by a whole culture. Rutherford is not alone in his discoveries. Einstein has already put forward the theory that a sphere in motion takes on the shape of an ellipse, that time and space are part of a continuum and cannot be considered separately. That there are no straight lines. And gravity is simply a curve in the continuum. That light travels in discrete units. Now in 1912, observing the relationship between orbiting electrons and lines of spectral l
ight, Niels Bohr discovers discontinuities in the subatomic world. Mechanistic physics cannot account for events here either. Bohr is happy with this discovery. He has begun to find the logic of the old physics stifling.
Habits of thought. One can sense the invisible lines drawn at the frontier. What lies beyond is ignored. Unfathomable. Or perhaps noticed with alarm. And then interrogated and sent hurriedly in another direction. But one grows bored. It is as if the organism, the body itself, deprived of its own infinite complexity, falls into despair.
Is this then the promise the air holds for Hugh Trenchard, a change in perspective? In 1912, Captain Lorraine, an old friend from Nigeria, writes him. You’ve no idea what you’re missing. He has joined the Royal Flying Corps. Come and see men crawling like ants.
According to his biographer, Trenchard will be thrilled by his first flight. I can imagine it now. It is an experience new to the world. It can hardly be put into words. The body is quickly part of the body of the plane. The speed over ground like a great rush of blood. You lift, at first imperceptibly, until you know suddenly you are gliding just over the ground, and then, in a swift arc, you rise. The white rocky edge of a mountain is just below you. You can almost touch it. You feel like laughing. You are as if born again. Air rushes through the engine, the cockpit, over and under the wings. In your new body, everything is air.
But Trenchard nearly misses his departure. He is thirty-nine. At forty he will be disqualified. He must fly alone and pass the examinations in four weeks. The question is contrary to history but still I cannot help but wonder what would have happened had he missed his chance? The effect is of a film being rolled backward. He is pulled down out of the sky, perhaps even out of his uniform, propelled into a different life. Is it possible? Does he fulfill his childhood dream to become the manager of Harrods department store? Others who would have been under his military command are also affected. Some die earlier. Many rise from the grave and move back into life, as if nothing unusual had transpired.
And in the inner landscape of his mind? Earthbound, does he move now on a path unaided by machines toward a change in perspective of another kind? His father is dying. His friend Captain Lorraine perishes in an accident. He himself is aging. Somewhere in the quieter recesses of his consciousness does he hear a different music, one that plays even in his own earthbound body? Listening, does he stop for a moment? It is as if he were at the edge of a field. One he walks past every day. But now, under the sharpening shadow of this sound, he is held by what he sees. What he knows is like what the aviator knows. It cannot be easily spoken. The outline of a yellow flower is more distinct to him. He is caught by the way the grass moves in the breeze. But though what he comprehends can be felt in these details, there is more. It is not just the flower and the grass, it is also himself. He is perhaps discovering a different relationship to gravity in the motion of his own cells. And it is this he recognizes in the field.
He thought he knew himself. He was made of hard masculinity. Tough at the core and steady. This fluttering substance, the soft almost wavering quality, that which might melt, give way, or undulate as it passed, this belonged to the female body and it was utterly strange that he should find it in himself. Unbefitting his manliness. And yet. Yet something unknown had opened if even for a second and this was intriguing. Might he go further in this direction?
But of course this is only fantasy. Though he has a rebellious streak, Trenchard is a traditional man. In this he resembles Ernst Jünger, who will soon be among his enemies on the battlefield. They are cut from a mold cast by the social body. Their advances through life are as if already guided by the unwritten laws of society.
There is of course a mystery to life and its wanderings, a momentary hesitation, a sudden turn. Nothing is predictable. The war that is coming is not here yet. But there are forces which shape this particular field. I can see them. They are arranged like tin armies who wait and watch over the lives of boys who will become soldiers. How can one fail to be impressed? The uniforms themselves are splendid. Shiny gold buttons. Sometimes a plume on the hat. A red brim. Bits of braid at the shoulders, the fringe falling over an arm, swaying with each step. Ribbons arranged in neat rows across the chest. A sword that hangs ceremoniously at the side in a radiant silver scabbard, embossed with fantastically curled filigree in a serpentine line.
If the meaning of these adornments is just beyond the understanding of a child’s mind, still he recognizes the tone, the gesture, the feel of significance. Already he wants to be a soldier. He has learned to salute, and his father, drawing himself to his full height, stands still for him and salutes him back. Then they laugh, or his father winks at him. He loves the sound of his father’s voice when he tells his war stories.
I am thinking of Douglas MacArthur, growing up in the shadow of his father’s uniform. The stories he heard since birth. His father’s heroic siege in the Civil War. The dash with which he ignored orders, faced danger, won the battle.
The romance of heroism can pull a child’s mind with all the force of a wave drawing a swimmer out to sea. I know this from experience. Looking into a future which, of course, from this vantage point I already know as memory, there will be one world war followed decades later by another. I will be born in the midst of this second war. Douglas MacArthur will be a famous general. My father is not a soldier. Even so, at the age of two I will put on my sister’s WAC uniform, several sizes too big. It is because the family is laughing that I am crying in the photograph. I will spend hours copying the drawings of Japanese fliers in combat with Americans that my sister and her friends, six years older than I, have become so adept at making. The fierce expressions on the faces of the enemy pilots. Golden energy emitted in jagged streaks from the fuselage of the airplanes. This is a world I long to enter, to be initiated into. Spencer Tracy, Gregory Peck, Audie Murphy, all in brown or blue uniforms. The newsreels of soldiers landing on the beach, crawling on their bellies, as I do, following my sister and her friends, whether or not I am wanted. And then of course there is the poster. It covers the closet door of the wood-paneled attic which is a bedroom for the boys across the street. On it is a famous photograph showing a team of men who strain mightily to raise an American flag. It has become a permanent fixture in my mind, and mixed somehow with the whispered story of a man down the street, shell-shocked, unhealed, who shot himself in an attic room.
Masculinity and the requirements of gender have a way of surrounding a life. Family history, the traditions of class, military training are as if at the edge of an invisible army that is sequestered in the background, blending in so well, it can hardly be seen. To become a man according to society’s idea of manhood seems to be an act of nature.
The fledgling boy must be weaned from the softer habits of his infancy. He must stop running to bury his head in the lap of his mother. He must not whimper. He is after all his father’s son, isn’t he? When his father slaps him hard on the back, he comes to welcome this blow. Yes, there are pleasures he relinquishes. But, over time, deprivation, discomfort, even pain become part of his patrimony.
I know what the gradual slide into a different, less pleasured body can be. A daily level of pain slips into the background and ceases to be registered as anything but the presence of oneself. If pleasure, not even intense pleasure but the natural pleasure of the body in a state of ease, returns, this can be alarming. I have had such moments. One feels nearly off balance, intoxicated, as if one more moment might break the entire structure of existence apart.
Gradually, then, as the growing boy looks into the mirror a motionless, harder face, a poker face, becomes his face. He knows no other. And now he begins to take pride in the taut body, the rigid spine, fists held up in the correct position, feet thick and steady. He has achieved an exceptional mastery over himself.
I am looking at the Marine Corps training manual. It explains that in the drill men in a unit are trained to march as one. To illustrate distance and file, one photograph of the same man i
s repeated across the page. His uniform is properly pressed and buttoned, his posture, musculature all fixed in a state of military perfection. He has achieved what John F. Lucy, soon to be a recruit in the First World War, calls a rigidity of limb. One must stare long and hard at this photograph to grasp the strangeness. The first and most powerful impression of this image is familiarity. You know this man, or the essence of his character; in your mind you see him step off these pages and out of uniform.
Can you see it there in the square, the impassive expression? Just a glimpse of an earlier history, a training that has gone on perhaps since childhood?
In my mind I place a photograph of Oscar Wilde dressed as Salomé, displaying his folds of sensuous flesh, next to this image of the well-disciplined soldier as he repeats himself across the page. Wilde of course rebels. Let us move back in time for a moment again to the turn of the century. One can see it in his body. He is called a lotus-eater. Pleasure-seeker. No wonder the Marquess of Queensberry is up in arms that his son, Lord Alfred Douglas, has become Wilde’s lover. This lithe body. Those rhythmic, undulating movements. That pouting, sensuous mouth. The eyelids half closed as if in rapture. It would be disgusting to this man, famous for inventing the rules of fisticuffs, who is himself a model of Victorian manliness.
And on this note, let us return to 1912. Oscar Wilde has been dead for over a decade. The Marquess himself is fading. We are following a younger man through history now, though he is equally manly. In fact, the inner territory of his body, trained like the body of the Marquess to be impenetrable, has become dull and lifeless. Trenchard is stifled. Even suffocated. The air is too close. He needs space. And it is perhaps in this mood that he longs for Africa, or dreams of entering the cockpit of an airplane.
A Chorus of Stones Page 22