On Death and Haunting

Several weeks ago I purchased Kurt Vonnegut's Armageddon in Retrospect. It is a collection of previously unpublished short stories collected by his son, Mark. I spent the last couple weekends reading some of the stories. In Wailing Shall Be in All Streets he wrote about his time as a prisoner of war in Dresden, Germany. America bombed the city and killed 100,000 civilians. Vonnegut argues that the destruction of that city was not important to our victory.

Vonnegut and many of his peers survived because they were housed deep in a meatlocker in a slaughterhouse. This experience would become the beginning of his famous text, Slaughterhouse-Five.

His experiences as a prisoner of war, and his perspective on the effects of war on all involved greatly influenced his work. In this text he tried to convey what he felt after they saw the destruction of Dresden. "I cannot describe the desolation properly, but I can give an idea of how it made us feel, in the words of a delirious British soldier in a makeshift P.W. hospital: "It's frigtenin', I tell you. I would walk down one of them bloody streets and feel a thousand eyes on the back of me 'ead. I would 'ear 'em whisperin' behind me. I would turn around to look at 'em and there wouldn't be a bloomin' soul in sight. You can feel 'em and you can 'ear 'em but there's never anybody there." We knew what he said was so." (pg. 39).

It is the struggle that many of us feel with war. We watch wars safely from behind our television sets. While military men and women put their lives at risk every day, technological advances also allow bombs to be dropped from miles away. Those bombs, at times, fall precariously close to civilian targets, and sometimes kill the innocents. I have seen too many images of blood soaked streets from terrorists bombing shopping centers.

The dead haunt me.

Someone whom I greatly respect shared a reading with me. It is a reading from Chief Seattle's response to a government official's offer to purchase the remaining Seattle Land in 1845.

"We will ponder your proposition and when we decide we will let you know. But should we accept it, I here and now make this condition that we will not be denied the privilege without molestation of visiting at any time the tombs of our ancestors, friends, and children."

"Every part of this soil is sacred in the estimation of my people. Every hillside, every valley, every plain and grove, has been hallowed by some sad or happy event in days long vanished. Even the rocks, which seem to be dumb and dead as the swelter in the sun along the silent shore, thrill with memories of stirring events connected with the lives of my people, and the very dust upon which you now stand responds more lovingly to their footsteps than yours, because it is rich with the blood of our ancestors, and our bare feet are conscious of the sympathetic touch.
Our departed braves, fond mothers, glad, happy hearted maidens, and even the little children who lived here and rejoiced here for a brief season, will love these somber solitudes and at eventide they greet shadowy returning spirits. "

"And when the last Red Man shall have perished, and the memory of my tribe shall have become a myth among the White Men, these shores will swarm with the invisible dead of my tribe, and when your children's children think themselves alone in the field, the store, the shop, upon the highway, or in the silence of the pathless woods, they will not be alone. In all the earth there is no place dedicated to solitude."

"At night when the streets of your cities and villages are silent and you think them deserted, they will throng with the returning hosts that once filled them and still love this beautiful land."

"The White Man will never be alone. Let him be just and deal kindly with my people, for the dead are not powerless. Dead, did I say? There is no death, only a change of worlds."

Deal kindly with all people. May the dead haunt us all.