The General Solitaire: Prophesy at Hand
In looking back, he sees forward.
A biography, a geography, a cryptography all lie before him as the road yet to be taken, the same road already long traveled, alone in his personal experience and in the experience of all, then and now, there and everywhere, once and for all, over and over.
As with the doomed lieutenant in South Pacific, the mystic horizon of truth, Bali Hai, has called to him repeatedly, in fact unceasingly, through multiple generations, and always the guise of this exotic promise has been war for the sake of peace.
Every boy promoted to “man of the house” by his father’s departure for war was he. And then he was the one to leave home, his father waving good-bye and wounded far more by that moment of perhaps fateful separation than by any enemy of past encounter.
Now, again, the same departure, the same embrace, the same impersonal wound personally reopened, mutually; for father and son are but passive travelers on the road of active duty: pawns on the chess board, court cards in a suit, key players in a game long and moot that makes history the first element of prophesy with changes of detail played as leitmotifs on the major and minor scales of time.
The art of war, self-framed, photographs of ghosts living and dead, memorabilia personal and immemorial now transform from long-poised sentries into a closing army of friendly fire.
Looming and lording, a star of Bethlehem, is the glow of the bankers’ lamp by which every army travels; it satisfies their stomachs as well as their vision; it is the sun and moon – the sanity and lunacy – of every war, the savior of every religion, and the power rather than the agony of both victory and defeat.
In his solitude, the general contemplates having lived as a gypsy, having seen the sun and moon from many locales but patriotism from only one perspective.
He has lived deeply both sides of war: the civilian, integrally natural battles of everyday life and the allegorical armed conflict between nations. He has experienced war’s glamour as victorious against reality as well as defeated by it. He has seen every rank, every strategy, empirically, empathetically or both. Every consequence of war, whether by planning, accident, luck, mistake, simple evolution or complex fate and the converse, has been the hypothesis of his reality, fulfilled or unfulfilled. He has defined the word hero and declined its pride, caught himself as a mercenary and watched idealism die. He has witnessed resurrection after resurrection, each colder than the first and seen Eisenhower’s warning materialize to burst. Indeed, the general’s greatest occupation has been that of his occupation in that each stage of defensive evolution has inhabitatively set the stage for vast self-offense of literal and virtual proportions.
What the great Pavlova conveyed through The Dying Swan the general has conveyed through occupational choreography, his own and that of his branch and country: the occupational hazard of death, at once real and symbolic, in the wake of romanticism, hence, in the wake of patriotism by any other name.
As an impresario the general has learned the secret of the ballet by making its perpetuation his duty; he knows that whether abstract or defined in its performance, the ballet is always well rehearsed as long as it is watching itself being watched.
How plentiful are mirrors during the mutually ironic and relative peace and boredom between wars; braid and brass shine then to be exclusively admired and generally denied for no other sakes than their own; however, once threat and war convert banal admiration and denial into necessity, one must then use other sources of reflection – if one dares – for mirrors have no place on the battlefield.
The general cuts the deck having long ago recognized the hands of fate as being ultimately human and therefore inclusively his own. He cuts to himself: the king of spades, lord of death, keeper of the ace of his suit, the dreaded card that begins and ends the catharsis of prophesy and by all rights belongs only to a celestial command of hearts from which the general egoistically and humbly hopes and prays that his own decisions derive.
Between the cut is everything: inclusive truth and exclusive faith, the full emptiness of the unknown, the silence of judgment, the polyphony of war and peace, the unguarded moment, the no man’s land of conscience. Here is “the arc between two deaths,” the area of movement between absolute motionlessness and complete collapse, Doris Humphrey’s “fall” and “recovery,” Martha Graham’s Seraphic Dialogue in which the spirit of Joan of Arc contemplates herself as maiden, warrior, and martyr. In all this – so much nothing – the general dwells, mercifully, until the time comes, once again, when each minute demands unconditional surrender to seconds, even if only in memory’s prophesy.
It is in this limbo that the general most feels the weight upon his shoulders, the lodestars he has followed from aspiration to perdition and back again, always bearing in mind truth, the same truth with which he has awarded medals as well as received them, the same truth by which tarnish as well as brilliance is created and defined.
– Mary Jo Magar –