"Great Was Its Fall"
by Edward Curtin
"When it comes, it comes on slowly
The day feels holy, a hush falls down
Whispered names, remembered faces
From desperate places, all gather ‘round"
Tom Paxton, “Come on, Holy”
"Early morning and the first heavy snow is falling. It is beautiful. I walk around the lake in the holy hush. Alone except for two newly arrived ducks swimming on an open patch of icing water. When I stop to watch them, the soft sound of the falling snow grows gradually louder, beating drums, like truly listening to Beethoven, not the lionized one, about whose honored status James Agee wrote “is the one surest sign of fatal misunderstanding, and is the kiss of Judas,” but the Beethoven whose music you won’t hear nicely but will hurt you and for which you should be glad.
Although I have come here to flee for an interlude the sound of the world’s anguish and to contemplate its beauty, I am deflected, as usual. How could I not be? Isn’t it true as the poet Rilke said, that “beauty is nothing / but the beginning of terror,” and we, with all our strange thoughts inside us, try to swallow the sobs that accompany all our joys.
My brother-in-law died unexpectedly a few days ago.
I watch the ducks swim so placidly in circles and I wonder.
I realize that my thoughts are meaningless to most but me, a minor writer in a world of screamers, yet I record them here to learn what I may think and to share with a few other human souls the musings of a distraught man in a world made mad and running red like a butcher’s bench with the blood of the innocent shed by ruthless people. I am old but hope I am forever young with a strong foundation that will help me find some insights along this path. Who knows?
I have spent many decades lost in beauty and an intense scholar’s study of the propaganda the world’s rulers use to convince the gullible that their intentions are pure and their actions are carried out for the common good. Few have heeded my findings. Why should they?
While the rulers’ endless lies should be apparent, they are not, for too many people have built their own lives upon foundations made of sand, and though they are shaking, few believe they will fall. And to think the official doll’s house of fabricated reality within which they dwell and upon whose words they build their lives will also fall – that is deemed impossible.
William Saroyan, in his 1939 play “The Time of Your Life,” (winner of both the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award) has a minor character, the Arab, repeat, “No foundation. All the way down the line.” That is all he has to say. “No foundation. All the way down the line.” Concise and cutting to the bone. True then, but much, much truer now.
Then came World War II and the defeat of Germany, Japan, and their allies with the United States dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki after fire-bombing Tokyo, Dresden, Cologne and dozens of other Japanese and German cities, intentionally killing vast numbers of civilians.
And if that wasn’t enough, the future CIA Director Allen Dulles, James Jesus Angleton, and colleagues brought nearly 2,000 Nazis scientists, engineers, biological weapons experts to the U.S. to work in government programs, while helping thousands more flee justice by helping them escape to South America and other places along the “rat lines.”
Thus the U.S. became the evil they denounced in others, and it could rightly be said Hitler triumphed in defeat. Upon this evil foundation, which is now crumbling, the U.S. empire was built despite its alleged Christian underpinnings.
There’s an old saying: And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it.
And when Jesus finished these sayings, the crowds were astonished at his teaching, for he was teaching them as one who had authority, and not as their scribes. Mathew 7:21-29
Being alone on my walk helps me focus on the elementary truth that we are all mortal and that beauty is terrifying since it evokes the anguish of its and our endings. And when we go, end, pass on, or die – take your pick – all the secret thoughts, hopes, memories, lives, and dreams we have had will vanish with us, if we have not, while living, found a way to tell the truths we harbor in our secret hearts. We will be but mysterious melodies others might hum without grasping our lyrics, as the Gershwin brothers referenced in their song “They Can’t Take that Away From Me.” Our melodies may linger on for a while once our songs have ended, as the songwriter says, but who we really were will vanish with us into the mists of time.
In quiet moments of timeless reflection, everyone knows we are complex creatures; just as they quickly don their masquerades when time resumes to face the faces that they face to deny such complexity.
When I left the ducks to their circle games, I continued on my way along the lake. The snow blew from the north into my face and made it hard to see. The lake and the neighboring woods disappeared and so did my thoughts as I constantly wiped my eyes of snow. But I felt a certain joy beyond telling.
As the snow and wind eased up, I saw up a hill through a cut in the woods a large doe with her three fawns grazing under some sheltering pine trees on posted property owned by a local college. A smart mother, I thought, since I knew shotgun deer hunting season was underway.
It was then that the hushed peace of the morning was broken by a few shotgun blasts from the western woods. Did the doe and her fawns, who in days past I would often meet and converse with at very close range along the road, take heed? Can such creatures learn to avoid men with guns? Why were the hunters on the prowl for deer to kill? Did they need the meat to eat, or did they just get their kicks from the killing and slicing and gutting of once living creatures who never did them any harm?
I wondered – and leave that wondering to you – as my mind turned to the genocide in Gaza and the murder of the innocent in so many other places by men with guns and weapons more amazing in their killing power, manufactured in spotless factories by people indifferent to how their bread is buttered. But I knew that the workers on the factory floors were no more guilty than those whose butter comes from investments in these ghoulish places. Yes, Thoreau knew: "Do not ask how your bread is buttered, it will make you sick if you do – and the like. A man had better starve at once than lose his innocence in the process of getting his bread. If within the sophisticate man there is not an unsophisticated one, then he is but one of the devil’s angels."
When I was about four years old, I went with my mother to the local butcher shop. When Sol the butcher came to wait on my mother, I noticed his white apron was covered in blood, so I asked him if he cut himself. He laughed and asked me if I would like a slice of liverwurst.
Didn’t Hitler claim to be a vegetarian because of animal suffering?
The shotgun blasts increased on my way home. I stopped to gather some long-needle pine and wild red berry branches for our mantle since it was December and the birth of the Prince of Peace was approaching. My knife slipped and I cut my finger, the blood dripping onto the white snow matched the berries’ redness. It was startlingly beautiful, but the cut was painful as I stanched it with a few tissues.
When I got home and was bandaging my finger and my wife was decorating our mantle with my cuttings, I recalled an analysis of our current situation offered by the French demographer, Emmanuel Todd, “The Dislocation of the West.”
Todd is an all facts guy, an historian, a sociologist, a middle-of the roader, far from a romantic dreamer, an analyst of the extensive data that he gathers. Years back, based on data analysis, he correctly predicted the fall of the Soviet Union. Now he is predicting the fall of the West based on certain specific variables that he considers key. When I read his work and heard him talk, I concurred completely, for I had for years, based on my work in the sociology of religion, reached the same conclusion without all his data to back me up.
We in the West, he says, are living at a time when nihilism, meaninglessness, and zero religious belief is the norm. It has come on slowly over a century and a half to the point where nothing seems holy. We have passed from a Zombie religious state when traditional religious values, but not belief, survived somewhat, to a time when nihilism undergirds everything. A nihilistic foundation, meaning no foundation. Reality has been undermined and a zombie state of lostness prevails, and irrational pure evil state nihilism lives for endless war. Moral values have disappeared behind a façade of fake belief.
If Thoreau were around, he might ask people what they really believed about God, death, and moral values, and the stuttering responses would befit the times. But no one is asking.
The song is over but only the melody lingers on, even as Bing Crosby sings “O Little Town of Bethlehem” on a cyber sale at Amazon.
Todd is a data man, a non-believer, a normal academic, and yet from his research he probably sounds to many as if he is unhinged. But he is just repeating what Jesus, Saroyan’s character, and the Protestant theologian Paul Tillich (in 1948) all said was happening with the shaking and undermining of the Western foundation. Hell would break loose. Nihilism would triumph.
And it did, of course, and will unless... I don’t know; Todd has no answer. "I think of all the blood in the woods, on the tracks, all the blood being shed everywhere, the killers licking their chops, the earth indifferently drinking all the blood, and the words of the French poet Jacques Prevert’s “Song in the Blood”:
"Where’s it going all this spilled blood?
Murder’s blood, war’s blood, misery’s blood,
And the blood of men tortured in prisons,
And the blood of children calmly tortured by their papa and their mama,
And the blood of men whose heads bleed in padded cells,
And the roofers blood when the roofer slips and falls from the roof,
And the blood that comes and flows in great gushes with the newborn,
The mother cries,
The baby cries,
The blood flows,
The earth turns,
The earth doesn’t stop turning,
The blood doesn’t stop flowing,
Where’s it going all this spilled blood?
Blood of the blackjacked,
Of the humiliated,
Of suicides,
Of firing squad victims,
Of the condemned,
And the blood of those that die just like that by accident."
But then my wife suggested that Todd and I may be wrong. When religious belief was strong in the West, weren’t nations and people slaughtering their enemies in the name of religion? Don’t many social scientists use data to argue points that lack counterpoints? Haven’t people long been fanatical killers in the name of religion and for their gods? When did morals or religious belief ever stop the shedding of blood? Such times are few and far between. Perhaps religious belief is not the explanatory variable that Todd thinks it is and seemed so to me when I first read his work and even concurred with it a few minutes ago.
Could not the key be that mysterious human attribute – love – that like despair cannot be measured, that finds in every other living creature a part of oneself, just the inkling in our hearts that everyone is us and should always be treated as an end and not a means, especially at a time when the spiritual has been subordinated to the technical, everything has become means, and the ends have disappeared.
It may sound laughable to suggest that Fyodor Dostoevsky explained it better than all the data gatherers in his story “The Dream of A Ridiculous Man”: "It is so simple: in one day, in one hour, everything would be settled at once. The one thing is – love thy neighbor as thyself – that is the one thing. That is all, nothing else is needed. You will instantly find how to live."
Or as Jesus said and other great religious leaders affirmed: "Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity [love], I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal." - Corinthians 13
Who can explain it? Who can tell you why? Not this fool. I can only wonder as I wander in the beautiful falling snow. Like Dostoevsky, “I will not, I cannot believe that evil is the normal condition of men. Yet all of them only laugh at my belief.” It’s understandable."
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