It's a recipe for blue, like it's 1862

I wrote a letter down to you,

Like I'm Sullivan Ballou...

It's a recipe for blue,

Like it's 1862

I've spent a lot of time on U.S. Civil War battlefields-- Gettysburg, Antietam, Monocacy, Manassas, Harper's Ferry, and many lesser-known sites are within an hour of my home in Maryland.  Richmond, Fredericksburg, and the Wilderness, down in Virginia, are about a two or so hour drive.  Living in the D.C. area, you're surrounded by memorials to that war and, if you pay attention to the signs, it can get into your blood if you've grown up there.  It wasn't until I was an adult and out on my own and had the means to really explore that I began being fully conscious of it. So I dove in-- Devouring books and magazine articles, and driving, bicycling, and hiking the battlefield parks.  I've read the Shaara trilogy, and listened to Shelby Foote wax rhapsodic in the epic Ken Burns documentary. 

For a while, I idealized Stonewall Jackson, with his destroyed arm buried all by itself and the sweetness of his final deathbed words, “Let us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees.”  And Lee, who put state before country and sat so regally on his white horse, Traveller.  Long-suffering Longstreet, who took all the blame for the Confederate loss at Gettysburg which should have been directed at Lee.  And Grant, so inept as a businessman but frighteningly effective as a general, who supposedly drank himself into a stupor over the horrific result of his decisions at Cold Harbor.

But then I began reading different sorts of books, focusing not on the battles and the presumably larger-than-life men who orchestrated them, but on the effects of the war.  In the bookstore at Antietam Battlefield Park, I found Too Afraid to Cry: Maryland Civilians in the Antietam Campaign and I learned of what the citizens of that town experienced both during and in the aftermath of the battle, of what they had to go through to put their homes and their lives back together. Then I came across This Republic of Suffering, which describes how our very religious nation had to come to grips with death on a scale it'd not experienced before, death without the salvation of confession or last rites, and loss that decimated families.  The song lyric at the top of this post references a letter from Major Sullivan Ballou to his wife Sarah, written a week before he was killed at the First Battle of Bull Run.  It's a very romantic letter, but only serves to highlight that this was not a romantic war, it was horrible and painful--

My very dear Sarah: The indications are very strong that we shall move in a few days — perhaps tomorrow. Lest I should not be able to write again, I feel impelled to write a few lines that may fall under your eye when I shall be no more …
I have no misgivings about, or lack of confidence in the cause in which I am engaged, and my courage does not halt or falter. I know how strongly American Civilization now leans on the triumph of the Government and how great a debt we owe to those who went before us through the blood and sufferings of the Revolution. And I am willing — perfectly willing — to lay down all my joys in this life, to help maintain this Government, and to pay that debt …
Sarah my love for you is deathless, it seems to bind me with mighty cables that nothing but Omnipotence could break; and yet my love of Country comes over me like a strong wind and bears me unresistibly on with all these chains to the battle field.
The memories of the blissful moments I have spent with you come creeping over me, and I feel most gratified to God and to you that I have enjoyed them for so long. And hard it is for me to give them up and burn to ashes the hopes of future years, when, God willing, we might still have lived and loved together, and seen our sons grown up to honorable manhood, around us. I have, I know, but few and small claims upon Divine Providence, but something whispers to me — perhaps it is the wafted prayer of my little Edgar, that I shall return to my loved ones unharmed. If I do not my dear Sarah, never forget how much I love you, and when my last breath escapes me on the battle field, it will whisper your name. Forgive my many faults and the many pains I have caused you. How thoughtless and foolish I have often times been! How gladly would I wash out with my tears every little spot upon your happiness …
But, O Sarah! If the dead can come back to this earth and flit unseen around those they loved, I shall always be near you; in the gladdest days and in the darkest nights … always, always, and if there be a soft breeze upon your cheek, it shall be my breath, as the cool air fans your throbbing temple, it shall be my spirit passing by. Sarah do not mourn me dead; think I am gone and wait for thee, for we shall meet again …

Reading things like this opened my eyes to the stark reality behind the gorgeous technicolor "suffering" depicted in films like Gone With the Wind.  And then I read the Declarations of Secession of some of the Confederate states-- Georgia's, in particular, is quite a peach--

The people of Georgia having dissolved their political connection with the Government of the United States of America, present to their confederates and the world the causes which have led to the separation. For the last ten years we have had numerous and serious causes of complaint against our non-slaveholding confederate States with reference to the subject of African slavery. They have endeavored to weaken our security, to disturb our domestic peace and tranquility, and persistently refused to comply with their express constitutional obligations to us in reference to that property, and by the use of their power in the Federal Government have striven to deprive us of an equal enjoyment of the common Territories of the Republic. This hostile policy of our confederates has been pursued with every circumstance of aggravation which could arouse the passions and excite the hatred of our people, and has placed the two sections of the Union for many years past in the condition of virtual civil war. Our people, still attached to the Union from habit and national traditions, and averse to change, hoped that time, reason, and argument would bring, if not redress, at least exemption from further insults, injuries, and dangers. Recent events have fully dissipated all such hopes and demonstrated the necessity of separation. Our Northern confederates, after a full and calm hearing of all the facts, after a fair warning of our purpose not to submit to the rule of the authors of all these wrongs and injuries, have by a large majority committed the Government of the United States into their hands. The people of Georgia, after an equally full and fair and deliberate hearing of the case, have declared with equal firmness that they shall not rule over them. A brief history of the rise, progress, and policy of anti-slavery and the political organization into whose hands the administration of the Federal Government has been committed will fully justify the pronounced verdict of the people of Georgia. The party of Lincoln, called the Republican party, under its present name and organization, is of recent origin. It is admitted to be an anti-slavery party. While it attracts to itself by its creed the scattered advocates of exploded political heresies, of condemned theories in political economy, the advocates of commercial restrictions, of protection, of special privileges, of waste and corruption in the administration of Government, anti-slavery is its mission and its purpose. By anti-slavery it is made a power in the state. The question of slavery was the great difficulty in the way of the formation of the Constitution. While the subordination and the political and social inequality of the African race was fully conceded by all, it was plainly apparent that slavery would soon disappear from what are now the non-slave-holding States of the original thirteen. The opposition to slavery was then, as now, general in those States and the Constitution was made with direct reference to that fact. But a distinct abolition party was not formed in the United States for more than half a century after the Government went into operation. The main reason was that the North, even if united, could not control both branches of the Legislature during any portion of that time.

That's just the first paragraph.  The word "slavery" is used 27 times throughout the full Declaration.  Twenty. Seven.  I began to understand the politics behind the Emancipation Proclamation, and just how deluded discussions of this having been a war for "state's rights" really are.  And when Confederate statues and memorials began being vandalized and removed in recent years, I decided that, to quote Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, it was "altogether fitting and proper that we should do this " at this time.  

Full transcript of Mayor Landrieu's speech can be read here.

I've seen defenses of the removal of these monuments that draw comparison to post-WW II Germany, making the point that you don't see memorials and statues to Hitler and the Third Reich because the German people understand that there's nothing romantic about those men or the cause they fought for and they certainly should not be idealized, revered, or memorialized.  Was Nathan Bedford Forrest as inhumane as Joseph Goebbels?  A lot of people don't seem to think so, and it's that sort of belief that contributes to the divides in this country.  

"There is a difference between remembrance of history, and the reverence of it".  How many more generations will it take for us to stop romanticizing this war and instead begin learning from it?

Random babblings: Fuck you, winter, and the joy of found objects

A pair of deer ran across the highway this morning right through a clump of cars going at high speed.  One of them stumbled then righted itself, but it happened too far ahead for me to tell if it'd been clipped by a car.  When they reached the edge of the road, they had to leap a fence to get to the field beyond and I saw that one of them was piebald.  The piebald one stumbled as it hit the ground on the other side of the fence, but it found its legs and took off after its partner. Again, I couldn't tell if it'd been hurt because they were both moving too fast.  It's been a long time since I've seen a piebald deer.

It was blustery and bitterly cold this morning and I'm so fucking sick of being cold that I can't even get excited over daffodils beginning to bloom along the side of the road.  

Drove past a church coming into Shepherdstown just as the White Stripes' tune Truth Doesn't Make a Noise was playing.  The sign out front proclaimed "JUDGEMENT & EXTRAVAGANCE" on a specified date and time.  I couldn't make the connection between the two concepts.

Headed to Antietam Battlefield after breakfast with a plan to hike the West Woods and Cornfield loop trails.  Didn't enjoy the prospect of traipsing through cold wind under a grey sky, but it's been too long since I've been on a trail so I told myself to stop being a weeny and just do it.  Turned out to be fortuitous self-advice-- A short ways along, where the trail runs down to parallel route 65, I struck off to the side to explore an old fenced enclosure.  Coming around the side of it, I found a beautifully clean, almost fully intact white-tailed deer skeleton. I've written before about how rare it is to find carcasses in the woods that haven't lost their heads, so imagine my surprised delight when I saw the skull of this one right there at the end of its delicately S-curved spinal column.  In very good condition, too, perfectly clean of flesh and not yet gnawed.  So newly clean, in fact, that the vertebrae next to it were still attached to each other by ruddy, not-yet-dissolved intervertebral discs.  So then came the ethical dilemma-- Snatch the prize and take it home, or cement the image of it in my memory and leave it for someone else to find?  I've been fortunate enough to find a few skulls over the years that I've been looking and have left the last couple where they were, happy enough with the discovery to not feel the need to cart them off.  And I'd barely endured enough cold this morning to feel that I'd earned some kind of a prize. But fuck it.  The grey-sky crankiness made me greedy.  I knelt down and disengaged this one from the weeds and tucked it inside my jacket with its upper teeth snug against the right side of my rib cage, then continued down the trail to the 15th Massachusetts monument. 

A bit farther beyond the monument, my eye was caught by something lying in a grassy area on the other side of the trees.  No way, it couldn't be.  I cut through the trees and, sure enough, lying tipped on its side in the bleached out, winter-flattened grass was another deer skull.  All by itself. I looked around and found a few remnants of a skeleton under the trees a couple dozen feet away, just a fairly aged vertebra and a thigh bone or two, which made this skull lying in the grass even more amazing.  But when I tipped it over to see what condition it was in, I found I wasn't the first person to discover it, and that it had apparently been a buck--  With somewhat sloppy precision, the section of skull where antlers would have been located had been sawed away.  Other than that, it was in just as great condition as the other I'd already claimed.  My greed knew no bounds and, besides, this one obviously deserved a good home where what was left of it would be admired and appreciated.  So I squatted down, unbuttoned my jacket, and slipped this one in on the left side.  Being a small-busted woman, there was plenty of room for both inside my men's size small jacket.  But when I buttoned back up and stood, I laughed out loud upon glancing down and finding myself suddenly quite chesty, albeit a bit droopy and lopsided.  With my hands cradling the bases of the skulls through my pockets and their bony noses tickling my nipples, I have to say the walk back to the car was quite, uhhh... tittilating.

Stopped once more across the road from the parking lot to sit for a few moments all alone in the old Dunker Church, staring at what little sunlight the overcast sky allowed through the windows gleaming on the old wooden floorboards and listening to the wind thump the shutters against the outside walls, and trying to imagine what prayers there must've sounded like.  Then I got up, hugged my treasures gently to my chest, and took them home with me.

Must've been a young buck? In both photos, you can see that the front teeth
on both sides of its mouth hadn't fully grown in yet.

Tea and impermanence

My Sunday’s have become fairly predictable this winter. To break the routine, I took the bold step of ordering a tea at Sharazade’s that I’ve never tried before: Smokey Russian Caravan, a blend of China black and Lapsang Souchong teas. When the pot was set in front of me, I poured a cup and let it sit to cool a bit while I waited for my food. Just before my fritatta was served, I became aware of an unusual odor and wondered if they were burning a pig in the kitchen (nothing on the menu would indicate this as a possibility, though). Then I picked up my cup and took a few sips of the tea. The taste was a fairly typical tea flavor, mellow and smooth but with, as the name suggests, a definite smoky element. And then I realized it… The smoky odor I had noticed was coming from my tea. I sat there trying to think of it as the smoky aroma of burning wood, but just kept coming back to that first impression of burning pig flesh, kind of sweet & smoky at the same time. It made for a very weird tea experience, to munch on an English muffin with jam and a sage-sausage fritatta, while occasionally getting whiffs of that perfectly acceptable-tasting tea that smelled vaguely of a charnel ground. Was it perhaps highly appropriate to be drinking and smelling this tea while reading a Buddhist magazine? Didn’t Siddharta Gautama, on his way to Buddha-hood, practice with monks who, inspired by the Hindu god Shiva, meditated in charnel grounds in order to fully grasp the concept of impermanence? Don’t Hindu monks still smear their bodies with cremation ashes as a reminder of the impermanence of all things? (And yes, I realize that I’m blurring the lines between Buddhism and Hinduism. For me, interest in the latter led to studying the former, so they’re inextricably linked in my mind.) I don’t know that I could ever acquire enough of a taste for Smoky Russian Caravan to make it a regular part of my tea repertoire, but it might be a good one to drink every now and again as an alternative to smearing my body with cremation ashes in a charnel ground…

Noticed an ad in the magazine for a book titled The Cosmos in a Carrot: A Zen Guide to Eating Well. The pairing of the words "carrot" and "eating" caused me to grin, seeing as how I’d just the other day been listening to T00l’s "Disgustipated":

And the angel of the lord came unto me, snatching me up from my place of slumber. And took me on high, and higher still until we moved to the spaces betwixt the air itself. And he brought me into a vast farmland of our own Midwest. And as we descended, cries of impending doom rose from the soil. One thousand, nay a million voices full of fear. And terror possessed me then. And I begged, "Angel of the Lord, what are these tortured screams?" And the angel said unto me, "These are the cries of the carrots, the cries of the carrots! You see, Reverend Maynard, tomorrow is harvest day and to them it is the holocaust." And I sprang from my slumber drenched in sweat like the tears of one million terrified brothers and roared, "Hear me now, I have seen the light! They have a consciousness, they have a life, they have a soul! Damn you! Let the rabbits wear glasses! Save our brothers!" Can I get an amen? Can I get a hallelujah? Thank you, Jesus.

You really have to hear the perfect mid-western preacher twang with which Maynard delivers these lines to get the full impact of "Disgustipated." The above is followed by a minute or so of Maynard chanting "This is necessary… Life feeds on life feeds on life feeds on life feeds on life feeds on…", etc, etc.

I’ve decided that I want a t-shirt that reads "Let the rabbits wear glasses!!"

After breakfast, I headed back across the Potomac River for a hike around The Cornfield at Antietam National Battlefield Park. I’ve been coming to this battlefield for years. Surrounding the town of Sharpsburg, MD, it’s a beautiful area of rolling hills between South Mountain and the Potomac River. The driving tour is excellent for bicycling and the hiking trails, while short and easy, make for some great meandering. This history of the place is not nearly so pleasant. The battle of Antietam began at dawn of September 17th, 1862, north of Miller’s cornfield. Over the course of the morning, 15,000 Federal soldiers converged on the cornfield. As they filed through the 6 or so foot tall stalks, they met the Confederate army, approximately 9,200 men, on the other side. Within four hours, roughly 10,000 of all those men were no longer standing. Union General Joseph Hooker later wrote in his official report, "In the time I am writing, every stalk of corn in the northern and greater part of the field was cut as closely as could have been done with a knife, and the slain lay in rows precisely as they had stood in their ranks a few moments before." There were two more phases to the fighting at Antietam that day in other areas of the battlefield. By the end of the day, more than 23,000 men had died as a result of the battle. The official website for the battlefield puts it in perspective:

Not only was this the first major Civil War engagement on Northern soil, it was also the bloodiest single day battle in American history.
To view the magnitude of the losses, consider that Antietam resulted in nine times as many Americans killed or wounded (23,000 soldiers) as took place on June 6, 1944--D-day, the so-called "longest day" of World War II. Also consider that more soldiers were killed and wounded at the Battle of Antietam than the deaths of all Americans in the Revolutionary War, War of 1812, Mexican War, and Spanish-American War combined.

And that’s not even taking into account the toll this battle took on the citizens of Sharpsburg. Apparently, before, during and after the battle, there were almost 1,000 soldiers in the area per each resident of the town. The day after the battle, Lee’s troops packed up and headed back across the Potomac into Virginia. McClellan’s troops, though, remained in and around the town for two months, in order to "rest the army’s horses", as McClellan put it in a communication to President Lincoln. First, the battle ravages and destroys the majority of the farms in the area, then the town and local homes become a great big field hospital, then 80,000 soldiers take over for two months. It had to be a harrowing experience that left many citizens in ruin and poverty.

I followed up my hike by heading back to Shep’town. I had noticed as I was heading to Sharazade’s that the local movie theater (and we’re talking a real theater here, not any behemoth multi-plex) was showing Pan’s Labyrinth, a movie that I’d been hearing a lot about. If you have the chance to see this film while it’s still in theaters (or multi-plexes, if that’s all you’ve got access to), do so. It’s engrossing and beautiful and gory and disturbing and moving, and it deserves to be seen on a big screen. I’ll probably end up buying the dvd anyway, though, when it comes out, ‘cause it’ll still be good on a small screen. And it was a fitting way to end the afternoon, considering it was yet another exploration of impermanence (though the ending really goes both ways, with impermanence contrasted to everlasting life…).

And now it’s time to once again celebrate impermanence, by ending this post.