Things in the Head

Posted on April 11, 2003 in Reflections

A friend of mine, Phoenix, talks to trees. I can understand that. I talk to saints and to my cats. She tells me that they answer and they hold conversations. Of course, she’s quick to add that this entire dialogue takes place in her head. So do mine.

Someone once asked if the voices of the saints and angels who came to Jeanne d’Arc (the original one) weren’t in her imagination. “Of course they are,” Jeanne said. “That’s where God speaks to me.”

Many things start in the head. Books, plays, films, paintings, sculptures are all things which everyone will agree proceeds from the mind of the artist through the hand and into the world. But we don’t like to think about other things that start in the head: wars, the decision to pull a trigger, to point the barrel of a tank cannon at a civilian hotel, etc. We don’t like to admit that these things even happen. We won’t let them into our imaginations because they disturb us, terrify us, make us lose sleep. So, using our imaginations, we wish them out of existence. We look to the immediate neighborhood and we say “All is right with the world.” “Something good is come to come out of this war.” And, as we do, we dispense with all the evidence to the contrary, that bad things are happening far away over the horizon line.

Sometimes I think Americans need a war on their soil — as they last had in 1865 — to remind them that this is a nasty thing. Europeans who have seen recent conflicts in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Makedonia have seen wars and they think twice about it. It doesn’t take much for them to invoke the horror of war, to see the dead people — the soldiers on our side and the families of children on theirs — in an imagination that is not far removed from reality. It is in America, where no one is storming our borders or bombing our cities, where we haven’t seen first hand a person killed by a shrapnel shell cutting through their neck — that our visions picture war as a good thing.

I hope that Americans wake up before that happens. There are only so many times that a barroom bully can win every brawl before someone gets smart and pulls a gun or the rest of the patrons gang up on him.

The bodies of my dead neighbors are in my imagination. I’d like to leave them there. And I’d like to see my fears of the dead in the next war reduced to phantoms of the mind, too.

Let’s talk peace in our minds and have the courage to speak it out in the world, without worrying about what our neighbors think. Let’s face the dead bodies made in our name and call our troops home.

Let’s stop denying the fruition of the fantasies of those who think we can live in peace while granting the violent fantasies of those who make this war in Iraq. Let’s do some real positive thinking and real positive acting, seeking to improve on the ways we live in this world. If you look away from the negativism of war, you’re not making the bad stuff go away, you’re abetting it. That’s a reality that no amount of fantasizing will change unless you put on the armor of righteousness and set things aright by your vote, your voice, and your determination to make the good things of your imagination come out of your head, through your hands and your mouth, into this world.