Vital Tumult

Have you ever noticed
How exciting the tumult is
The uproar and confusion
How vital and present it feels

We battle through it
We quell the uproar
We resolve the confusion
We overcome

And it feels good
Even in the midst
Of the worst of times
These are the best of times

So I wonder how it is
We fail to acknowledge
Just how much
We love a good war

We are a species
Of adrenaline junkies
Bent on our own destruction
Because it makes us feel alive

Vital Tumult
Athabasca Fails
Athabasca River
Jasper National Park
Ablerta, Canada

Taken during travels, 2017

Doris Lessing introduced me to this notion, that we feel most alive during a war, and because of this we are both fascinated by it and, ultimately, attracted to it. Perhaps the thought had crossed my mind before, but Lessing put it bluntly and boldly in her 1986 Massey Lecture series, Prisons We Choose to Live Inside.

These lectures are among the most insightful explorations of our human condition I’ve ever encountered. Highly recommended. If we do not explore and acknowledge what truly motivates our actions, we relinquish our agency, our free will. In an unexpected way, Lessing’s presentation and analysis of social scientific insights became the basis of a spiritual awakening, as I began to look deeply into my self.

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Manja Mexi Movie on Jan 5, 2019 at 1:05 pm
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Well, it might be just how you say but I hate it. Confrontation for confrontation-sake, quarrels in order to break silences, drama instigation for the fun of it. Shoot yourself in the foot and scream. And leave innocent people alone. (Not you… those.)

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  Patrick Jennings on Jan 5, 2019 at 7:05 pm
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  Yeah, I can understand how what I’ve written can be read that way. Know this: I’m with you on confrontation for confrontation’s sake. That’s belligerence, and I’m fond neither of receiving it or doling it out.
  
  However, what the poem and my discussion of it refer to is tumult itself, and not so much the kind we instigate ourselves, but the kind we become caught up in, or which is entirely inserted in our lives by external forces. And it’s not so much about conflict as the challenging conditions of an unsettled existence.
  
  The reference to war is particularly about the social and psychological constructs which rally a society to engage in it. In some societies, such rallying becomes an ongoing aspect of the society itself.
  
  I think in particular of the reverence which some countries express for their military, the presence and prevalence of military imagery and the pride in national military prowess. I think of the annual military expenditures in the USA, which eclipse the spending of the next ten most-powerful nations on Earth combined. That the USA almost always leads any “coalition of the willing” into the next military conflict, often pushing for it with a fervor well beyond any other nation, is another example. America is, quite arguably, the world’s most willing combatant. Since The trillions of dollars the American government spends, the numbers of active and reserve troops in an all-volunteer army, the sheer volume and sophistication of the arms it produces, not just for its own armies, but the world’s armies, and insurgents, and guerillas.
  
  These… symptoms, if you will, can be found in most — maybe all — nations to some degree or another. We in Canada do not lag so far behind the US as we’d like to think.
  
  Now Lessing, in her Massey lecture, takes this notion of love for war further than I do. But, she’s experienced a rather brutal war or two directly, one of the worst sorts, in Africa during the Rhodesian civil war. Here’s the passage from Prison’s We Choose to Live Inside. Skip the first paragraph… it’s unpleasantly graphic and out of context.
  
  I’m not fond of war, either. To say the least. But I grew up in a family with a father who’d flown fighter jets for the RCAF, in West Germany, while the Soviet Union was erecting the Iron Curtain dividing the two Germanys. He’d left it for commercial aviation before I was in kindergarten, nonetheless, I grew up fascinated by anything military. Thankfully, I’d realised becoming a warrior wasn’t for me by the time I got out of high school. It took longer than that to realize just how deeply ingrained the love of war is, not just in the society I grew up in, but in myself — a pacifist.
  
  Go figure.
  
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    Manja Mexi Movie on Jan 6, 2019 at 2:50 am
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    Thank you for your elaborate reply. I know we are on the same side, I was not in doubt about it. I hate it when I see basic human emotional and probably genetic setup deployed for building up division, nationalism, the need to protect and serve, all in the name of making more money for the richest. I commend you for seeing the truth.
    
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