The shadows on the wall seem to tremble like vultures drying their wings. Within the darkness of Hungarian photographer Sylvia Plachy’s blurred black and white image, two boys raise and stretch their arms against the grimy concrete of the Berlin Wall. It is 1990 and the boys know that approaching the wall and mocking the still roving guards will no longer unleash an array of bullets. But to play at dying is irresistible. Something insists that they reenact the fears of all the bloody senseless deaths they’ve seen and known since early childhood. Though a real threat has suddenly evaporated, innocence has not been reclaimed; a game of exorcism is necessary.
I often watch a horde of small boys make themselves big guns and swords out of broken sticks. They form sides and defend their chosen territories on either side of the great cedar. They take turns falling dead on the ground, only to rise again and continue their pseudo wars with shouts of apparent glee.
I wonder if, as we age, we lose the capacity to exorcise our fears. Do we have a reliable way to preserve our sanity after our ability to reason, and rationalize, has grown? Can we release our anxieties by merely vicariously, passively, absorbing from the internet and TV what, as children, we would have acted out?
My poet friend, Paula Sayword, and I, just the other day, mentioned to each other how much we had enjoyed our cap guns once upon a time. Mine was a Roy Rogers model, with a shiny engraved barrel and a fake ivory handle. We agreed the smell of caps was intoxicating. Rather plaintively, she remarked, “I don’t have mine anymore.” Nor do I.
We had just been sharing our distress about the war in Ukraine. We were imagining ourselves, two old women, standing for 20 hours in a packed train of terrified mothers and children; “gagging on the panic” as Sayword wrote in her recent poem. We spoke of all the horrors we have been witnessing and our almost shameful impotence.
Is there any way to exorcise our fears and our pain? Giving money to Ukraine and to the refugees is certainly a balm. Expressing outwardly our true and complicated feelings is another. Offering solace to each other in the form of music and words and prayer. These things are not nothing but they do not alleviate the burden we have to carry as members of the human family when anyone anywhere is suffering the devastation and insanity of war. Our bodies react. Tears flow at unpredictable times. There is no solution but trying to accept that our pain is the gift of empathy, the gift of connection that evolution granted us. Painful but also preserving our decency and our integrity.
The vultures have returned to roost in the evergreens across the street as they have for years. In the ancient lore of several cultures, vultures are symbols of death and of rebirth, of perception, resourcefulness, intelligence, cleanliness, and protection. A complicated symbolism, as complicated as only human brains can create. I always experience a moment of mysterious relief when I watch them catch a thermal and soar high into the clear blue unknown and when they fly over our house on their way home.
Margot Fleck is an artist who lives in Northfield.