Personal Reflection to the Disease of Matter

Hamlet, Vladimir and cancer have contributed greatly to how the neurons fired in my reaction to Robert's Ross' life. These are the parallels and comparisons these influences dredged up;

Hamlet was recruited by his father to avenge his death, and, though Robert enlisted himself, he did so to redeem a point for his life in the eyes of his dead sister. Vladmir squanders away his life, wondering how to go about living it - putting off suicide because there may be some reason undisclosed not to believe life isn't worth living for- while Robert decides to risk death after he determines what is worth dying for. He can't go on living in a world where innocence is sneered at and stomped on...or turned against by the mutinously malignant cells of some popular notion that infects the entire system.

Robert, in a 'madness' diagnosed by his contemporaries, made the only sane decision possible under his circumstances; he fought with a conviction galvanised by the tarnished, rusting apparatus of warfare to "not be taken" by this "disease of matter." He was defeated, but he was not taken. Life is unpredictable, but a person's actions are his responsibility alone (hmmm...it would appear the stoics have also made an appearance in my psyche recently). At least he died as who he decided he wanted to be.

The day after I finished reading The Wars, I asked my Mom if it was true that she was responding to a ad she had snipped out of the classifieds and left on the coffee table. The job regarded a position at an aerospace manufacturer (that, for the record is "doing very well" because of the various wars antagonised by North America), she responded; "can you taste the lemon juice in the soup?" I said maybe she should add a pinch of cilantro next time. War was an industry that had invaded my home, and I said nothing. I felt a fraction of the pressure Ross must have felt squirming under toxic societal norms. I stirred the vegetables around - blobs of tomato guts swirling around in their own blood - and wondered how her life would have been different if she hadn't given up on teachers' college.Alas, our impotence when it comes to following through on 'personal existential epiphanies' ...and the reason that heros of existentialism are fictional.

Or Diane Fossey...
Or Rosa Parks...Or my Mom when, a few days later she said “you know, I just wouldn’t feel right working there.”

citations

Chlorine Gas." Spartacus Educational. Spartacus Educational. 26 Oct 2008 http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/FWWchlorine.htm.

"Entrainement a Valcartier." Musee de la Guerre. La Société du Musée canadien des civilisations . 25 Oct 2008 http://www.museedelaguerre.ca/cwm/exhibitions/guerre/training-val-f.aspx.

Gaspar, Laura. "The narrative through photomontage: Uses of photography in The Wars." 08 Aug 2001. 30 Oct 2008 <http://mural.uv.es/laumon/Findley.html>.

"Horses in World War I." history learning site UK. history learning site UK. 27 Oct 2008 http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/horses_in_world_war_one.htm

"If Some Things Never Change, When did they Begin?." Library and Archives of Canada. Library and Archives Canada. 17 Oct 2008 http://collectionscanada.ca/education/firstworldwar/05180204_e.html.

Kosich, Dorothty. "Canadian Government wins re-election. Positive for mining?." Oil Sands and Truth. 15 Oct 2008. Oil Sands and Truth. 27 Oct 2008 http://oilsandstruth.org/canadian-government-wins-reelection-positive-mining.

"Life in the Trenches." Spartacus Educational. Spartacus Educational. 22 Oct 2008 http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/FWWtrench.htm.

McMurty, John. "Myths of the Freemarket." NewInternationalist 401Jun 2007 20 Oct 2008 "The Canada/Britain Relationship." War Songs from the First half of the 21st Century. McMaster University. 28 Oct 2008 http://library.mcmaster.ca/archives/exhibitions/WorldWar/file08.htm.

Payne, Mathew. "Arise and Shine: a Prophetic Word by Gabriel." ezine @rticles 04 27 2007 25 Oct 2008 <http://ezinearticles.com/?Arise-and-Shine-a-Prophetic-Word-by-Gabriel&id=542284>.

Peden, William. "World War 1." HCP Consulting Ltd.. HCP consulting Ltd.. 23 Oct 2008 http://www.hcpconsulting.ca/granddad/hist002.htm. "

"Residential Schools." CBCnews.ca. 20 Oct 2008. CBC Radio. 30 Oct 2008 <http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2008/05/16/f-faqs-residential-schools.html>.

Roberts, Carol. Timothy Findley: Stories from a Life. Toronto: ECW Press, 1994. "19th - 20th Century India and Britain ." 19th-20th Century India and Britain . 30 Oct 2008 <http://www.gpmsdbaweb.com/memoir2/Colonialism/Colonialism2.htm>.

"Stop the Tar Sands." Greenpeace Canada. Greenpeace Canada. 30 Oct 2008 <http://www.greenpeace.org/canada/en/campaigns/tarsands>.

"Timothy Findley." Biography Base. Biography Base. 27 Oct 2008
<http://www.biographybase.com/biography/Findley_Timothy.html>.

Apologia: the Wars Against Nature

The Wars’ significance cannot be understated at this time in Canadian history. Findley’s work show us how deviation from societal norms may be an outpost of reason. The destruction wrought by blind colonialism in World War I is mirrors the current status quo of profit at any cost to nature is manifest in the expansion of Alberta’s Tar Sands.

During any era and in any culture, the degree of conformity to norms is how humans determine the morality of their fellows. Robert’s final act is therefore startling and disturbing to his contemporaries as it challenges the passively accepted system of sanctioned murder and disregard for life upon which the British Empire hinged.
In 1914, the dominant Canadian paradigm had been shaped by its identity as a British colony. It was expected that Canadians should whole heartedly defend the prosperity of the motherland (Canada Britain Relationship). And they did.

GOD SAVE THE KING!!! (a banner) (Findley, 8).

The current dominant paradigm also defies rationality and preaches and celebrates its religion like a fanatic. The recklessness of industrial expansion lays ruin to natural systems for the sake of job opportunities. As the government swings closer to liberal capitalism, the reasons not to exploit bitumen to its fullest potential are secondary to the ultimate goal of securing an imminent boost to the economy. The life put at risk by the Alberta Oil Sands Project is regarded as a mere externality incidental in the process of wealth accumulation. According to Prime Minister Harper, “Canada’s incredible share of this endowment will fuel the prosperity of our country for generations” (Kosich). This is typical of the dogmatic neo liberal blindfold which hides the obvious role environmental sustainability plays in resource management.

Young men died so that future generations of British would be more prosperous. The environment has now been cast as a pawn, its casualties seen as sacrifices in the tunnel vision of projected economic growth.

Just as the flame thrower was invented as war threatened to exhaust itself in deadlock, oil has literally been squeezed out of sand due to the increasing instability of Middle Eastern supply. Each day in operation, 1.8 billion litres of potable water are used to purify bitumen from the Alberta tar sands, and, since the beginning of this venture, 30 000 km2 of the Boreal Forest has been cleared. If they are developed to the level projected, they will be responsible for almost half of all carbon emissions in Canada (Stop the Tar Sands). Such ‘innovations’ would have been - previous to the context that begat them – utterly inconceivable. However Canadians, trusting in and dependent on the dominant paradigm of the unsustainable exploitation of natural resources, have come so see such destructive ventures as progress.

Robert, however, could not see the mechanised attrition of warfare as progress. The innocent lives caught in the cross fire are to him unjustifiable deaths. He and his friend Rodwell bring these creatures to the sanctuary of the 'stained glass dugout'; "There was a whole row of cages....Birds, Rabbits, Toads and things....They [were] resting. [They were] all injured.That's [a] sort of hospital (Findley, 85-86)." Together they shelter and care for and the refugees they find blown out from destroyed trees and burrows.

This pair can be compared to the work of NGOs such as Greenpeace and the Sierra Club, campaigning against the current corporate mentality that has trickled down into the minds of the average constituent. Clearly, the message of such organisations will be drowned out if attention is not gievn to their appeals.Eventually Rodwell dies of his compassion for the helpless creatures who have been dragged into warfare. He commits suicide after men desensitized by warfare force him to watch the murder of a cat. Rodwell, like Ross, cannot live if it means resigning to a world order won by unfeeling brutality. It was not the Kaiser or the King who killed him, it was the ordinary men and their adoption of the designs of officials. Afterall, "It is the ordinary men and women who determine who we are (p.12)."And ordinary men and women have accepted the Tar Sands. The stirring of individual thought and conscience has been suppressed by the collective acceptance and apathy toward the way things simply are.

Just as the debate on Robert's actions should instead focus on the a retrospective analysis of the factors which drove Canadians to the killing fields, the attention placed on "fringe" environmental activists should be shifted to the oil fields against which they are campaigning. Humans are just like the rest of nature in striving for survival, which in a capitalist context, is manifest in ‘ensuring’ the prosperity of future generations at any environmental cost. Findley warns us that this blindingly selfish urge - when manipulated by a government concerned with its own preservation - will ironically be our downfall.

Explication of Robert's Heroic Redemption

Robert's sensitivity is based in an inherent idealism that is forced into a process of actualisation by Roweena's death. He was absent when she fell, and his negligence was the original sin which drove him to on a mission to redeem himself. He sets about this in a struggle to preserving the vulnerable and innocent; whose essence is the same as the beloved sister he failed to protect. Polti's classification of "loved ones" are thus expanded to include the people and animals who Robert encounters, empathises with, and for whom he eventually sacrifices himself. Motivated by the remorse he feels at having abandonned his hydrocephalic sister - just like everyone else in his family and society had done - he sets out to prove to the world that innocence should exist in the world and that he could protect it. He fails often, but each time pushes him even harder into the identity of a hero fighting to redeem himself in the eyes of these lost loved ones.

When Robert was a child , he looked in the mirror pretending to see his skin was red. He took up running as a way to emulate his role model, Longboat, a Native athlete (Findley 43). Findley, writing only as an observer of Robert's actions, implies this affinity to be an indication of his ideals (Gaspar); he intuitively associated qualities such as autonomy and naturalist wisdom with these cultures. However, these are qualities which he cannot explore in city-life where an artificial sense of collectivism and and detachment from nature constitute the norm (Canada Britain Relationship).

This feeling of anomie becomes overpowering after the death of his sister: without her to protect, he had no reason to stay living a way of life to which he does not belong. So he enlists, but only to discover that the pervasive perversion of his society's values were even more askew in war: moving out to Europe, he was ordered to shoot an injured horse. The animal's life was just that dispendable. His instinct to protect him was subordinate to his the officer's command. He had to shoot the horse in order to establish an air of stoicism that would appease his superiors and conform to the contemporary conception of 'strength'. He has failed again. The murder of the helpless animal in a fly-filled hold is a traumatic experience which galvanises his resolve to never let life be treated like inconsequential externalities in the pursuit of human designs.

Robert's friend Harris underlines the interconnectedness of all life through a universal primordial essence; the sea that pulses through every vein. To Findley "humans are no better and no worse - no larger and no smaller than any other creature that walks, crawls, flies or swims, [we are] merely different." Harris dies with Robert at his bedside. The legacy Robert would carry of his friend is a profound patience and respect for his fellow soldiers and individual humans in general, but becomes increasingly deviant in his opinion of war as unjustifiable in the gross lack of respect it exhibits for the equality of all forms of life and their entitlement to exist.

Never does Findley describe Robert indiscriminately shooting at enemy lines. Once does Robert fire at another human being, and this is when he can look into the eyes of a German who, in a split second of panic, he thinks is going to fire at him (Findley, 131). While this murder is in self defence, it should never have happened. Men should not be accidentally killed like this. The murdered man is another vulnerable soul who represents the goodness he was trying to preserve. His murder of the German is a representation of how societal pressure perverts human instinct to false ends (McMurty). Robert was acting in the interest of his own survival when he killed this innocent man, just as every man who enlisted believed he was fighting in the interest of the human race. Trust that he would not be harmed by his official "enemy" was the German’s downfall. In war, the survival of none is guaranteed, but the death of the sensitive and trusting is certain. The murder of his German counterpart haunts Robert till the day of his own downfall, when he can no longer stand to live in a world where Honour and Justice become casualties. This murder is proof that if he does not actively protect, their destruction is his guilt at passively enforcing the status quo. He has only two choices; jam the machine or become a gear within it.

Robert’s society spat on the natural vulnerabilities of all animals, when it is exactly this quality in living things that should foster peace ans mutual sterwardship; symbiosis between all life. Robert could not fight for this kind of perversion, so, in his final act, he dies taking a stand against it (Findley 188). He is not guiltless – he has killed his sister by neglect, horses by obedience and another man by false instinct. His values and judgement had been was corrupted. However, in salvaging his ideals from the wreckage of his errors, from the deaths of his loved ones, he finds the resolve to sacrifice himself for the innocence he had thus failed to defend.

Welcome to The Wars

The narrator describes the first steps of his investigation as he painstakingly sifts through pieces Robert Ross' life. In imagining the stillness of the archive; the shafts of afternoon sunlight exposing suspended dust particles; the archivist perched silently at her desk; the suppressed coughs of other researchers; and the narrator's hushed tones, the reader gets the sense that it is a place of reverence. A place where objective reflection on the past warms cold cases and humanises history in a way that illuminates the paradox of both the constancy and diversty of the human condition.

While This book explores the decension of people into brutish beasts blinded by the instict for self preservation, its main theme is that of redemption. Robert redeems himself from guilt in the death of his sister by protecting the mute innocents exploited or ignored or somtimes literally tramped upon in WWI. And it will be in the defence of these animals that he sacrifices himself, thus atoning for the original sin of his negligence.

resource links



http://www.biographybase.com/biography/Findley_Timothy.html - briefly describes Findley's career and provides list of works



http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/gas.htm - good cross reference to Findley's description of gas attacks



http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/horses_in_world_war_one.htm - Robert's relationships with horses

'Inarticulate Doubt'

1915.
The year itself looks sepia and soiled - muddied like its pictures. In the snapshots, everyone at first seems timid - lost - irresolute. Boys and men stand squinting at the camera. Women turn away suspicious. They still maintain a public reticence....
...Then something happens. April. Ypres. Six thousand dead and wounded. The war that was meant to end my Christmas might not end till summer. Maybe Fall. This is where the pictures alter - fill up with soldiers - horses - wagons. Everyone is waving at either the soldiers or the cameras. More and more people want to be seen. More and more people want to be remembered. Hundreds - thousands - crowd into frame.
Here come the troops down Yonge street! The women abandon all their former reticence and rush into the roadway, throwing flowers and waving flags. Here come the 48th highlanders! Boys run after them on bikes. Girls, whose mouth hangs over, hardly dare to follow. Older men remove their hats. There is Sir Samuel Hughes standing on the dais, taking the farewell salute. 'GOD SAVE THE KING!!!' (a banner). Everywhere you look, trains are pulling out of stations, ships are sailing out of ports. Music drowns the long hurrah. Everyone is focused now, shadinf their eyes against the sun. Everyone is watching with an outstretched arm. Silence at the edge of wharves and time....
...Then you see him: Robert Ross - standing on the sidelines with pocketed hands - feet apart and narrowed eyes. His hair falls sideways across his forehead. He wears a checkered cap and a dark blue suit. He watches with a dubious expression; half admiring, half reluctant to admire. He's old enough to go to war. He hasn't gone. He doubts the validity in all this martialling of men, but the doubt is inarticulate. I stammers in his brain. He puts his hand out sideways, turns. He reaches for the wicker back of a wheelchair. 'Come on Rowena, there's still the rest of the park to sit in [p. 8-9].'

Robert's intuition warns him against the flurry of nationalism proffered by the alliance of the crown and Sir Sam to the masses. It appeals to the youth searching for an identity in a world whose modernisation has been sped up by war. He would rather protect the serenity of his dear disabled sister than join the impersonal fray, but cannot justify his reluctance. He is everything to his helpless sister, and would become nothing to the eminent British Empire were he to enlist - and yet, his inklings are undermined even by his own family; a mother who hands out chocolate to the departing troops, a brother who has altered his wagon to vaguely resemble a tank, and a father, whose own sense of forboding remains mute.