City of Light

This is something I wrote a while back that I'm still figuring out what to do with...but I figured I'd post it here. Makes a good first post, I think.

The cathedral was full. Its' impossibly tall grey arches holding the echoes of a dozen different languages and the smoke of incense. People moved from shrine to shrine. Fanny pack wearing tourists taking pictures and talking to each other, old women lighting candles and moving their lips silently, Asian tour groups staying together and praying loudly. In the center of the cathedral the pews were roped off as a priest said mass was said in French.

I don't go to church all that often. And when I do it is usually more of an inchoate desire to feel something rather than a intense religious feeling. But here I could feel it. To me, a few churches contain a reverberation not only of voices, but of prayers. So many people for so long have worshipped in a place that they have consecrated it in a way a priest never can. We build our own holy places. Sometimes they are burned into the ground by blood and horror, sometimes they are smaller churches off the beaten path, sometimes a river or a pool or a circle of stones. And sometimes a gargoyle-clotted building on a island, in a river, in a metropolis becomes one also, just as it was designed to be.

The island is Ile de La Cite, the river is the Seines, and the metropolis is Paris. I love Paris. It's one of the few places I feel completely justified in speaking only English. And revel in the fact
that the natives have to struggle with it. I enjoy their resentment in some way that probably speaks poorly of me as a person, but makes me feel all warm inside. Plus, the food is fantastic.

I was there on a sunny afternoon in May. I had walked through the enthrallingly close urban channels of the Left Bank. Stopped in a wine bar for a bottle of Cotes du Rhone and as many pork sausages as I could eat and headed down the river to the church on that island, the Notre Dame.

The wine, the sausages and the cathedral were all for the same reason. Twenty four hours earlier I had driven down the most dangerous road in the world. People had died on it fifteen minutes after I had passed by. The explosion rattled the windows of the airport terminal I was standing in and a black column of smoke rose lazily into the cloudless sky. I watched it from the terminal and unconsciously began saying the Hail Mary over and over to myself. I had left Baghdad, safe, again.

The wine had settled my nerves, the sausage the burning desire I get for pork after spending any amount of time in a Muslim country, the cathedral felt like something I needed to do. To acknowledge, in some official way my gratitude for being alive. Like I said, I don't often feel spiritually compelled, but I needed to do something, to show gratitude. I was alive and other people weren't and that felt like a gift I should feel thankful for.

So I entered the cathedral and walked past shrines of saints I didn't know and confessionals offering three languages. I began to look for the shrine of Mary. Every Catholic Church in my experience has one, so I wandered silently through the crowds of tourists and worshippers looking for it. I walked around the Church for what must have been an hour. Stopping here and there to stare at statues or people. I felt numb and enraged at the same time. Some strong emotion welled up in me that I didn't recognize. It gripped my chest and my throat and my eyes. I became despondent I couldn't find the chapel of Mary and began to become angry at myself, at the world and certainly at Baghdad.

Then it occured to me that Notre Dame aren't just funny sounding foreign words. Amazingly, they have meaning as well. Our Lady. The whole damn place is consecrated to her. I turned left, knelt on a wooden Prie Dieu and once again began to repeat the hail Mary as my shoulders shook and I began to sob.

Other people had died and I had lived. And I had no idea why. I still don't. I have been in and out of Iraq for years now. I have reported on the politics of it, the lives of the people here, the stories of the soldiers who are fighting. I can talk about the intricacies and complexities of the place. I can talk endlessly on the failures of this or that person or country or strategy or administration. I can list off the horrific numbers and talk calmly of the different ways innocents are tortured and killed.

But I really have no idea why it is happening. I send emails out to my friends and family regularly from here, sharing with them my experiences. On my first trip I got a response from my father, a former soldier. He wrote that I really sounded like I was in a war zone. A little perplexed, I asked him why he said that. He wrote back tersely, "Because people are dying for no reason."

Whether they are the butcher carving happily in Dresden, a newspaper boy calling out in Hanoi, or a barber snipping unknowingly in Baghdad...war can, and does, claim them all.

The only wisdom I have to share about war, after covering three this summer alone, is perhaps best expressed in the in the poem "Musee des Beaux Artes" by Auden. It opens:

"About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along."

So I'm not going to write about the war. I feel unable and ill-qualified. My ability to tell the subtleties in sound between an AK and an M-16, the cannons of a Bradley or an AC 130, the careful differences in rubble caused by a car bomb or an IED or an air strike, they seem to have the mundanity of a birdwatcher distinguishing between species of robin. Unlike Robert E. Lee, I cannot understand becoming too fond of it, because it is so terrible. It is a madness that fertilizes
every dark place in the human soul.

What I can write about is that feeling I had in in the church, on the island, in the river. The one I didn't know then I know intimately now. It was a release of fear, and fear has become a close companion of mine. I know its shapes and expressions, its spasms, its grinding, its slow blooms and quick deaths. I lean on it, am driven by it, loathe it, and, occasionally, revel in it. I have become expert in the fine lace of fear that has been stitched into me, and at times caress every loop and knot.

Maybe I was wrong and Lee was right. Perhaps I have grown too fond of my fear and the clarity it brings. I find my fear to be ammonia on glass, cutting through the ordinary oils that make up one's day in a safe place. Sure, I shrink from loud noises, and wake up sweating and shouting. But, in Baghdad, I have a clear window on the world, framed by life and death. All the words you say to someone in their deathbed I try to say everyday. All the dreams deferred anger me like a dying man wishing he had done something different with his life.

I am heading back to Iraq in a couple months. Each time I think to myself...this is the last time. But, I'll be back...describing the subtle layers of feathers, or death, that move from red to grey across the breast of a small bird, or the streets of a city never washed clean.