That winter, when I was talking about the England of Langland and
Chaucer and Shakespeare and Webster, the war-machine of totalitarian
Germany had turned to devour that island, and morning after morning when
I glanced at The New York Times in the library, between classes, I read the
headlines about the cities that had been cut to pieces with bombs. Night
after night the huge dark mass of London was bursting into wide areas of
flame that turned its buildings into empty craters and cariated those miles
and miles of slums. Around St. Paul’s the ancient City was devastated, and
there was no acre of Westminster, Bloomsbury, Camden Town, Mayfair,
Bayswater, Paddington that had not been deeply scarred. Coventry was
razed to the ground. Bristol, Birmingham, Sheffield, Newcastle were all
raided, and the land was full of blood and smoke.
The noise of that fearful chastisement, the fruit of modern civilization,
penetrated to the ears and minds of very few at St. Bonaventure’s. The
Friars understood something of what was going on: but they lost
themselves, for the most part, in futile political arguments if they talked
about it at all. But the students were more concerned with the movies and
beer and the mousy little girls that ran around Olean in ankle socks, even
when the snow lay deep on the ground.
I think it was in November that we all lined up, students and secular
professors, in De la Roche Hall and gave our names in to be drafted. The
whole process was an extremely quiet and unmomentous one. The room
was not even crowded. You didn’t even have the boredom of waiting.
I gave my name and my age and all the rest, and got a small white card. It
was quickly over. It did not bring the war very close.
Yet it was enough to remind me that I was not going to enjoy this
pleasant and safe and stable life forever. Indeed, perhaps now that I had just
begun to taste my security, it would be taken away again, and I would be cast back into the midst of violence and uncertainty and blasphemy and the
play of anger and hatred and all passion, worse than ever before. It would
be the wages of my own twenty-five years: this war was what I had earned
for myself and the world. I could hardly complain that I was being drawn
into it.
Like Merton, we all get drawn into wars that are sometimes of our own making, sometimes not. When I was younger, I believed that, as you aged, life would get easier. You'd fall into a career. Into love. Into family. Fall into a kind of existence where every day is, at worst, normal and quiet, and, at best, a little new and exciting. I didn't aspire to be Ernest Hemingway or a contestant on Survivor. I preferred guided tours versus build-your-own-adventures.
Yet, despite my best efforts, wars happened and continue to happen. I can be a little free and loose with my opinions around friends and family. That has caused a few minor police actions. And a few people in my life have nuclear capabilities that have led to one or two Cuban Missile Crises and a few Hiroshimas, as well. It is impossible, in this broken world, to avoid being wounded in combat.
Of course, my personal turmoils pale in comparison to the experiences of women and men who have gone into actual armed conflict. I know that. The war analogies I'm using here are my way of addressing huge issues that I have dealt with/am dealing with. I don't want to lay myself bare. I'm not Sylvia Plath or Robert Lowell. I'm more Emily Dickinson: "Tell all the truth but tell it slant--"
So, my slant truth is that I am in the trenches. Have been for a few years now. Only a handful of people know the whole story, because, believe it or not, I'm a fairly private individual. In my poetry, I've let Bigfoot do the talking for me. For four or five years, he's been my surrogate, dealing with the slings and arrows. He's bigger and stronger than me. Can carry the world on his broad shoulders a lot longer than I can.
More people need Bigfoot in their lives. Or more people need to be Bigfoot. I may sound crazy right now, but that's okay. I'm speaking my Bigfoot truth. You see, wars are senseless things, usually started by people who have lost sight of what it means to be a part of humanity. It's very easy to hurt a person if all you are focused on is yourself. Your own pleasures and wants. That's called narcissism, and it will eventually lead to abandonment, isolation, depression, mental illness. And war.
I prefer a Bigfoot outlook. Where you don't use the world solely for your own selfish needs. Where love isn't a finite resource, that shifts and changes and disappears. Where the song of spring peepers can thaw a frozen heart. Where everyone has a cave filled with pine bough beds and piles of sweet apples. Where giants stand hidden in the forest verge, keeping guard against greed and hunger and sorrow. Where footprints are deep and wide and full of mud. Where forever is forever, with shoulders that span the universe.
Perhaps the reason Bigfoot remains myth is pretty simple: human beings are too human. We embrace all the things that hurt and destroy. We declare war on each other and the world. Until all that changes, Bigfoot is never going to come out of the woods. Will remain a mystery.
And that's Saint Marty's slant Bigfoot truth.
A Good Hominid Is Hard to Find
by: Martin Achatz
Flannery wasn't into beauty:
dolls and doilies and needlepoint.
Gravity pulled her to Bantams
that strutted backwards. Carnivals
where intersexed people spouted
Gospel. Eucharist suns that bled
across Georgia dusk. And Bigfoot.
She loved him sacramentally,
as if her salvation depended on it.
When she couldn't walk any more,
he carried her around Andalusia,
so she could hear stupid cows
bellow, see peafowl blossom
into resurrection. When she sat
at her Remington, he stood outside
her bedroom window, listened
to her machine gun fingers
as they hunted misfits moving
through pine branches like noon
grace. She thought Bigfoot
was a holy ghost, a hairy pentecost
in her feebled life. In the hospital,
when she died, perhaps she saw
him enter her room, scoop her up,
cradle her against his thick breast,
carry her down a highway where
insects sawed the heavens in two.
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