Vimy Ridge and the Next Hot War

Tags

jacques parizeau, justin trudeau, montreal, NATO, pacifism, putin, vimy, world war III

 

Quebec wants to rename Vimy Park in Montreal after the late separatist premier, Jacques Parizeau. Canada is griping about the dishonour to those 10,000-odd Canadian soldiers who were killed or wounded during one of the most ferocious battles of World War I. It begs many questions, but perhaps the most important is the issue of commemorating a senseless slaughter of conscripted troops who were not asked if they wanted to support the British in a pointless struggle that ought never to have been started and went on murderously for many years too long. Prominent voices denounced it early, and a number were jailed for their honesty. My grandfather fought in Flanders, so I grew up on stories of that most horrendous of wars, with its tens of millions dead. It seems to be equated now with World War II, yet there was nothing like the justification existing for stopping Hitler, whose very existence can be ascribed to the inequity with which Germany was treated after the first war – in which the German army felt itself confident of victory until being told by the government to surrender ignominiously. Understandably, many Quebeckers had no desire to fight for Britain, and, among the many evils of war, conscription is one of the greatest, violating all our current notions of human rights. It has always struck me that the way to forget the actuality of something is to erect a memorial to it. A park named ‘Vimy’ acknowledges nothing about the realities of that wicked, unnecessary war, beyond the name of a battle, which is also ridiculously enshrined among the useless artifacts that aspiring Canadian citizens are expected to memorize as a signal part of their new country’s more inglorious past. I am not particularly a separatist, but I do recognize Quebec’s right to view history in a somewhat different light. The French-Canadians who died or were mutilated at Vimy were many, and the obliteration of this stupid park is the commemoration of a greater tragedy, the forced servitude of men to die in a cause for which they had no passion or even concern. I deplore our ongoing participation in celebrating the barbarism of all wars. As Aldous Huxley noted, a war to save democracy sounds good, but once you have centralized a command system necessary to fight any war, instituted conscription, interned foreign nationals, and done all the other vile things essential – you no longer have a democracy to save. As Tolstoy said, war is the greatest of all crimes, because it contains all other crimes – murder, rape, arson, robbery, even counterfeiting, and so on. All the more disturbing is it to see this once-pacific country urged towards another war, with the usual devices or fear and fake jingoism.

When I hear of this nation’s indigenous peoples’ plight, or that of our urban poor and dispossessed, and then hear of the plans to spend many billions on new warplanes and ships, I despair. And now the the drumbeat to join NATO in defending Eastern Europe against Russian aggression – WTF? For a start, aggression doesn’t stop aggression, it incites it. And a few hundred troops in Latvia, or wherever, will stop the Russian armies for a day at the most, should they invade. The last time NATO badgered us into joining a brief peace-keeping mission was in Afghanistan, and it ended up as five years of armed conflict, with much loss of life. Are we deluded enough to be bullied into this again? Fighting the Taliban and sundry medieval warlords will be nothing like fighting the Russians in conventional warfare. The escalation of such a war would be unthinkable – Russia still has enough intercontinental ballistic nuclear warheads to destroy the planet several times over. Yet in contemplating this extreme folly Justin Trudeau, and his defense minister, are surely forced to think of the unthinkable. If the unstable Premier Putin ignores a NATO threat, what then? Who is that next decision up to? Not Canada, to be sure. With Europe in various forms of turmoil, and the US in its usual blindly belligerent mayhem, do we really want to support a NATO, and how does it benefit us if we do? No one will survive a nuclear war, and NATO does not possess the troops necessary to fight Russia in a conventional war. What then? Did we elect the wrong Trudeau brother? – for Sasha has seen war in Iraq, and, I think, understands the realities of armed conflict better than hail-fellow-well-met Justin.

If we wish to disassociate ourselves from the colonial past – and we do – why be coerced into Euro-American neo-imperialism? For such it is. In supporting various petty nationalist aspirations approved by Washington, we seem to be unable to see or approve of the same thing done by Russia. Syria is just a Russian client, and Moscow’s confounding policies there demonstrate that. The Baltic countries have, on and off, been part of a Russian or Soviet imperium, as the Ukraine has been. American interest in these regions is purely self-serving and cares not a jot for realities or national aspirations. The Baltic states did not seem to object especially to Nazi domination, and indeed happily participated in very early stages of the Holocaust. Russian domination may seem like Hades to someone in Idaho, but it will be business as usual in Latvia. Why interfere when the interference is only in the interests of US strategic hegemony?

I would suggest that we do not need an aggressive army in Canada, with warplanes and a nuclear navy, but, since we are supposedly a democracy, why do we not demand a plebiscite on the issue? An army to make peace and assist with disasters, or one to make war and create more disasters in the process? Many billions spent with Lockheed-Martin, Boeimg, or other Masters of Death, or else those billions spent at home where they are sorely needed? A peace-loving nation, or a belligerent punk, a wannabe superpower? We the people ought to choose who and what we are. If I was not blind, I would start a petition right now – but someone ought to. The choice seems obvious to me, and it is, after all, our tax money – but put it to a vote and let’s see.

If Putin moves to regain the old Soviet Empire, and to boost his own flagging reputation, how will he be stopped? Exactly. The best-case scenario in that event is more memorials to the dead, ignoring the scandalous futility of their deaths. With the West in an incessant economic chaos, the incentives to war are great: the Masters of Death make vast profits and employ many.  But those, like me, familiar with the truths of nuclear war, although we may now number few, can assure everyone that no climate change will be as climactically changed as a Nuclear Winter. It is extinction, the survival of a few we now think least fit – organisms able to thrive on atomic radiation.

We have no enemies in this wonderful country – except ourselves, perhaps — so let’s keep it that way, and then hope for the best, knowing we have behaved as best we could under the circumstances. At least those Russian missiles won’t be directed at the Great Lakes, as once they were.

 

Paul William Roberts    

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David Altmejd

Tags

art, contemporary art, david altmejd, England, montreal, sculpture

When I saw the Van Gogh retrospective at London’s South Bank Gallery in 1969, with the works arranged chronologically – that last fearsome image of the path dividing three ways through a cornfield bothered by crows and stormy winds at the end – I walked out to sit on a bench overlooking the dreary grey Thames, and I cried for an hour. I had shared ten years’ of Vincent’s life, with its very tiny pleasures, its ineffable moments of divine awe, and, of course, its plunging periods of ever-deepening depression and despair, culminating with the suicide committed within hours of completing that last doom-laden painting. The retrospective had been an emotional roller-coaster ride through Vincent’s final ten years, and I felt I knew him better than anyone I knew. Thus, that final painting – like all great art – hit me in the heart like a bullet, and I experienced the same plummeting hopelessness as its painter must have been feeling. It took days to restore my centre of gravity; but I was only eighteen, and fully expected that a world of such powerful exhibitions lay ahead, much as I expected the next Beatles’ album would be yet another advance upon the previous one.

In the late sixties art – in every form – was exploding. In England, where we cared little for ‘New York faddism’ – Pollack, Rothko, Warhol, ‘flatness’: rubbish – but then we had the early David Hockney, Alan Davie, Francis Bacon, Henry Moore, Ben Nicolson, and so many others. With my meagre Saturday job wages, I subscribed to Studio International, so I knew – or thought I did – what was going on. I was even a member of the Tate Gallery, invited to openings etc. There was a big one too: Francis Bacon New Works, I think it was called. I’d only seen individual paintings before, besides magazine spreads, but it struck me even then that Bacon was a one-trick pony, essentially making the same painting over and over again. A few years later, when I was at Oxford, I met him on several occasions, and, besides finding him a drunken arsehole, realized his main interest was money – needed to pay off gargantuan gambling debts. It also struck me that his gallery had more of a say in what he painted than he did. Fame, 20^th century-style, appeared to have a very negative influence upon art and artists. It made me wonder how Vincent’s life and work might have changed had he become a star. Would that last painting have been postponed indefinitely? I think not.

Possibly due to reading classical literature at university, my interests in art drifted back in time. Possibly due to an interest in psychotropic drugs, I became increasingly drawn to artists attempting to portray dream-worlds, or hyper-realities, the preternatural. Oddly enough, this ended up in a fascination with ancient Egyptian art, where no individual artist is known by name, and the purpose is entirely symbolic – except during the reign of the so-called monotheistic pharaoh Akenaton. This latter work is often hard to see in the original. You have to bribe your way into the Theban tombs where some of the finest bas-reliefs exist. But bribing a warden in the Valley of the Kings is not the pecuniary apocalypse that bribing a suit on Capitol Hill might prove to be. You will, however, need to bring your own good, big flashlight. In its beam you will see the only depictions of everyday ancient Egyptian life in existence. Virtually everything I have seen of ancient Egypt has been a bullet to the heart – especially after reading Schwaller de Lubic’ monumental Temple of Man, the most indispensable book on Egypt – but the Akenaton works fire a special bullet of their own. Human love is shown with irreducible subtlety: a wife’s arm placed oh-so-delicately on her husband’s shoulders. The deep appreciation of life’s manifold pleasures is displayed in countless ways. A meal is displayed, revealing, in the graceful drooping of a dead goose’s neck, gratitude for the life that has given itself to sustain life. The joy in living, aware of its own brevity, is portrayed in a manner so moving that one is forced to paraphrase Wordsworth’s still, sad music of humanity.

The sheer potency of ancient Egyptian art and architecture enthralled, obsessed, and puzzled me, until I read Schwaller’s aforementioned book. It is much like wondering why walking down the aisle of Chartres Cathedral has such an uplifting effect on the heart or soul, and then discovering the precise Pythagorean mathematics involved in its design (the space between pillars makes them effectually a musical chord). Art and music are two things which elude scientific explanation. There is no reason why vibrations in the air reaching the tympanum, and thence ferried into the brain ought to create such vastly different effects: one, say, making you think of beer and pretzels; another creating thoughts too deep for words. Similarly, there is no explanation for why one painting or sculpture – regardless of technical skill – makes the heart glow, while others simply hang or stand there inert. Pythagoras actually has some of these answers – at least those relating to music and sculpture – but he deserves an essay to himself. However, what he knew and taught he learned in Egypt, as Schwaller – renowned mathematician and philosopher – noticed for himself during his 16-year study of one single Egyptian temple.

What, the reader rightly asks, does any of this have to do with David Altmejd? A lot, as it turns out – but patience is a virtue (not one of mine, I confess). After 50-odd years of seeing much great art, few great exhibitions, and being married to a painter so uncompromisingly attached to her vision that she’d rather sell nothing than change it, I had come to expect nothing from exhibitions by contemporary artists, less still that bullet-to-the-heart experience.

Bearing in mind that I am legally blind (about 7% vision in one eye), I do have to be dragged to most exhibitions these days, although I will happily stand before a single work for an hour, since the ‘good’ eye’s 7% seems to triple its abilities when confronted by a masterpiece. Thus it was with weary trepidation that I shuffled my way into Montreal’s Museum of Contemporary Art last week on my wife’s arm. She had already seen the David Altmejd exhibit once, insisting that I must see it myself. I usually trust her judgement, but I must admit that her description of it convinced me I would loathe it. My sole consolation was that the Museum closed in less than two hours – and time-limited torment, as Dante may have observed in Hell, is a blessing.

90 minutes later, my heart aglow, I was thinking they’d have to drag me out in chains if they expected me to leave this most exquisite of living dreams.

I have no intention of describing this exhibition, for any attempt to do so would fall miserably short by being forced to break up a whole into the parts it is greater than. No photograph can do it justice either. It is, quite simply, by far the greatest exhibition by a contemporary artist that I have ever seen in 50 years. It is overwhelming, a work of the highest genius, able to stand beside the ten supreme masterpieces of all time. I would urge anyone who cares about art, wherever you are, to drop whatever it is you’re doing and fly to Montreal before September 10^th, since it seems unlikely that the exhibition in its current magisterial form will ever be seen anywhere else again.

What I will say about some of the individual sculptures is that, whether through instinct or intent, they embody Egypto-Pythagorean dimensions, and not a few resonate with the same timeless potency of temple art. Indeed, the whole exhibit deserves a permanent temple of its own, for an aura of sanctity pervades the work, from its guarded angels to its muted rainbow threads. In a piece made entirely from thin gold chains, we even find the Pythagorean Egg. The pineal gland, identified by both ancient Egyptians and Vedic Indians as the physical seat of metaphysical enlightenment, appears in a number of isolated heads. But nothing in the initial rooms prepares you for the magnum opus which is to come. My poor eye was dazzled, and I shake even now, a week later, recalling a splendour of such beauty and complexity that the reactions of other people – not your usual art crowd of aesthetes by the sound of them – lent their own unique beauty to the awesome spectacle surrounding us. I thought of Proust, who could spend ten pages on Elstrir’s seemingly boring paintings, and wondered what he would make of this: it would either have killed him, or added another ten volumes to the memoir. I thought of Salvador Dali, who I once interviewed – childish, pompous, vain – whose reaction would have been envy expressed as scorn. I thought of Picasso, who I also met a few times, during the retrospective of his playful 3-dimensional works at the Tate Gallery: he would have loved this, and kissed Altmejd’s feet in respect. James Joyce – eyes as bad as mine —  would have loved it too: “Finnegans’ Wake in three dimensions,” one can almost hear him cry. By standing on the shoulders of giants, you see further than they can. David Altmejd has chosen his giants with care and discernment. He sees further than anyone else has yet managed to do. All one is left to wonder is who will be able to stand upon his mighty shoulders. Beyond all doubt, this is the greatest artist of the 21^st century. I wish I could pay for you all to see this indescribably moving, ineffably beautiful, supreme masterwork.