Cake Lollipops

You have to watch out for these cake lollipops! They look so delicious, but they're actually a little dangerous. The other night at the reception after the Jefferson Lecture (yes, there was a reception! We were a little worried in these hard economic times, but it was still there!) there were lovely looking cake lollipops. I took a bite of one and (I can't even remember what it tasted like, because, just as I took the bite) the other half fell off the stick and plopped into my glass of wine. This meant, of course, that a bunch of the wine ended up on my arm and, I'm sure, on the floor. But, thankfully I always know exactly how to act in awkward situations (I'm pretty sure this is what Lawrence taught me, or perhaps I just made it up): ignore the awkwardness and pretend like nothing happened. I think that's what the Queen would do, anyway. Well, or not eat the cake lollipop in the first place. Or perhaps eat them carefully and not drop them in her drink. The creme brulee was much more manageable.

The Jefferson Lecture itself was intriguing. The speaker was Drew Gilpin Faust, the president of Harvard. She was ostensibly speaking about the Civil War, but mostly spoke about war in general, which was fascinating. She started her speech with a description of attending a Civil War reenactment. She criticized it as, ironically, an attempt to forget the history and context and of the Civil War, while focusing on sewing all of the buttons on the uniform properly.

She spoke about war as both something that distinguishes us from animals and as something that is inhumane. Narrative, or the attempt to tell stories about war, is both something that war resists (and so resists what is human about us--language) and something that war compels--it is an attempt to create meaning from chaos. She maintains both that war is incommunicable and that we must attempt to communicate it--that we must keep trying to tell a true story about war.

She hinted at poetry as a particularly good medium for communicating war, although she never came out and said it--she emphasized the use of images as effective (plus, the evening started with a reading of an [overly romantic] Walt Whitman poem, which made me happy). Okay, perhaps she didn't hint at poetry as the way to articulate war, but if I had given that lecture, I would have.

She maintained that war is a paradox--that it is both terrible and we love it. She talked about romanticized views of war as grand and noble and sublime and even able to put us in touch with the transcendent. She spoke about war as a struggle to pass the boundaries of the human. Honestly, I didn't understand the part about loving war. Is that a thing? Do people really love it for its own sake? That seems to me to be a huge problem (not something we should accept about humans)--war seems to me to be at best a necessary evil. It seems to me that romantic views of war are simply that--romantic. Do any people who actually fight in a war hold those romantic views of war still? How in the world does war push us toward the boundary of being human? Is war an attempt to be like God? To tie this to contemporary events, to quote the status message of countless of my facebook friends, from the Vatican statement on the death of Osama Bin Laden: "Faced with the death of a man, a Christian never rejoices, but reflects on the serious responsibility of everyone before God and man, and hopes and pledges that every event is not an opportunity for a further growth of hatred, but of peace." I think Christians should have a similar response to war.

She also talked about the narratives that we tell about war as informed by our contemporary concerns. She maintained that the way in which we talk about race's role in the Civil War depends on our contemporary view of race. This was part of her point that a true story about war can never be told--we need new narratives for new times (interestingly, this also means that there will always be a business of writing history). On the one hand, this is compelling--I believe in narrative and the revelation of truth within a particular context. On the other hand, her emphasis on narrative struck me as slightly post-modern--that all we have is narrative and that it is inevitably influenced by our contemporary concerns.

Drew Gilpin Faust (what a fancy name!--it reminded me of a name that a Georgetown student might have) also argued that the humanities as a whole emerge from and are tied up with war. I thought that this was an overstatement of the importance of the thing that she studies. This may have to do with my current obsession with Laurie Colwin, but I think that peace (and love!) does make darn good writing. Plus, at least in the creation story, love precedes war. This is my feminist critique of the speech--it leaves out women; in reality, women have to bear enough men to start fighting and killing each other.


(picture, picture)