Santosh Bakaya
These days, I don’t know why an intellectual’s frothing-at-the-mouth rejoinder to my take on the Importance of Peace in contemporary times, and his shaking finger pointing at me in stammering incoherence, during an international seminar on Peace and Conflict Studies, keeps appearing on my mental screen.
His words were lost in a fog of intense and quivering indignation. There was utter scorn in his words: “You peaceniks are …”
I was flummoxed, having no idea what was to follow…
Destroying the world.\ annihilating the world. Or…
Were the peace lovers bent on destroying the world? Can peace destroy the world?
I am suddenly yanked up from sleep by the discordant beat of war drums.
How is a war going to help anyone? In the long run, it is humanity that suffers- the kids, men, women, Soldiers, their families, civilians…
Allow me to share part of Author’s Note from my Book,
[Where Are the Lilacs? 2016, AuthorsPress], which is as relevant today as it was nine years ago.
“Poets in all ages have dipped their quills in soothing inks, beseeching everyone to court peace and shun violence as the ‘quaint and curious’ war brings nothing in its wake but a “catalogue of woes”. Hardy talks of the futility of war so poignantly in The Man He Killed:
‘Yes, quaint and curious war is!
You shoot a fellow down
You’d treat, if met, where any bar is,
Or help to half a crown.’
Ivor Gurney expresses much the same anguish in The Target, concluding his poem by a heart-wrenching cry, ‘This is a bloody mess indeed’
We can almost hear the cry of despair coming from deep inside John Scott’s [1731-1738] heart, in “The Drum”.
‘I hate that drum’s discordant sound,
Parading round, and round, and round:
To me, it talks of ravaged plains,
And burning towns and ruin’d swains,
And mangled limbs, and dying groans,
And widow’s tears, and orphans’ moans,
And all that Misery’s hand bestows,
To fill a catalogue of woes.’
In this present dystopian world, it is normal to bludgeon a person who does not toe our line, it is normal to clobber dissent into silence, and it is also painfully normal to shrug off the killing of kids as a corollary damage of war.
In The Challenge of Thor, H.W. Longfellow wrote a long time back,
‘Over the whole earth
Still is it Thor’s Day!’
Pablo Neruda’s words continue to resonate with a spine-chilling intensity, ‘come and see the blood in the streets’, when we see the world morphing into a war zone, lives ripped by terror, and limbs blown off.
Let us not hear the discordant sound of war drums or a litany of woes, but listen to the angel of peace swinging from boughs, chirping from trees, and humming the melody of love.
Why not listen to the petite flautist who sings songs of peace in dark alleys, or the white cheeked-bulbul who belts out song after song, strewn with notes of peace?
In The Peace of Wild Things, Wendell Berry wrote that when he is worried about what the world has in store for his children, he takes pleasure in the antics of the wood drake and the great heron, and comes ‘into the peace of wild things.’
Yes, indeed, there are peace notes scattered all around us- in the sloughing of the trees, the rustling of the leaves, the chirping of the birds, in the squirrels’ heartbeats, and the chortles of toddlers. Come, let us prick our ears to the sparrow’s peace song, to the child’s guileless chortle. Come, let string those peace notes into a love song, drowning all strident notes of ear-callousing cacophony.
“An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth will make the whole world blind,” maintained the greatest peace warrior of our times. In his Beyond Vietnam speech, also known as Riverdale Speech, Martin Luther King Jr’s baritone proclaimed, “Over the bleached bones and jumbled remains of civilizations are written the pathetic words too late.”
On my morning walks, I have often seen a white dove among a horde of grey doves, standing out, so serene. Every morning, I am in the throes of apprehension,
will it come today? But it has been coming every day, unfailingly.
At times, I feel as if I am living the character of Joanna, Joansy in O’ Henry’s classic story, The Last Leaf, as if my very existence depends on the appearance of the white dove.
I almost catch myself hoping that some Good Samaritan, like the artist Braham, permanently paints a white dove on the world canvas, and it keeps spreading the message of peace.
To deal with this world gone all topsy-turvy, we have an array of options.
Like Walt Whitman’s Wound-Dresser, we can sit by the wounded and soothe them, or silently watch the dead, or, sponge away the blood from ‘the stump of the arm’, ‘amputated hand’…
.
One can indeed find peace like Wendell Berry in the sight of the wood drake resting and the heron feeding in the water, listening to the ‘squirrel’s heartbeats’ and ‘hearing the grass grow’, and with Sylvia Plath, allow our lungs to ‘inflate with the onrush of scenery-air, mountains, trees, people’.
But, the best option, and not too difficult, I think, would be to try giving peace a chance. So, come, let us give peace a chance.
Let me end with these lines of Seamus Heaney, one of my favorite poets, whose birthday fell on 13th April.
‘History says, don’t hope
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.’
Let us hope that the ‘longed—for tidal wave of justice’ comes before parched lips are forced into uttering the pathetic words, “too late!”
Let us script a saga of love.
A saga of peace.
Santosh Bakaya
Internationally acclaimed for Ballad of Bapu, [poetic biography of Gandhi],abiography of Martin Luther King Jr. [Vitasta] and thirty well- received books across different genres, Santosh Bakaya, PhD, poet, essayist, novelist, biographer, is also a Tedx speaker, whose talk on Myth of Writer’s Block is popular in creative writing circles
