You are currently browsing the tag archive for the ‘destruction’ tag.
Wrapping story around horrific events disseminates their skeletal outlines into bite-sized pieces for readers’ assimilation and learning.
Such an event occurred the night of January 30, 1945, during a freezing snowstorm upon the Baltic Sea. The Soviet submarine S-13 torpedoed the German transport ship, the MV Wilhelm Gustloff, nine hours into its passage. On board were 10,000 refugees fleeing from the Russian and Allied offensive. Only one thousand survived.
For three years the author Ruta Sepetys, the daughter of a Lithuanian refugee from World War II, researched this disaster until, in her imagination, Salt to the Sea (2016) was conceived. The story unfolds, piecemeal, through four characters: Joanna, a twenty-one-year old Lithuanian nurse; Florian, a seventeen-year old East Prussian preservationist and restorer of works of art; Emilia fifteen-years old, Polish and eight months pregnant; and Alfred, a seventeen-year old delusional German seaman assigned to the Wilhelm Gustloff.
Like a skilled minimalist painter, Sepetys reveals more by what she leaves out. Her precise words have dropped depth charges upon this reader’s psyche, its rumble evoking a slow burn and profound feelings for the characters.
Salt to the Sea, an historical novel, also leaves me with questions. In seventy-five years, will anyone be writing of today’s refugees caught within the cross-hairs of global politics? Since when has it been all right to minimize the losses of the poor, even their lives?
All of this cries out to God—And it does.
At 11 P.M., I awoke with this shocking dream:
It is night. A wealthy, mean-spirited old man lives alone in his country estate. A solitary lamp illumines the great room in which he lounges upon an oversized wingback chair, his crop of white hair tangled about his large ears. His thick lips suck a cigar, its juice darkening the creases around his mouth. Because his health is failing, he needs help with personal care. Within the shadows, numerous young women, clad only in bikinis, await their turn to be interviewed. Each must kneel before him and allow him to fondle their breasts and other body parts. I’ve no recall of having been touched, but I was hired.
Disgust forced me to end the dream by returning to consciousness. I could not bear to see myself in service to Evil, the wealthy, mean-spirited old man hiding out in my psyche. Such corresponds to the archetype of the Negative Animus as discovered by Dr. C. J. Jung in his analytical psychology in the early 1900s. I still shudder with the implications of this dream, especially having lived within its thrall for much of my life.
That the Beast is still around unnerves me.
After I reflected upon my entrapment in the dream and short-circuiting its momentum, I resorted to composing a different ending. I returned to that great room, shielded my eyes from the wealthy, mean-spirited old man, grabbed my purse, ran out the front door of the country estate, found my car under the waning moon, and raced home, still panting. Only deeper consciousness in the present will prevent further entrapments. For that I rely totally upon Precious God.
Who does not get chills within the bowels of malice in stories of shape-shifting?
One of these is The Soldier’s Tale (1919), the collaborative effort of the Russian composer Igor Stravinsky and the Swiss librettist C. F. Ramuz. Because funds were scarce in the aftermath of the First World War for the composition of large works, Stravinsky scored this old Russian folk tale with seven musicians and four actors/dancers, all sharing the same bare stage. (Check out YouTube.)
We grow to love this war-weary soldier, his knapsack on his back as he cavorts toward his village, all the while anticipating his ten-day leave with his mother and girlfriend. Suddenly, into his path steps the devil, disguised as a maiden who persuades him to exchange the old fiddle (his soul) in his knapsack for a red book filled with secrets for obtaining immense wealth. After three days of luxurious initiation by the devil, the soldier is hooked.
Years of prosperous but increasingly empty living begin to glut the soldier’s passion for fame, and he longs for his old life.
This story line is painfully familiar throughout oral and literary traditions all over the world: All is ours if we but surrender our souls to the devil. A period of unprecedented prosperity ensues until eviscerated by the maggots of worldly success. A longing for the way things used to be glimmers; within its light, some move toward conversion and return to ordinary life.
Others do not, including our soldier of this Russian tale.
Heart Whisperings 