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RIP: Dwight Graves,
Vietnam veteran, falling with the autumn leaves[1]
“Fall: The
flavor of fall is pungent its smell is rank. The Emperor lives on the
Comprehensive Pattern side of the Hall of Light. He wears white robes and white
jade ornaments, rides a war chariot pulled by white horses with black manes,
trailing white streamers…Cool winds begin; white dew descends; young hawks are
now able to sacrifice birds.”[2]
Dwight Graves
was a burning star, an indomitable force in many domains: A Master potter,
musician and artist, long-standing member of the League of NH Craftsmen, an
active member of the Tucson Pottery Co-op, a NH Educator of the Year,
accomplished musician, Vietnam Vet ('67-'69), Harley rider, activist, world
traveler and peaceful warrior.
Dwight’s life,
particularly after Vietnam, was a living testament on how to promote peace over
war. Dwight was able to understand peace because he understood war, which most
people can’t because of impaired imagination; that’s according to James Hillman
in his groundbreaking book, A Terrible
Love of War. He says, “War demands a leap of imagination as extraordinary
and fantastic as the phenomenon itself.”[3]
Dwight personifies
such an extraordinary and fantastic leap. With an artist’s imagination, he was
able to transcend our country’s shrill and petty, polarized and self-serving,
black and white understanding of war.
I first met Dwight in the 1980s when we were
founding Merrimack Valley Chapter of Veterans for Peace (VFP). He and I and the
rest of our initial group were Vietnam vets who came together in common cause
to keep it from happening again, a new Vietnam, another illegal and immoral war,
this time in Nicaragua which, at the time, Ronnie Reagan was foaming at the mouth
to start.
Dwight was the
perfect manifestation of the peaceful warrior but not a pacifist. None of us
were. We vehemently disagreed, years later when our national organization voted
to make our motto: “Abolish War.” We knew, like it or not, war was forged into
our psyches, “an archetypal truth of the cosmos.”[4] It was
simple minded to think one could abolish war: any crusade to abolish war would
fail just as surely as the periodic crusades to ban sex before marriage.
Love and war, at
first glance, appear to be mutually exclusive but A Terrible Love of War discloses that they are in intimate
relationship: “where
else in human experience, except in the throes of ardor – that strange coupling
of love with war – do we find ourselves transported to a mythical condition and
the gods most real?”[5]
According
to Hillman, we can’t have one without the other: both are essential components
of the human psyche: Aphrodite, the goddess of love, art, beauty and poetic
discourse acts as a counter-balance to Ares, the god of war; or in Hillman’s
words, Aphrodite’s “softening, bridging pleasures” of poetry, music, and art
“weaken the will of aggressive war.”[6]
Dwight
lit up the sky because, in my opinion, he represented the best qualities of
love and war. On one hand, he personified
Aphrodite, not only through his magnificent art, music and ability to create community
but from the fact that Dwight made each day of his life an exuberant
celebration of love.
At the same
time, rather than denying Ares’ presence, Dwight appeared to embrace the
reality of war in the same forthright manner as classical Greek and Roman
civilizations. With that same ancient wisdom, I can imagine Dwight asking Ares to
grant him that unshakable courage and conviction he always possessed in order
to fight back against the mob, to restrain the emotional hysteria that causes
America to rush blindly, hell-bent into one war after another.
I imagine him appealing
for help, just as the Greek’s did in the age of Homer in this “The Hymn to
Ares:”
Hear me, helper of mankind
dispenser of youth’s sweet
courage,
beam down from up there
your gentle light
on our lives,
and your martial power,
so that I can shake off
cruel cowardice
from my head,
and diminish the deceptive rush
of my spirit, and restrain
that shrill voice in my heart
that provokes me
to enter the chilling din of
battle.
You, happy god,
Give me courage, let me linger
In the safe laws of peace[7]
Now that Dwight
has left us, I see him, in my mind’s eye, looking down on us from above, still
personifying the best of Ares and Aphrodite, carrying on just as outrageously
as before, make music, making art, making love; all the time beaming his cleansing light into our lives, dispensing
courage to us all to give us the strength to fight the good fight for social
justice and equality while restraining that shrill voice in our hearts that
provokes us into the chilling din of battle.
XXX
Click here to seea' A Terrible Love of War: Part I'
[1] A photo I took (& then
posterized in photoshop) of Dwight at a VFP party in the 1980s at Paul Nichols
home on Loudon Ridge
[5]
Ibid. p. 9
[6]
Ibid p. 176
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