The God called Poetry

"For me, the naked and the nude
(By lexicographers construed
As synonyms that should express
The same deficiency of dress
Or shelter) stand as wide apart
As love from lies, or truth from art."

-The Naked and the Nude, Robert Graves

     I fell in love with Robert Graves while reading his autobiography, Good-Bye to All That, as research for some study in World War I literature.  Graves (24 July 1895 – 7 December 1985) has set the level for good literature.  He respects history with enough awareness to disregard it at the right moments so that his account of the story, and the feelings he wishes to arouse in people, can bleed through the facts.  When he write about love, I fall in love as well.  When he writes about his experience in war, I am in the trenches with him glancing over the parapet to look the enemy in the eye.  I cannot say anything about the war or love that has not already been said, but I can say a few things about this wonderful writer who many have never had the joy of reading.

     Did I say reading?  I should have used the word experienced, for when you read Graves you feel the emotion in his words and the emotions become mutual.  It is unlike anything else I have felt when I read, which I do copiously.  It is like I become this man, this wonderful man, and the years between us melt down in to an ivory liquid of experience, which I cannot help but ingest.  I can feel pangs in my chest when shells burst overhead and the shrill waves of an English whistle crack through my skull, as if my heart wants to run.  But I fight.  I fight as I jump over the parapet ladder; as a bullet grazes my mask canister.  My converse sneakers transform into ill-fitting English leather that carries me over French soil to plunge a bayonet into the heart of a filthy, wretched German.  The German is not my enemy, and I cannot hate him.  On the contrary, I respect him and love him.  That is why I penetrate him.  His existence stands in juxtaposition to my own and we cannot occupy the same space.  As the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre said, objects should not touch.  And we, we are merely objects with lost souls in this elaborate version of a twisted game.  Life is good and warm as it leaves the German heart and spills on my hands, and it is more real to me than the cold repetition of my own existence.  I am not a hero, as heroes save lives.  I am not a murderer, for murderers take lives.  I am loved, for the German gives his life to me just as I may give my life to another German.