Seattle Press on Line - Give Them the "Bird"

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Give Them the "Bird"

By Stephen Herold

Apr 11, 2002 -- Of all the benefits of man's mastery of the physical world, good evil and unintended, the most pernicious is our momentary forgetfulness of the cruel realities of the "natural" life we led until we created "civilization." In a country where the greatest problems facing most people are how to reduce their overweight, swollen bodies to human scale and how to acquire more money so they can waste even more of the worlds precious resources, grim reality is a 30 second "bite" in an evening of senseless TV. When truth breaks in, whether from natural or human agency, we call it a "tragedy" and enlarge our blinders as we wall off the implications.

Hobbes and Locke wrestled with the logical consequences of equating human civilization with man himself and could never agree. Hobbes saw man the animal as dominant and evil; Locke our civilizing influences as a new truth leading to love and kindness. In the end it does not matter what we think since natural events will always happen when they will, and violent and heedless men have ever plunged us into the agonies of war and crime. Nowhere is this brought home more certainly than in war and all the attendant evils we tolerate in the name of victory.

Merely knowing about war and evil does nothing for us and prevents no new conflict. What are names and dates and casualty figures but a blur of scribbles on paper? What we need is to feel the terror and pain and loss of that violent cruelty. I talk to people about WW II and it is ancient, and Vietnam happened 'a long time ago' and means nothing to them. To those of us who struggled and suffered to put down such a shameful war and educate our countrymen to the evils of power this, too, is a sad consequence of lacking emotional connections. Some of us can never forget the pain of that era, when our brothers came home in plastic bags so fat politicians could move pins on a map, and confused troops could continue rape, murder and drug dealing without the censure of their officers.

Of all the books about the "feelings" of wartime none is so eloquent, brutal and true as Jerry Kosinski's The Painted Bird. Kosinski is a Polish emigrant who, most interestingly, wrote his books in English and not in Polish. Indeed, until just recently The Painted Bird was never translated into his native tongue and not permitted to be sold there -- it told truths too painful to retell.

Told through the eyes of a small boy sent away to 'safety' in the countryside as World War II broke out, it has the added piquancy of the helplessness of children to the monstrous cruelties of war. His first guardian suddenly dies and her whole property is consumed by a fierce fire accidentally set by the confused child. In terror he runs away and begins an odyssey seeking safety and his family and always finding yet more pain and rejection. This is where the title takes on meaning as, Kosinski explains, it is an old Polish custom to take a bird from the flock, paint it differently, and watch it torn to pieces as an outsider when it attempts to return to the security of its own flock. So too is the nameless boy eternally an outsider to be used, tormented and driven off. Here, at last, we are exposed to the feelings of being brutalized, and we either open our eyes and heart to compassion or learn our own hardness.

This novel, of course, although directly based on fact, is fiction with a storyline and development of plot. Here, at least, we can obtain a degree of closure and see the world move on again, but not for the tens of millions of victims of that conflict. Evil peaks in the rape and murder of an entire village by the Nazi-sympathizing Kalmucks and our little boy is driven into muteness by the shock, only to be rescued by the advancing Red Army and taken on as a unit mascot. Left in an orphanage as violent as the world it absorbed the leftovers of, he slowly returns to a feeling of being alive and ends thus:

"I opened my mouth and strained. Sounds crawled up my throat. Tense and concentrated I started to arrange them into syllables and words. I distinctly heard them jumping out of me one after the other, like peas from a split pod.'

And so we find that even the most abused and fragile of beings, if given even a little care, can find and resume their humanity. Yet, they will never be free from the scars of that life and will always be looking over their shoulders for the next blow to fall. If we could be so perceptive we would cause less evil ourselves. This book is one small voice in a journey to be aware of the humanity of others as well as their mere physical exterior.

Stephen Herold is a scholar, poet and calligrapher who spends his life creating books and running wonderful bookstores. He currently runs Books AtoZ, a digital publishing service company, and Wit's End Bookstore & Teashop in Fremont.

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