I see the impact of stunned shock over the shootings in Arizona this weekend. Our esteemed bugle in the UK, the Daily Mirror, reports these events as happening in "Tuscon"(sic), which somehow to my mind gives a patina of pathetic poignancy to this terrible happening. It also flashes a bizarre image across my imagination as I respond to this.... that of a plane coming in on a dark future wind and crashing into the towers of San Gimignano or Pisa, as I imagine a Tuscan disaster.
Some news outlets have reported the length of silence in memoriam as "a moment"; some British media report it as a minute. Held at that time-honoured and now seemingly prophetic hour of 11 a.m.
A silence of one minute would be exactly half the time that is set aside every November on Armistice day to hold silence for the fallen...initially those from the First World War, the Great War wherein the lights went out all over Europe, yet extended through the Second War and other conflicts since.
I do not even know the "raw" figures, let alone the cleaned and cooked figures for the named and unnamed dead of the first or other wars. Was it 11 million Russians in the second? How many eastern europeans and German civilians in the final throes of 1945? Was it 20 thousand dead or dead/wounded before lunchtime on Day One of the Somme? Indeed, like Eliot's humankind, I cannot bear much reality when figures are in millions, with all the zeros laid out in identical and silent shouts across the page. I am too weak and selfish often to imagine the pain of one other as greater than my own transient fears, rages and losses.
Hundreds of thousands then? Tens of thousands? Saul has slain his thousands; David his tens of thousands...
I think of the one person who is dearest to me above all others, knowing full well that this may not be reciprocated, yet imagining the disassociation and grief I would feel if this one person were no longer in the world...and try as I might, I cannot even multiply it by two, as my heart does not have the space. Multiplying it by 5, or 10...a thousand...a million, 6 million, 12 million....and the more dead and fallen I consider, the more unknown this "it" becomes.
And thus I must use logic here: if the Arizona shootings have been publically remembered by one minute yesterday, and all the fallen of all the real and grown-up and evolved wars by 2 minutes in November, then am I to believe that the dark and terrible space left by the loved and grieved ones who lie in Arizona, is of the same dimensions and volume as that of 50% of those fallen in purposeful conflict since 1914?
We remember them this much; we are diminished in bodyship yet augmented in loss and disbelief, in so vast and painful a way, we consider it as personally and nationally terrible as if we were suffering the falling of half of those who fought the wars of the 20th and 21st centuries....
Yet this was not an attack on and a willful killing of fighting men who had chosen to place themselves in an arena of war. A congresswoman, a judge, 4 bystanders who included a lady of 79 years and a girl of 9. Need we demean them by appending them thus: an "old" lady of 79 and a "little" girl of 9? Are we that desensitised that we truly need an adjectival crowbar to prise our hearts open?
The attacker was that increasingly-seen manifestation of terror and mindlessness: the mentally ill person with a firearm, the trigger of which is wired directly to the snaking looms of chaos that have held this person like a tape-wrapped, shrink-wrapped...and shrink-rapt...hidden explosive device. He is dysfunction, the perpetually-imbalanced equation in a fallen wolrd; he is the Helmand boobytrap, the grey-smoke mastermind plotting from caves of hate in the desert; he is the whisper in the ear of the fanatic; he is the rogue cell of cancer; Abaddon, the Destroyer.
And suddenly, then, if one were to ask to quantify the unconscionable, to express in some way a response to a terror that is too large for words and for the mind, one must wrestle with metaphor and image, saying:
"it is too terrible for me to comprehend; thus the only way we both could be able to be united in bodyship, the only way I can see us able to give and receive a shared comfort before the healing, is by the sharing of the images deep within us that are our language when words are impossible. And thus I say to you, my pain, our pain, surely immeasurable, may be equated this moment to this: Imagine, my friend, half the whole world's fallen of over a century, and what I would consider if remembering them....and it is something like that...."
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