How I Watched the Iraqi War on TV (continued)

But what about the rest of us? What about those of us who have neither the time nor the inclination to sift through the documents, listen to the reports, weigh the evidence, form an opinion? It wouldn't seem so pressing if I hadn't just seen a little Iraqi girl sitting on the curb crying. A little Iraqi girl crying in front of a bombed out building. Faced with that image, I've got several choices. I can pick up stakes, and start doing humanitarian work of some sort. Purge the guilt of inaction through action. Or I can develop a kind of moral callous. I can tell myself that there's nothing I can feasibly do about the little Iraqi girl; that evil exists; that people suffer and die all over the world, all the time. Always have, always will. I can tell myself these things, and I often do. But I'm not entirely happy with my response. There's still another possibility. I can begin to think of my job-teaching-as a legitimate response to the atrocities that flash across the screen. At least in my classroom, the reasoning goes, I will provide my students with the kind of education that encourages them to think skeptically and act independently. And most importantly, to base their actions on their well considered thoughts and deliberations.

But that doesn't work because strategies of that sort only address the general knowledge that there is evil in the world, and that death and dying are part of the human condition. Deal with it, think clearly, do your job, and pray for aces. Don't be a bleeding heart. And don't worry. Your time is coming. You will die too; perhaps not as violently as those who've been targeted by one of our warships, but death still sits there, waiting. We're good with generalities; we love them, need them and use them, because they keep the individual nature of human suffering at arm's length. But when I look into the eyes-brown, wet, frozen in fear-of the little Iraqi girl with the green scarf around her neck, I see suddenly that suffering is not a general condition. I see that suffering visits each of us individually, and isolates us. And this kind of suffering, when viewed on television, renders us helpless and ineffective. The point is that if the girl showed up in our front yard, we'd do something for her. In fact, walking into my classroom and talking about Simone Weil or Martin Luther King will do nothing to alleviate the suffering of the girl that I see on TV. And yet all of us are left wanting to help in some way; it's instinctive, and to be unable to help is to frustrate, even to deny, this life-preserving instinct.

Here is what I mean: I confront an image of unmitigated horror, unbuffered by the passage of time, unexplained by the chatter of a journalist's report, and I can think of only one thing to say from the comfort of my living room, one thing of equal magnitude, one thing that responds with equal measures of horror and integrity. So I say it: We don't know what happens to us when we die. We don't know that the overwhelming suffering embodied by the girl on the curb will ever find its proper redemption. Who doesn't feel this? When I study that image of that little girl presented in precisely that way, no other statement matters to me.

It matters because those of us who are not on the front lines of the war, of the relief agencies, of the news coverage, need a way to integrate into our lives the images we receive from those who are there in harm's way, providing aid, reporting. Pay these arresting pictures no mind, and I believe at some level they maim us. They demand a response, and yet most of us are unable to respond in the obvious ways that lead to Purple Hearts, sainthoods, and Pulitzers. When confronted with the little girl, we confront as well our inability to help her, to draw on the comforts of action. James Agee, decades ago in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men , asked his readers, who were seeing for the first time Walker Evans's photographs of the Alabama sharecroppers, the question that haunts all of us who grapple with the moral dilemma often posed by photographs of atrocities: " . . . what will you do about it?" We hunker down in our homes, our safe homes, feeling slightly guilty, and at times haunted by the girl's image. And so it is that I'm left alone with my inscrutable mortality, and more importantly, with the various questions its looming presence sets in motion.

I haven't listened to Tallis since Baghdad fell. Maybe I'll bring him out for our next war. Tallis, my wartime composer, a label he'd surely disdain. He died in Greenwich in 1585 and was buried at St. Alphege, the parish church. The deep history here is revealing: the church where Tallis was laid to rest was named after the eleventh-century archbishop of Canterbury, Alphege, who was murdered by marauding Danes, as they besieged Canterbury in 1012. Not long after Tallis was buried, St. Alphege was torn down, and Tallis's grave was lost. Music and martyrdom, for these two at least, were the appropriate response to the highest pitch of human suffering-I mean persecution and war, and so it's fitting that their memories consecrate the same plot of ground. All that's left of Tallis now, besides his music, is his epitaph, which somebody saved, and it praises how quietly he lived and how quietly he died. I'd go one step further. I'd say that death's sidekick is plain, old anonymity; I'd say that regardless of how much noise we make in our living, our dying is a quiet and, for most of us, unnoticed affair when compared to sieges and wars and falling cities. Tallis's music doesn't tell us a thing about whom he loved, whom he hated, what foods he had to avoid, the kinds of weather he favored. Death has no use for the personal, and neither, apparently, did 16 th-century church music. Both, it turns out, are deep in anonymity's pockets.

But Tallis must've known several of those who were martyred by the Christian reforms of his century, and known them well. Maybe he knew a few of their children too. He must've looked into their eyes, and felt that sinking in the gut that comes when you see tragedy face to face. "The wicked man," Tallis's liturgy goes, "forsakes his thoughts." We don't know Tallis's thoughts on the wickedness of his own time, but we might assume he took the liturgical advice. After all, he worked his entire life within a tradition obsessed with the fine points of death and resurrection and persecution, and he didn't let regime change stand in his way, or slow his production. He continually scrutinized the inscrutable. When I looked at the Iraqi girl, I felt at times as though I'd done the same thing. Her agony is finally inscrutable to me in the same way that my own mortality eludes my understanding, yet continually demands my attention. That's an honest beginning because those, at least, are my thoughts right now, and I shouldn't forsake them. And I shouldn't forsake them, it occurs to me, because that would be to forsake the little girl, or a way of thinking about her that does justice to her plight, and to ours as well.