On the Mound of the Dead.

I thought I was in for an easy evening. My son was away at a festival, the neighbors were on holiday, no-one else for several miles in any direction. It was dry and warm. I decided to go and tuck myself into a little copse of trees way in back of the property, light a fire, crack a cold one and enjoy the gloaming.

As the fire began to crackle and blaze a figure emerged through the billowing smoke and into the copse tumbled the laird of the land. ‘Do you know what this place is?’ he demanded, careening straight on without waiting for an answer, ‘this place is sacred, I won’t see it desecrated!’

He clearly meant it so I thought it best to sit still and encourage the telling of his story. He began, asking whether or not I had noticed the pressing banks around the copse or wondered why this place remained unused when all about lay planted farm land.

I hadn’t.

The laird himself didn’t know the real story of the copse until mid life, despite all this land being in his family since living memory. All he knew was no-one went near the place. Then, one day, he called in a native diviner to help him look for water on the property. He was an old man renowned for his second sight who lived by himself on the edges of a nearby village. The laird thought to try in the copse and asked the diviner to have a look.

The old man walked carefully over to the site and stood looking on at the copse with its gnarled beech trees and protective mossy banks. His eyes glazed over. The divining rods hung limp in his hands. Tears began to run down his face.

‘This is a place of death,’ he said softly. ”When the Black Death came,’ he added, as though witnessing it himself, ‘the village was all but wiped out. Those who would die tomorrow came and buried their loved ones who’d died today. Here,’and he indicated the gently mounded copse, ‘they dug a great pit and put them in.”

As he turned to leave the old man muttered, ‘two crusaders in chain mail guard the dead.”

The laird finished his story and disappeared into the falling night. I was left with my fire, perched upon the mound, the dead piled beneath me and the crusaders a little way off talking quietly but earnestly to one another. I was tempted to run all the way home but something kept me there, some pressing urgency to remain in this dread spot.

Eventually I went over to the knights and sat with them to hear their conversation better. They were speaking of their fallen comrades and of their family who lay here, doing their level best to remember all of the obligations with which they had been charged by the departed so their memory could be appropriately honored.

At some point they looked up and inquired about my own obligations. I wanted to protest saying this had nothing to do with me but I knew it was a lie before the words were formed and so I fell silent and then began to weep for all those I had lost myself, at first quietly and then with anguished abandon.

‘Why must there be so much grief?’ I asked once the storm had passed.

‘To keep us all human’, they replied.

This week the leader of the free world, so hardened to grief that he can boast about crowd sizes and vilify his enemies between mass shooting funerals, endorsed a tweet naming him King of the Jews and then told incredulous reporters that he is ‘The Chosen One’.

Which goes to show how the refusal to feel and the doubling down of eternal invulnerability can have consequences for both sanity and the state of your soul way beyond considerations of political impropriety.

The only other person I know to make such a claim was my mate K_____ who ended his career as Lord of the Universe in a padded cell having been discovered stark naked and knee deep in confetti by his landlord with a box of matches in one hand and a jerry can of kerosene in the other.

At the same press conference on the White House lawn, the glorious leader conflated his august person with the state on several occasions. ‘I have the best economy…’ The last known leader to create a symbolic equation between himself and the nation was Hitler who famously remarked, ‘I am Germany.’ Before that there was Louis XIV, ‘L’etat c’est moi.’ I am the state. It ended badly for both of them.. and their nations.

Denial of feeling blighted the youth of all three of these men with disastrous consequences for those within reach, particularly minorities, though their influence ultimately spread to the character of the entire nation which led to a generalized malaise of spirit, a corruption of national integrity, immuring the souls of those it did not murder.

Voltaire describes Louis’ debilitating effect on the esprit de coeur of the nation in a way that could have been lifted from last weeks Washington Post if only it hadn’t been written nearly three centuries ago…

‘Flattery pleased him to such a degree that the coarsest was well-received, the basest with most relish. It was only in this way that anyone ever reached him. It was this that gave such power to his ministers through the constant opportunities that they had to adulate him. Suppleness, baseness, an admiring, cringing, and dependent air, above all, an air of nullity except through him, were the only means of pleasing him. Year by year the poison spread…’

This poison is essentially a loss of soul which comes about as a result of having to suppress feeling and relatedness which not only separates you from others but also from yourself. The reason for this is that our values are rooted in feeling without which they simply become a negotiable commodity entitled to flip flop which ever way the wind is blowing at the time.

This places the notion that there is any such thing as a ‘negative feeling’ in a much broader context than the quasi morality of judging certain sets of feelings to be bad and wrong, feelings that you simply have to get over, or worse, let go. For every feeling denied, values are eroded, knowing how to think and act are impaired, gaps open up in the soul which have to be filled with toxic drama and adrenalin to hold oneself together. The need for enemies nags at sleep.

Another commentator on the psychology of Louis observed..

”Then came the desire for glory, hence the facility with which Louvois, the Secretary of State involved him in great wars and the ease with which the minister convinced him he was a greater captain than all his generals. He appropriated all with an admiring complacency in himself and believed he was really such as they depicted him. Hence his taste for reviews, which he pushed to such lengths that his enemies called him the “review king”; Lapham Quaterly

The man who stifles down his ‘negative feelings’ identifies himself with the state and, by way of compensation, believes he is divinely appointed. He must then go to war, not just for re-election or to keep the people in fear but to prevent his own utter collapse into psychosis. He goes mad to stay sane, which is a neat strategy, only, the nation gets dragged into the gutter in the process. Reflecting on whether Louis had made France and therefore himself great again after decades of catastrophic wars Voltaire offered this consideration,

”If greatness of soul consists in a love of pageantry, an ostentation of fastidious pomp, a prodigality of expense, an affectation of munificence, an insolence of ambition, and a haughty reserve of deportment, Louis certainly deserved the appellation of Great. Qualities which are really heroic we shall not find in the composition of his character. ‘

The notion that big boys don’t cry is not just a stupid macho trope. For the want of mourning on the mound of the dead, for want of the willingness to be at home in our own skins whatever we may be experiencing means becoming deadened ourselves. We may then never learn to walk a mile in another’s shoes without losing our own. Recourse to action is then limited to the destructive mix of equating oneself with the Gods married up with the compulsive need to lash out at the world.

Trump may fare better than Louis who died a hideous and agonizing death from diabetic gangrene. But what about the rest of us? Or does it take having nuclear codes in the hands of a man who actively needs to go to war for the sake of his rocky internal cohesion to get us in touch with our own gut feelings and the values they may then give rise to?