Vietnam and Other Alien Worlds (28 page)

An illustrative example that sticks with me is a superficially conventional picture of a woman walking through surf, casually naked, a neutral introspective expression on her face. It's a pretty picture. The pose and setting could have come straight out of any men's magazine pictorial, although the woman would probably have a more provocative expression.

There's something about the picture that seems odd, though; unsettling, and a moment's inspection shows that it's due to the combination of lens setting, exposure time, and emulsion choice. It goes against our expectations about glamour photography (not to say soft-core porn): a conventional shot would have been around f/2.8 with a fast shutter speed, about 1/1000, and pretty fast color film, so you would isolate the woman's image with shallow depth-of-field and add drama to the picture with the sensuous time-frozen splash of surf around her calves. Mapplethorpe shot the black and white picture on slow fine-grained film with a slow shutter speed, 1/60 or even 1/30, and the lens cranked 'way down, f/16 or f/22. (No technical data were given with the pictures, so I have to infer everything from the result.) The picture is surgically crisp, and the depth of field is so generous that the surf is in focus from the bottom edge of the picture to the top, perhaps ten yards of water. The water splashing around her calves is blurred. It's hard to use words to describe the difference that this makes, but it gives the woman and the sea equal dignity, equal reality. It's objective, but the exact opposite of pornography's “objectification” of the female body. It is a perfect moment, perfectly captured. This woman will grow old and die. Some day the sea will die. But
now
is all that matters; now is real.

Eventually you do have to deal with The Pictures, the ones Christian groups mail around to politicians; the ones that raise Jesse Helms's blood pressure (not high enough to finish him off, unfortunately). They're presented at the end of the show, as part of a group of 8x10 glossies under glass.

Five of them are outrageous. One is a picture of urinaglia, a man urinating into another man's mouth. One is a self-portrait of the artist with the handle of a whip inserted into his anus. One shows a man's genitals harnessed in a metal contraption, spattered with blood. One is a weirdly abstract photo of “fisting.” A clinical close-up of a man using a vibrator. There are other pictures of people dressed in bondage restraints that are disturbing without being pornographic.

(There are two other pictures that bother bluenoses. One is the torso of a man in a polyester three-piece suit with an elephantine penis incongruously hanging out. It's a joke, guys. A joke. Another is a little girl in a frock, rocking away from the camera, unintentionally disclosing her lack of underwear. Anyone who finds erotic content in that ought to seek counseling.)

Some apologists for Mapplethorpe claim The Pictures are not pornographic because the artist's intent was serious. I don't see where one attribute makes the other impossible, if you think of pornography not as a legal term but as an everyday description of an everyday phenomenon. There are bookstores in every town of any size full of magazines wherein none of those pictures would seem remarkable except for their quality. The artist knew they were pornographic when he took them, though he might have described them with some more flattering and intellectually acceptable euphemism. I suspect and hope not; the impression you get from the show is of a man fiercely open and honest.

The pictures belong in the show for two reasons, not even counting the very real reason that the gallery would have made about a tenth as much money without them. One is that this ultraviolet end of the sexual spectrum was an important part of the artist's life for many years, and he was not the kind of artist to hide it. The “But why make us look at it?” argument is ludicrous; I laid out a good chunk of a ten-dollar bill and most of an hour of waiting in line to see
those
pictures. Nobody held a gun to my head.

Second, those pictures are shocking, but an artist has the right and sometimes the obligation to shock his patrons. “The Anatomy Lesson” was shocking in its time; “The Disasters of War” outraged some of its audience. Rembrandt and Goya could have painted or drawn pictures like Mapplethorpe's, but they probably would have had more than their NEA funds cut off. We live in more interesting times; we're harder to shock.

More to the point is Mathew Brady. Brady could have stayed up north and continued to make a good living in studio portraiture. Instead he took his cameras and plates and chemicals down into hell, and sent back a travelogue. It would be simplistic to say that none of Mapplethorpe's photographs approaches the obscenity of those images of young bodies shattered, rotting open-mouthed in sunlit meadows; it would be invidious to compare the courage of Brady with the up-yours defiance of Mapplethorpe. In both cases, though, the artists made consciously political decisions—and I suspect that in both cases the prospect of fame, or notoriety, was at least as much of a factor as a desire to seek out truth in art.

It was an odd coincidence that PBS was showing the Brady photographs at the same time I went downtown to Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art to be challenged by Mapplethorpe. Brady probably hurts me more than he hurts most people, because I spent 1968 watching a dozen friends drop one by one in the jungle, protecting an irrelevant country from an obsolete doctrine, and when I see the Brady photographs I can smell the roadkill rot and hear the flies buzzing, and know that last night those guys were shooting craps or writing home or worrying about their nonexistent futures.

Mapplethorpe relates to that on a visceral, personal level, because like most people in the arts I have a lot of openly gay friends—and in the two decades since Vietnam I've lost half as many friends and acquaintances to AIDS as I lost to enemy fire. In my mind the guys who wasted away because of their sexual preference were as innocent as those other boys—who are dead now longer than they were alive, just because they went along with the program and let themselves be drafted.

There is no conclusion. Brady didn't stop the next generation from bounding down to Cuba to die in the sun, or the next from going to France to die in the mud, and so on
et sequentes.
Mapplethorpe's brutal images will not deter any man from seeking out another man, if that's the way he's built, and won't make him sensible about what he does there if he's not otherwise inclined to be sensible.

But there is the woman frozen forever in beauty, in harmony with the sea. There are the boys who will litter the Pennsylvania battlefield for thousands of years to come. Most pictures are not worth ten well chosen words, let alone a thousand, but there are others that speak volumes. They are worth seeking out even if they're going to hurt.

Story Poems

Saul's Death

1.

I used to be a monk, but gave it over

Before books and prayer and studies cooled my blood,

And joined with Richard as a mercenary soldier.

(No Richard that you've heard of, just

A man who'd bought a title for his name.)

And it was in his service I met Saul.

The first day of my service I liked Saul;

His easy humor quickly won me over.

He confided Saul was not his name;

He'd taken up another name for blood.

(So had I—my fighting name was just

A word we use at home for private soldier.)

I felt at home as mercenary soldier;

I liked the company of men like Saul.

(Though most of Richard's men were just

Fighting for the bounty when it's over.)

I loved the clash of weapons, splashing blood—

I lived the meager promise of my name.

Saul promised that he'd tell me his real name

When he was through with playing as a soldier.

(I said the same; we took an oath in blood.)

But I would never know him but as Saul;

He'd die before the long campaign was over,

Dying for a cause that was not just.

Only fools require a cause that's just.

Tools, and children out to make a name.

Now I've had sixty years to think it over

(Sixty years of being no one's soldier).

Sixty years since broadsword opened Saul

And splashed my body with his precious blood.

But damn! we lived for bodies and for blood.

The reek of dead men rotting, it was just

A sweet perfume for those like me and Saul.

(My peaceful language doesn't have a name

For lewd delight in going off to soldier.)

It hurts my heart sometimes to know it's over.

My heart was hard as stone when it was over;

When finally I'd had my fill of blood.

(And knew I was too old to be a soldier.)

Nothing left for me to do but just

Go back home and make myself a name

In ways of peace, forgetting war and Saul.

In ways of blood he made himself a name

(Though he was just a mercenary soldier)—

I loved Saul before it all was over.

2.

A mercenary soldier has no future;

Some say his way of life is hardly human.

And yet, we had our own small bloody world

(Part aches and sores and wrappings soaking blood,

Partly fear and glory grown familiar)

Confined within a shiny fence of swords.

But how I learned to love to fence with swords!

Another world, my homely past and future—

Once steel and eye and wrist became familiar

With each other, then that steel was almost human

(With an altogether human taste for blood).

I felt that sword and I could take the world.

I felt that Saul and I could take the world:

Take the whole world hostage with our swords.

The bond we felt was stronger than mere blood

(Though I can see with hindsight in the future

The bond we felt was something only human:

A need for love when death becomes familiar).

We were wizards, and death was our familiar;

Our swords held all the magic in the world.

(Richard thought it almost wasn't human,

The speed with which we parried others' swords,

Forever end another's petty future.)

Never scratched, though always steeped in blood.

Ambushed in a tavern, splashing ankle-deep in blood;

Fighting back-to-back in ways familiar.

Saul slipped: lost his footing and our future.

Broad blade hammered down and sent him from this world.

In angry grief I killed that one, then all the other swords;

Then locked the doors and murdered every human.

No choice, but to murder every human.

No one in that tavern was a stranger to blood.

(To those who live with pikes and slashing swords,

The inner parts of men become familiar.)

Saul's vitals looked like nothing in this world:

I had to kill them all to save my future.

Saul's vitals were not human, but familiar:

He never told me he was from another world:

I never told him I was from his future.

Homecoming

His hometown was space, and he never left:

The boy who watched the Russian beeper drift

through the twilight is the old man who camped

outside the Cape to watch huge dumbos lift

their loads of metal, oxygen, water…

Living in the back of an ancient Ford,

showing children, at night, the starry sky

through a telescope his young hands had built,

seventy years before.

He died the week before

they came back from Mars. But every story

ends the same way. Some extra irony

for the Space Junky. His life had twists, turns,

wives, deaths, jail, a rock. One story that he loved:

The time he gave the army back exactly

what the army gave to him. “Bend over,

Westmoreland,” he'd shout in his cracky voice,

and only other oldsters would get it.

In college in Florida, just because

he could watch the rockets; the Geminis

the Apollos—roaring, flaring, straining

around the Moon…

but then he was drafted.

Sent to 'Nam months after Tet. Bad timing

more ways than one. The fighting was awful,

the worst yet—but worse than that, the timing!

The year! When men first stepped down on the Moon

he was not going to be on his belly

in the jungle. He was going to be
there.

The Space Junky was a poker player

without peer. Saved his somewhat porky ass,

this skill, just knowing when to push your cards,

and when to pass—the others always stayed

in every hand; it was like harvesting

dandelions. Almost embarrassing,

the way the money piled up—play money,

“Military Payment Certificates,”

but a shylock in Saigon would give you

five for six, in crisp hundred-dollar bills.

Kept them in a Baggie in his flak vest,

those C-notes, until he came up for “Rest

and Recreation,” a euphemism,

trading the jungle for a whore's soft bed

for a week. He went to Bangkok, where girls

were lined up on the tarmac as you left

the plane. He chose a fat and kindly one,

and explained what it was he had in mind.

She took him home for two bills, made some calls.

Gave him a rapid bit of sixty-nine

(not in the deal), and put him in a cab.

A man with a printing press signed him up

in the Canadian Merchant Marine.

Seven seasick weeks later he jumped ship

in San Francisco, and made his way down

to Florida, in July of sixty-nine,

to stand with a million others and cheer

the flame and roar, the boom that finally broke