Weapons of war can become pieces of art.
by Peter MeinkeGods cluster like orgiastic barnacles
along the barrel of this exquisite machine
heating up as shots explode toward flesh
or fortress death aesthetically pleasing
ah, the elegant weapons! …
In the fall semester of 1992, Jeanne and I were living in the basement of the Eckerd College Student Center — a five-story Georgian rowhouse on Gower Street in London. The water pipes from upstairs ran behind the headboard of our bed, and we’d wake with dreams of being water-boarded, until we forbade showers after 10 p.m.
When we came up from the basement for air, we’d take our students to visit various museums, and one of our favorites was the Wallace Collection, in an historic mansion on Manchester Square. We’re particularly fond of small museums that leave us excited instead of exhausted; and the Wallace is one of the best (admission free, open seven days a week — come on, America!).
The collection specializes in 17th and 18th-century paintings — e.g., Nicholas Poussin’s “A Dance to the Music of Time” (1634) and Franz Hals’“The Laughing Cavalier” (1624) — but to my mind (childlike, corrupt and male), its real attraction is its Arms and Armour collection. In stately rooms, thousands of weapons are displayed for their beauty and elegance: cannons, rifles, pistols, shields, helmets, daggers, swords, scimitars, sabers, axes, pikes, lances, arrows, bayonets — there are more English names for pointy things that kill you than Eskimo words for snowflakes.
I admit to conflicting emotions as I look at these gorgeous objects. Although I served in the Army as a post-Korea draftee, I have at least semi-pacifist leanings. I feel in general that — even leaving out the “innocent” victims — soldiers are sent to kill exactly those kind of men they would really like in peacetime, ordered to do so by exactly the kind of men they don’t like.
Our son Pete once told a pacifist friend of ours, as Pete was considering letting his name be pulled out of a hat for Vietnam, “I don’t think I can call myself a pacifist when I feel like shooting the bastard who wants to draft me.”
I wonder how Wayne LaPierre, the NRA marksman, I mean spokesman, would feel about the Wallace collection. I don’t think he’d enjoy it: his view of weapons is universally utilitarian, having said, “The only way to stop a bad man with a gun is with a good man, woman or child with a gun.” Or something like that.
It’s unlikely that the Wallace arsenal ever stopped anybody, except visitors who walk by the glassed-in exhibits. The weapons, like Mazzaroli’s cannon, could probably have been used, but the head curator, Jeremy Warren, assured me that these were primarily “parade weapons,” made for show. Rulers and other rich men would roll them out, or wear them, for parades and formal ceremonies; or to be formally painted grasping them with phallic complacency.
In her drawing for this column, Jeanne has stripped the cannon back to its original and functional shape, which Mazzaroli’s intricate decorations tend to hide, or at least distract the viewer from seeing that this is a weapon. Though it makes my head spin to think about, I believe that this art — like almost all art — is amoral, but not immoral. (To me, the NRA’s support of AK-47’s, etc., for civilian use is immoral.)
Jeanne isn’t alone in not liking the violence of football, but maybe decorative weapons are to war what football is to violence: a way of moving it off the streets over to the aesthetic sphere, trying to frame and contain our natural destructive tendencies.
But even as I think this, in the week of Armistice Day, somewhere in the back of my head I can hear old Tom Lehrer (born 1928, and still around) laughing at us, while he sings again the scientist’s apologia: “Vunce the rockets are up who cares vere they come down? / Dot’s not my department!’ says Werner von Braun.”
… so when
the inevitable bad ending ends he
and all artists shall be ready
with their stunning ivory-crusted
gold-leaf and silvered caskets
—Both quotes from “Mazzaroli’s Cannon” by Peter Meinke, in Scars (1996), U. of Pittsburgh Press.