Can violence ever be beautiful?
For me, the short answer is yes. I say this in spite of the fact that I am usually an ardent protester against any sort of violence – political or personal. This has to do with the fact that I also know what it’s like to be small and helpless. I know what it’s like – strangely enough for someone who has gone so soft in her later years (shouldn’t it be the other way around?) – to look down at a gun in her hand and think, “oh dear, sweet, merciful God – does the steel ever feel good.”
People tell me that I have “internalized the oppressor.” It sounds too good – “internalizing” the man who creeps around from behind after dark. That’s how my memories of violence are – they are shaped like men, they smell like men.
They are part of me, and I couldn’t cut them out of myself even if I tried.
Like many people, I watch the proverbial Dance of Death and find myself mesmerized. There are no easy explanations – and no comfort to be had in this realization. It’s just something that I live with – violence is both terrible and beautiful – and beauty and terror are close cousins.
After the Twin Towers fell – some Westerners were quoted as saying that the sight was horrifyingly appealing. In most cases, they were shouted down. But maybe we should have listened closely; after all, the attraction of destruction is something that we need to understand if we try, in some small way, to prevent future 9/11’s (although who am I fookin’ kidding, right?).
I like to think that there was a time when I was essentially peaceful and innocent – set loose in a green field somewhere as a child – but the more I look at the world, the less faith I have in my own lost innocence. The way a gun feels in your palm – as if it was always meant to be there – proves otherwise.
I remember shooting tomatoes – pop – red, thick sap like fireworks in the air – pop – and the satisfaction of it – more satisfactory, even, than playing Snood. I must have been seven or eight at the time. This is some seriously crazy shit – but it’s my life. And, in the words of Humbert Humbert: it’s “beautiful, beautiful, beautiful.”
Natalia A. 
Violence is beautiful precisely when it is liberating, on a personal or a political level.
However, beauty is all too often in the eye of the beholder. If the tomato happens to be that beholder, the violence you refer to certainly isn’t beautiful.
Example: some dude who’s lived in some neglected ghetto his/her entire life, seeing his/her family and friends constantly arrested and harassed by police, often for no discernible reason, decides to go shoot a cop. From his/her point of view this act is liberating, not only for him/herself but for his/her community. Hence shooting the cop is a beautiful act from his/her point of view.
But since beauty is not an objective quality, no act can be objectively beautiful. Hence one can only judge the morality of violence in hindsight.
This leaves us with the perennial question of whether violence is ever justified. The above analysis reduces that to the question ‘in hindsight, was the violence objectively beautiful?’.
Rann 7:64: “Blow some shit up, yo!”
I take a lot of photographs, and although I will never ever claim to be any good, or knowledgeable about it… I do recognize what makes a good photograph. My point being, that sometimes in capturing violence on film, in print, in words, or however memory interprets moments of violence, its emphatic drama is the very thing that turns it into something of import, and consequently, something that can be beautiful, with grace, symmetry, and mortality, for company.
When I read the post, I thought of that picture Eddie Adams took of a general executing a Viet Cong prisoner in Saigon during the Vietnam War. See link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Nguyen.jpg
Somethings, sometimes, say more than they mean to…
In retrospect, that picture cannot be beautiful, since it was violence exerted by an imperial power on an indigenous movement.
It is nonetheless an incredible picture.
***its emphatic drama is the very thing that turns it into something of import, and consequently, something that can be beautiful, with grace, symmetry, and mortality, for company.***
Indeed.
It also reminds of the violent paintings that, in particular, attempted to represent antiquity… Just the way that they captured movement. There’s something disturbingly gorgeous about it.
I think we all secretly want to know how it would feel like to destroy ourselves and everything we know. What would it feel like to be obliterated into a myriad million pieces? Every single part of us exploding in a shower of light, or something like that. Floating among the stars. No memories, no attachments. Only feeling. The culmination of a moment where we are outpouring ourselves into action. Like orgasm, perhaps?
So if we like the feeling of executing violence on some object are we in fact wondering how it would feel to be on the other end – pushed beyond barriers of rational thinking, or only craving the rush of chemicals to our brain telling us to “Get him good!”?
Ack. This abstraction is kind of driving me nuts. Having actually been in situations when I was perfectly capable of inflicting violence on repressive elements (mostly Israeli police and army), I repeatedly chose not to.
This wasn’t because I didn’t want to. These assholes were shooting at children. However, I decided not to because it would not be strategic and because the consequences would be inflicted on those I was attempting to stand in solidarity with. In those cases, non-violence (eg putting myself in between the two) was far more effective.
Would there have been an element of beauty in grabbing some 18 year old soldier’s gun and aiming it at his head? Sure. But that beauty would have been momentary and the consequences pretty awful – not for me (I would have possibly gone to jail for a couple of months, no big deal), but for the people I was standing with. More than likely, there would follow a massive assault on their homes, mass arrests and home demolitions.
My point is that beauty is tied in with morality, with the future, not just the present. The picture of the execution posted by Milo was not beautiful. It was striking and it was revolting and it was terrifying. A picture of US soldiers shooting their own commanders to get the hell out of Vietnam, ending that pointless and murderous war, now that would have had lasting beauty. A similar picture from Iraq would have immense impact and immense beauty.
That actually happened in Vietnam, by the way. The GI revolt, caused by the atrocities they were being ordered to commit in attempts to turn the Vietnamese against the VC caused a huge drop in morale, leading to the occasional outright mutiny. Those are moments of beautiful violence, because they come from a realization that the violence you are being commanded to inflict on others is in fact destroying yourself and that only a short but violent act can liberate yourself, your comrades and those people you are fighting against for a cause that isn’t your own.
I’m hard pressed to find any beauty in violence too.. In fact, even in retribution, violence hardly ever has any appeal…(maybe momentary, but the long term effects are never any good)…My point, I guess, was that if there is any beauty to be found, it is quite possibly only found in retrospect… and especially, when captured for posterity. How you interpret that picture, is really upto you… as they say ‘beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder’. To me, it’s stark drama, and my equally strong reaction to it, makes it beautiful to me. Because even if it is a picture that represents repression, violence, and immorality… and certainly spelt death for the person on the barrel end of that gun, …that gun killed the Viet Cong prisoner, but that camera ‘killed the general’. (these are the words of Eddie Adams). That may be a justification on his part for sitting back and taking a picture while someone got shot, but it is true.
At the end of the day tough.. it is really all in how you intepret it… I think you are competely justified in thinking the picture is revolting. Just as I will never ever find anything appealing or beautiful in those pictures of the Rwandan genocide. Because the experiences that we come attached with, will always colour our views on what is beautiful and what is not.
I agree; most violence is not beautiful – when we see it up close. From afar we tend to glorify it. It’s sickening when we actually experience it.
But I still think there is a subconsious fascination with death and destruction – it’s a natural thing to be so. That’s why when the Twin Towers fell it was gut-wrenching yet compelling for those not actually experiencing it to watch. Something so mighty, real and indestructible was falling to absolute ruin. And we want to apply that to ourselves.
“Those are moments of beautiful violence, because they come from a realization that the violence you are being commanded to inflict on others is in fact destroying yourself and that only a short but violent act can liberate yourself, your comrades and those people you are fighting against for a cause that isn’t your own.”
Well said.
Thank you 🙂
Personally, I can’t remove the depiction of an event from the event itself for long. When those first bombs exploded over Baghdad in 2003, I was glued to the screen, fascinated by these rather beautiful sprouts of light blooming from the ground. A couple of minutes later, I remember shaking my head and coming to grips with the horror of what was happening. Beauty is not just in the depiction or the pictorial capture of an event, it is in the consequences of that event. Bombing Baghdad was not a beautiful thing, so its depiction cannot have lasting beauty.
Check these out:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_pictures/6166998.stm
Those are beautiful, because they prevent violence. Even if you argue that it is violent to encourage people to come to a house which you know may be bombed, the chance of preventing the destruction of life, livelihood and community balances it all out and makes it an act of beauty.
While we’re at it: http://www.awalls.org/
Interestingly enough, I was in Kuwait when Operation ‘Shock and Awe’ hit Baghdad. (Seriously, though.. when will they start naming their little projects something we can say without snorting laughter after..??) It wasn’t pretty… in fact it was horrific, because the media portrayed the whole thing like it was a huge military exercise, like one of those parades China and India (and many other countries) have once a year to show their military might. With all the firework-like and ’embedded reporter’ (o they so loved that term) coverage CNN and BBC gave it, you would have thought it was a three-ring circus.
No, there is no beauty in that. Life, rarely is, if taken straight up and down the hatch. That’s why we have art. The role of art, I think is not just to record, but to interpret and move. And when something moves you, does that make it something beautiful? I think it does.
P.S. “Check these out:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_pictures/6166998.stm” -Yes, they are beautiful.
“That’s how my memories of violence are – they are shaped like men, they smell like men.”
That’s how my memories of violence are too, Natalia. They are shaped like black men, they sound like black men.
Having been the victim of armed assault several times as a take out manager, and all the criminals having been black, I naturally am more suspicious of blacks than whites.
Is that bigotry? Are you a bigot as well?
( I support you being armed. I recommend it for any man or women who has experienced a violent assault. Of course, where I live, a heavily Democratic state, it is almost impossible to legally carry.)
There’s nothing like listening to “anti-war” people discuss how beautiful war is when it is waged against people they call the enemy.
Yay! You’re back!!!
Did you look at any of those pictures? What exactly did you see in them that was violent? That was hurting anyone?
Since you probably don’t read Hebrew, I’ll translate the sign the guys on the tank are holding up. It says ‘dismantle the murder machines’.
Really, that sign is just the essence of war and violence, isn’t it?
I don’t follow your links, Rann. You and Goff are nasty little fellows and I wouldn’t put it past either of you to be up to mischief.
Nice touch in the earlier post, Rann, by the way, recalling my mentioning that I had been homeless for a few years due to alcohol and drug addiction and then telling me to go do some drugs and have a drink.
Awwz, poor mikey. Where’s a racist to go, eh? Too many of our institutions shun the tweaking and the insipid whining all the racist bastards have to offer, and he’s left with only the internet.
The truly evil thing? Projecting idiots like mike keep on being created, and preznit chimpy keeps slashing education funds. Where would mikey be with a better education? I would hope he’d be championing worthwhile causes instead of his own insipid vendettas, but alas. America is not a nation that adequately funds its education system. We shall strive harder, mike, so that your plight never happens to anybody, ever again. This, I vow, good sir.
Yep, mike, clicking on any of my links will take you to a page where you will be forced to allow me to see video of you from the shower. You got me.
Rann 6:45: “Mikem is a fucking idiot”
I’m tired.
Not that anyone cares, since the discussion has ventured off into politics, but I think the idea of violence without repercussions can be very beautiful. It’s the childish desire to act out and smash things with having anything to clean up afterwards. What’s not to like? It’s only when confronted by the grisly aftermath that we recognize how wrong the violence was.
That was the theme behind the TV coverage of Desert Storm, Shock & Awe, etc. We saw the violence and then we could just turn the TV off.
Coincidentally, that’s also why I loved playing ice hockey so much.
I was actually hinting at the links between violence and my own sexual desires, mike, but thanks for coming along and hijacking the discussion AGAIN.
Rann and Goff, two blissfully hate spewing blog commenters, lecturing others about bigotry (especially Goff, LMAO). They say you can measure a person by the friends they choose, Natalia.
” I was actually hinting at the links between violence and my own sexual desires, mike”
Oh yeah, is that why the gun made you feel safer? Do your sexual desires include resisting your “partner” with a gun??
And by the way, I pivoted directly off your remarks to ask a simple question about whether or not your remarks about violence taking a male form is any less bigoted than someone saying that violence takes a black male form? (Both informed by personal episodes of being victims of violence.)
Simple enough, as long as you are not afraid of the answer. But you almost always are afraid of answers because answers often expose hypocrisy in one’s stated principles. (Like Choice for Women/No Choice for Men.)
Just answer the question, Natalia. And don’t count on your hateful friends to drive questions away. I’m more than happy to see Rann and Goff presented as the face of “liberalism” and leftism.
***Just answer the question, Natalia.***
Take your tone down a notch, boy. It ain’t my first time at the rodeo.
Those who often accuse society and others of bigotry can rarely see it in themselves. It’s part of that “all things are allowed to the righteous” syndrome that permeates the elitist cadre. And it’s why they avoid answering questions that require their own behavior being compared to the principles they claim to believe in.
Wouldn’t you like to have even one day of living by principle rather than a string of days abjectly avoiding them?
I’m creeped out. Is anyone else creeped out?