Stalking the god of war followed by a reflection on wolves and walkabouts

Plate 76 from .The Disasters of War. (Los Desastres de la Guerra): 'The carnivorous vulture' (El buitre carnvoro)
(Image by Billy Quinn 1954)   Details   DMCA

I am looking into the distance and I see the god of war

Limping across the land.

It is a battered, pitted land of smoldering ruin

And burned out fields,

Not of any specific godforsaken place

But it is the archetypal battlefield

That haunts the dreams of this pacifist.

It is like a movie with me in it,

Like an animated masterpiece

From Goya's "Disasters of War"

Filled with ghoulish over-decorated officers with owl eyes

Supervising atrocities. But in my movie there are no zoom-ins.

The horror is all in the distance

And at the feet of the god of war who is walking

Parallel to the horizon and to me.

The ruined land trembles by,

His steps are enormous, each one a hundred feet

He never stops to look at what is passing beneath him

Whether it is an ant-like wounded soldier

Tending to his buddy whose body was just mutilated by a mine

Or a mother pulling rubble off a smoldering pile

Searching for her children.

He just keeps walking. And I keep walking.

The Greeks would not recognize this god of war.

He doesn't look much like Ares.

He is older, perhaps in his sixties,

And he seems to be in pain,

Bent over slightly, with a long beard

Naked except for a filthy loin cloth.

He looks like someone who has lost everything.

Too large for the world,

He resembles an unhappy giant from a fairy tale.

No doubt he is weary of his stint on earth.

I am weary of walking next to him.

I wish he would go home or disappear

Whatever gods do who have outlived their purpose.

But until he does I must keep my eye on him.

Like an old wolf

I shadow this old arthritic warlord

Who cannot ignore the plethora of bloody offerings

That keep him feeling needed

And me resigned to stalk him until he falls.
.............
This started out being a hard poem to write (I worked on it for days) until I pictured myself as an old wolf with a job to do, stalking this aging god / archetype. I like to think this old-Ares' days are numbered. I found this on google: Old wolves don't have any sense of living just for themselves, they live for each other. Generally extremely old wolves become lone wolves and go on walkabouts until they eventually die. May I suggest that human-old wolves can also go on walkabouts. This is close to what I was imagining when I saw myself as an old wolf stalking this god. The old wolf has the time and skill and the medicine power to fulfill this role which has no analogue in the middle world where real wars are being fought around the clock, but, in case you haven't noticed, there is important work to do in the Dreamtime.

I found this at: Click Here

"Walkabout," as a European word, started as a derogatory, and white, term to describe an aboriginal who had irresponsibly, in the white persons eyes, simply left his employ to go and walk in the bush for an extended time.

"Where's Billy?"
"Dunno, gone walkabout, haven't seen him for weeks."

To the aboriginal person it was far more, and almost a duty, to follow the path of the mythical dream time ancestor, to whose clan he was attached, as it moved across Australia, singing the land into existence.

And, I will be the first to agree that this answer barely scratches the surface of beliefs held by people who lived in a mainly unchanged culture for 65,000 years, possibly the oldest culture on the planet that was still in existence when Europeans first made contact."

What is hard for us (Westerners, folks of European descent) to grasp is that for the Australian Aborigines, whose culture is 65,000- 100,000 year old, Australia is not just a country or a physical place but it has its own Dreaming. There is no dividing line between inner and outer or dead and alive for them, or even past and present. The Dreamtime is all-inclusive and is non-dualistic. When they go on a "walkabout", to a white person they might be wandering but for them they are never not home, so the walkabout is a way of returning to their senses, to remembering who they really are.

But when the land is a battlefield, pitted with bomb craters and seeded with mines, how does this affect the land's Dreaming, and how can anyone be safe walking the land? My poem is a kind of meditation on this problem: Much of the human race is, arguably, evolving beyond the need for war, but the god of war is still worshipped and, even if he himself is tired of his "stint" on earth, he can't disappear as long as those people continue to make bloody offerings to him.

I can't stalk him as me, but I can stalk him as an old wolf because only a retired wolf has the time and the medicine power to orient his walkabout to keeping an eye on this old, tired god. And believe me, he is with us, not literally of course, but in the Dreamtime.

This is not a metaphor.