First Entry

This blog is meant to serve several purposes:

1) To document war memorials in New York City historically, pictorially, and experientially.

2) Through the utilization of the blog format, create a space for communal dialog concerning war memorials, their histories, personal experiences, and anything else that might contribute to a thorough collective consideration on the natures of war and art.

3) To satisfy the requirements for a final creative project in The New School’s undergraduate interdisciplinary lecture “War & Art”. The requirements as given on the syllabus:

Final Project: May be one of the following: a) a substantial creative project (literary, visual, etc.) that deeply engages the course material in aesthetically compelling manner; b) a proposal for an addition or revision to the syllabus, that includes a description of the new item, a detailed argument for its inclusion in the course, a lesson plan, and an annotated bibliography; or c) an 8-10 page research paper (this may be an extension of one of your short assignments), complete with secondary sources.

- “War and Art: Literature, Image, History – ULEC 2120 – Syllabus – Spring 2008″

It is my hope that this blog will function in satisfying option (a) as a creative multimedia project that explores the ways in which war and art converge in permanence within civilian populations.

I end this first entry with a poem by Wilfred Owen, written on the fields of battle during the First World War.

“Dulce et Decorum Est”

“Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!–An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime…
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,–
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.”