Eugene Weekly : Culture : 09.02.04

Wine:

Why War?

A little irony to prime us for glugging.

Sports:

Surfing's Serenity


Newport offers dreamy surf conditions

Why War?

A little irony to prime us for glugging.

BY LANCE SPARKS

Got a minute for small sip of deliciously bitter irony?

For months, I've been in deep mopery because of the war — no, because of all the "collateral damage" done by war as it inevitably escalates when there is no genuine pursuit of peace on any side. When the militaries have done with destroying each other, the war machinery grinds on, consuming civilians, cities, lands, and, ultimately, all the myths and morals that sustain the dream that human beings can actually live together in civil culture. The force of war is powerful, cyclonic, and tends to sweep us all toward that chaotic state that philosopher Thomas Hobbes called "the war of all against all." Then the stuff gets really nasty.

Three books lie open on my desk, two of them coffee-table compendiums of photographs backed by thin textual matter. The third I'll get to in a mo'. It's part of the cup of irony I'm serving today with your wines.

First book is Elie Wiesel's After the Darkness: Reflections on the Holocaust (Schocken Books, 2002) a mere 50 pages of stark graphics of "Persecutions, massacres, mutilations, rapes, burnings," gleaned from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. A record of a nightmare? We might wish it so, but it is plain, waking reality. Any single print can paralyze a sensitive reader, but the one that haunts me shows some women, just liberated for Bergen-Belsen concentration camp (April 1945), huddled together, peeling potatoes into a few pots. Behind them, hardly a dozen feet away, slender trunks of evergreens spread their branches over piles of naked, wasted bodies. Let's ask ourselves, is there any limiting factor to human brutality, any tiny spark of restraint that might prevent us from committing some horrors?

Second book is a collection edited by Robert Dannin, Arms Against Fury: Magnum Photographers in Afghanistan (powerHouse Books, 2002.) It captures in black and white images the 60 years' struggle of Afghan tribespeople against each other, the British, the Russians, then the Americans, now, again, each other. The land is barren, the culture primitive, the people poor, the misery endless. Such a handsome, loving, brutal people.

The Bushites proclaim that, following American liberation and nation-building, Afghanistan is now a democratic country. In Bush lingo, "democratic" actually means capitalistic, and that might be true; Afghanistan is now the world's largest supplier of opium to the global heroin market. The central government in Kabul is hardly effective to the city limits, but some folks are making money, enough at least to buy more weapons.

Third book is most poignant. I remember discovering it years ago, but it's enjoying an Internet vogue and is always worth revisiting. Title is Why War? (catchy, huh?), authored by two great minds, Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud, published following their correspondence in 1931-1932.

It's a skinny volume, considering its subject and the status of the writers, but the back story and the follow-up lend it real weight. Back story: Following World War I (millions dead, more millions suffering, large parts of the world in ruins), a committee of the newly formed League of Nations asked Einstein, as the world's leading scientist, to undertake an investigation into the causes of war, in the wish that wars of such savagery might be prevented in the future. Einstein, clever man, saw right away that if we could hope to prevent what he called the "psychosis of war," he'd best ask the world's leading authority in human psychology, Freud. The exchange was courteous and disappointing. In sum, Freud argued that human beings' dual nature, their impulses to sexuality and aggression, could only be controlled by a "world judiciary" with enforcement powers. There being no such thing and little hope of any, war seemed inevitable. Sweet Albert demurred, expressing his faith in the strength and power of rational elites to direct the world toward reasonable states of peace and prosperity.

Drum roll, pour the irony now: In less than a year (January 1933), Hitler becomes chancellor of Germany; in autumn of 1937, Germany invades Austria, the SS arrests Freud in Vienna, his books are burned in Berlin, he is deposed as head of the International Psychoanalytic Association and Carl Jung takes his position to rationalize the superiority of the super-race that goes on to produce the Holocaust. Freud is allowed to leave for London just ahead of the Blitz. Einstein's work in relativity, of course, becomes the theoretic foundation for creation of atomic and hydrogen bombs that incinerate a hundred thousand Japanese on Aug. 6 and 9, 1945.

Now, howzzat for why war? Feel like glugging a glass of wine? Shopping list follows:

Do not miss (!) Jean Leon 2002 Terrasola ($8), lovely Spanish white discovered by the glass at Zalaya. This blends 87 percent muscat with 13 percent parellada, turns out bone dry but bursting with aromas and flavors of lychee fruit, citrus zest and white flowers. Put it on the table with light late-summer pastas, white cheeses, any Asian dish.

Bargain merlot: Hogue 2002 Merlot Columbia Valley ($8, post-off) is no monster red, but it's a sloshable steal at this price, yielding good merlot flavors of black cherries with a touch of spice.

Jump on it: Big, bad Aussie red, d'Arenberg's 2002 The Stump Jump ($11), juicy blend of grenache, shiraz (syrah) and mourvedre, dark, rich, peppery. Throw a beef on the barbie and pour summa this in yer boot.

Surfing's Serenity

Newport offers dreamy surf conditions

BY BEN FOGELSON

Surfer Meagan Orion eyes a smooth one.

I sleep a dreamy sleep after surfing.

Out the front door, my breath fogs at 5 in the morning, even in summer. Dew beads up on the blue porch steps, on the greenness in the lawn, down the windows of my red, two-door Volvo. I lay a Therma-Rest on the car's roof, then my board. I open both doors, throw cam-straps over the white, 9-foot slab of shaped fiberglass, pull the straps tight underneath, inside the car.

A poor-man's surf-rack.

I listen to reggae, mostly. The shortcut to Newport is a left off Hwy. 99 about 10 miles north of Monroe; I emerge from country fields at Philomath, bypassing Corvallis. One more album of weeping and wailing, and as my old car bests the final rise above Newport, I get my first view of the ocean.

There she lays, blue and vast in sunlight cresting coastal hills. I scan yellow flags on car lot poles when I turn onto Hwy. 101. The flags hang motionless, and I visualize the period between waves, the time betwixt surfing, as placid, calm, a sheet of frigid, blue-green iron.

Isn't it cold?

I park at the beach, set a new record for man-into-wetsuit. Thick booties, still damp from a week ago. Suit zips up the back, and gloves Velcro around the wrist. Last five minutes in the car I blasted the heater.

It's 7 o'clock. The beach is long and deserted. I paddle on my stomach along a rocky cliffside. The first trickle of cold water slips down my nape, busily warms itself under a blanket of neoprene near the hollow of my back.

I sit, alone, offshore, methodically rising and falling with the rhythm of incoming swells. The coastline stretches to infinity. Gulls flap wings on a windless morning.

No politics.

A clean, smooth sheet of water banks up between me and the horizon, draws closer, steepens, and on my stomach I paddle for a rendezvous.

As the wave nears, a black seal bursts from somewhere within it, then slides down the oncoming peak, a true surfer. It looks up and our eyes meet, then it pulls back, with little effort, into the heart of the wave.

A sign.

I paddle like a motherfucker, try to pop up without touching my knee to the board.

Standing up, it's as if the world has fallen behind. I'm only on the wave, hurtling forward by a seemingly simple, yet stunningly complex convergence of gravity, wind and will.

What divine timing has brought me to these crossroads?

I accelerate, climbing higher on the steep surface. It's as if my mind and eyes are full of sparkling crystals, and in one instant it's completely clear to me why I've come.

The reason is as complex as a wave itself.

I turn, leaving the swell, which is all breaking now. I can't supress a smile as I fall back down toward my board, floating on the water, resting on the earth. So passes a moment of connectivity. I reach out and catch myself on the fiberglass. It's soft as a pillow …

And then I wake.

The coffee kettle whistles about as fast as a kettle can. I fill up a Mason jar with the dark liquid, then step out onto the porch. My breath fogs at 5 in the morning, even in summer. A friend pulls up in a beige Subaru, board already strapped down. Dew is beaded up on the blue porch steps.