“Never/Enough” from Dispatches from the Land of Erasure
By Philip Metres
There is nothing to be said about war. No, there is nothing new to be said about war, for too much has already been said, and not enough. There is never enough said. Never enough, again. Never again, enough.
I didn’t want to write this. After spending most of my adult life writing about war, I don’t want to study war anymore. Down by the riverside, I want to lay down my arms, enter the clear water and cross over the river. Isn’t it time to study the arts of peace? Anton Chekhov once wrote to a friend, in a similar predicament, “I simply want to be a free artist and regret that God has not given me the ability to be one.”1
As I made my way through the poetry of the states and peoples and languages [in Paideuma’s Symposium issue on War and Literature]—Igbo poetry in Nigeria, Yiddish poetry of the Holocaust, Yugoslavian dissident poetry, U.S. American memoir, poetry, stories, and novels—I kept coming back to the seeming-inevitable fact of it, the persistence of this nebulous and yet all-too-clear set of mechanisms and operations of mass organized violence. William James, over a century ago, in “The Moral Equivalent of War,” diagnosed the modern predicament in this way: the endless preparation for war is the war. His solution? To find some “moral equivalent” of war that would serve the social function of the military and of war, without the spilling of blood, without the trauma, without being endlessly stuck in the nightmare of history.
War, from the High German werran, from the deep Proto-Indo-European root, wers, meaning to confuse, to mix up. War is a confusion. It brings us to confusion. It fuses and diffuses. It decapitates, amputates, rakes us with its fires. And yet it keeps coming back, because we keep calling.
Among the first written texts in the world is a poem by Enheduanna, a Sumerian high priestess, lamenting the spirit of war. As long as there has been writing, there has been protest against this strange ritual of mass bloodletting, as there has been valorization of the courage of those who partake. It is courageous to risk death to protect oneself and one’s family, one’s tribe, one’s people. It is also courageous to refuse the logic of sacrifice, but that’s a courage the world too often calls cowardice.
After serving as a nurse during the Civil War, Walt Whitman admonished that “the real war will never get in the books”—and carried that real war in his body for the rest of his life. There is always something new to say about war, because every war is different, and every war is the same, and every generation must relearn what the previous generation forgot or could not find a way to tell them.
Just the other day, I was preparing to send to a digitizing service my father’s letter tapes recorded during his time in Vietnam. He recorded them on 3” reels, packed them in their plastic boxes, and mailed them to his family at home. For years, I’ve had no way to listen to them, as the technology to play the reels went into obsolescence. As I opened one of the boxes, dated February 1, 1968, a sliver of a note tumbled out.
It read: “Dear Mom and Dad, fighting is over in Saigon. Everything is quieted down. All’s ok with me. Love, Phil.” He’d somehow survived the Tet Offensive. The note says everything and nothing. Never enough language to describe the indescribable, to heal a trauma. He’s spent his whole life trying to stanch the blood.
There are many lies, not only Wilfred Owen’s “old lie” about the sweetness of blood sacrifice. One of those lies is that there has never been a time in human history when there hasn’t been war. That is meant to rationalize and naturalize its presence. The vast span of human history is, rather, marked by peace. Most of the time, people are not organizing in groups to kill each other. What if we saw war, and our ceaseless preparation for it, as the illness that it is?
Of course, there are other kinds of violence both active and structural—enslavement, oppression, exploitation, threat, torture, terror. We must face that violence in us, and between us, especially since we are experts at hiding, and failing to see, what is plain as sight.
As societies have grown more and more complex, as technology has become more sophisticated, war has kept pace. The authors of war gather and dream and conduct a metal orchestra on a scale of human inhuman endeavor that would cause the fiercest geniuses of plot and rhyme to drop their narrow instruments of description and incantation.
Some of our writers have borne the brunt of refusal, of opposition, of resistance, and have paid with their livelihoods and sometimes their lives. Sometimes they simply have refused to participate. Sometimes, they have made visible our collective complicity, saying, as Balkan writer Dubravka Ugreŝić did, “I am to blame.”2
What Charles Simic said about the predicament of the lyric poet can be said about the conscientious objector, the war resister: “Here is something we can all count on. Sooner or later our tribe always comes to ask us to agree to murder. . . The lyric poet is almost by definition a traitor to his own people. He is the stranger who speaks the harsh truth that only individual lives are unique and therefore sacred. He may be loved by his people, but his example is also the one to be warned against.”3
May our writing not be a language to paper over the cracks in the walls of war. May our pens widen the cracks until the walls fall. Until the house that war built no longer stands.
But every day, someone comes and fills in those cracks with liquid capital. Builds more walls with our own sweat and blood. And finds a way to profit from other people’s suffering.
So may we chronicle what went wrong, to lay bare the operations of a machine that is operated by people to destroy other people.
And then, as importantly, prophesy another world inside this one. We can see that other world all around us—in the courage of refusals, in calling out the powerful, in erasing the erasures, in imagining ourselves in webs of relationships that include even our enemies, in compassion for self and other, in dreaming of the fields where we lie together without names or causes, in lying together without names or causes, in binding our words with others, in creating shared spaces, in building bridges and bridging narratives, in acts large and small—as small as Mahmoud Darwish making coffee in Beirut during another war. Somewhere, someone is making coffee right now. Somewhere, someone is dying, and someone is being born. Somewhere, someone is changing a diaper. Somewhere, someone is making love. Somewhere, someone is heading to the river to wash.
It is us. The river is ahead, shining in the afternoon sun. As we approach, hot and tired, it opens itself like it’s never been entered. We can see clear down to the riverbed.
It’s time to lay down our burdens and enter the water. And, if only for its eternity of now, to be cleansed.
1. Andrei Turkov, ed., Anton Chekhov and His Times (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1990), 291.
2. Richard Berengarten, “War, Shadows, Mirrors,” Paideuma 47 (2020): 53–99.
3. Charles Simic, The Unemployed Fortune-Teller: Essays and Memoirs (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 37–38
Reprinted from Philip Metres’s Dispatches from the Land of Erasure, University of Michigan Press, September, 2025.