Last Friday afternoon, with nothing to do and even less to lose, the babe (who is almost three) and I had a date at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He was wearing his pirate outfit---little, blue silk, Chinese shirt-and-pant pajamas that were a gift from friends who lived there. He carried his pirate flag, a white napkin attached to a wooden spoon by an elastic band---an item with which he does not separate. And so in the spirit of his warrior ways, I took him to the Arms & Armor Collection. Can you imagine? Life-size men on life-size horses---covered top to bottom in intricately etched steel armor complete with jaunty bursts of feathers atop the helmets---march down the center of the hall. Glass cases bristle with swords of gold, sabers studded with diamonds and gems, daggers embedded with rubies, the hunting guns of kings, and even two Flintlock pistols of Empress Catherine the Great. We were impressed. We were, the babe and I agreed, also relieved that the ancient Japanese warriors, spooky and ogre-like, were safely contained behind glass walls---and would not, we reassured each other repeatedly, even come into our rooms at night.
Though many of the pieces displayed were intended for tournament, you can't help but imagine the armor-clad mannequins coming to life and making that crunching, horsey-clomping sound as they clump-clump across great sweeping fields to attack, by hand, the enemy---defending their women,
their honor, their country and their Queen.
My little Bubba, in his sweet embroidered Chinese pajamas, the napkin of his wooden spoon flag dragging behind him, was in awe, and I was thinking of him later that night as M. and I took a cab home from the Israeli film Dancing with Bashir. In the cab, coming home from the film, I was not in awe of battle anymore. I was slumped, heartbroken in a way I have started experience in glancing moments: for what if someday, (it is very possible) my son is taken off to war?
The film is animated---a collage of interviews with those who were young soldiers in the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Their stories and dreams come alive in animation as they talk. But these are not boasting accounts; their voices are detached, weary and defeated. The film is drenched in a sort of golden-yellow. It's sad. In the recollections, the young men hide in their tanks, swim all night to
escape the enemy, or dance with machine guns firing through the urban streets. Something about the film's animation, perhaps, makes the young soldiers seem so... accessible, so personal---just young guys (regardless of heritage or nationality) trying to process the horror of the atrocities happening around (and sometimes because of) them.
My heart was still a bit heavy on Saturday at the Museum of Natural History. The babe---no longer a babe really, but a little boy, isn't he?---was still carrying his wooden-spoon pirate flag, and was delighted by the Butterfly Conservatory. He was impressed by the magnificent blue whale hovering over the Hall of Ocean Life. But it was bordering on nap time when we went to the Cosmic Collisions film at the planetarium, and when the first meteor sailed across the dome above us, he declared he was ready to go. I took him out and pushed him in the stroller up and down the ramp that wraps around the planetarium so he could fall asleep.
We went up and we went down and we went up again along a pathway (I soon realized) that was guiding us along cosmic evolution since the beginning of time 13 billion years ago. I had to keep the rhythm of the stroller moving, so I could only read a sentence here and there, and the quasars caught
my eye. "Newborn galaxies" I read, and passed by and read again, and passed by and read again.
"Newborn galaxies," I thought. How sweet.
"I don't think the human race will survive the next thousand years, unless we spread into space. There are too many accidents that can befall life on a single planet," says Steven Hawking.* Oh theoretical physicists, how I share your concern! And just how many accidents can befall life on a single planet? The answer, if you are a mother, is: quite a few. A chill can become pneumonia; a dispute can become a war that can demand my son's life; a meteor (as if there wasn't enough to worry about) could land in Central Park tomorrow. The web page (not Hawking) continues:
The Universe is enormous, and people are incredibly insignificant in the infinite space, full of unknown dangers. From this point of view, all our mutual rivalries appear at least ridiculous.
Well (and now I must end this rambling, where-am-I-going-with-this? tune)... well, there's that. From another point of view---say from the perspective of a newborn galaxy, for example---these warriors and wars, these rivalries and fears... appear, at least, ridiculous.
* From "To Survive in the Universe", a rather unexpected catagory on the website www.sky-map.org.
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