Martial Art

Abstract

A large crowd stood around, enjoying the dancing magic, as in the middle two acrobats led on the dance, springing, and whirling, and tumbling.—Homer, The IliadWestern Literature's most magnificent object stages an intimacy between struggle and tranquillity. A gift to no soldier, but to his mother, requiting her ancient kindness, the shield of Achilles proffers a drama of war and of peace. The city of peace vibrates with the sound of flute and lyre, a wedding celebration, deliberations at assembly; the city of war quivers with well-armored soldiers, women and children perched atop the walls, beyond the walls an ambush laid along the river just where flocks of cattle come to drink (Il. 18.478–608). Homer teaches this truth about the object world: in the moment of their manufacture, weapons already manifest both prosperity and pain, technology and ceremony. Sweating, and longing, and grieving; springing, and whirling, and tumbling. The worlds inscribed on the shield figure those worlds out of which weaponry as such is forged. Could some new ekphrastic pedagogy disclose such worlds in the Hummer, the Abrams tank, the M-16, the B-52—revealing the quotidian histories they both congeal and obscure? If not, must we settle for Auden's lament, the mother pained now by what, for modernity, the god has wrought: “there on the shining shield / His hands had set no dancing-floor / But a weed-choked field” (294 [“The Shield of Achilles”]). Is the modern artifact so bereft of people?