War of the Ants

Today, always it is today, the now of the existential moment, the now when historical events pass through the crisis of their realization and need for resolution, the now of eternity and the now of interior timelessness, and the time of whenever—the big news is always the endless war in the Middle East—Arabs and Israelis, Muslims and Jews, terrorists and the IDF—a regular clash of cultures and civilizations, forever going on, each little war or breaking of a truce, tit for tat, a cycle of violence, really a linked part of the terrible history of this region and of the world as it emerged geo-politically from the strains of colonial oppression, imperialist expansion, and racial and religious conflicts going on for millennia.  Who came as conquerors?  Everyone: Egyptians, Assyrians, Greeks, Romans, Muslims, Saracens and Crusaders, Ottoman Turks, then British Imperial Forces, and then the PLO.  History is not written by the winners, but by the losers, that is, us. 
World Wars shrink down in several ways.  They become regional conflicts always threatening to spill out, like long columns of liquid hatred, until they stain the soil with blood, and people forget the contours of their history.  Or they seep into the bodies that trudge across the fields of combat, and then the living survivors, wounded in flesh and in mind, return home bringing with them the grudges, the barely repressed rage, and the twisted hooks of revenge.  Or they return into the depths of the earth, gathering into small balls of fear and anxiety, lying still under the rains and the unseen heat, waiting to be reborn--but without memories and without consciences.  Nests of thoughtless aggression.  Or reborn fetuses, in which the desire for peace, justice and procreation gradually growing into animation and freedom.  Months become years, years decades, and decades centuries.

Back then, however, when I am telling you a story from, it was all so very different.  A war of the ants, red versus black, all exactly true, literal and physical, in front of your eyes.  It was easy to see who was aggressor and who was victim.  No need, however, to pick sides.  You sat down, put your elbows on your knees, focused your eyes, and watched.  Let the battle begin!

But if you did want to extrapolate and draw analogies, read in allegories, dream in parables, well, then, some changes were necessary.  Back then, and now, too, if you want to be accurate.  Think of the exceptions, the modifications, the differences, each like the jointed body of an ant, little red or black bubbles attached to wire connections to make them move in strange bouncing steps along the ground, to give them sensations through their antennae, to help them lift pieces of grass, to harvest seeds, to struggle in mortal combat.  And after their battles, not bodies strewn across a bloody field, but bits and pieces of round and thin balls and bars, as though they were disengaged automata.

Exception one: no matter how many there were of either kind, it was always as single beings that they met; and yet, unlike a human army, with hierarchy and division of labour, I could never tell one from another.

Exception two: None of them believed in anything or acted of their own free will, for though they all skittered along in some kind of erratic bounce, the direction of their movements passed from one to another like an organic electrical signal; if it were the mobilized forces of two nations in this war, the leaders would make speeches, the generals give orders, and the field officers prod their men into action.

First big modification: this place where I was sitting and watching the ant wars was not in Eretz Yisroel, the Land of Israel, but in the Catskill Mountains, sometimes known as the Ketzkills, which was and maybe still is a Jewish homeland, at least in the summertime.

Second modification not so big, nebech: I was not yet a real big person, soldier or diplomat but a kid of maybe ten or eleven years old, and I was shuffling along a dirt road in the mountains on a day off from the usual camp stuff, well, perhaps not a whole day, just the afternoon nap time when I would quietly slip away from the hot, stifling hut where we were supposed to lie on our cots for an hour or two after lunch, before game time or swimming.  It wasn’t exactly slipping away as maybe just walking out while everyone else’s eyes closed, including the counsellors, who were more tired than we were, eyes shut down tight to avoid the glaring sun through the screens.  Maybe they knew where I was.  I was never called to account.

Hence the differences: to begin with, though I squatted on a rock or lay along the road to watch, my presence made no difference to them, and yet all of my attention was drawn into their epic struggle, and I poured into the experience all the meaningfulness of great ideas I was still far too young to understand; and then, even more, the war was in progress when I arrived, even if the daily engagements had yet to be begun, as I watched the long column of reds file down the ruddy path on the side of the dirt track in back of the camp grounds, and it always continued, without issue or conclusion no matter how long I was allowed to stay; so that were I to be diverted after three or four days or a week, and then to return, there might be nothing on what had been the field of combat, no bodies, no marks of fighting—it was as though the war had never been.

Nevertheless and notwithstanding, just as I was not ever sure about who or what I was in regard to the great events in Palestine recently become Israel, I was not quite certain in my mind an ant or a pismire or an emmet (all those terms valid at some time in the past)—because at times I had the intention or the wish to become one.  Why?  Because of the books I read, like White Patch, and the dreams I dreamed, neither of which I was very adept at recalling or keeping apart in my mind—today, too, old as I am, if I start to fall asleep or to wake up, in that intermediate period, all the novels I have read and all the strange delusions in my life, run into one another, like threads of sand, and these threads of sand, each of a different colour, swirl themselves into intricate paintings on the floor of my mind. 

Be that as it may, it was all superbly interesting to watch how the ant war came about and how it was fought, though never did I have the time to watch until it reached its highly dramatic conclusion.  Ant time is not the same as human history, at least in that respect. In other respects, without insisting on anyone respecting Nature in this regard, that is, when she displays herself, if not red in tooth and claw, at least violently and unrelentingly cruel, you can see too many similarities between us and them.

            At first, I spent as many hours as I could sitting or lying stretched out near a dirt road in the middle of the Catskills and watched the long line of giant red ants marching relentlessly towards a nest of smaller black ants.  Eventually, the two sides met, with the red ants engaging with the outriders of the black nest; then, as the signal passed back into the dark tunnels, streams of home forces streamed out to try to stop the invading army from gaining control, and stealing both the eggs and the aphid slaves of the black nest.  More and more black ants came out into the sunlight, and yet the red columns also seemed endless.  The minutes turned into hours and then time just seemed to disappear for me.  Individual ants fought each other in single, mortal combat.  Though the mass of tiny beings spread out on both sides, all fighting was one on one, never massed confrontations.  Bodies mounted up, more black than red, but the fighting went on, if not until the end of the day, then at least until I was called back to camp by one of the counsellors. 

And the date precisely?  It was the year 1952 and the Cold War was in full bloom, so naturally you would think that in my mind would be the perfect political interpretation, a struggle between the Free World on the one side and the Enslaved World on the other.  You might have been right, but only if you could have crawled into my brain and tapped into the cells where a lifetime of training and education had shaped the responses available to me.  Depending on who you were back then—and I certainly don’t think you would be whoever you are now a half century later, with all the benefits of hindsight and maturity to power your judgment—you might have been very surprised to find that I probably thought of the Free World.
It was also only a few years after the War of Independence and the re-emergence of Israel among the nations of the world, yet always surrounded and threatened by hostile armies.  Maybe I would have thought in that way.  However, considering who I was then, and how old I was, and where most of the relatives I had came from and usually no longer existed thanks to the Holocaust, and then again maybe not.