Ways in which we are only beginning to talk about war

I

The opposite of peace is not-peace. War then is one type of not-peace, not all of it.

A better question, I think, is: What is neither peace nor not-peace? One answer: A state of being where nothing has been concluded about it either way. Nothing constitutes a binary to be experienced as peace and not-peace.

What terms do we give to conditions that aren’t concluded or concludable? Here, I also think, we confront the same problem associated with consciousness: As consciousness is very difficult to define and isolate, we instead give examples of what it is like to experience something.

And when you think about it, the examples are many, in fact so many that some have yet to be discussed.

II

This means in illustrating the multitude of what is neither peace nor not-peace, I can start almost anywhere. (That’s the great opportunity in complexity.)

For me, right now, what do the war dead say about wars? Well, to this atheist, the dead aren’t saying anything. Even when I memorialize the corpses as an argument against warfare, the dead still aren’t talking.

But, that’s too conclusive, right?

Any such determination is not part of the neither-nor inconclusiveness. The point of being neither peace nor not-peace is that the war dead are an entirely different matter, and that matter can’t be talked about in ways that we can talk about “peace” and “not-peace.”

So stated, this also opens the huge canvas of examples.

III

For instance, I’m free to talk about the war dead in what has been called infrathin. Infrathin is a French coinage for any concept that is impossible to define and for which one can only give cases of. Repeatedly mentioned are the warmth of a seat just left, tobacco smoke that also smells of the mouth exhaling it; and the momentum in taking a minute of silence.

To my mind, the war dead are the infrathin of an indescribable ether around and in between us and not-us. Ether, you may know, has been proven to be an unscientific concept. Exactly my point.

This ether that is the war dead isn’t something we breath in and out, but rather it is “something” like our bodies being semi-permeable to the other bodies, consciously–just like consciousness.

IV

An example?

It is reported that Dante finished the Paradiso just before he died of malaria on September 14, 1321. That experience was of course before our experience with the war on malaria.