Note: the following is an essay from my MFA thesis, and a form of it was published as a David O. McKay Essay Contest winner. All the blockquotes are from What Are Poets For? by Martin Heidegger. Excluding the last, of course.
What threatens man in his very nature is the willed view that man, by the peaceful release, transformation, storage, and channeling of the energies of physical nature, could render the human condition, man’s being, tolerable for everybody and happy in all respects.
One afternoon, I killed a bee for buzzing and beating his head against the interior of my living room window. Or rather, for distracting me from my book.
Before murder, I briefly considered opening the window and letting the bee bumble elsewhere, but saw the screen would keep it trapped. I might have found a way to gently escort the bee through the front door, I suppose. But, as I couldn’t be bothered with any such nicety, I retrieved a fly swatter from a nail in the kitchen, slapped the bee as he sat befuddled on the glass, scooped him up with the swatter, and flushed him down the toilet. Mine was a crime of convenience.
Somewhere between crushing his body with a flick of my wrist and interring it in a watery grave, I felt a slight pang of guilt. Or something like guilt.
Maybe it was sympathy? Or wounded fraternity? Though I was living in Northern California then, I have long considered myself a Beehive State native. After all, my family has lived in Utah since it was Deseret, a Book of Mormon word for honey bee used, even today, to evoke the neighborly virtues of industry and cooperation. So maybe I felt reminded not to ask for whom the swatter swats; maybe I knew it swatted me.
Whatever the case, the feeling buzzed in my brain, insisting that I begin essaying toward its root, rather than returning peaceably to my book.
The peace of this peacefulness is merely the undisturbed continuing relentlessness of the fury of self-assertion.
I’ll attempt to quell the rattling prepositional clutter in the above translation and present Heidegger’s words, again from “What Are Poets For?,” as I understand them: peace is unenforceable. So is happiness. Quiet is the best even the tenderest tyranny can promise.
I feel satisfied with this rendering. But in the vacuum it produces, a more grating dissonance becomes inescapable: how could Heidegger condemn man’s compulsion to impose peace and happiness while embracing Nazism? Being a neophyte on this issue, I’ll retreat to one related but more familiar.
In the summer of 1834, the prophet Joseph Smith told some of his followers not to kill some rattlesnakes that had entered their camp. “How will the serpent ever lose his venom while the servants of God possess the same disposition and continue to make war upon it,” he asked. So the snakes were carefully carried across a neighboring creek. This happened on a march from Ohio to defend the rights of Latter-day Saints in Missouri. They called themselves Zion’s Camp, and most expected they would shed enemy blood.
Somewhere along the Missouri-bound march, a handful from Zion’s Camp decided to have a parade. A man named Sylvester led them, piping away on his flute. Then Joseph’s dog snapped at him and Sylvester snapped back, threatening to shoot the dog. That ended the parade.
The next day, Joseph put on his best Sylvester voice and said, “if a dog bites me I will kill him; if any man insults me, I will kill him.” That’s what’s wrong with the world, said Joseph, then he turned to Sylvester and said, “if you kill that dog, I will whip you.” Sylvester never shot the dog, so Joseph never whipped Sylvester. But they shouted at each other for the next three months and some people say Joseph once threw the camp bugle at Sylvester, though I don’t recall why.
In the end, Zion’s Camp came home with stories of how God defended them against an armed mob by sending a terrible storm. They said it flooded a river to drown one enemy and sent a lightning bolt to kill another while Zion’s Camp sheltered in a Baptist church and sang hymns. Back at home, they also told stories: about how God told Joseph they should go home without ever fighting any Missourians because the Mormons in Missouri mostly needed to repent and be better neighbors, and about how God plagued Joseph and Zion’s Camp with cholera because they fought with each other over not fighting. In the end, they said the whole trip was a trial of faith that would bring different blessings than those expected.
If I understand him, which is a very big if, Heidegger worried over the human tendency to endanger man’s own being with the very technologies, organizations, and actions mankind produces to preserve and improve our existence. And according to my reading, Heidegger says we ride these rockets down Oedipus Road because we erroneously believe good intentions conquer all:
What threatens man in his very nature is the view that this imposition… can be ventured without any danger, as long as other interests besides — such as, perhaps, the interests of a faith — retain their currency.
That the prophet Joseph Smith was killed and his followers were driven west primarily for practicing polygamy is a popular myth; though rumors of plural marriage were on the rise just prior to Joseph’s death, the practice was kept largely secret before the Utah days. Polygamy was a cause of strife, but it wasn’t the cause. Mainly, Mormons were unpopular because they settled in droves (their population in Nauvoo, Illinois grew from 100 to 12,000 in six years), voted in unison (for Joseph), and had a well-manned militia (led by Joseph). And it didn’t help that they were mostly Yankee or European immigrants in a region divided on the issue of slavery.
The militias and mobs who drove the Mormons from Missouri and Ohio to Illinois, and then from Illinois to the Rocky Mountains may also have heard something about the 1838 Independence Day speech Sidney Rigdon (a sometimes spokesman for Joseph) gave to a Missourian crowd that was only mostly Mormon. In that speech, he said: “the mob that comes on us to disturb us, it shall be between us and them a war of extermination; for we will follow them till the last drop of their blood is spilled.”
I’ve heard some people say Sidney said and did some crazy things because, six years before he preached extermination, some anti-Mormon neighbors dragged him out of his home and into the frosty spring moonlight by his feet. His head bounced down his own stone steps on the way, perhaps causing some permanent brain damage. Then they stripped him and poured hot tar and feathers all over his body. When Joseph, who had also been tarred and feathered that night, came to see him the next morning, he said Sidney appeared crazy, his head “highly inflamed.” That’s when Sidney asked his wife to bring him his razor. She asked what for, and he answered, “to kill Joseph.”
Sidney never followed through on that threat. Maybe forgiveness became easy when pity took over. By the end of the month, Joseph and his wife buried an adopted infant son who died of pneumonia; somehow, in the confusion of the night Joseph and Sidney were taken by the mob, the door had been left open and death crept in.
In any case, after Sidney’s Independence Day speech boiled Missourian blood over the last half of the summer, Governor Liburn Boggs issued Missouri Executive Order 44. It says, “the Mormons must be treated as enemies, and must be exterminated or driven from the State if necessary for the public peace.” So the Mormons went to make a home out of a malaria-infested swamp on the Illinois-side of a bend in the Mississippi River, swatting at the mosquitoes who hosted the disease, draining the buzzing insects’ soggy breeding grounds to make room for brick houses, homesteads, mansions, dry goods stores, lodges, printing offices, and gunsmith shops. In building and defending the beautiful, bustling City of Nauvoo, which rivaled Chicago at the time, the Mormons made more enemies. Within five years of settling, they were driven deep into the west.
It may be that any other salvation than that which comes from where the danger is, is still within the unholy. Any salvation by makeshift, however well-intentioned, remains for the duration of his destiny an insubstantial illusion for man, who is endangered in his nature.
If Joseph Smith ever had a photograph or daguerreotype taken of him, it was never properly archived. And Emma, Joseph’s first wife, said no artist ever got his likeness quite right. So the closest thing we have to an accurate portrait of Joseph is a death mask. It was made not long after a mob killed him in Carthage Jail. But even death masks distort things a bit, owing to the weight of the plaster on soft tissue, so even Joseph’s death mask obscures his true face.
Then there are written portraits of the prophet. One such was printed in the first and only edition of the Nauvoo Expositor. As the name suggests, the paper did not specialize in flattering likenesses. It accused him of preaching a variety of heretical doctrines, including the idea that plural marriages could be sanctified in life and persist after death. When Mayor Joseph and the Nauvoo City Council read the Nauvoo Expositor, they quickly deemed the paper “a public nuisance,” destroyed the press it was printed on, and burned all the copies they could find.
According to the council’s minutes, Joseph said he “would rather die tomorrow and have the thing smashed, than live and have it go on, for it was exciting the spirit of mobocracy among the people, and bringing death and destruction.” According to William Blackstone’s legal canon, which Joseph and the city council reviewed, destroying the press may have been a legally defensible action. According to neighbors in and out of Nauvoo, it was unconstitutional; they demanded legal action, accused Joseph of inciting riot and treason, and urged “war and extermination.” According to Mormon historians, Joseph intended to evade trial by going into hiding, but surrendered when criticized by some friends. According to Mormon scripture, Joseph said, “I go like a lamb to the slaughter; but I am calm as a summer’s morning” on the road to Carthage Jail, where the Governor promised protection while Joseph awaited trial. By all accounts, Joseph Smith was killed by a mob without a trial.
Are there mortals who reach sooner into the abyss of the destitute and its destituteness? These, the most mortal among mortals, would be the most daring… still more daring even than that self-assertive human nature which is already more daring than plant and beast.
Joseph’s brother Hyrum was also killed in the upper room of Carthage Jail. He was the first to fall: shot in the face through the door he tried to brace against death. Joseph fell to Hyrum’s side, shouting his brother’s name while two friends continued to struggle against the door, striking down gun barrels with a cane as the mob began entering through the widening crack. Then Joseph pulled a secreted revolver from his pocket, returned to the embattled door, and fired a few shots into the mob. This bothers some who feel men can only become martyrs when they receive death quietly.
After Joseph fired the revolver, he turned and ran across the room to the second story window where he was shot twice from within the jail and once from without. What went through Joseph’s mind in those final moments? Maybe he didn’t realize the jail was surrounded and hoped to escape? Or maybe he pulled himself through the second story window and into more bullets to draw the mob away from his friends? Whatever Joseph’s intentions, his body fell from the window, and the mob rushed downstairs to gloat over their kill, leaving Joseph’s friends alive and alone after the prophet leapt or fell from the window.
Soon after, people started telling all sorts of stories about how God sent lightning, confusion, and even an angel — dressed as a nineteenth-century gentleman — to prevent a savage man with a face painted black with wet gunpowder from mutilating Joseph’s corpse. But I don’t suppose God or angels, or even Joseph, cared much about what happened to the body at that point.
I’m repeatedly drawn to a lamentation penned by an unspecified son of King David: “vanity of vanities; all is vanity.” And the greatest of these: believing man can twist an arm and bend the cosmos to his will — even if only to silence some nuisance at the window — without binding his own hand with violence. Whether we like it or not, all creation dangles within an infinite abyss, and the Bible says our little world is destined to burn more fervently than an iron furnace. Sometimes it seems God watches in hiding, waiting for us to concede our utter dependence and abject nothingness before He even considers intervening.
Do I paint an ugly God? Is this blasphemy? If so, let me be stoned or hanged or sawn asunder with the prophets who cried out: O God, where art thou? Verily thou art a God that hidest thyself. Why hast thou forsaken me?
Plant, animal, and man — insofar as they are beings at all, that is, insofar as they are ventured — agree in this, that they are not specially protected.
I see Joseph among God’s martyred prophets, but I don’t suppose his death was any more tragic in heaven’s eyes than a sparrow’s. Death seems inconsequential to all but the bereft. Not that I’m eager to brave the abyss myself.
Thy mind, O man! if thou wilt lead a soul unto salvation, must stretch as high as the utmost heavens, and search into and contemplate the darkest abyss, and the broad expanse of eternity — thou must commune with God.
~ Joseph Smith, In a Letter from Liberty Jail
When I do think of the inevitable, or brood over life and its impenetrable uncertainties, I take strange comfort in reading a dream Joseph reportedly shared on the way to Carthage, wherein he and his brother escape a burning ship, walk upon the face of the deep, and enter a heavenly city.