This work began by juxtaposing two obsessions of mine that took root in the late 1960s: (1) the Battle of Passchendaele, fought by the British Army in Belgian Flanders in late 1917, and (2) the chöd ritual, the core “severance” practice of a lineage founded by Machik Lapdrön, the great twelfth-century female Tibetan Buddhist saint.
I have no complete explanation as to why these two subjects have remained of abiding interest to me, but I can tell you a bit about each of them.
Passchendaele
In the fall of 1968, assigned to write a paper for my high school Modern European History class, I went to the school library where I came upon a bound set of The Illustrated London News for the years 1914–1918. Aware that (like our own Life magazine) pictures would dominate, it seemed an easy way to cruise the era for a topic.
The issues from late 1917 that covered the Third Battle of Ypres—a great, glorious, and decisive victory of the British against the Germans and all odds—offered dark drawings of the battlefield, of teams of exhausted men working enormous artillery pieces, of lines of courageous soldiers moving across difficult ground toward ultimate victory. Rich fodder for an easy essay.
A brief review of secondary sources revealed the News’s coverage to be, shall we say, incomplete. While to this day historians argue about the decisions made by the generals and politicians, the Battle of Passchendaele remains unimaginable and the poster child for the horrors of the Great War: waves of exhausted men advancing slowly uphill for weeks in relentless rain through waist-deep mud into artillery and machine-gun fire in order to capture a few yards of strategically insignificant ground. There were roughly 500,000 German and Allied casualties. Almost 90,000 British and Commonwealth soldiers who fought in the Ypres Salient vanished there and have no known grave. And this bit of ground was only a small segment of the Western Front.
These scenes felt shockingly familiar (how could that be? who was there?) but unfathomable. Was this victory? Who could have called it that? Why? What kind of officers would give such orders? What kind of men would follow them? What kind of courage enabled them to walk into mud, into walls of shellfire, into machine guns? For so far? For so long? In the rain? How could one imagine this? How did one explain it to oneself, to loved ones? Who were these men? How do we grasp them? Where are they?
In the decades that followed I continued to collect material related to those weeks in late October and early November 1917. I read not only history, poetry, and fiction, but also unit diaries; contemporary reports and individual accounts; survey information and maps of all kinds; treatises on aerial photography and artillery tactics; and manuals on field engineering and tactical planning. I walked the ground, between and behind the lines, campaign maps in hand, for weeks at a time, in all seasons and all weathers.
Protective Magic
I grew up with terrible nightmares, and across from our town’s seventeenth-century burial ground. I have always been deeply interested in protective magic.
For me, the late 1960s were infused with Eastern religions. During the autumn in which I discovered the war in Flanders I also discovered W. Y. Evans-Wentz’s translations of The Tibetan Book of the Dead and of texts on Tibetan yogic practices, including the chöd rite. As I understood it at the time, the chöd rite required you to seek out a haunted place—a charnel ground, cemetery, or desolate place—and, once there, to visualize dismembering your own body and offering the pieces thereof, as food, to all the demons and other beings that seek to harm you. Once sated, they would vanish, and you would be safe. Forever. Here were my wrathful deities who, somehow, could be transformed into teachers and guardians.
In the decades since, I have worked with Tibetan scholars, spent considerable time in the Himalaya, and met many of the hundreds of translators who have made a wide variety of Tibetan sacred and secular works available in English. Biographies of Machik Lapdrön, chöd-related texts, doctrinal works from the various lineages, and studies of the wrathful pantheon and protective magic (Buddhist and Bön) are now widely available. I understand more clearly now that the practice that had fascinated me was about severing one’s attachment to one’s individual self, and in an act of absolute compassion making, in dismemberment, what the military often refers to as “the ultimate sacrifice.”
I began Salient by placing these two poles of obsession in proximity to one another. And waiting. In the charged field between them I originally thought I might find The Missing. And that they, too, might finally be safe.
I am grateful to those, living and dead, who have proved good companions on confusing ground. The misunderstandings are mine. May the protectors be patient.
Ieper/Ypres, Belgium
November 2017