would burn; an eternal fire; its meaning entrusted to a child for
keeping. I think they stayed calm inside the fire; burning; I
think they stayed quiet; I mourned them; I grieved for them; I
felt some shadow o f the pain; maybe there was no calm;
maybe they shrieked; maybe it was an agony obscene even to
God; imagine. I’d go to school on just some regular day and
it’d happen; at night, on the news, they’d show it; the gray
picture; a Buddhist in flames; because he didn’t like the
government in Vietnam; because the United States was
hurting Vietnam; we tormented them. Y o u ’d see a plain street
in Saigon and suddenly a figure would ignite; a quiet, calm
figure, simple, in simple robes, rags almost; a plain, simple
man. It was a protest, a chosen immolation, a decision,
planned for; he burned him self to say there were no words; to
tell me there were no words; he wanted me to know that in
Vietnam there was an agony against which this agony, self-
immolation, was nothing, meaningless, minor; he wanted me
to know; and I know; he wanted me to remember; and I
remember. He wanted the flames to reach me; he wanted the
heat to graze me; he wanted this self-immolation, a pain past
words, to communicate: you devastate us here, a pain past
words. The Buddhists didn’t want to fight or to hurt someone
else; so they killed themselves; in w ays unbearable to watch; to
say that this was some small part o f the pain we caused, some
small measure o f the pain we made; an anguish to communicate anguish. Years later I was grow n, or nearly so, and there was Norm an M orrison, some man, a regular man, ordinary,
and he walked to the front o f the White House, as close as he
could get, a normal looking citizen, and he poured gasoline all
over him self and he lit it and the police couldn’t stop him or get
near him, he was a pillar o f fire, and he died, slow, in fire,
because the war was w rong and words weren’t helping, and he
said we have to show them so he showed them; he said this is
the anguish I will undergo to show you the anguish there,
there are no words, I can show you but I can’t tell you because
no words get through to you, yo u ’ve got a barricade against
feeling and I have to burn it down. I grew up, a stepdaughter
o f brazen protest, immense protest; each time I measured m y
ow n resistance against the burning man; I felt the anguish o f
Vietnam; sometimes the War couldn’t get out o f m y mind and
there was nothing between me and it; I felt it pure, the pain o f
them over there, how wronged they were; you see, we were
tormenting them. In the end it’s always simple; we were
tormenting them. Others cared too; as much as I did; we were
mad to stop it; the crime, as we called it; it was a crime.
Sometimes ordinary life was a buffer; you thought about
orangejuice or something; and then there’d be no buffer; there
