I have been looking for that photograph for the longest time. I have flipped through so many photo magazines in book superstores trying to find it. Today I remembered to google it. Google has changed my art of living, let me tell you…
Anyway, I first saw the picture on this PBS documentary about photography –it might have been about Time Magazine photos (Though I couldn’t find the picture in a collection of Time Magazine photos throughout history…) It’s the skull of a Japanese soldier that the girl’s boyfriend sent to her during WWII. Apparently, it was the trend to send enemy skulls across the sea to loved ones.
The photograph astounds me, as it probably does anyone, because of the way it exposes the society’s tendency (in that day? have we changed at all?) to shrug off human life. It just seems so… I don’t know.. Ancient Rome or something. It’s one thing for the folks at war to be immune to the horror of skulls and things, but the fact that this girl, far from the fighting, can share a room with it and not flinch is a bit hard for me to digest. Or maybe there is something in that expression–almost underneath the expression–that seems to ask whose skull it is. I mean, if anyone received such a “keepsake,” I hope they asked the question at least once.
Today in my reading of Thich Naht Hanh’s Living Buddha, Living Christ, he referenced Jesus’ bid for us to love our enemies and said that once we love our enemy, he is no longer our enemy. Clever for Jesus to put it this way, then. We do have to do the loving to get to a place where we have no enemies (not that we can see). It’s not just something we’re going to wake up knowing. Having no enemies is a practice, like anything else.
