Planet Damnation

… war began, that is, an event took place opposed to human reason and to human nature. Millions of men perpetrated against one another such innumerable crimes, frauds, treacheries, thefts … incendiarisms, and murders, as in whole centuries are not recorded in the annals of all the law courts of the world, but which those who committed them did not at the time regard as being crimes.

- Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“There are no poets in Bravo Company of the US 24th Mechanised Infantry Division. They admit that their letters home are full of boredom and descriptions of the heat. They read a bit, sleep a bit, work a lot, mostly at night when the air cools. They live in a world of oppressive silence, so that you can hear Private Andrew Shewmaker rummaging around deep inside the hot bowels of his M-I tank. When he climbs out of the turret, he is clutching a folded sheet of brown cardboard. He leans his right elbow on the gun barrel and scuffs the glistening, sugary sand away with his left hand before sitting on the scorched outer casing of the armor. He unfolds the cardboard with great care, as if it is a love letter.

“Running across it is a set of straight lines, intersecting and dividing in a series of perfectly drawn circles. Each circle possesses a name. Saturn, Pluto, Uranus, Mercury, Earth. At the top, in biro, an almost childish hand – it is Private Shewmaker’s – has underlined the words “Planet Damnation”. It’s his idea. All you need is a dice. “I wanted to keep the guys from being bored,” he says in a shy, embarrassed way. “We each start off in a spaceship from Planet Earth and have to travel far through space. At each planet – at Mars, say – we have to take on fuel. But distances are so great that we start running short. You have to try and reach just one more planet before you run out of gas and then you can refuel. The last person to keep going, he wins. The rest lose.” 

“Private Shewmaker does not realise, I think, that he has captured the lives of his tank crew on this creased, rectangular sheet of cardboard. Isolation, the desperate need for fuel, fear of the unknown. On the tank around him, and sitting in the sand beside his tracks, Shewmaker’s friends listen intently as he explains the board game. In the eleven days since they settled into this immense, lonely planet, they have received no letters from home, no newspapers, no hot meals. Many of them have no maps. When they talk, they do so in a monologue, having thought a lot and spoken little since they arrived. On the other side of the gun barrel, Sergeant Darrin Johnson is sitting on his haunches, eyes focused on that point in the desert where the sand is so white and the blue sky so pale that the two become one. Not once does he look at you when he speaks. He has been married for just twenty days.”

- Robert Fisk, The Great War for Civilisation

John Psathas, in writing Planet Damnation, took great inspiration from Robert Fisk’s chapter of the same name in Fisk’s novel, The Great War for Civilisation. Fisk wrote extensively on the experiences and horrors of war, and the consequences of political leaders misleading the public to commit to a war in the middle east under false pretenses.

War itself is a means to an end. In Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, he proposes one possible ultimate pursuit of human activity as the ability of one “to flourish.” Aristotle goes on to explain that flourishing is a means to itself - that we can view other virtues, such as respect, intellect, and pleasure, as a means to other things. But flourishing is the ultimate goal in that it meets all of our needs, and is the goal of everything we do. Aristotle then goes on to explain that this act of flourishing extends beyond ourselves, but also to the people that are a part of our lives. There are limits to this, however, in that if we allow ourselves to consider our ancestors, distant neighbors and long-lost relatives, our circle of flourishing soon becomes too large for us to fathomably flourish, and thus achieve happiness.

What is the purpose of war? Most commonly, it is to gain power and ability over another group. Therefore, in order for us as humans to flourish, we cannot take away the ability for others to also flourish. John Psathas, in writing his Planet Damnation, presents us with this same conflict of thought - how can we grow through war without directly taking away from someone else? Psathas describes his attempts to adequately portray the ironic, cynicism of heroism in the context of war. How can one be heroic at the expense of others?

In Psathas’s accompaniment, he intentionally explains that the orchestration continually shifts instrumentation so that the listener grasps on to the timpani as a beacon of light through a dark, winding cave of sounds. Psathas uses the timpani, in its steadfastness, to provide a sense of familiarity in the same way that Fisk describes Shewmaker clinging on to his piece of crumbled cardboard throughout uncertain times of war.

The timpani, in Planet Damnation, take on the role of the hero. Psathas wrote many of the elements of the piece to be reminiscent of soundtracks that accompany heroic or epic themes in movies. He uses the timpani as the protagonist of the story, utilizing it’s ability to single-handedly overpower the rest of the ensemble it accompanies. It is a story of challenge, struggle, chaos, and ultimately triumph.