When I occasionally lead visitors through the archaeological museum in Parma, Italy, where I live, the epigraphic slabs and fragments of Roman writing always amaze.  The physical act of committing words to marmoreal permanence seems a perfect match of material and means.   On the ground floor of the museum, the largest Roman bronze tablet with writing ever found lists agricultural low interest loans given to compensate Apennine farmers whose grapes and wine were at a price disadvantage to products sold  on the alluvial Po plain.  The august dimensions in warm. buffed metal—one and one half meters by nearly four meters—carrying the names of people receiving the assistance —glow with the economic power of Rome in the middle of the second century, CE.  Another revealing feature of their far-sighted social welfare: the interest from the loans was used to feed poor children in the area. 
            In our age, instead of weighty materials and time-consuming production, we have a fluctuating form for words that is nearly instantaneous and, in many ways, without context.  In order to write, we must turn on a machine and, to compose, we look straight ahead at an illuminated screen.  These are surely altering features of our new relationships to words.  Instead of looking down and thus, down into one’s own mind or gut, one is at eye level facing a flatly illuminated Other.  Writing is closer to a social activity by the very positioning of one’s head.   The words appear quickly.  Hesitation over the keys triggers a message of alarm in the computer itself. There may even be sound.  Each session we venture out onto a kind of electronic stage.  Distinctions within and among concepts feel very different because of the very process by which they are generated.  They could not be further from aspirations to endure in stone.  
The idea of objective truth seems a more natural consideration when one holds a hand-written page in one’s hands.  Not that the interlocutor was necessarily more truthful when words were being written by a hand translating from inwardness. But there is an undeniable feel of differences between how one sources words if the tool is a chisel, or a pen, or a Selectric. The weight on one’s shoulders when writing with a computer is less.  The use of resources is no longer a subtle conditioning issue. The screen mirrors one’s thoughts at a faster, blurrier  pace.  Speech patterns move closer to connecting.  Electronic writing mutates, dissolves, and conceives, from the beginning, of a different audience and way of being received.   The reader is considered a companion, a player. 
            Anyway, the chance to speak beyond the published paper page exists now.  So the question is: how can I use this chance, without distracting the reader from the essay, “Seeing Butterflies”, as it was written.  The essay urged readers to enter silent thought.  It suggested that they explore their imaginations.  I wanted an essay that was carved beyond ego and aspired to permanence.  What can I add to something that I hoped was pristine, open-ended but complete?
             More thoughts on the Iraq war are something that I can add to my essay on “Seeing Butterflies”.  The war in Iraq and my struggle to understand how US information concerning the war was distorted or missing was the initial reason for writing my piece.  I still cannot understand how the subject of war and thinking about fact and fiction in life and death matters, can be of so little interest to so many Americans. I  still wonder how fear (and hardly for the first time in history) can suppress a need to know.
 In recent trips to the United States, the war, far from being a burning issue, still cannot even be brought up in many circles.  It’s considered rude, off limits, even though it has plunged the entire world into a new period of uncertainty.  In the nineteen eighties, as managing editor of a journal of political and economic analysis, I edited a book on nuclear proliferation.  The popular climate then was still one of arms reduction and arms control.  The fact that we are now talking so lightly about nuclear options for western defenses is another thing I can stress in this electronic piece.  I can underline again the idea that all life is sacred.
 All living creatures want to live.  Until we grasp that, grasp that a butterfly has a communication system and a path and habits and need for a place, and that all human beings have feelings, hopes, and violent impulses, too, we will find ourselves ever closer to destroying the unique world that we inhabit.  There are no simple solutions.  Each act we make pushes things forward and blocks others.  Each time we think we are saving something we may tip a balance negatively elsewhere.  Thought linked with feeling is the only solution.  The butterfly essay was a call for thinking and for writing as an act of thinking. It was also a call for listening.     
            The war in Iraq is transmitted every night on television in Italy.  Iraqi families are shown, bleeding, running, drinking from muddy puddles.  Children.  Poverty.  Violence.  U.S. soldiers, too, are shown injured.  Running.  The utter chaos is shown.  The holes left by terrorist bombs are shown.  The rubble from explosions is shown. When a soldier dies in Nassirya, where 32 Italians have died in these three years, the body is followed every inch of the journey from the mortuary in Iraq to the airport to the Italian airport to the   cathedral in an Italian city, to the cemetery where the young or middle aged life is sadly buried.  The family house is shown, the desolate fiancé, and then the Mass.  For the most recent death of an Italian soldier, as for all the previous ones, the funeral was televised.  The ceremony did not exalt war or pray for victory.  It honored the utter sacrifice of war.  In the most recent Italian funeral, as for all the previous ones, the cameras panned from the flag-draped casket to the president of the Republic, the Prime Minister, cabinet secretaries, two choirs, a military orchestra, soldiers in uniform. Hundreds of local citizens packed the church and as has been true for each death, the solemn and excruciating experience of loss was focused for an hour and one half.  We were made to identify and participate.  The death in war belonged to each of us.  The faces in grief defined the word sacrifice.  And the grief, once again, tore at our hearts, filling them with questions of accountability.
            The willingness to sacrifice human lives on either side in war can only come from a sense of an unavoidable purpose.  The strategy of our current US government has been to diminish thinking about what constitutes purpose by removing citizens from the appalling reality of the situation we have brought about. It has largely removed from the media the reality of the motives for war and the reality of destruction and death.  By using inflated unreal language that glorifies war as a game to win and, in many cases, inventing the stories in order to pursue a goal of war that was started under false premises, the US government actually mocks the concept of sacrifice.  We have never mourned our dead. 
            The butterfly essay was written to support the often forgotten angle in reality where the mystery of life appears.  It describes, in the flashes of wings, the unimaginable beauty and terror of everyday.   It argues for interconnections that can give us courage. If we cultivated the love for truth, the importance of borders between fact and fiction would become far clearer.
 
            Of course, since butterflies are part of a living story, I shall add a few new coincidences.  The galleys for the butterfly essay reached me on my son’s birthday.  A very soft touch.  I add, too, that on the day I sent the essay in as a submission, a  fascinating author, Richard Burns, in England, sent in a poem to the editor, John Matthias, an old friend of his, and Matthias forwarded the piece “Conversation between a blue butterfly and a murdered man at one of the entrances to the Underworld” to me.  Richard Burns and I began corresponding. His work, which has many links to Ex-Yugoslavia, has taken him into Serbia; his collection, “The Blue Butterfly” is based on a Nazi massacre that happened there in 1941. The links between death and eternity were very deeply felt and the origins of the cycle reached deep into his psyche when a blue butterfly landed on his finger.
 Recently he told me that he has begun a long collection of poems, beautiful as all his work is, on hands.  I held my breath, because I, too, am working on hands. He and I are two of six billion people working and we crossed paths, as our minds connected through butterflies and then, hands. 
Two more lines on the paper essay.  A publishing house in Italy is going to translate a book of my essays: the essay that set the project in motion was “ Seeing Butterflies.”  My second thought refers to the challenge and privilege of paper, which must never just been seen in economic terms.  Readers of the electronic version, I ask you to  return to the Notre Dame Review that is printed and bound.  Hold it and meditate and think about differences.   Feel the importance of silent thinking.  Be still with the magazine and follow the impulse of permanence when you sense it on the page.

                                                                           Wallis Wilde-Menozzi