This story from Jim Banholzer originally appeared under the comment section about The Magic Teapots. But it’s such a powerful story, we decided to post it.
Dissimilar teacups are a potent metaphor:
Several weeks after piloting the atomic bomb that unleashed its devastation upon Hiroshima, Japan, U.S. Commander Paul “Warfield” Tibbets walked through and examined the swelled streets of Nagasaki where his comrades-in-arms had dropped the second bomb.
There “to sate his academic curiosity,” Commander Tibbets nonchalantly purchased some souvenir rice bowls and wooden teacups, later remarking, “Damndest thing you ever saw.”
Throughout his life, which ended only last year, Commander Tibbets always maintained that surgically dropping these vaporizing bombs was a patriotic mission that saved both sides millions of lives from what would otherwise have been a long enduring horrendous battle.
Around the same time as Commander Tibbet’s postwar walk, Navy skipper and Axis sub chaser Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who went on to become San Francisco’s City Lights Bookstore founder, peacenik warrior and beat poet extraordinaire, hiked among the same Nagasaki ruins. There he observed—as San Francisco Chronicle writer Paul McHugh reported two Veteran Days ago: “I saw a giant field of scorched mulch. It sprawled out to the horizon; 3 square miles looking like someone had worked it over with a huge blowtorch. A few sticks from buildings jutted up like black arms,” Ferlinghetti says. “I found a teacup that seemed like it had human flesh fused into it, just melted into the porcelain.” In that instant,” said the former submarine chaser Ferlinghetti, “I became a total pacifist.”
I swear, there’s a weird loop here, Cynthia! Thanks for posting this. Maybe we’ll all figure this stuff out as a group mind or something!
Okay , I just have to tell you…… A while ago I had posted on my blog my little incident about the mention of Leonard Cohen. You responded to me about that because you remembered having seen a “Leonard Cohen interview”. That made 3 Leonard Cohen incidents for me within a week’s time. In the telling of these occurences to a friend who was unfamiliar with him, I was telling her that for me Leonard Cohen had been a big name “back then” , as had Lawrence Ferlenghetti.
Since your responding to my post , I have been following yours. Lo and behold, today you retell the above story, and who was mentioned? Right Lawrence Ferlenghetti .
Now I’ve become quite convinced that there is something in these intertwined stories of poets that I need to pay attention to, but for the life of me , I can not fathom what the message is. Guess I just need to keep my ear tuned a little more carefully to the universe.
I love your blog, by the way.
There were several levels of Max’s magic teapot story, which I thoroughly enjoyed. The part about adventuring to far away nooks and crannies, then finding treasure within his own walls, reminds me of the There and Back again story of Beck Weathers on Mount Everest, who returned home from a near-death experience to discover he had been ignoring the best treasure life could give him – his loving wife.
Another synchronicity: After rereading Max’s story, something else struck a chord and suddenly I realized that I had blogged about his underground spelunking experiences before. Last year while doing family genealogy research, I discovered a story about Banholzer North Mississippi Beer, where a branch of our family had stored beer bottles in a mile and a half long cave they dug beneath St. Paul in the mid-1800’s. In one of the adventure stories I linked to, they mentioned Max’s action squad. Not only that, but at the time I forwarded this story to Rob MacGregor!
https://www.citypages.com/content/printVersion/12739
Maybe we should call this synchronicity rubbing magic teapot genie-logy.