Joseph Hirsch's Blog - Posts Tagged "metaphysics"
World War Ten
Sometimes I’ll be thinking about two different, seemingly unrelated concepts, and then all of a sudden the two dovetail into each other. I’ll give you an example. “Deep Time” is an idea I think I heard in relation to H.P. Lovecraft, though it can probably apply to other writers. This is the idea that the Elders (or the Gods, or the Universe itself) perceive time in a way that is wholly alien to us yet just as valid. I think this concept may be as old as the Bible, but it’s pretty easy to understand from either a scientific or metaphysical standpoint. Our two basic benchmarks for measuring time are the changing of the seasons and ageing throughout our lifetime. In deep time terms, the time in which the creation of oceans or mountain ranges occurs, something like fifty years is maybe three seconds.
That’s deep time.
The other, less complicated concept I’ve been thinking about is what the self-defense expert Rory Miller calls “the dead man’s ten.” Saying that someone died a violent death is a bit like saying someone died of AIDs; it’s not accurate to say someone died of AIDs, because all people who die “from AIDS” die from the complications related to the lowering of immunity and T-cell count that comes with the AIDs virus. People who “die a violent death” or who are killed by violence usually die from the shock related to the trauma, not the trauma itself (there are a couple of exceptions to this rule, where one is instantly dead before they have time to process anything, even at the autonomic level).
This is why in so many movies and shows about war (and in real wars) guys try to bullshit injured soldiers about their wounds and their severity. If your friend got his legs blown off, but thinks maybe his legs have just gone numb, and he asks you how he’s doing, while laying there prone, you have to not only try to bullshit him with your words but sweettalk him with your eyes. If he can read your terror there, it can kill him even faster.
The dead man’s ten, then, is the idea that people can more or less have ten seconds between when something that’s “instantly” fatal happens to them, and when they actually die. For people who’ve been involved in real shootings (in war or in a police situation), this explains why killing is many times anticlimactic and not like in the movies. A guy gets shot, doesn’t usually get lifted off his feet or go flying as if he’s attached to wires. It looks a bit like a hard wind hit him, he walks or maybe stumbles as if exhausted or drunk, and then he lays down or slides into a sitting positions along a wall. Then he dies.
So Deep Time and the Dead Man’s ten were running through my mind, and joined up specifically the question of: If the Elders or the Gods or the Ancients or the Universe or Yahweh, or G-D, who dwells in deep time, were to have his or her or its own concept of “a dead man’s ten seconds,” what would it look like?
I think, as Henry Miller said in Tropic of Cancer, we are all dead here. I think there is a bit of lag involved between when we as a fatal species were dealt the fatal blow (or dealt ourselves the fatal blow) and when we as a species will literally stop existing. It’s nuanced enough that we who are dealing with our own lives (and deaths) can’t notice it, but I think we as a species, humanity, are walking around in that ten seconds.
One can point to specific examples or indicators that we’re on the way out, whether moral, or environmental, or spiritual, or maybe Malthusian (just because Malthus took a pounding in the past doesn’t mean he can’t be right in the present or in the future).
I understand it’s a dark thought to have, but I spend a good bit of time in a dark cast of mind. Not pessimistic, mind you, just moreso curious at the horrible things we’re capable of doing and have already done to each other. I read quite a bit about war, especially the Great War. Many people tend to treat the Second World War (especially with its Holocaust and nuclear annihilation) as a sort of rip in the continuum of meaning that had existed up until that point in human history (as bloody as it had been until that point, it had never felt quite so senseless), but the Second World War is in many ways a continuation and outgrowth of unresolved issues from the Great War (no need to rehash that here).
Most wars seemed to be about conquest, with the usual attendant horrors like rape and pillaging, as well as unexpected moments of kindness and mercy, like a soldier quietly sparing a weeping enemy, but the Great War seemed without meaning and confusing, and more importantly, despite the hatred for the General Staff and war profiteers and hypocritical clergymen, it seemed to be a war without someone at the helm or actually directing things. Read enough about the Great War and men who had any mind left were convinced after three years or so that the War was never going to end because it could not end, because it was no longer in human hands. War, as a living and breathing creature, had achieved some kind of strange sentience and had decided to make the insane humans who had unleashed Him kill each other to the last man.
Europe came pretty close.
Of course, some of this “sentience” that I’m speaking about is just major technological advances unleashed in the Great War, which amplified the cruelty of weapons (things like phosgene gas, flamethrowers, early aerial bombardment) while allowing the perpetrators of the cruelty to put some space between themselves and the effect of their actions on their remote victims.
The use of drones these days makes me think we’re pretty close to the singularity moment between humanity’s loss of humanity and its capacity to kill remotely without thinking about the consequences (though I’ve heard suicide rates and depression for drone operators is fairly high, which, paradoxically, is good news inasmuch as it means they still have the ability to feel and we are not yet machines).
My gut tells me that the Great War was the moment where nature or the universe or God (or Man himself) squeezed the trigger and the bullet entered the flesh. The following timespan of roughly a century, with all of its wars and horrors and some miraculous successes and cultural and scientific efflorescence, may have been seconds 2 through 5 or something like that in our collective dead man’s ten.
Maybe we have five seconds (roughly 200 years) before we realize we offed ourselves in a frenzy of what the anarch and philosopher Ernst Junger once called “Titanism” (though that’s a topic for another day and another blog entry).
That’s deep time.
The other, less complicated concept I’ve been thinking about is what the self-defense expert Rory Miller calls “the dead man’s ten.” Saying that someone died a violent death is a bit like saying someone died of AIDs; it’s not accurate to say someone died of AIDs, because all people who die “from AIDS” die from the complications related to the lowering of immunity and T-cell count that comes with the AIDs virus. People who “die a violent death” or who are killed by violence usually die from the shock related to the trauma, not the trauma itself (there are a couple of exceptions to this rule, where one is instantly dead before they have time to process anything, even at the autonomic level).
This is why in so many movies and shows about war (and in real wars) guys try to bullshit injured soldiers about their wounds and their severity. If your friend got his legs blown off, but thinks maybe his legs have just gone numb, and he asks you how he’s doing, while laying there prone, you have to not only try to bullshit him with your words but sweettalk him with your eyes. If he can read your terror there, it can kill him even faster.
The dead man’s ten, then, is the idea that people can more or less have ten seconds between when something that’s “instantly” fatal happens to them, and when they actually die. For people who’ve been involved in real shootings (in war or in a police situation), this explains why killing is many times anticlimactic and not like in the movies. A guy gets shot, doesn’t usually get lifted off his feet or go flying as if he’s attached to wires. It looks a bit like a hard wind hit him, he walks or maybe stumbles as if exhausted or drunk, and then he lays down or slides into a sitting positions along a wall. Then he dies.
So Deep Time and the Dead Man’s ten were running through my mind, and joined up specifically the question of: If the Elders or the Gods or the Ancients or the Universe or Yahweh, or G-D, who dwells in deep time, were to have his or her or its own concept of “a dead man’s ten seconds,” what would it look like?
I think, as Henry Miller said in Tropic of Cancer, we are all dead here. I think there is a bit of lag involved between when we as a fatal species were dealt the fatal blow (or dealt ourselves the fatal blow) and when we as a species will literally stop existing. It’s nuanced enough that we who are dealing with our own lives (and deaths) can’t notice it, but I think we as a species, humanity, are walking around in that ten seconds.
One can point to specific examples or indicators that we’re on the way out, whether moral, or environmental, or spiritual, or maybe Malthusian (just because Malthus took a pounding in the past doesn’t mean he can’t be right in the present or in the future).
I understand it’s a dark thought to have, but I spend a good bit of time in a dark cast of mind. Not pessimistic, mind you, just moreso curious at the horrible things we’re capable of doing and have already done to each other. I read quite a bit about war, especially the Great War. Many people tend to treat the Second World War (especially with its Holocaust and nuclear annihilation) as a sort of rip in the continuum of meaning that had existed up until that point in human history (as bloody as it had been until that point, it had never felt quite so senseless), but the Second World War is in many ways a continuation and outgrowth of unresolved issues from the Great War (no need to rehash that here).
Most wars seemed to be about conquest, with the usual attendant horrors like rape and pillaging, as well as unexpected moments of kindness and mercy, like a soldier quietly sparing a weeping enemy, but the Great War seemed without meaning and confusing, and more importantly, despite the hatred for the General Staff and war profiteers and hypocritical clergymen, it seemed to be a war without someone at the helm or actually directing things. Read enough about the Great War and men who had any mind left were convinced after three years or so that the War was never going to end because it could not end, because it was no longer in human hands. War, as a living and breathing creature, had achieved some kind of strange sentience and had decided to make the insane humans who had unleashed Him kill each other to the last man.
Europe came pretty close.
Of course, some of this “sentience” that I’m speaking about is just major technological advances unleashed in the Great War, which amplified the cruelty of weapons (things like phosgene gas, flamethrowers, early aerial bombardment) while allowing the perpetrators of the cruelty to put some space between themselves and the effect of their actions on their remote victims.
The use of drones these days makes me think we’re pretty close to the singularity moment between humanity’s loss of humanity and its capacity to kill remotely without thinking about the consequences (though I’ve heard suicide rates and depression for drone operators is fairly high, which, paradoxically, is good news inasmuch as it means they still have the ability to feel and we are not yet machines).
My gut tells me that the Great War was the moment where nature or the universe or God (or Man himself) squeezed the trigger and the bullet entered the flesh. The following timespan of roughly a century, with all of its wars and horrors and some miraculous successes and cultural and scientific efflorescence, may have been seconds 2 through 5 or something like that in our collective dead man’s ten.
Maybe we have five seconds (roughly 200 years) before we realize we offed ourselves in a frenzy of what the anarch and philosopher Ernst Junger once called “Titanism” (though that’s a topic for another day and another blog entry).
Sacred Sad Time
The “eternal return” is the idea that we are condemned, blessed, or just fated to live through the same event over and over again, with perhaps just enough variation in each new manifestation to make noticing this spiritual Deja Vu the purview of a select few. To give you an example, there was a rapper who spoke of the ghetto as being a massive slave ship, and crack cocaine as cotton growing up figuratively from the concrete. The Ur-Scene is destined to be repeated again and again, and can be recognized in its new and attenuated forms no matter how novel they may seem at first glance.
Another use of the term (not exactly the same, but related in concept) is that the original act is not always repeated, but that one can establish a link between the present and the past through ritual. The most obvious example of this would be the Catholic idea of transubstantiation. A congregation on Sunday in a postmodern megachurch is not literally present at the Last Supper, and neither is a room full of reform Jews who break Matza literally wandering through the desert with Moses, but through the ritual one can establish the link to the past, and, based on the fervency of one’s belief or their own metaphysical worldview, one can really go back there through the act alone.
This latter concept was popular with the lay theologian Mercia Eliade. He spread the idea to Ernst Junger, the famous German veteran of the Great War, who experimented with everything from LSD to entomology in his quest to unlock the Urstoff/essence governing the heart of the world. I’m not sure if his efforts panned out, but he did live to be something like 102 years old and was still smoking cigarettes, laughing, and sipping wine in his Methuselah-esque dotage, so he must have figured something out.
I’m only thinking of Junger now, and especially in relation to the concept of the Eternal Return and Sacred Time, because I can’t help feeling a link established between his experience in the Great War and something I felt during the war in Iraq.
Understand that the two wars cannot be compared, that more people were killed in five minutes in the Great War than were killed over the course of a decade in both the Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq combined.
It’s the feeling I’m talking about, that feeling Junger expressed while humping his gear with his fellow soldiers, as a young junior officer, in between bloody engagements like the (comparatively) smaller skirmishes at Guillemot and the absolute charnel house of something like the Somme.
I’ve never forgotten the scene from Im Stahlgewittern/Storms of Steel, in which Junger, the arch-conservative epitome of Prussian manhood, broke down crying:
“In one terrible attack, in which a direct hit kills about 20 men, a baby-faced soldier, who a few days earlier had been laughed at for breaking down under the weight of munitions boxes, now, unasked, picks them out of the crater and lugs them along: I threw myself to the ground, and sobbed hysterically, while my men stood grimly about.”
Left unsaid in all the debate about which novels or veteran-writers are pro-war, antiwar, or just intent on showing war as a phenomenon, is that the ideology seems to come after the war, rather than during (though Junger’s philosophy was already in chrysalis form while he was under fire). Ernst Junger, as many times as he was wounded and as unquestioned as his bravery was, did things in the Great War that not only could be construed as cowardly, but could have been classified as executable offenses if observed by the wrong general staff officer in a foul humor. Antiwar and prowar writers have the same response to incoming mortar rounds, which is to duck.
I’m still stuck on Junger’s breakdown, though, that moment where he saw that earnest young soldier trying to carry a burden that was too much for him, and he started crying hysterically.
Maybe it’s the nearness of Veteran’s Day. My neighbor’s kid left some candy and a “Thank you for your service” card on my porch, so they must know about my time in the Army. We don’t talk much so maybe it’s the haircut that’s a dead giveaway.
I didn’t cry during the war much, but I certainly felt like it quite often. I sobbed hysterically inside whenever I saw the local Jundi (Iraqi soldiers) doing their version of the mounted convoy to patrol the streets. Unlike the American soldiers, they didn’t use up-armored vehicles and Humvees and Bradleys. They were too poor for that. They had old Datsun pickup trucks with beach chairs and modified chaise lounges tied or bolted down in their beds, where soldiers would sit with dusty old AK-47s hoping not to get picked off by local insurgents as they cruised through the countryside.
Their earnestness humbled and embarrassed me. And even now, where the nightmare of that war has receded for most Americans (even for some vets), I still continue to relive similar scenes, feel that inward sobbing from Iraq that reminds me of Junger’s hysterical crying in the Great War.
The reason for this is simple: I watch Tagesschau, which is a German twice-daily news show, in order to maintain my language skills I picked up while stationed in Deutschland. And since their media is less shy about covering the region honestly, I end up seeing a lot more disturbing footage of the war-torn Middle East than your average “Ami” (as the Germans call us Americans).
I torture myself with images of the blood-covered babies being brought out of rubble by weeping fathers, or the fat old matronly women with warts on their noses and sorrowful eyes, hijabed and wailing at the news crews filming them, begging for the madness to stop. Worst of all for me, though, is seeing those poorly accoutered and poorly trained locals who are willing to stay and fight in the rubble of their former cities, while a roomful of well-meaning but powerless people half a continent away hammer out some detail in a finely appointed room, drafting up resolutions and ceasefires that don’t stop the bombs for a minute. UN resolutions seem to have as much effect on the tides of war as saying “Nice doggie” in a soothing voice would seem to have on a rabid and frothing rottweiler biting through your forearm and finding its taste surpasses steak.
It makes me want to cry to see those ill-armored ragtag militias, a lot of the soldiers still young and earnest enough to even smile in the face of what they don’t know is coming. Yes, I want to cry and I can’t. And I won’t be doing shit to celebrate Veteran’s Day, aside from staying in the house and listening to music as the hours pass, with my dog at my side.
But that’s the way I prefer to spend every day, holidays included, so don’t pity me.
Save a thought for the poor Jundi, though.
Another use of the term (not exactly the same, but related in concept) is that the original act is not always repeated, but that one can establish a link between the present and the past through ritual. The most obvious example of this would be the Catholic idea of transubstantiation. A congregation on Sunday in a postmodern megachurch is not literally present at the Last Supper, and neither is a room full of reform Jews who break Matza literally wandering through the desert with Moses, but through the ritual one can establish the link to the past, and, based on the fervency of one’s belief or their own metaphysical worldview, one can really go back there through the act alone.
This latter concept was popular with the lay theologian Mercia Eliade. He spread the idea to Ernst Junger, the famous German veteran of the Great War, who experimented with everything from LSD to entomology in his quest to unlock the Urstoff/essence governing the heart of the world. I’m not sure if his efforts panned out, but he did live to be something like 102 years old and was still smoking cigarettes, laughing, and sipping wine in his Methuselah-esque dotage, so he must have figured something out.
I’m only thinking of Junger now, and especially in relation to the concept of the Eternal Return and Sacred Time, because I can’t help feeling a link established between his experience in the Great War and something I felt during the war in Iraq.
Understand that the two wars cannot be compared, that more people were killed in five minutes in the Great War than were killed over the course of a decade in both the Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq combined.
It’s the feeling I’m talking about, that feeling Junger expressed while humping his gear with his fellow soldiers, as a young junior officer, in between bloody engagements like the (comparatively) smaller skirmishes at Guillemot and the absolute charnel house of something like the Somme.
I’ve never forgotten the scene from Im Stahlgewittern/Storms of Steel, in which Junger, the arch-conservative epitome of Prussian manhood, broke down crying:
“In one terrible attack, in which a direct hit kills about 20 men, a baby-faced soldier, who a few days earlier had been laughed at for breaking down under the weight of munitions boxes, now, unasked, picks them out of the crater and lugs them along: I threw myself to the ground, and sobbed hysterically, while my men stood grimly about.”
Left unsaid in all the debate about which novels or veteran-writers are pro-war, antiwar, or just intent on showing war as a phenomenon, is that the ideology seems to come after the war, rather than during (though Junger’s philosophy was already in chrysalis form while he was under fire). Ernst Junger, as many times as he was wounded and as unquestioned as his bravery was, did things in the Great War that not only could be construed as cowardly, but could have been classified as executable offenses if observed by the wrong general staff officer in a foul humor. Antiwar and prowar writers have the same response to incoming mortar rounds, which is to duck.
I’m still stuck on Junger’s breakdown, though, that moment where he saw that earnest young soldier trying to carry a burden that was too much for him, and he started crying hysterically.
Maybe it’s the nearness of Veteran’s Day. My neighbor’s kid left some candy and a “Thank you for your service” card on my porch, so they must know about my time in the Army. We don’t talk much so maybe it’s the haircut that’s a dead giveaway.
I didn’t cry during the war much, but I certainly felt like it quite often. I sobbed hysterically inside whenever I saw the local Jundi (Iraqi soldiers) doing their version of the mounted convoy to patrol the streets. Unlike the American soldiers, they didn’t use up-armored vehicles and Humvees and Bradleys. They were too poor for that. They had old Datsun pickup trucks with beach chairs and modified chaise lounges tied or bolted down in their beds, where soldiers would sit with dusty old AK-47s hoping not to get picked off by local insurgents as they cruised through the countryside.
Their earnestness humbled and embarrassed me. And even now, where the nightmare of that war has receded for most Americans (even for some vets), I still continue to relive similar scenes, feel that inward sobbing from Iraq that reminds me of Junger’s hysterical crying in the Great War.
The reason for this is simple: I watch Tagesschau, which is a German twice-daily news show, in order to maintain my language skills I picked up while stationed in Deutschland. And since their media is less shy about covering the region honestly, I end up seeing a lot more disturbing footage of the war-torn Middle East than your average “Ami” (as the Germans call us Americans).
I torture myself with images of the blood-covered babies being brought out of rubble by weeping fathers, or the fat old matronly women with warts on their noses and sorrowful eyes, hijabed and wailing at the news crews filming them, begging for the madness to stop. Worst of all for me, though, is seeing those poorly accoutered and poorly trained locals who are willing to stay and fight in the rubble of their former cities, while a roomful of well-meaning but powerless people half a continent away hammer out some detail in a finely appointed room, drafting up resolutions and ceasefires that don’t stop the bombs for a minute. UN resolutions seem to have as much effect on the tides of war as saying “Nice doggie” in a soothing voice would seem to have on a rabid and frothing rottweiler biting through your forearm and finding its taste surpasses steak.
It makes me want to cry to see those ill-armored ragtag militias, a lot of the soldiers still young and earnest enough to even smile in the face of what they don’t know is coming. Yes, I want to cry and I can’t. And I won’t be doing shit to celebrate Veteran’s Day, aside from staying in the house and listening to music as the hours pass, with my dog at my side.
But that’s the way I prefer to spend every day, holidays included, so don’t pity me.
Save a thought for the poor Jundi, though.
The Worst Last Words One could hear
I’m not a social person. It’s not that I don’t like people, but I’ve had more than enough of them. All the same, I do sometimes miss hanging out with my cousin and her husband. We’d go to the movies, or out to dinner, or just hang out at their house. I’d bring my terrier over and let their dogs romp around with mine while we played Scrabble. Normal stuff like that.
These people are Christians, but in a gentle way, not heavy-handed at all about it. I can’t remember how we got onto the specific subject, but I do remember one night my cousin’s husband (who I’ll call Bill) told me his mother’s last words, which she uttered on her deathbed in the hospital. “She just sat up, after sitting there for twenty minutes or so with her eyes closed. Then she opened her eyes, shouted, ‘You tricked me!’ and fell back down onto the pillow and died.”
How’s that for an exit? It ranks up there with Goethe’s Mehr licht! (“More light!”) and possibly bests the apocryphal chestnuts from Oscar Wilde’s last day on Earth (one of which I remember was “Either that wallpaper goes, or I do.”)
“You tricked me.”
Fuck.
Naturally I asked my cousin Bill what she meant by that. And of course Bill had no answer. He wanted to know, too. And there is the chance that his mother didn’t even know what she meant, either. People aren’t exactly lucid in their final moments all the time, which is why wills get contested on that “sound of mind” clause more than occasionally. There’s even a book dedicated to parsing the subtext of one crazy man’s last words recorded by a police stenographer in the hopes that this rumrunner’s hospital bed ramblings might yield some interesting clues as to the inner workings of the Mob (they didn’t).
Regardless of whether or not Bill’s mom meant anything with her last words, they stick in my craw. I can’t stop thinking about them. And at my lowest moments I think that the words are tied to the betrayal of her own religiosity, which she bequeathed to her son. In this explanation of “You tricked me!” the mother, having dedicated her life to right-living and expecting an eternal reward, sees only a massive vacuum of black Lovecraftian antimatter or whatever void we all face as we slough off our mortal coils.
I know nothing about Bill’s mother (aside from her last words), but in this explanation, I see her as a woman who was perhaps a little hedonistic at heart, like perhaps most people. She wished to indulge in a fling with some sailor while her husband was at sea, but she knew the Commandments forbade it, and so she abstained. In the front of her mind she told herself she’d done the right thing. But maybe elsewhere there was a kernel of regret, budding in her brain, telling her to go ahead and do it, and after the fact that little budding seed kept nagging at her, and she kept fighting it down, tamping it with the recital of the mantra that was her moral code. “I can’t do this to my husband. I can’t betray God’s laws like this.”
But then, as she died, she saw this fellow who had every intention of tupping the hell out of her when she was young. And here he was on the other side, still young and strapping, waiting and winged in the eternal void, but unwilling to lift or embrace her, because she had shunned the pleasures of the flesh with him back when she’d been a mortal. She’d thought her decision the right one, the moral one at the time, but only realized now that it had been a mere act of cowardice masquerading as righteousness.
Sometimes I wonder if the point of life is to maximize pleasure and not only over some long term, but merely in the moment. Part of this refrain in my brain (and, to be frank, in my soul) is probably just a byproduct of the cynicism in which we all marinate. Postmodern America is a very ugly place, with a very short attention span and a collective Id that, rather than being checked or even examined, is fanned and enflamed and encouraged in its every indulgent impulse. It wouldn’t take a prude to look around here (at least at the intersubjective world of pop culture) and see that something is horribly out of tilt.
But there is still a part of me that thinks that these mundane and material pleasures are all that is to be had, and since it’s all going to collapse soon (perhaps due to the icecaps melting, or some bespoke superbug manufactured in the makeshift lab that is some man’s garage), I might as well get mine, too, damnit, while the getting is good.
And since I’m not very attractive or rich, pleasure for me would naturally mean gorging on food.
I’ve lost sixty pounds over the course of the last year (probably more), and would like to keep losing weight. And yes, it feels good to walk around without carrying around that shifting burden of rubbery flesh that clung to me like a polyester suit to a sweaty preacher, but there are still times when I think of giving up and stuffing my face. And in those moments, even though the dissipation, the wallowing in fatitude (sic) is just a figment of my imagination, I still feel a kind of ecstasy that borders on the sinful just thinking about it.
I want to eat an entire pepperoni pizza with the lights off and the blinds drawn, using only my mouth, with my hands tied behind my back like the fat kid in the pie-eating contest in Stand By Me.
I want to use a spoon that practically has the dimensions of a soup ladle to dislodge chunks of chocolate chip from their frozen moorings in mounds of mint ice cream, gripping the pint with my other hand all slippery with condensation.
I want to eat twelve chicken wings, tilt the Styrofoam carryout box in which they came so that all the remaining hot sauce juices pour into the far corner of the container, and then I want to drink that mixture of chicken skin fat, marrow, and spicy broth like Bacchus quaffing the blood of his cult from a grapevine.
Yes, I’m a pig, but I’m a pig who’s denying himself a rut in the mud for reasons I can’t quite fathom. The “why?” question lays heavily upon my chest, growing ironically ever heavier as I myself continue to torture myself losing weight.
To what end am I losing weight? I have no spouse or kids for whom I need to extend my lifespan, or to whom my presence means anything. I have a dog, but considering that she probably only has five years left (at most), I could cast myself into an abyss of marathon takeout Chinese sessions while popping Percocet in a La-Z Boy on full recline from now until the last of her little canine heart palpitations and she would still beat me to the boneyard.
So why not just give in? For fear of having my porcine behind prodded with the Devil’s pitchfork if I were to succumb to the Schweinerei of gluttony I fantasized about a handful of paragraphs ago?
I guess I’m saying, I don’t want to die and realize that I deprived myself of some pleasure for reasons I’ll forget or that will be rendered inconsequential when I pass over to the other side. Yes, the pleasures which I’m denying myself are small, and they are pleasures with consequences, punishment that are more prosaic than pitchforks, waiting for me should I indulge in the transitory and chimerical joys of pigging out.
Before I burn in Hell, there’s the matter of heartburn with which I need to contend.
But regardless of burning in heart or burning in Hell, I would still have that moment, that second of glorious sinful bliss of backsliding that might be worth a millennium of teetotaler’s smug satisfaction. Charles Baudelaire spoke of that instant of ecstasy in exchange for an eternity of fire (though he was probably aiming his ken much higher, to some god’s ichor or at least some good opium, and not a cheeseburger).
The thing is, though, should I feel deceived in my final moments as an ex-fat man, at least I will not be shouting to the void, “You tricked me!”
My deception will have been self-imposed. So if I die (or rather when I die, since it’s a given that I’m going to die), give me a mirror to scream at, a reflection of myself which I can insult. And have someone there (police stenographer or layperson) to record my last words.
Maybe they’ll be funny.
Maybe they’ll be sad, or at least otherwise memorable.
And maybe they’ll be “More!” though unlike Goethe I’m probably apt to be asking for more Snickers or Coke. Screw the “Licht.” A fat man feels better in the dark.
These people are Christians, but in a gentle way, not heavy-handed at all about it. I can’t remember how we got onto the specific subject, but I do remember one night my cousin’s husband (who I’ll call Bill) told me his mother’s last words, which she uttered on her deathbed in the hospital. “She just sat up, after sitting there for twenty minutes or so with her eyes closed. Then she opened her eyes, shouted, ‘You tricked me!’ and fell back down onto the pillow and died.”
How’s that for an exit? It ranks up there with Goethe’s Mehr licht! (“More light!”) and possibly bests the apocryphal chestnuts from Oscar Wilde’s last day on Earth (one of which I remember was “Either that wallpaper goes, or I do.”)
“You tricked me.”
Fuck.
Naturally I asked my cousin Bill what she meant by that. And of course Bill had no answer. He wanted to know, too. And there is the chance that his mother didn’t even know what she meant, either. People aren’t exactly lucid in their final moments all the time, which is why wills get contested on that “sound of mind” clause more than occasionally. There’s even a book dedicated to parsing the subtext of one crazy man’s last words recorded by a police stenographer in the hopes that this rumrunner’s hospital bed ramblings might yield some interesting clues as to the inner workings of the Mob (they didn’t).
Regardless of whether or not Bill’s mom meant anything with her last words, they stick in my craw. I can’t stop thinking about them. And at my lowest moments I think that the words are tied to the betrayal of her own religiosity, which she bequeathed to her son. In this explanation of “You tricked me!” the mother, having dedicated her life to right-living and expecting an eternal reward, sees only a massive vacuum of black Lovecraftian antimatter or whatever void we all face as we slough off our mortal coils.
I know nothing about Bill’s mother (aside from her last words), but in this explanation, I see her as a woman who was perhaps a little hedonistic at heart, like perhaps most people. She wished to indulge in a fling with some sailor while her husband was at sea, but she knew the Commandments forbade it, and so she abstained. In the front of her mind she told herself she’d done the right thing. But maybe elsewhere there was a kernel of regret, budding in her brain, telling her to go ahead and do it, and after the fact that little budding seed kept nagging at her, and she kept fighting it down, tamping it with the recital of the mantra that was her moral code. “I can’t do this to my husband. I can’t betray God’s laws like this.”
But then, as she died, she saw this fellow who had every intention of tupping the hell out of her when she was young. And here he was on the other side, still young and strapping, waiting and winged in the eternal void, but unwilling to lift or embrace her, because she had shunned the pleasures of the flesh with him back when she’d been a mortal. She’d thought her decision the right one, the moral one at the time, but only realized now that it had been a mere act of cowardice masquerading as righteousness.
Sometimes I wonder if the point of life is to maximize pleasure and not only over some long term, but merely in the moment. Part of this refrain in my brain (and, to be frank, in my soul) is probably just a byproduct of the cynicism in which we all marinate. Postmodern America is a very ugly place, with a very short attention span and a collective Id that, rather than being checked or even examined, is fanned and enflamed and encouraged in its every indulgent impulse. It wouldn’t take a prude to look around here (at least at the intersubjective world of pop culture) and see that something is horribly out of tilt.
But there is still a part of me that thinks that these mundane and material pleasures are all that is to be had, and since it’s all going to collapse soon (perhaps due to the icecaps melting, or some bespoke superbug manufactured in the makeshift lab that is some man’s garage), I might as well get mine, too, damnit, while the getting is good.
And since I’m not very attractive or rich, pleasure for me would naturally mean gorging on food.
I’ve lost sixty pounds over the course of the last year (probably more), and would like to keep losing weight. And yes, it feels good to walk around without carrying around that shifting burden of rubbery flesh that clung to me like a polyester suit to a sweaty preacher, but there are still times when I think of giving up and stuffing my face. And in those moments, even though the dissipation, the wallowing in fatitude (sic) is just a figment of my imagination, I still feel a kind of ecstasy that borders on the sinful just thinking about it.
I want to eat an entire pepperoni pizza with the lights off and the blinds drawn, using only my mouth, with my hands tied behind my back like the fat kid in the pie-eating contest in Stand By Me.
I want to use a spoon that practically has the dimensions of a soup ladle to dislodge chunks of chocolate chip from their frozen moorings in mounds of mint ice cream, gripping the pint with my other hand all slippery with condensation.
I want to eat twelve chicken wings, tilt the Styrofoam carryout box in which they came so that all the remaining hot sauce juices pour into the far corner of the container, and then I want to drink that mixture of chicken skin fat, marrow, and spicy broth like Bacchus quaffing the blood of his cult from a grapevine.
Yes, I’m a pig, but I’m a pig who’s denying himself a rut in the mud for reasons I can’t quite fathom. The “why?” question lays heavily upon my chest, growing ironically ever heavier as I myself continue to torture myself losing weight.
To what end am I losing weight? I have no spouse or kids for whom I need to extend my lifespan, or to whom my presence means anything. I have a dog, but considering that she probably only has five years left (at most), I could cast myself into an abyss of marathon takeout Chinese sessions while popping Percocet in a La-Z Boy on full recline from now until the last of her little canine heart palpitations and she would still beat me to the boneyard.
So why not just give in? For fear of having my porcine behind prodded with the Devil’s pitchfork if I were to succumb to the Schweinerei of gluttony I fantasized about a handful of paragraphs ago?
I guess I’m saying, I don’t want to die and realize that I deprived myself of some pleasure for reasons I’ll forget or that will be rendered inconsequential when I pass over to the other side. Yes, the pleasures which I’m denying myself are small, and they are pleasures with consequences, punishment that are more prosaic than pitchforks, waiting for me should I indulge in the transitory and chimerical joys of pigging out.
Before I burn in Hell, there’s the matter of heartburn with which I need to contend.
But regardless of burning in heart or burning in Hell, I would still have that moment, that second of glorious sinful bliss of backsliding that might be worth a millennium of teetotaler’s smug satisfaction. Charles Baudelaire spoke of that instant of ecstasy in exchange for an eternity of fire (though he was probably aiming his ken much higher, to some god’s ichor or at least some good opium, and not a cheeseburger).
The thing is, though, should I feel deceived in my final moments as an ex-fat man, at least I will not be shouting to the void, “You tricked me!”
My deception will have been self-imposed. So if I die (or rather when I die, since it’s a given that I’m going to die), give me a mirror to scream at, a reflection of myself which I can insult. And have someone there (police stenographer or layperson) to record my last words.
Maybe they’ll be funny.
Maybe they’ll be sad, or at least otherwise memorable.
And maybe they’ll be “More!” though unlike Goethe I’m probably apt to be asking for more Snickers or Coke. Screw the “Licht.” A fat man feels better in the dark.
The Right to be Forgotten: Some Musings on Immortality, that Stupid Invention of the Living
When I was a young man I wanted to be a writer. I tried for a few years while working crap jobs on the side and living at home with my mother, but I had very little success. I had some very rare acceptances here and there, but even those were for little or no money and eventually it became painfully obvious to me that I would have to give up on my dream, or at least defer it for a while. I made a quite unoriginal decision at that juncture: I would join the Army (during wartime no less) and if I didn’t die or go crazy, I would try this writing thing one more time after I got back, with four years of life experience under my belt and the GI Bill to sustain me while attending college.
The plan didn’t quite work. I mean, I started selling stories for token payment, but I did it while still in the Army rather than when I got out. I had told myself to go and live for four years as a soldier and then to return to the cave and to write of my experiences. But after two years the words were flowing through me and I had to write again.
I had a simple technique for honing my craft. Every Friday in garrison after falling out from final formation I would pack a bag in the barracks, call a cab, and head to an off-post hotel for the weekend. I would spend Friday writing the story, Saturday editing the story, and Sunday morning I would submit the work before heading back to the barracks in a cab.
By the time I got out of the service I already had several short story credits under my belt, my Montgomery GI Bill money that would allow me four years to waste, as well as twenty-thousand dollars or so in my bank account (it is hard to spend a lot of money in a remote outpost in Iraq when your mail comes only sporadically, and then via helicopter or uparmored Humvee).
The only things I lacked upon exiting the service were my mind, my body, and my soul. I had a host of injuries to every part of my person ranging from the hip to the shoulder and the testicle; I had PSTD to the point where I could not perform sexually. I was also certain that I was going to hell when I died, or possibly sooner. Other than that, I was doing alright.
Eventually, after multiple surgeries and countless stays in VA bughouses I started writing again, only this time instead of short stories I was writing novellas. Some of the novellas sold. Then it was on to novels. Those somehow got published; sure they were of varying quality and the operations that put them out were either micro-presses or fly-by-night outfits, but they weren’t vanity presses. I was living my dream, however ragged its contours may have been in comparison to the seamless vision I’d conjured up in my mind all those days and nights ago lying around as a young man after working a shift at Pizza Hut and living in a small house with my mother, or some years later as a slightly older young man sitting in my barracks’ room waiting for my chance to be free, to have what was left of my body and mind and soul belong to me again instead of to the state or to some petty boss whose life consisted of slaving in some grease pit to make a man he would never meet even richer than he already was.
As my career (if you can call it that) progressed, publishers demanded I promote my work, and I was required to do things like track down blurbs from fellow authors and to give readings. I am very much of the school that believes you do not pester people you admire, but since my publishers were adamant, I decided to at least give it the “ole GED try” as my First Sergeant liked to say. And I figured that if I was going to bug someone for blurbs, it should at least be someone I admired.
During my time in the Army I really got into crime novels, noir, hardboiled, whatever the hell you want to call it.
At some point while in the service and just getting my chops as a writer, I came across a blog hosted by a man named Don Herron, a noir and fantasy aficionado (he wrote a quality book about Conan creator Robert E. Howard). Herron also led the Dashiell Hammett Tour in San Francisco, taking readers through the stomping grounds of Sam Spade, presumably shuttling tourists from one haunt to another via cable car over the rollicking and befogged hills of San Fran.
On his blog Don sang the praises of a noir writer named Tom Kakonis, claiming he was heir to the mantle of the late and singular crime writer Charles Willeford, whose work I very much admired. I added the name “Kakonis” to my mental rolodex and didn’t think much more about him for a while after that.
Sometime later (while stationed in Germany and still trying to sell stories) I took a supercheap Ryan Air jaunt to Dublin, Ireland, and spent a weekend wandering around the rain-soaked cobbles of the old city. I didn’t do any Stoker or Joyce tours, though I did slip into a small boutique bookshop called Murder Ink. It had everything I could want as a noir fan. There was Chester Himes, William Lindsay Gresham, Howard Browne, Walter Mosley, all the greats, both the prolific and those so given over to melancholy or the bottle that they ended up choosing self-destruction over continued creation as authors.
I found a Tom Kakonis book in Murder Ink called Criss Cross, about a once-athletic, now gone-to-seed middle-aged man working security at a big box store during the holidays. The man doesn’t know it, but an attractive girl who works in the shop is about to pull him into a bloody strongarm caper involving her ex-con ex-beau, his dimwitted drug-addled sidekick Ducky, and a whole rococo cast of grotesqueries, including a computer programmer whose only source of sexual satisfaction is having a woman place her hand in a rubber glove, submerse said-hand in Crisco, and then to relentlessly fist him while his flaccid, curtain-like shanks of stretchmark-scarred fat tremble and he writhes in ecstasy.
It’s a wild book, some kind of masterpiece, but it didn’t seem to get the love it deserved when it came out. Most of the reviews I read of Kakonis either criticized him as wordy (minimalism is especially prized by most fans of crime fiction) or, strangely enough, because his cast of characters were usually too loathsome to follow across the span of several hundred pages. But I loved his stuff, and when I was hunting blurbs on behalf of one of my books, I finally had a chance (or excuse) to look him up online and call him, tell him how great I thought he was, and to tell him that I was trying to make it myself as a writer.
His wife Judy picked up the phone when I called him, and while she obviously functioned as his screener, eventually she became convinced of my good intentions and let her guard down and passed the phone off to the man himself. He was friendly, relaxed, and generous, more bemused than embittered with his fate as a casualty of what he called “the midlist crunch.” He also not only agreed to read and blurb my book, but became a sort of mentor for me throughout my career. Eventually he did what we are all going to do or have already done, which is to say that he died.
I only found out about his death one day as I was googling his name and I got an auto-complete assist of “obituary.” After I found out he died, I called his number again. I wanted to not just express my condolences to his wife, but my gratitude. But I got the answering machine.
I’m no good at speaking, especially when I know my voice is going to be recorded, but my conscience would not let me just abruptly hang up without saying something.
In my disjointed way I said most of what I wanted to, the words spilling out of me, and just as I was about to hang up his wife Judy came on the line. She told me that he had appreciated my friendship, was flattered by my admiration, but that he didn’t want anyone making a big to-do after he was dead. He didn’t even want a funeral, I think. She said, in essence, that he wanted to be forgotten.
At the time I remember thinking that for him to be forgotten would be a sort of injustice. Now, and especially in the wee hours of the morning, sitting here in front of this computer monitor, I’m frankly not quite so sure anymore.
“Immortality is the stupid invention of the living,” as the cantankerous bard of Skid Row Charles Bukowski once said.
I’m starting to think he’s right. I’m starting to think that part of the dignity of death is in the being forgotten, commended back to the soil and returned to whatever great cosmic Ur-trough we’re all born from. If all is vanity, and all is transient, than the shedding of the body and the sloughing off of ego are not only necessary but something to be celebrated rather than bemoaned. And if there is an afterlife, and any dead writer is there haunting that realm, I would hope to God that they have more important things to worry about than the books they wrote to cope with the torment of being trapped in a mortal coil all those years ago. You cannot transcend this realm and maintain a painstaking bibliography of your works at the same time. At some point, I think you not only have to let go of the idea of being important, but of the search meaning itself.
When I am finally free of life, I also want to be free of words, too, for while they are my consolation and friend in the late and lonely hours like these, they are also shackles, a reminder of my limitations as a man, an artist, a human being. I’m not quite ready to go as far as William Burroughs and say that words are a virus that needs exterminating (though sometimes I sure feel that way), and I’m not even sure that language is a medium that more readily lends itself to abuse than any other (I think images are much better at that, considering the way they sort of bypass not only the intellect but the conscious mind).
It’s hard to say how much solace words provide, versus how much torment they cause, since writing is a form of thinking and we tend to torture ourselves with our endless thoughts, the locutions of the patterns of painful memories and fears playing across the canvas of the mind, or the pixels of this screen.
I ask myself if would it be balm to the soul of someone like the departed Edgar Allen Poe to know that some girl has a poster of him on the wall in her bedroom above a bookcase made from wooden planks and red bricks, or if he would get a kick to discover there are reprints of some aquatint of him looking forlorn and immiserated on mezzanine walls above bistros in big box bookstore chains spread across the country. Either he’s been reunited with his Lenore on the other side and all the attention we lavish on him is moot, or the crowing raven wins and it turns out that all that we do, including all that we write, is for naught.
Maybe I should think less of Poe and think more of Whitman, whose metaphysical cast of mind was less burdened by romanticism’s morbid obsession with death. I will borrow a couple bars from his Song of Himself, and look for a bit of Tom Kakonis beneath the sole of my shoe tonight. And I guess I’ll continue to sing this song of myself for the time being, at least until I get hit by a bus or develop crippling carpal tunnel syndrome or something.
The plan didn’t quite work. I mean, I started selling stories for token payment, but I did it while still in the Army rather than when I got out. I had told myself to go and live for four years as a soldier and then to return to the cave and to write of my experiences. But after two years the words were flowing through me and I had to write again.
I had a simple technique for honing my craft. Every Friday in garrison after falling out from final formation I would pack a bag in the barracks, call a cab, and head to an off-post hotel for the weekend. I would spend Friday writing the story, Saturday editing the story, and Sunday morning I would submit the work before heading back to the barracks in a cab.
By the time I got out of the service I already had several short story credits under my belt, my Montgomery GI Bill money that would allow me four years to waste, as well as twenty-thousand dollars or so in my bank account (it is hard to spend a lot of money in a remote outpost in Iraq when your mail comes only sporadically, and then via helicopter or uparmored Humvee).
The only things I lacked upon exiting the service were my mind, my body, and my soul. I had a host of injuries to every part of my person ranging from the hip to the shoulder and the testicle; I had PSTD to the point where I could not perform sexually. I was also certain that I was going to hell when I died, or possibly sooner. Other than that, I was doing alright.
Eventually, after multiple surgeries and countless stays in VA bughouses I started writing again, only this time instead of short stories I was writing novellas. Some of the novellas sold. Then it was on to novels. Those somehow got published; sure they were of varying quality and the operations that put them out were either micro-presses or fly-by-night outfits, but they weren’t vanity presses. I was living my dream, however ragged its contours may have been in comparison to the seamless vision I’d conjured up in my mind all those days and nights ago lying around as a young man after working a shift at Pizza Hut and living in a small house with my mother, or some years later as a slightly older young man sitting in my barracks’ room waiting for my chance to be free, to have what was left of my body and mind and soul belong to me again instead of to the state or to some petty boss whose life consisted of slaving in some grease pit to make a man he would never meet even richer than he already was.
As my career (if you can call it that) progressed, publishers demanded I promote my work, and I was required to do things like track down blurbs from fellow authors and to give readings. I am very much of the school that believes you do not pester people you admire, but since my publishers were adamant, I decided to at least give it the “ole GED try” as my First Sergeant liked to say. And I figured that if I was going to bug someone for blurbs, it should at least be someone I admired.
During my time in the Army I really got into crime novels, noir, hardboiled, whatever the hell you want to call it.
At some point while in the service and just getting my chops as a writer, I came across a blog hosted by a man named Don Herron, a noir and fantasy aficionado (he wrote a quality book about Conan creator Robert E. Howard). Herron also led the Dashiell Hammett Tour in San Francisco, taking readers through the stomping grounds of Sam Spade, presumably shuttling tourists from one haunt to another via cable car over the rollicking and befogged hills of San Fran.
On his blog Don sang the praises of a noir writer named Tom Kakonis, claiming he was heir to the mantle of the late and singular crime writer Charles Willeford, whose work I very much admired. I added the name “Kakonis” to my mental rolodex and didn’t think much more about him for a while after that.
Sometime later (while stationed in Germany and still trying to sell stories) I took a supercheap Ryan Air jaunt to Dublin, Ireland, and spent a weekend wandering around the rain-soaked cobbles of the old city. I didn’t do any Stoker or Joyce tours, though I did slip into a small boutique bookshop called Murder Ink. It had everything I could want as a noir fan. There was Chester Himes, William Lindsay Gresham, Howard Browne, Walter Mosley, all the greats, both the prolific and those so given over to melancholy or the bottle that they ended up choosing self-destruction over continued creation as authors.
I found a Tom Kakonis book in Murder Ink called Criss Cross, about a once-athletic, now gone-to-seed middle-aged man working security at a big box store during the holidays. The man doesn’t know it, but an attractive girl who works in the shop is about to pull him into a bloody strongarm caper involving her ex-con ex-beau, his dimwitted drug-addled sidekick Ducky, and a whole rococo cast of grotesqueries, including a computer programmer whose only source of sexual satisfaction is having a woman place her hand in a rubber glove, submerse said-hand in Crisco, and then to relentlessly fist him while his flaccid, curtain-like shanks of stretchmark-scarred fat tremble and he writhes in ecstasy.
It’s a wild book, some kind of masterpiece, but it didn’t seem to get the love it deserved when it came out. Most of the reviews I read of Kakonis either criticized him as wordy (minimalism is especially prized by most fans of crime fiction) or, strangely enough, because his cast of characters were usually too loathsome to follow across the span of several hundred pages. But I loved his stuff, and when I was hunting blurbs on behalf of one of my books, I finally had a chance (or excuse) to look him up online and call him, tell him how great I thought he was, and to tell him that I was trying to make it myself as a writer.
His wife Judy picked up the phone when I called him, and while she obviously functioned as his screener, eventually she became convinced of my good intentions and let her guard down and passed the phone off to the man himself. He was friendly, relaxed, and generous, more bemused than embittered with his fate as a casualty of what he called “the midlist crunch.” He also not only agreed to read and blurb my book, but became a sort of mentor for me throughout my career. Eventually he did what we are all going to do or have already done, which is to say that he died.
I only found out about his death one day as I was googling his name and I got an auto-complete assist of “obituary.” After I found out he died, I called his number again. I wanted to not just express my condolences to his wife, but my gratitude. But I got the answering machine.
I’m no good at speaking, especially when I know my voice is going to be recorded, but my conscience would not let me just abruptly hang up without saying something.
In my disjointed way I said most of what I wanted to, the words spilling out of me, and just as I was about to hang up his wife Judy came on the line. She told me that he had appreciated my friendship, was flattered by my admiration, but that he didn’t want anyone making a big to-do after he was dead. He didn’t even want a funeral, I think. She said, in essence, that he wanted to be forgotten.
At the time I remember thinking that for him to be forgotten would be a sort of injustice. Now, and especially in the wee hours of the morning, sitting here in front of this computer monitor, I’m frankly not quite so sure anymore.
“Immortality is the stupid invention of the living,” as the cantankerous bard of Skid Row Charles Bukowski once said.
I’m starting to think he’s right. I’m starting to think that part of the dignity of death is in the being forgotten, commended back to the soil and returned to whatever great cosmic Ur-trough we’re all born from. If all is vanity, and all is transient, than the shedding of the body and the sloughing off of ego are not only necessary but something to be celebrated rather than bemoaned. And if there is an afterlife, and any dead writer is there haunting that realm, I would hope to God that they have more important things to worry about than the books they wrote to cope with the torment of being trapped in a mortal coil all those years ago. You cannot transcend this realm and maintain a painstaking bibliography of your works at the same time. At some point, I think you not only have to let go of the idea of being important, but of the search meaning itself.
When I am finally free of life, I also want to be free of words, too, for while they are my consolation and friend in the late and lonely hours like these, they are also shackles, a reminder of my limitations as a man, an artist, a human being. I’m not quite ready to go as far as William Burroughs and say that words are a virus that needs exterminating (though sometimes I sure feel that way), and I’m not even sure that language is a medium that more readily lends itself to abuse than any other (I think images are much better at that, considering the way they sort of bypass not only the intellect but the conscious mind).
It’s hard to say how much solace words provide, versus how much torment they cause, since writing is a form of thinking and we tend to torture ourselves with our endless thoughts, the locutions of the patterns of painful memories and fears playing across the canvas of the mind, or the pixels of this screen.
I ask myself if would it be balm to the soul of someone like the departed Edgar Allen Poe to know that some girl has a poster of him on the wall in her bedroom above a bookcase made from wooden planks and red bricks, or if he would get a kick to discover there are reprints of some aquatint of him looking forlorn and immiserated on mezzanine walls above bistros in big box bookstore chains spread across the country. Either he’s been reunited with his Lenore on the other side and all the attention we lavish on him is moot, or the crowing raven wins and it turns out that all that we do, including all that we write, is for naught.
Maybe I should think less of Poe and think more of Whitman, whose metaphysical cast of mind was less burdened by romanticism’s morbid obsession with death. I will borrow a couple bars from his Song of Himself, and look for a bit of Tom Kakonis beneath the sole of my shoe tonight. And I guess I’ll continue to sing this song of myself for the time being, at least until I get hit by a bus or develop crippling carpal tunnel syndrome or something.
War is the Cowardly Evasion of the Problems of Peace
“War is the cowardly evasion of the problems of peace.” I can’t find the quote online in the original German, but it’s attributed to the German writer Thomas Mann. Most probably it was excerpted from his Gedanken im Kriege (Thoughts in Wars would be a direct translation). It’s a quote that’s come back to me time and again through the years.
I suppose one’s first reading of the quote would be to view it as antiwar, but I’m not quite sure that gets at the heart of what Mann was saying. War sucks, sure, but inherent in Mann’s words is the idea that peace is even harder. Peace comes with its own burdens, which, believe it or not, make war a kind of psychic relief from the complexity and nuance that some people find excruciating.
There’s some Bukowski story I read a million years ago that’s relevant here. Buk’s alter ego Chinaski is sitting in a bar (or maybe a bus terminal, I frankly don’t remember) and some hippy kids sidle up to him. One of the hippies, wearing a grimy army surplus jacket, asks Hank his opinion of war. To which Hank characteristically responds: “When you to the grocery store, that’s a war. When you get into a cab, that’s a war.” Melodramatic? Maybe, but I think he’s right that ultimately everything is a war. He even had a poetry collection titled War all the Time.
I can’t remember exactly what the hell I was thinking when I joined the Army. It was only a little more than a decade ago but it might as well be ancient history, lost to the mists of time. All I know is that at the time I walked into that recruiter’s office, I was feeling pretty desperate. I was a classic failure to launch, a wannabe writer in his mid-twenties living at home with his mother, gradually growing weirder and more pathetic by the day. For a couple years there, I worked as a pizza deliveryman, but I didn’t enjoy having my car pelted with rocks by kids in the public housing complexes. The deductible could only cover so much, and only so many times. Also, the idea of potentially losing my life over a Meat Lover’s Supreme and a two-liter of Mountain Dew seemed ignominious, even for a creature as pathetic as I.
Eventually I wisely quit that job. After that, I supported myself (to the extent I could) by taking whatever jobs I could land through a temp service. For a time there I had a decent gig doing background checks for a firm called General Information Services. I sat in my swivel chair, squinting under the fluorescence, sneaking looks at the legs of the women around me, crossed and sheathed in black or tan stockings. Alas, that gig didn’t last, and after an excruciating stint working at the Otis Spunkmeyer muffin factory, I decided I would rather risk dying than continue living this way.
I’d threatened to join the army a couple of times, but my mom had always dismissed my threats as hollow. One day, though, I drove the recruiter’s office where it was located in the center of a suburban shopping plaza with a brick and stucco facade. They must not have been getting much traffic, as I literally had to rouse the buck sergeant behind his desk from a deep sleep.
Later that night I went home and told my mother what I had done. She promptly called my father, which shows the gravity of the situation, as he hated her and she hated him. I don’t remember much about what they said (I was already locked in my mind, lost in my own zone at this point). I just recall her shouting, “Yeah, but I didn’t think he’d actually do it!”
I was in terrible shape physically, but somehow forced my soft and flabby body through the whole nine weeks of basic training at Fort Benning. I did not emerge from the experience “Born again hard,” as Gunnery Sergeant Hartmann observed of Private Pyle in Full Metal Jacket. But on the plus side, neither did I put a round into my DI’s chest and then fire one through the back of my skull, either, a la Pyle.
The military simplified everything. In the real world, I had felt constantly stressed about money. I had felt pathetic and poor and out of place, weak and neurotic and sexless, a loser in a society that only tolerated winners. Delivering pizzas, I felt like a bug with a slimy carapace scurrying up to the doorsteps of these stone McMansions filled with happy and prosperous people. I drove my mom’s crappy Aerostar minivan through the suburbs, surrounded by sleek, shining Benzes and big black SUVs (usually with impressive fiberglass speedboats tailed to trailer hitches).
In the army, though, all of my bills were paid, meals were provided, and hierarchy was based on rank alone. And the loss of outward identity (down to shearing off my hair) let me develop a stronger interior life. I no longer felt insecure. I was too faceless, anonymous to pretend to paranoia. Who the hell would bother looking at me here? How could anything be personal where the drill sergeants barked at literally everyone, berating them with profanity-laced insults?
Back in the real world, I had felt the constant ache of failure that went with not having a girlfriend. I’d definitely had no prospects for marriage, or the social or emotional skills to develop anything like a meaningful relationship. Every day after work, whether at Pizza Hut or Otis Spunkmeyer, I would smoke weed in my bedroom and masturbate to porn. I was wrapping myself deeper into a cocoon of seeming pleasure. But it was really just deadening everything inside me, including all ambition and the pain, which I should have recognized was unavoidable. It would have been healthier to face it and deal with the hurt and fear.
But in the Army I was only around other young men, most of them horndogged up most of the time, just as sexually immature and crass as me. That said, a few already had spouses, real responsibilities, and even kids.
Again, everything in the army was simpler, if not always easier.
But I’m speaking only of the regimentation of Army life, not war itself.
Eventually I got orders for my first duty station (Darmstadt, Germany) and from there deployed to Iraq (though we started out in Kuwait).
The experience definitely changed me, made me more aware not just of my own mortality, but my humanity, as well as my heretofore undiscovered sense of shame. I was ashamed of what we were doing, and what I had done. The war had woken me up from the slightly unsettling dream that was my previous life, unpleasant but too undramatic to merit the title of nightmare.
Is that easier, though, than living on the homefront in supposed peace?
I think so.
It probably requires greater fortitude to, say, clean toilets at a ballpark after a big game than to man a minigun while hanging out of a Blackhawk helicopter. Staring down at villages of mud huts, relicts of ziggurats, and fields of crops shimmering under a blazing sun at least offers scenic vistas of an ancient land. It definitely beats staring into toilet bowls, even when you factor in that toilet bowls, unlike the fields in Mesopotamia, aren’t seeded with men in burnooses with AK47s.
Back when I was in the service, being a soldier still sort of conferred a certain kind of respect on the person serving. Being a soldier, I didn’t feel quite as alien or out of place in America anymore. I had passed through some membrane, performed some ritual required to psychically bond people across class and culture lines that was once an important aspect of becoming a citizen.
Of course you sensed the cynicism beneath the praise and respect with which we were showered. The whole patriotism industry feted you because it was what big war profiteers like Lockheed and their lobbies and their rent boy politicians wanted. And guys who had the audacity to cite love of country as their reason for joining made sure to get the best sign-on bonuses they could, just like everyone else. But since you were the beneficiary of all this cynicism and you got all this smoke blown up your ass, you didn’t really question it. And naturally you knew that in their hearts of hearts, the Lee Greenwoods with their jingoistic yokel acts and the businesses giving soldiers discounts thought that we were suckers. And they were right.
It takes a very special kind of mark to try to fabricate meaning out of dying for no reason, on behalf of people who deep down really don’t give a shit. Then think about the damage war does to the people in these impoverished countries, the goatherds and farmers growing their bitter crops in the mud. Think about the pain you put your family through, even if you don’t die or get severely injured, just making them worry about you while you’re downrange.
But these are all thoughts I only have in hindsight, that, as most, were minor inklings, registering as mere cricks in the neck at the time.
People would stop you in the airport and thank you for your service, too. Vets from previous wars would shake your hand, treat you with respect. Bearded, hippyish dudes who’d been in Vietnam might saddle up to you for a conversation, or an older man in suspenders might pigeonhole you to talk about war. Combat, of course, was a much more intimate affair in their days. And nothing we did in Iraq could compare with what happened at, say, Khe San, and definitely not at the Battle of the Bulge or Betio.
But again, we were the recipients of love and praise, and whether or not it was misplaced (it was), it felt good and we didn’t question it.
It isn’t just the praise and ego stroke that made being in the Army an alluring and ultimately simplifying illusion, preferable to living in the real world. Nor was it just the wearing of a uniform and feeling the high that comes with surrendering one’s will to that kind of fascistic power.
It’s the way that being in the military breaks one’s life up into easily understood chapters. It gives one’s life a narrative aspect, a B.C. and an A.D. dividing line between the person one once was and the one they have become. These things happen in normal, nonmilitary life (I assume) in a more nuanced and complex way. Eventually you go from a boy to man, or a girl to a woman, without the delusions or pageantry.
I remember coming home on one of my first leaves and feeling a great sense of pressure constricting around my chest like a band. And I remember another band fastening itself around my skull as if I were trying to take a nap in a house with a slow but persistent gas leak.
I could feel that the people around me had been going about their lives—dating, working, struggling, in an unpraised but frankly admirable kind of silence. They bore the banality, the repetition, everything I had fled when I joined the army. They labored in a fog unrelieved by action, combat, awards, changes of locale imposed by whoever at Brigade level (or even higher) cut orders. To not be shuffled around the world, to wake up and face the same people every day—coworkers, spouse, children—seemed like a great burden.
On leave I would go to coffeeshops or to libraries or to the pharmacy, and I would just steal glances at the people working there. I’d marvel at their bravery, their ability to endure this nondescript, unbroken continuity of time lived in the same place, basically the same day, relived again and again.
Their identities and lives were organic, not something handed to them by someone else. Their time was not bisected and parceled, sliced and shuffled by some clerk at Operations deciding whether to send them to Fort Bliss or Fort Huachuca. Sure they had to work eight or even twelve hours a day, but when the day was done their time and mind was theirs. In the Army, even when we shammed and hid from work, our lives and bodies and souls belonged to the institution. We could mock it and make jokes, develop codes to express our disgust (FTA supposedly meant “Fun Times Always,” but everyone knew what it really meant). But we had exchanged something we could never get back, something that everyone else still had.
A lot of the civilians I stared at on leave seemed happy. And many of those people no doubt were happy. But I think they were brave, too.
A lot braver than me.
I think, ultimately, that Thomas Mann was right about war being a cowardly escape from the problems of peace. Assuming, that is, he actually said it.
I suppose one’s first reading of the quote would be to view it as antiwar, but I’m not quite sure that gets at the heart of what Mann was saying. War sucks, sure, but inherent in Mann’s words is the idea that peace is even harder. Peace comes with its own burdens, which, believe it or not, make war a kind of psychic relief from the complexity and nuance that some people find excruciating.
There’s some Bukowski story I read a million years ago that’s relevant here. Buk’s alter ego Chinaski is sitting in a bar (or maybe a bus terminal, I frankly don’t remember) and some hippy kids sidle up to him. One of the hippies, wearing a grimy army surplus jacket, asks Hank his opinion of war. To which Hank characteristically responds: “When you to the grocery store, that’s a war. When you get into a cab, that’s a war.” Melodramatic? Maybe, but I think he’s right that ultimately everything is a war. He even had a poetry collection titled War all the Time.
I can’t remember exactly what the hell I was thinking when I joined the Army. It was only a little more than a decade ago but it might as well be ancient history, lost to the mists of time. All I know is that at the time I walked into that recruiter’s office, I was feeling pretty desperate. I was a classic failure to launch, a wannabe writer in his mid-twenties living at home with his mother, gradually growing weirder and more pathetic by the day. For a couple years there, I worked as a pizza deliveryman, but I didn’t enjoy having my car pelted with rocks by kids in the public housing complexes. The deductible could only cover so much, and only so many times. Also, the idea of potentially losing my life over a Meat Lover’s Supreme and a two-liter of Mountain Dew seemed ignominious, even for a creature as pathetic as I.
Eventually I wisely quit that job. After that, I supported myself (to the extent I could) by taking whatever jobs I could land through a temp service. For a time there I had a decent gig doing background checks for a firm called General Information Services. I sat in my swivel chair, squinting under the fluorescence, sneaking looks at the legs of the women around me, crossed and sheathed in black or tan stockings. Alas, that gig didn’t last, and after an excruciating stint working at the Otis Spunkmeyer muffin factory, I decided I would rather risk dying than continue living this way.
I’d threatened to join the army a couple of times, but my mom had always dismissed my threats as hollow. One day, though, I drove the recruiter’s office where it was located in the center of a suburban shopping plaza with a brick and stucco facade. They must not have been getting much traffic, as I literally had to rouse the buck sergeant behind his desk from a deep sleep.
Later that night I went home and told my mother what I had done. She promptly called my father, which shows the gravity of the situation, as he hated her and she hated him. I don’t remember much about what they said (I was already locked in my mind, lost in my own zone at this point). I just recall her shouting, “Yeah, but I didn’t think he’d actually do it!”
I was in terrible shape physically, but somehow forced my soft and flabby body through the whole nine weeks of basic training at Fort Benning. I did not emerge from the experience “Born again hard,” as Gunnery Sergeant Hartmann observed of Private Pyle in Full Metal Jacket. But on the plus side, neither did I put a round into my DI’s chest and then fire one through the back of my skull, either, a la Pyle.
The military simplified everything. In the real world, I had felt constantly stressed about money. I had felt pathetic and poor and out of place, weak and neurotic and sexless, a loser in a society that only tolerated winners. Delivering pizzas, I felt like a bug with a slimy carapace scurrying up to the doorsteps of these stone McMansions filled with happy and prosperous people. I drove my mom’s crappy Aerostar minivan through the suburbs, surrounded by sleek, shining Benzes and big black SUVs (usually with impressive fiberglass speedboats tailed to trailer hitches).
In the army, though, all of my bills were paid, meals were provided, and hierarchy was based on rank alone. And the loss of outward identity (down to shearing off my hair) let me develop a stronger interior life. I no longer felt insecure. I was too faceless, anonymous to pretend to paranoia. Who the hell would bother looking at me here? How could anything be personal where the drill sergeants barked at literally everyone, berating them with profanity-laced insults?
Back in the real world, I had felt the constant ache of failure that went with not having a girlfriend. I’d definitely had no prospects for marriage, or the social or emotional skills to develop anything like a meaningful relationship. Every day after work, whether at Pizza Hut or Otis Spunkmeyer, I would smoke weed in my bedroom and masturbate to porn. I was wrapping myself deeper into a cocoon of seeming pleasure. But it was really just deadening everything inside me, including all ambition and the pain, which I should have recognized was unavoidable. It would have been healthier to face it and deal with the hurt and fear.
But in the Army I was only around other young men, most of them horndogged up most of the time, just as sexually immature and crass as me. That said, a few already had spouses, real responsibilities, and even kids.
Again, everything in the army was simpler, if not always easier.
But I’m speaking only of the regimentation of Army life, not war itself.
Eventually I got orders for my first duty station (Darmstadt, Germany) and from there deployed to Iraq (though we started out in Kuwait).
The experience definitely changed me, made me more aware not just of my own mortality, but my humanity, as well as my heretofore undiscovered sense of shame. I was ashamed of what we were doing, and what I had done. The war had woken me up from the slightly unsettling dream that was my previous life, unpleasant but too undramatic to merit the title of nightmare.
Is that easier, though, than living on the homefront in supposed peace?
I think so.
It probably requires greater fortitude to, say, clean toilets at a ballpark after a big game than to man a minigun while hanging out of a Blackhawk helicopter. Staring down at villages of mud huts, relicts of ziggurats, and fields of crops shimmering under a blazing sun at least offers scenic vistas of an ancient land. It definitely beats staring into toilet bowls, even when you factor in that toilet bowls, unlike the fields in Mesopotamia, aren’t seeded with men in burnooses with AK47s.
Back when I was in the service, being a soldier still sort of conferred a certain kind of respect on the person serving. Being a soldier, I didn’t feel quite as alien or out of place in America anymore. I had passed through some membrane, performed some ritual required to psychically bond people across class and culture lines that was once an important aspect of becoming a citizen.
Of course you sensed the cynicism beneath the praise and respect with which we were showered. The whole patriotism industry feted you because it was what big war profiteers like Lockheed and their lobbies and their rent boy politicians wanted. And guys who had the audacity to cite love of country as their reason for joining made sure to get the best sign-on bonuses they could, just like everyone else. But since you were the beneficiary of all this cynicism and you got all this smoke blown up your ass, you didn’t really question it. And naturally you knew that in their hearts of hearts, the Lee Greenwoods with their jingoistic yokel acts and the businesses giving soldiers discounts thought that we were suckers. And they were right.
It takes a very special kind of mark to try to fabricate meaning out of dying for no reason, on behalf of people who deep down really don’t give a shit. Then think about the damage war does to the people in these impoverished countries, the goatherds and farmers growing their bitter crops in the mud. Think about the pain you put your family through, even if you don’t die or get severely injured, just making them worry about you while you’re downrange.
But these are all thoughts I only have in hindsight, that, as most, were minor inklings, registering as mere cricks in the neck at the time.
People would stop you in the airport and thank you for your service, too. Vets from previous wars would shake your hand, treat you with respect. Bearded, hippyish dudes who’d been in Vietnam might saddle up to you for a conversation, or an older man in suspenders might pigeonhole you to talk about war. Combat, of course, was a much more intimate affair in their days. And nothing we did in Iraq could compare with what happened at, say, Khe San, and definitely not at the Battle of the Bulge or Betio.
But again, we were the recipients of love and praise, and whether or not it was misplaced (it was), it felt good and we didn’t question it.
It isn’t just the praise and ego stroke that made being in the Army an alluring and ultimately simplifying illusion, preferable to living in the real world. Nor was it just the wearing of a uniform and feeling the high that comes with surrendering one’s will to that kind of fascistic power.
It’s the way that being in the military breaks one’s life up into easily understood chapters. It gives one’s life a narrative aspect, a B.C. and an A.D. dividing line between the person one once was and the one they have become. These things happen in normal, nonmilitary life (I assume) in a more nuanced and complex way. Eventually you go from a boy to man, or a girl to a woman, without the delusions or pageantry.
I remember coming home on one of my first leaves and feeling a great sense of pressure constricting around my chest like a band. And I remember another band fastening itself around my skull as if I were trying to take a nap in a house with a slow but persistent gas leak.
I could feel that the people around me had been going about their lives—dating, working, struggling, in an unpraised but frankly admirable kind of silence. They bore the banality, the repetition, everything I had fled when I joined the army. They labored in a fog unrelieved by action, combat, awards, changes of locale imposed by whoever at Brigade level (or even higher) cut orders. To not be shuffled around the world, to wake up and face the same people every day—coworkers, spouse, children—seemed like a great burden.
On leave I would go to coffeeshops or to libraries or to the pharmacy, and I would just steal glances at the people working there. I’d marvel at their bravery, their ability to endure this nondescript, unbroken continuity of time lived in the same place, basically the same day, relived again and again.
Their identities and lives were organic, not something handed to them by someone else. Their time was not bisected and parceled, sliced and shuffled by some clerk at Operations deciding whether to send them to Fort Bliss or Fort Huachuca. Sure they had to work eight or even twelve hours a day, but when the day was done their time and mind was theirs. In the Army, even when we shammed and hid from work, our lives and bodies and souls belonged to the institution. We could mock it and make jokes, develop codes to express our disgust (FTA supposedly meant “Fun Times Always,” but everyone knew what it really meant). But we had exchanged something we could never get back, something that everyone else still had.
A lot of the civilians I stared at on leave seemed happy. And many of those people no doubt were happy. But I think they were brave, too.
A lot braver than me.
I think, ultimately, that Thomas Mann was right about war being a cowardly escape from the problems of peace. Assuming, that is, he actually said it.
