What would it be like to open and run a bank? This question has swarmed in my mind recently.
I keep thinking about business opportunities that would make me happy with my current situation. I would prefer to work for myself for a future of my making than that of someone else. This is the narrative that I repeat quite often when I'm not doing something that requires thought. Lately, that's been a lot of my time.
So far the dream looks like a mom and pop savings and loan company. I guess viewing 'It's a Wonderful Life' inspired me. I had intended to go to my dad's to pop the question regarding running a restaurant with him then. Instead, we watched that movie and discussed politics.
In addition to the mom and pop angle, I see the institution as one that is utterly transparent. The returns would be rather low and slow--my investment strategy would be U.S. savings bonds. I am unsure of the year commitments but this would require me to have cash on hand while the purchased matured. I had considered how employees and/or investors would get specific percentages of the profits garnered from that investment. It's a slow and rather meager way to grow a lending institution. It needs work, research, thought.
I just like the balls that are implied in opening a bank. Here I sit, at 5:30 in the morning. The streets are covered in snow. My car needs to be defrosted. I am scheduled to help install glass at a hospital a few towns over in freezing weather. That sounds like no fun, but I guess it will give me time to think and to dream. Strange really, what good is it for a man who fumbled his PhD aspirations to end up doing manual labor and thinking of a more illustrious future. It's no different than what I began doing once I started college--dreaming of a better tomorrow. It's just a fun mental exercise not unlike when I'd dream of having a radio-controlled flying device with a camera.
What's in a dream? Last night's meal I suspect.
Tuesday, December 27, 2011
Sunday, December 18, 2011
rational paranoia
There's a saying around the world of common sense--fringe ideas are held by mentally unstable people. Mental stability is a generic (read, 'genre') argot for labeling those who oppose elements of society: its institutions, its authority structures, its power, its scope, its secrets. Their writings are labeled as conspiracy theories, and their precipitating mental conditions are often labeled as paranoia. We see this label affixed to those who attempt and sometimes succeed to assassinate political figures even as early as the 19th century. This madness is nothing new; it's a feature of our rapidly mobile modernity and the scale at which communication travels. It's best to have a way to carefully snuff oppositional opinion by placing it below the bar of civil discourse. And what better way than to pathologize the persona and diagnose the writing or actions as symptomatic of their particular mental pathology. After all, how crazy does a person have to be to face down some of the most powerful figures in some of the most powerful countries?
That crazy if one were to set some kind of empirical bar to it.
But there's something inherently lopsided in a triad between an agent, his agency, and the scenery against which he acts. The bias cuts along common sense, better judgment, and the authority that these uphold in a society that has created some powerful people, powerful positions, powerful institutions, and powerful weapons to administer and sustain them for generations: the law, the gun, surveillance, knowledge infrastructures, and of course the lies that sustain a lopsided use of these for the sake of a democracy. An essential lie of any democracy is that we are free to choose who best represents our interests. Yet in that very democracy we are not free to choose how this freedom gets expressed because the minds that sustain these ideas and the subjectivities they inherit are formed prior to us having a choice. America is a nation of immigrants with assimilation anxiety--an overwhelming desire to fit in. Feel as an outsider wanting to get in, you concede to the mindset that you think represents an insider. The lack of information between outsider and insider creates the space that nourishes a mythos and a mystery to the other. That enhances the difference in a specific way; it grants a sense of power and privilege to the insiders as perceived by the outsider. The insider has legitimacy, access to power and privilege, something that the outsider lacks. One alternative is to create another power structure out of networks of outsiders; mafias and labor unions are but one way that alternative power structures have emerged from a unified attempt to make a social organization apart from those that are institutionalized into the legitimate business and legal community. Yet what we fail to recognize is that the most powerful operate much like these alternative social organizations, outside legal structures with an express emphasis on self-policing. The short lesson one draws from this unfinished narrative is that modern democracy purports to grant people power through their influence upon electoral politics, but power and influence have long been locked into very well-guarded channels. Any chance to break into these requires something akin to a solemn oath to the interests of the people who guard those channels, and so nothing outside gets in without the express privilege or consent of the guardians.
An assassin circumvents democracy with the vote of one. The assassin establishes a new access point to the powerful office--the gun sight. A dissident voices an opinion into a hypermarket of ideas that expressly encourages people to chase fame. Those that seek to level a critique and register this critique through a manifesto or a gun faces several legitimacy challenges, and common sense encourages one to see the very act itself as lunacy. To stand against the powerful is ineffective. To stand against the powerful is insane. To stand against the powerful is to unravel the official story, and in this unraveling so go a number of assumptions, values, and common senses about an average individual's subjectivity and beliefs about one's power to bring about change. Editorials have length requirements, and by their nature attract ridicule and amusement over racist screeds or delusional thinking. The web's commenting function, owing to its visual economy, bury posts to a Precambrian stratum, lost and forgotten, making either recent posts or highly rated ones visible. And fame chasing strategies abound. One's ability to run for office is limited by the two party branding scheme, which brings with it the attendant desire to fit in by voting along party lines. Running outside the system invites normally one kind of label--left and radical are among them. Political demagoguery has narrowed the spectrum of legitimate issues to those labeled patriotic to those labeled as socialistic. Within the high-walled canyon carved by this rhetoric few tenable political positions exist.
To abruptly shorten my narrative again the point is that legitimate sources of discontent are continually shifting away from truth production like the news into a marginal space of flashing banners and poorly edited and maintained web backwaters. There, people with little, no, or the wrong credentials attempt to shed light on power only to have their marginal status work against them. One man's sane and rational analysis of steel gets placed alongside another man's report about Lizard People. A measure of credibility by association gets implied in this kind of positioning. A professor discussing dissent gets his report aired next to a man in a ski mask discussing how to address police. The effect is one that immediately strains the credulity of the professor. It's as if the Jesus of his day were found to have an illegitimate message to spread based on the fact that he associated with both the potentates and dregs of society. This lack of consistency is one of many tactics used to discount the messenger.
Rational paranoia is not intended to add pun to a psychological ailment, nor is it meant to water down either of the juxtaposed entities. It intends to frame the conditions under which some kinds of unpopular or 'alternative' views on official events raise the specter of mental fitness. That fitness becomes the mode of questioning to presume without saying that the world as we know it through official narratives is not a fiction, a human construction, but in fact the real world.
Discussing how knowledge gets formed and accepted does nothing to forward either cause. It is the very understanding of this process that can be used to manipulate the outcome of one's mindset and opinions on any number of issues. Conspiracy labels start here, and what follows from such labels are attempts to make a science of studying why this form of paranoia happens.
To question power and authority should be sane. I have no truck with it. But power and authority have no domain over reality. Given how much of our reality is mediated by experience in two spheres our ability to establish an independent reality is compromised. We go to work for the majority of our days, and that world is a highly regulated public space. Our thinking and action are shaped by the merits of productivity. We engage in a specialized form of activity known as 'labor.' When we come home from labor we engage in any number of home-based activities. Primary among these is media consumption. And who's media is this? It could be any number. But if we were to limit our menu--for the sake of argument--to entertainment, news, and Lizard people updates how equipped are we to engage in a democratic society? We are very poorly equipped. We lack the chops as average Joes to even purport to speak for our constituents. That's the domain of the specialist and the well-networked individual, both of whom are quite synonymous in contemporary America. One reason we lack the chops to represent constituent interests is because we have the choice of consuming marginal news sources. One fitting definition of the internet by Richard Kyanka explains it as a place where weird people find like-minded others in order to feel that they're normal. Our freedom to consume what media and information we please contribute to our decidedly non-catholic worldviews. We're all partisans in this fight. We lack a worldview in the literal sense because so much of our life is consume by work and media consumption. Both of these decisively narrow our worldview to one framed by interests. And to stand outside of that worldview and to call those interests by their names leads to a suggestive semiotic domino-effect whereby one presumptively topples the world as such. The only recourse to those who are beholden to this world as such, and that goes for the average Joes, is to question the sanity of those who do such things. And so oppositional figures will remain marginal figures because they denounce more than just a political system but a reality system that is tied to a symbol system and a logic system. Simply put, power and authority have staked their claims on something more expansive than politics and government. They're in the business of reality management.
And so we don't question reality while we watch dramatizations of humans in reality show drama. And we don't question reality as we 'clock in' at our 'real' jobs. Meanwhile we pray to all our lesser gods of stock markets and finance. Some of us still believe in luck as we play lotteries. All of us carry around paper deities of worth, and all of this seems rational and sane. And that's because we all do it.
That crazy if one were to set some kind of empirical bar to it.
But there's something inherently lopsided in a triad between an agent, his agency, and the scenery against which he acts. The bias cuts along common sense, better judgment, and the authority that these uphold in a society that has created some powerful people, powerful positions, powerful institutions, and powerful weapons to administer and sustain them for generations: the law, the gun, surveillance, knowledge infrastructures, and of course the lies that sustain a lopsided use of these for the sake of a democracy. An essential lie of any democracy is that we are free to choose who best represents our interests. Yet in that very democracy we are not free to choose how this freedom gets expressed because the minds that sustain these ideas and the subjectivities they inherit are formed prior to us having a choice. America is a nation of immigrants with assimilation anxiety--an overwhelming desire to fit in. Feel as an outsider wanting to get in, you concede to the mindset that you think represents an insider. The lack of information between outsider and insider creates the space that nourishes a mythos and a mystery to the other. That enhances the difference in a specific way; it grants a sense of power and privilege to the insiders as perceived by the outsider. The insider has legitimacy, access to power and privilege, something that the outsider lacks. One alternative is to create another power structure out of networks of outsiders; mafias and labor unions are but one way that alternative power structures have emerged from a unified attempt to make a social organization apart from those that are institutionalized into the legitimate business and legal community. Yet what we fail to recognize is that the most powerful operate much like these alternative social organizations, outside legal structures with an express emphasis on self-policing. The short lesson one draws from this unfinished narrative is that modern democracy purports to grant people power through their influence upon electoral politics, but power and influence have long been locked into very well-guarded channels. Any chance to break into these requires something akin to a solemn oath to the interests of the people who guard those channels, and so nothing outside gets in without the express privilege or consent of the guardians.
An assassin circumvents democracy with the vote of one. The assassin establishes a new access point to the powerful office--the gun sight. A dissident voices an opinion into a hypermarket of ideas that expressly encourages people to chase fame. Those that seek to level a critique and register this critique through a manifesto or a gun faces several legitimacy challenges, and common sense encourages one to see the very act itself as lunacy. To stand against the powerful is ineffective. To stand against the powerful is insane. To stand against the powerful is to unravel the official story, and in this unraveling so go a number of assumptions, values, and common senses about an average individual's subjectivity and beliefs about one's power to bring about change. Editorials have length requirements, and by their nature attract ridicule and amusement over racist screeds or delusional thinking. The web's commenting function, owing to its visual economy, bury posts to a Precambrian stratum, lost and forgotten, making either recent posts or highly rated ones visible. And fame chasing strategies abound. One's ability to run for office is limited by the two party branding scheme, which brings with it the attendant desire to fit in by voting along party lines. Running outside the system invites normally one kind of label--left and radical are among them. Political demagoguery has narrowed the spectrum of legitimate issues to those labeled patriotic to those labeled as socialistic. Within the high-walled canyon carved by this rhetoric few tenable political positions exist.
To abruptly shorten my narrative again the point is that legitimate sources of discontent are continually shifting away from truth production like the news into a marginal space of flashing banners and poorly edited and maintained web backwaters. There, people with little, no, or the wrong credentials attempt to shed light on power only to have their marginal status work against them. One man's sane and rational analysis of steel gets placed alongside another man's report about Lizard People. A measure of credibility by association gets implied in this kind of positioning. A professor discussing dissent gets his report aired next to a man in a ski mask discussing how to address police. The effect is one that immediately strains the credulity of the professor. It's as if the Jesus of his day were found to have an illegitimate message to spread based on the fact that he associated with both the potentates and dregs of society. This lack of consistency is one of many tactics used to discount the messenger.
Rational paranoia is not intended to add pun to a psychological ailment, nor is it meant to water down either of the juxtaposed entities. It intends to frame the conditions under which some kinds of unpopular or 'alternative' views on official events raise the specter of mental fitness. That fitness becomes the mode of questioning to presume without saying that the world as we know it through official narratives is not a fiction, a human construction, but in fact the real world.
Discussing how knowledge gets formed and accepted does nothing to forward either cause. It is the very understanding of this process that can be used to manipulate the outcome of one's mindset and opinions on any number of issues. Conspiracy labels start here, and what follows from such labels are attempts to make a science of studying why this form of paranoia happens.
To question power and authority should be sane. I have no truck with it. But power and authority have no domain over reality. Given how much of our reality is mediated by experience in two spheres our ability to establish an independent reality is compromised. We go to work for the majority of our days, and that world is a highly regulated public space. Our thinking and action are shaped by the merits of productivity. We engage in a specialized form of activity known as 'labor.' When we come home from labor we engage in any number of home-based activities. Primary among these is media consumption. And who's media is this? It could be any number. But if we were to limit our menu--for the sake of argument--to entertainment, news, and Lizard people updates how equipped are we to engage in a democratic society? We are very poorly equipped. We lack the chops as average Joes to even purport to speak for our constituents. That's the domain of the specialist and the well-networked individual, both of whom are quite synonymous in contemporary America. One reason we lack the chops to represent constituent interests is because we have the choice of consuming marginal news sources. One fitting definition of the internet by Richard Kyanka explains it as a place where weird people find like-minded others in order to feel that they're normal. Our freedom to consume what media and information we please contribute to our decidedly non-catholic worldviews. We're all partisans in this fight. We lack a worldview in the literal sense because so much of our life is consume by work and media consumption. Both of these decisively narrow our worldview to one framed by interests. And to stand outside of that worldview and to call those interests by their names leads to a suggestive semiotic domino-effect whereby one presumptively topples the world as such. The only recourse to those who are beholden to this world as such, and that goes for the average Joes, is to question the sanity of those who do such things. And so oppositional figures will remain marginal figures because they denounce more than just a political system but a reality system that is tied to a symbol system and a logic system. Simply put, power and authority have staked their claims on something more expansive than politics and government. They're in the business of reality management.
And so we don't question reality while we watch dramatizations of humans in reality show drama. And we don't question reality as we 'clock in' at our 'real' jobs. Meanwhile we pray to all our lesser gods of stock markets and finance. Some of us still believe in luck as we play lotteries. All of us carry around paper deities of worth, and all of this seems rational and sane. And that's because we all do it.
Friday, December 2, 2011
the phenomenology of obedience
What do I study you ask?
What do I write about you ask?
What motivates my research you ask?
What frames my questions you ask?
What initiates the search you ask?
I seek to understand the phenomenology of obedience within technopolitical social orders.
'What in the hell is that?' you ask.
It's many things. Owing to the focus on phenomenology, I'm concerned with action, where it happens and how it happens--the lived event.
Why obedience you ask?
That's the focal point of what I'm studying. Granted how we interpret action is an orthogonal grab bag of valences, values, salience, and outcome. That's how anyone invests meaning in a rather amorphous and unresolved set of behaviors. Any interpreter sets the boundaries and implies the outcomes as a process of turning toward the phenomenon under study. I merely question the assumption that free will drives our human behavior.
The mechanistic, biomechanical discourse is becoming ascendant in understanding human behavior as brain-dependent. That flushes out the ghost in the machine. The machine is being used to describe the projection, the ghost, that was once human nature.
Those who are apologists for free will still find space for human intuition invested in temporality. Owing to our reflexivity we are unstuck, so to speak, from the mere machinery of action, but we're not completely untethered from it. It functions as a yang of determination to our ying of agency. That's the tension underlying any interpretation. These apologists, finding their free will in the space of afterthought and forethought intentionally cannot look to the present, the now, and to do so is to try to parse the brute data of activity into the categories: reflex, tendency, and agency. So even the apologists haven't denounced the mechanistic determination of human behavior; they've merely added some slack in the tether between action and substance. That is where I enter.
I too see the notion of human action as this combination of behavior and the lag time of retrospection being put into future action. That's the messy dialectic that underlies our own struggle with our humanity and the researcher's struggle for understanding. Obedience is my watch word. I see us both in our machine and in our reflection upon the machine as being fed by a tendency to short circuit this reflexivity in a constant buzz of gadget-obsessed, information aware, metaknowledge hopping activity.
The phenomenology of obedience is transparent. You see the glass as half full. I see it as half empty--same thing. My hopping off point is that I don't see us heading in a positive direction but one toward which our brains, our culture, and our activity coalesce around an ever tightening loop of interactivity with dramatized information management. Having the world at our fingertips is posed as a triumph of the western idyl of citizen as both consumer and free agent in a free society. Instead, having the world at our fingertips deadens our perception to our surroundings, adjusts our attention, and refocuses our recursive behaviors.
Our obedience occurs first to the interface. Then it's a matter of understanding how that interface is defined, described, and determined, which challenges our freedom of thinking. We're beginning to mistake judgment for selecting from a set of pre-defined options. We're beginning to mistake thinking for search. It's our mistake that we can modify the interface cosmetically that gives us freedom, but it's the same thing, only in a new configuration. We mistake having the world at our fingertips with the world. In order to journey we search. In order to understand we search. In order to reach out to others we search. In order to make a community we interface with each other as information. A status update is a phatic datum of being thereness, that isn't really thereness.
We mistake our obedience to an interface as free will, our own doing if only because we're flooded with options for exploring, customizing, and returning to it. Our obedience is never registered as such because we never recognize our cage; it's fictional in that our activity makes it. But as long as I return to the computer, check the same sites, return to e-mail throughout the day, double check a few forums then I've merely milled about my cage. If the cage accepts some input and, importantly, provides some output, we return.
What do I write about you ask?
What motivates my research you ask?
What frames my questions you ask?
What initiates the search you ask?
I seek to understand the phenomenology of obedience within technopolitical social orders.
'What in the hell is that?' you ask.
It's many things. Owing to the focus on phenomenology, I'm concerned with action, where it happens and how it happens--the lived event.
Why obedience you ask?
That's the focal point of what I'm studying. Granted how we interpret action is an orthogonal grab bag of valences, values, salience, and outcome. That's how anyone invests meaning in a rather amorphous and unresolved set of behaviors. Any interpreter sets the boundaries and implies the outcomes as a process of turning toward the phenomenon under study. I merely question the assumption that free will drives our human behavior.
The mechanistic, biomechanical discourse is becoming ascendant in understanding human behavior as brain-dependent. That flushes out the ghost in the machine. The machine is being used to describe the projection, the ghost, that was once human nature.
Those who are apologists for free will still find space for human intuition invested in temporality. Owing to our reflexivity we are unstuck, so to speak, from the mere machinery of action, but we're not completely untethered from it. It functions as a yang of determination to our ying of agency. That's the tension underlying any interpretation. These apologists, finding their free will in the space of afterthought and forethought intentionally cannot look to the present, the now, and to do so is to try to parse the brute data of activity into the categories: reflex, tendency, and agency. So even the apologists haven't denounced the mechanistic determination of human behavior; they've merely added some slack in the tether between action and substance. That is where I enter.
I too see the notion of human action as this combination of behavior and the lag time of retrospection being put into future action. That's the messy dialectic that underlies our own struggle with our humanity and the researcher's struggle for understanding. Obedience is my watch word. I see us both in our machine and in our reflection upon the machine as being fed by a tendency to short circuit this reflexivity in a constant buzz of gadget-obsessed, information aware, metaknowledge hopping activity.
The phenomenology of obedience is transparent. You see the glass as half full. I see it as half empty--same thing. My hopping off point is that I don't see us heading in a positive direction but one toward which our brains, our culture, and our activity coalesce around an ever tightening loop of interactivity with dramatized information management. Having the world at our fingertips is posed as a triumph of the western idyl of citizen as both consumer and free agent in a free society. Instead, having the world at our fingertips deadens our perception to our surroundings, adjusts our attention, and refocuses our recursive behaviors.
Our obedience occurs first to the interface. Then it's a matter of understanding how that interface is defined, described, and determined, which challenges our freedom of thinking. We're beginning to mistake judgment for selecting from a set of pre-defined options. We're beginning to mistake thinking for search. It's our mistake that we can modify the interface cosmetically that gives us freedom, but it's the same thing, only in a new configuration. We mistake having the world at our fingertips with the world. In order to journey we search. In order to understand we search. In order to reach out to others we search. In order to make a community we interface with each other as information. A status update is a phatic datum of being thereness, that isn't really thereness.
We mistake our obedience to an interface as free will, our own doing if only because we're flooded with options for exploring, customizing, and returning to it. Our obedience is never registered as such because we never recognize our cage; it's fictional in that our activity makes it. But as long as I return to the computer, check the same sites, return to e-mail throughout the day, double check a few forums then I've merely milled about my cage. If the cage accepts some input and, importantly, provides some output, we return.
Friday, November 11, 2011
obgligatory november post
Hi self who reads my shit caked commentary on culture, society, self, science, ad nauseum.
Nothing new really to report. I work here. I work there. I save money. I don't spend much other than what I blow on restaurants. Oh boy. I am getting fat. That's nothing new. I expect to if all I eat is restaurant food. Blah blah. Gorge, gorge. Work, work, cash, spend.
The cycle is in full motion. I do various odd kinds of work. Nothing could be more odd than to teach public speaking to engineering students only to turn around and work on their projects as an iron worker. Thus is the strangeness of life. Our economy is a no-economy. I am unsure what will come of the future of labor in the United States. Now it seems that absence makes the heart grow fonder for low-wage jobs--the same ones that left briefly only to return as non-union and no promises jobs. A different ethic reigns where people who complain are labeled as such while the larger picture of who benefits and under what conditions goes unstated. If we are the labor our only recourse to garner an honest wage is to do what our forebears did--strike. We have to organize and demand a better wage. This is a democracy. We can't merely hold that notion up and practice it for a few minutes every major election while we spend the majority of our lives toiling under the capricious hand of capital. That's a farce. It's an ideological smokescreen. We cannot for one moment think that hard work will produce riches. Hard work produces a wage decided by the person creating that job. 'Suck it up' is the motto of the day.
Globalization and a non-partisan unpatriotic global dollar define the terms. No wonder old men are being framed as terrorists. It was set up this way. Crash a few planes, crash the markets, and in the ensuing panic loot away, destroy files, and rewrite the laws by placing metal braces on the Constitution. The Patriot Act is fascism in plain sight. We don't reduce our freedoms in order to be safe. That's ridiculous. We could also limit the speed of automobiles to that of walking in order to reduce crash fatalities to zero, but what's the good in that. The risk a government takes in giving its population freedoms is a risk of control. Prediction and control is being orchestrated. We have a two party system that crowds out any 'fringe' voices. You know those voices. Fringe voices that call for universal health care--that's socialism by the way. They gerrymander districts to place the balance of power between the two parties into predictable cycles of election, incumbent challenges, reelection, and a steady replacement of unpopular candidates with future unpopular candidates. Each one is equally groomed to play to their monied handlers. The level of distrust and distaste for politics is also orchestrated. If you still believe that government is the problem you will work against it without realizing that in a democracy you are the government. You. The anxieties that we feel and the retreat to God and guns is driven by this total lack of accountability which signals a lack of control in the politics of the day. Of course we also have the dying media to grant culpability as well.
I am sick of the same tropes, the same sacred cows, the same demagogues, the same jobs, the same pay, the same fears, the same diversions. I can only disconnect myself so much from the media apparatus. But here I am listening to public radio all day long. I absorb it. I am unsure why I do. It informs my political cantankerousness.
On that note, I will continue listening to the radio. I will continue to teach my class. And I will continue to scrape by.
Nothing new really to report. I work here. I work there. I save money. I don't spend much other than what I blow on restaurants. Oh boy. I am getting fat. That's nothing new. I expect to if all I eat is restaurant food. Blah blah. Gorge, gorge. Work, work, cash, spend.
The cycle is in full motion. I do various odd kinds of work. Nothing could be more odd than to teach public speaking to engineering students only to turn around and work on their projects as an iron worker. Thus is the strangeness of life. Our economy is a no-economy. I am unsure what will come of the future of labor in the United States. Now it seems that absence makes the heart grow fonder for low-wage jobs--the same ones that left briefly only to return as non-union and no promises jobs. A different ethic reigns where people who complain are labeled as such while the larger picture of who benefits and under what conditions goes unstated. If we are the labor our only recourse to garner an honest wage is to do what our forebears did--strike. We have to organize and demand a better wage. This is a democracy. We can't merely hold that notion up and practice it for a few minutes every major election while we spend the majority of our lives toiling under the capricious hand of capital. That's a farce. It's an ideological smokescreen. We cannot for one moment think that hard work will produce riches. Hard work produces a wage decided by the person creating that job. 'Suck it up' is the motto of the day.
Globalization and a non-partisan unpatriotic global dollar define the terms. No wonder old men are being framed as terrorists. It was set up this way. Crash a few planes, crash the markets, and in the ensuing panic loot away, destroy files, and rewrite the laws by placing metal braces on the Constitution. The Patriot Act is fascism in plain sight. We don't reduce our freedoms in order to be safe. That's ridiculous. We could also limit the speed of automobiles to that of walking in order to reduce crash fatalities to zero, but what's the good in that. The risk a government takes in giving its population freedoms is a risk of control. Prediction and control is being orchestrated. We have a two party system that crowds out any 'fringe' voices. You know those voices. Fringe voices that call for universal health care--that's socialism by the way. They gerrymander districts to place the balance of power between the two parties into predictable cycles of election, incumbent challenges, reelection, and a steady replacement of unpopular candidates with future unpopular candidates. Each one is equally groomed to play to their monied handlers. The level of distrust and distaste for politics is also orchestrated. If you still believe that government is the problem you will work against it without realizing that in a democracy you are the government. You. The anxieties that we feel and the retreat to God and guns is driven by this total lack of accountability which signals a lack of control in the politics of the day. Of course we also have the dying media to grant culpability as well.
I am sick of the same tropes, the same sacred cows, the same demagogues, the same jobs, the same pay, the same fears, the same diversions. I can only disconnect myself so much from the media apparatus. But here I am listening to public radio all day long. I absorb it. I am unsure why I do. It informs my political cantankerousness.
On that note, I will continue listening to the radio. I will continue to teach my class. And I will continue to scrape by.
Sunday, October 16, 2011
Lady Gaga in 15 words or less
From An AVclub article about the artist Lady Gaga:
Call me out of touch with today's youth pop culture, but that pretty much sizes her up.
a combination of spoiled arrogance masquerading as simplistic empowerment messages and tediously self-aware “outrageousness”
Call me out of touch with today's youth pop culture, but that pretty much sizes her up.
Monday, August 29, 2011
What happened?
I've lost track of my creativity. I've not done much to contribute to this diary of writing. I suppose that the majority of my writing was driven by alcohol-induced fugue states, depression, or some mental condition in between.
Now, now I have other things on my mind. If I'm not doing some kind of work, thinking about some kind of work, or planning to do some kind of work then I'm just plain busy. It's not the good kind of busy it's just busy for busy's sake. I get involved in gaming just to fill time and to get my mind into that set that occurs when you're obsessive and absorbed. That's what I do. On the weekend I go on date. I spend my money on those dates. In fact what I'm doing is trying to do things right: paying for everything, opening the doors, and being polite. I'm unsure what that really means or if it's important. I suppose it makes an impact. My date treats me quite well. She's a bit older than me, but that's nothing to really remark about. She's pretty, enough said.
So, now that I'm not so interested in getting blitzed off my ass and awaking still drunk to scribble my thoughts I'm not scribbling my thoughts. Could this writing have been merely a transient condition of one's mental abnormality whether chemically induced or over-reflection?
Change is good. I'll maintain my reflection as needed here. I do have a concern not to skip a month. I almost did that. It's been over a month here. That aside. I'll focus on change and try to document it here.
Now, now I have other things on my mind. If I'm not doing some kind of work, thinking about some kind of work, or planning to do some kind of work then I'm just plain busy. It's not the good kind of busy it's just busy for busy's sake. I get involved in gaming just to fill time and to get my mind into that set that occurs when you're obsessive and absorbed. That's what I do. On the weekend I go on date. I spend my money on those dates. In fact what I'm doing is trying to do things right: paying for everything, opening the doors, and being polite. I'm unsure what that really means or if it's important. I suppose it makes an impact. My date treats me quite well. She's a bit older than me, but that's nothing to really remark about. She's pretty, enough said.
So, now that I'm not so interested in getting blitzed off my ass and awaking still drunk to scribble my thoughts I'm not scribbling my thoughts. Could this writing have been merely a transient condition of one's mental abnormality whether chemically induced or over-reflection?
Change is good. I'll maintain my reflection as needed here. I do have a concern not to skip a month. I almost did that. It's been over a month here. That aside. I'll focus on change and try to document it here.
Wednesday, July 27, 2011
Prisoner of Consciousness
I am a prisoner of consciousness. I think too much. I think myself into a shame-filled bubble of remorse and self-loathing.
I am a prisoner of consciousness. I am too self-aware, all too painfully self-aware. If ignorance is bliss, then awareness is a prison. It's a prison of my own making, and so far I can loose the latch to my gate only when I'm on some alcohol bender. And even that's not a guarantee that I'll be free if only for a minute.
I am a prisoner of consciousness. The rub is that it's a prison of my own making, and in truth I made nothing. I am a prisoner on the envelope of neuronal activity. I'm cresting a wave of brain electricity, but it's persistent stormy cloud of neuronal awareness that is particular to my situation.
I am a prisoner of consciousness. I fight demons that are already impaled on my knife's point. You can't wound a wound. You can't cut a cut. You can remove the life from something that never existed.
I'm a prisoner of consciousness. It's a grammatical prison. It begins with the frame--prisoner. It situates this in an activity--thinking. And it seals the deal with the subjective affirmation--I am.
I am not a prisoner of consciousness, and I know why the caged bird sings. The mind is a prison. The thinking substance cannot transcend the thing which it is. The prison is just one manifestation of the thinking substance coming into self awareness. Self-awareness is the prison, the condition for self-discipline. It's time to go back to counting tiles, anything to take my mind of my situation.
I am a prisoner of consciousness. I am too self-aware, all too painfully self-aware. If ignorance is bliss, then awareness is a prison. It's a prison of my own making, and so far I can loose the latch to my gate only when I'm on some alcohol bender. And even that's not a guarantee that I'll be free if only for a minute.
I am a prisoner of consciousness. The rub is that it's a prison of my own making, and in truth I made nothing. I am a prisoner on the envelope of neuronal activity. I'm cresting a wave of brain electricity, but it's persistent stormy cloud of neuronal awareness that is particular to my situation.
I am a prisoner of consciousness. I fight demons that are already impaled on my knife's point. You can't wound a wound. You can't cut a cut. You can remove the life from something that never existed.
I'm a prisoner of consciousness. It's a grammatical prison. It begins with the frame--prisoner. It situates this in an activity--thinking. And it seals the deal with the subjective affirmation--I am.
I am not a prisoner of consciousness, and I know why the caged bird sings. The mind is a prison. The thinking substance cannot transcend the thing which it is. The prison is just one manifestation of the thinking substance coming into self awareness. Self-awareness is the prison, the condition for self-discipline. It's time to go back to counting tiles, anything to take my mind of my situation.
Thursday, July 21, 2011
"Fake love to me."
My friend Thomas shares a birthday with me. His is the day before mine. So we shared the celebration together this year. Since we celebrated on his birthdate, he called the shots and we went where he decided. He invited the group, and we all moved together across the city.
Among the crowd of friends was a woman that he used to date. I made a few overtures at her that night. And we danced. I was blacked out for some of this, but I do remember with vivid clarity the end of the night. She drove me home from the bar.
Except we didn't go home.
We drove across the river into Fairmount City and ended up at the Cahokia Mounds historic site. The ride was quiet. No one said a word. I had this creeping suspicion that she wanted me to have sex with her there. I grew anxious, not in anticipation of the event but fearing the inevitable problem--my fear and my impotence and my fear of my impotence.
When we arrived she ducked into some weeds to take a leak. I wandered around in the dark for a minute at the base of Monk's mound--the largest earthen structure on the complex and the largest earthen mound structure in the world. We began the trek up to the top. Upon arriving at the top I found a place to take a leak and we found a bench. Immediately she pulled her pants and underwear down to her ankles and laid on the concrete bench set at the plateau of Monk's Mound. Following through, I pulled my pants down. Knowing what would come of the situation I made the best of it. I went down on her. After a few minutes she faked an orgasm and she encouraged me to cum on her tits. Frozen in fear but mechanically performing what I could do intimately I felt nothing. I did what I could.
We pulled our pants up and walked back down the mound to the car. I briefly explained that I never can get an erection the first time. It's a truth, but in it is a lie. Sometimes, I cannot get hard the second time, or the third time. Encountering an issue I didn't know existed until I first encountered it I was able to overcome it in subsequent encounters. But, since then, the problem has been compounded by my own thinking.
She said something briefly to me on the ride back to St. Louis. She coached me on getting over that fear. The conversation ended. I asked her for her phone number. Instead of saying "no," she told me that she had a boyfriend.
"I understand," I replied.
I did actually. This was a throw-away evening. I was just the lucky recipient of a coincidence of factors--a sexually frustrated woman attending a birthday celebration for her former lover in the midst of his new love interest. She was happy to find a measure of retaliation in me, so she let me flirt and dance with her. She took me to the mound not out of love or interest but out of a need to conclude the evening and to conclude the play of forces between her and her ex.
We arrived at Thomas' house where I parked my car. I noted that he wasn't home yet. I noticed that my phone was dead, and so were my chances at getting her number anyway. But that night is seared in memory and serves as a painful reminder of something that I've yet to enjoy--meaningless, momentary sex with acquaintances.
Liz said as much to me after enjoying this with a fellow Peace Corpse volunteer. I could read the frustration in her story. After all I did one morning to please her I couldn't do that one thing to please her--put my erect penis inside her and eventually cum.
My lack of an erection is wish fulfillment. I intend to be a disappointment, not only to me but to others. My current employment status has a bittersweet component to it that I sip like a fine scotch. Emotional pain is my vice, and so I bathe in it every chance I get. I overthink situations anyway, and so I end up feeling alienated from the scene as it plays out before me. At times, when I'm very close to a woman I become so distant. I want to hide, and so I retreat to the darkest and inner most recesses of myself. I become virtually unresponsive physically, emotionally, and mentally. I enter a state of catatonia.
So here's to Liz and to Eleanor: "Fake love to me." That's all you're ever going to get from me.
Among the crowd of friends was a woman that he used to date. I made a few overtures at her that night. And we danced. I was blacked out for some of this, but I do remember with vivid clarity the end of the night. She drove me home from the bar.
Except we didn't go home.
We drove across the river into Fairmount City and ended up at the Cahokia Mounds historic site. The ride was quiet. No one said a word. I had this creeping suspicion that she wanted me to have sex with her there. I grew anxious, not in anticipation of the event but fearing the inevitable problem--my fear and my impotence and my fear of my impotence.
When we arrived she ducked into some weeds to take a leak. I wandered around in the dark for a minute at the base of Monk's mound--the largest earthen structure on the complex and the largest earthen mound structure in the world. We began the trek up to the top. Upon arriving at the top I found a place to take a leak and we found a bench. Immediately she pulled her pants and underwear down to her ankles and laid on the concrete bench set at the plateau of Monk's Mound. Following through, I pulled my pants down. Knowing what would come of the situation I made the best of it. I went down on her. After a few minutes she faked an orgasm and she encouraged me to cum on her tits. Frozen in fear but mechanically performing what I could do intimately I felt nothing. I did what I could.
We pulled our pants up and walked back down the mound to the car. I briefly explained that I never can get an erection the first time. It's a truth, but in it is a lie. Sometimes, I cannot get hard the second time, or the third time. Encountering an issue I didn't know existed until I first encountered it I was able to overcome it in subsequent encounters. But, since then, the problem has been compounded by my own thinking.
She said something briefly to me on the ride back to St. Louis. She coached me on getting over that fear. The conversation ended. I asked her for her phone number. Instead of saying "no," she told me that she had a boyfriend.
"I understand," I replied.
I did actually. This was a throw-away evening. I was just the lucky recipient of a coincidence of factors--a sexually frustrated woman attending a birthday celebration for her former lover in the midst of his new love interest. She was happy to find a measure of retaliation in me, so she let me flirt and dance with her. She took me to the mound not out of love or interest but out of a need to conclude the evening and to conclude the play of forces between her and her ex.
We arrived at Thomas' house where I parked my car. I noted that he wasn't home yet. I noticed that my phone was dead, and so were my chances at getting her number anyway. But that night is seared in memory and serves as a painful reminder of something that I've yet to enjoy--meaningless, momentary sex with acquaintances.
Liz said as much to me after enjoying this with a fellow Peace Corpse volunteer. I could read the frustration in her story. After all I did one morning to please her I couldn't do that one thing to please her--put my erect penis inside her and eventually cum.
My lack of an erection is wish fulfillment. I intend to be a disappointment, not only to me but to others. My current employment status has a bittersweet component to it that I sip like a fine scotch. Emotional pain is my vice, and so I bathe in it every chance I get. I overthink situations anyway, and so I end up feeling alienated from the scene as it plays out before me. At times, when I'm very close to a woman I become so distant. I want to hide, and so I retreat to the darkest and inner most recesses of myself. I become virtually unresponsive physically, emotionally, and mentally. I enter a state of catatonia.
So here's to Liz and to Eleanor: "Fake love to me." That's all you're ever going to get from me.
Saturday, July 16, 2011
Facebook commodifies weak social ties.
"Hi, you're in my biology lab. What are you doing Friday?"
College does one of those interesting things that only modern institutions do. It brings together a great number of men and women in their prime. Walking the halls and grounds of a university in between classes is a cavalcade of beauty and opportunity. One can suspect that each face has a future, a potential financial success.
Before was the city, a convergence point of people from far and wide. It was a measure of the degraded institutions of family and community that would have placed strictures on intimate contact.
"Hi, you work at the Triangle Shirt Factory. Are you going to the dance Friday?"
Then came modern travel: the steamboat and the steam engine became a recursive social algorithm for those weak social ties.
"Hi, I saw you on the westbound 4:19. Seeing anyone?"
Something intoxicating occurs when I go to a hotel. There among the halls I sense an opportunity to meet and have completely meaningless encounters with others. The freedom from significance is all that I seek. And removed from the strictures of social ties I can be a nobody, a perfect nobody.
Freed from my social body I shed the social anxieties and pathologies of self, which they have created and which become the behavioral automata that I self-medicate in order to mitigate.
Facebook is merely a communication appliance that extends this weak tie. I use something as simple as Google to seek out the names of those missed opportunities. It's a wishing well for the information age. Carving one's name on a tree along an oft-traversed path is the graffiti of one's discontent.
"Hi, you're in my biology lab. What are you doing Friday?"
College does one of those interesting things that only modern institutions do. It brings together a great number of men and women in their prime. Walking the halls and grounds of a university in between classes is a cavalcade of beauty and opportunity. One can suspect that each face has a future, a potential financial success.
Before was the city, a convergence point of people from far and wide. It was a measure of the degraded institutions of family and community that would have placed strictures on intimate contact.
"Hi, you work at the Triangle Shirt Factory. Are you going to the dance Friday?"
Then came modern travel: the steamboat and the steam engine became a recursive social algorithm for those weak social ties.
"Hi, I saw you on the westbound 4:19. Seeing anyone?"
Something intoxicating occurs when I go to a hotel. There among the halls I sense an opportunity to meet and have completely meaningless encounters with others. The freedom from significance is all that I seek. And removed from the strictures of social ties I can be a nobody, a perfect nobody.
Freed from my social body I shed the social anxieties and pathologies of self, which they have created and which become the behavioral automata that I self-medicate in order to mitigate.
Facebook is merely a communication appliance that extends this weak tie. I use something as simple as Google to seek out the names of those missed opportunities. It's a wishing well for the information age. Carving one's name on a tree along an oft-traversed path is the graffiti of one's discontent.
Tuesday, June 21, 2011
Authority
I have my bodily metabolites analyzed and my thinking imaged in order to determine a truth I cannot be trusted to articulate with my mouth.
Friday, June 17, 2011
between a rock and another rock
I have a chance to leave my house, but it will be to see a band. I was invited by someone I should not spend time with outside of family functions. She's the mother of my nieces. Why does this happen?
This should not have happened. No, it did not happen. Nothing happened. Nothing will. For as long as I have any handle on the situation I will ensure that nothing happens. Nothing always happens. That's my specialty. I had a joke based upon this today.
"Your farts smell like nothing when you're nobody."
That is hardly a victory. It is an un-win. It is not a win, and neither is it a loss. It occupies the third category, which is that of the un-win. The win precluded me. I cannot win, nor can I lose because I have no legitimacy to compete. I am not there. I was always missing from the picture.
I unraveled my friendships just to see how they were particularly coiled. I was unable to reconstitute them. I loosed trust in the process of the unraveling.
Why do I think of lost opportunities? My relationship unraveling is a consequence of not wanting to lose an opportunity. A lot of good this does me.
Once again I will let an opportunity dissipate. The window will close. It should. It wasn't there. Opportunities don't exist. Moments present themselves and you either choose to act or avoid acting upon some presumption that for you is ripe in this moment. A lot of good that will do you. A lot of damn good that will do.
The moment will pass as all moments should. I cannot wish them into existence. I cannot wish them away. They merely exist. Here, I stand with no one. I am non-coincident to myself. Existence pushes something aside. I have no desire to push back. I have no desire. I have no will. I have no motivation. I am without a narrative or an identity that persuades me to act upon it let alone share it.
But I have a dream to be a cloud someday. I am mostly water, so I am mostly a cloud with some other mineral and molecular material holding it to the ground in some semblance of a person. I want to be a cloud. Sooner or later this personage, this historical, nagging inertia of an identity will lose its selfish battle for self-identity. Then, then my watery remainder will rise into the sky.
To want to be a cloud is a laughable offense.
This should not have happened. No, it did not happen. Nothing happened. Nothing will. For as long as I have any handle on the situation I will ensure that nothing happens. Nothing always happens. That's my specialty. I had a joke based upon this today.
"Your farts smell like nothing when you're nobody."
That is hardly a victory. It is an un-win. It is not a win, and neither is it a loss. It occupies the third category, which is that of the un-win. The win precluded me. I cannot win, nor can I lose because I have no legitimacy to compete. I am not there. I was always missing from the picture.
I unraveled my friendships just to see how they were particularly coiled. I was unable to reconstitute them. I loosed trust in the process of the unraveling.
Why do I think of lost opportunities? My relationship unraveling is a consequence of not wanting to lose an opportunity. A lot of good this does me.
Once again I will let an opportunity dissipate. The window will close. It should. It wasn't there. Opportunities don't exist. Moments present themselves and you either choose to act or avoid acting upon some presumption that for you is ripe in this moment. A lot of good that will do you. A lot of damn good that will do.
The moment will pass as all moments should. I cannot wish them into existence. I cannot wish them away. They merely exist. Here, I stand with no one. I am non-coincident to myself. Existence pushes something aside. I have no desire to push back. I have no desire. I have no will. I have no motivation. I am without a narrative or an identity that persuades me to act upon it let alone share it.
But I have a dream to be a cloud someday. I am mostly water, so I am mostly a cloud with some other mineral and molecular material holding it to the ground in some semblance of a person. I want to be a cloud. Sooner or later this personage, this historical, nagging inertia of an identity will lose its selfish battle for self-identity. Then, then my watery remainder will rise into the sky.
To want to be a cloud is a laughable offense.
Tuesday, June 7, 2011
The absent presence
"Why Phil," she would say, "what puts you in the dumps to-day? You are as solemn as the upper bench in Meeting. I shall have to call Alice to raise your spirits; my presence seems to depress you."
"It's not your presence, but your absence when you are present," began Philip, dolefully, with the idea that he was saying a rather deep thing. "But you won't understand me."
"No, I confess I cannot. If you really are so low as to think I am absent when I am present, it's a frightful case of aberration; I shall ask father to bring out Dr. Jackson. Does Alice appear to be present when she is absent?"
from The gilded age: A tale of to-day (vol. 1) by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner (1873)
"It's not your presence, but your absence when you are present," began Philip, dolefully, with the idea that he was saying a rather deep thing. "But you won't understand me."
"No, I confess I cannot. If you really are so low as to think I am absent when I am present, it's a frightful case of aberration; I shall ask father to bring out Dr. Jackson. Does Alice appear to be present when she is absent?"
from The gilded age: A tale of to-day (vol. 1) by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner (1873)
Wednesday, June 1, 2011
why try?
Why try?
When I reach out I inadvertently push people away. I've pushed away a woman named Anna. I'm pushing away a woman named Eleanor.
Eleanor's is a slow-motion car crash. Pain and disappointment get heaped on with broken glass shards of chance opportunity, hell even hope, thrown in.
Why try when all I do is lose the friends I have? Is that the taboo to dating within your friend network? I'd hate to think that there's some kind of unwritten rule regarding this.
I don't know what I'm doing. I truly don't know. One hand reaches out while the other covers my face, a childish attempt at hiding myself at shielding me from my own shame at what I'm doing.
I don't know what I'm doing. I lack confidence completely when it comes to personal, intimate relations. I am a dolt. I am an idiot. I am a fool. I reveal this, and the person with whom I share this rare moment of my foolishness loses all respect for me. Hell she even hates me. That's what I sense--hate.
I set out to prove what I tell myself daily--you're a useless, youthless, toothless, bum. Every day brings me closer to my nadir, a nadir that I've set for myself as a personal goal.
This is my doing. I am an accomplished loser. Give me a job somebody. I need to take my mind of my own self pity.
When I reach out I inadvertently push people away. I've pushed away a woman named Anna. I'm pushing away a woman named Eleanor.
Eleanor's is a slow-motion car crash. Pain and disappointment get heaped on with broken glass shards of chance opportunity, hell even hope, thrown in.
Why try when all I do is lose the friends I have? Is that the taboo to dating within your friend network? I'd hate to think that there's some kind of unwritten rule regarding this.
I don't know what I'm doing. I truly don't know. One hand reaches out while the other covers my face, a childish attempt at hiding myself at shielding me from my own shame at what I'm doing.
I don't know what I'm doing. I lack confidence completely when it comes to personal, intimate relations. I am a dolt. I am an idiot. I am a fool. I reveal this, and the person with whom I share this rare moment of my foolishness loses all respect for me. Hell she even hates me. That's what I sense--hate.
I set out to prove what I tell myself daily--you're a useless, youthless, toothless, bum. Every day brings me closer to my nadir, a nadir that I've set for myself as a personal goal.
This is my doing. I am an accomplished loser. Give me a job somebody. I need to take my mind of my own self pity.
Tuesday, May 31, 2011
An idea big enough to murder you
This idea of an Eleanor is big enough to murder me.
She's eating me up inside. I act foolish. I'm rendered stupid by the occasion. I don't know what to do.
Here I sit at five in the morning, emerging perhaps from a dream but one remembered as an unbroken feeling in heart and preoccupation in mind. I am consumed by an idea of a person. I am consumed by time. I am consumed by the various steps taken off a well-laid path for me. She had given me a sign. I continued to play along. A week goes by. I come closer, but still I keep my distance. She arrives at a show. I smile at her. She's indifferent to me. I can accept this as a norm for women who are interested. It's part of the game; it can be.
She invites me over to a little party. I arrive. I make myself a fool. She calls me out for what she notes, if I recall correctly, as my vanity, my self-absorption. I've become an ungrateful bordering on obnoxious and self-centered asshole. The night ends with me saying goodbye in my usual virtually stand-offish manner. The word alone is all I can muster with maybe an accompanying hand gesture. I can't hug her. I can't kiss her. I can't even touch her. She's always with someone. I don't stick around long enough or muster the force to speak my interest. No, I'm paralyzed by the moment's possibilities. So I wave goodbye in my all-too-mechanical manner and fade into a long tirade against myself at my car. There I sit for an hour beating myself up for my childish behavior. And that's me--no substance. I'm Fake Sinatra. It's the little joke that's spoken between us about me that has an unvarnished truth to it. And it's that kind of thing that reminds me how she's a truth, an idea of a world big enough to murder mine.
I shouldn't say that it's murder. It's me killing me. But the killing is personally painful and carried out every waking and non-waking moment. She's on my mind. She's been on my mind. And now my actions, which I feel jeopardize any opportunity in the little window she provided become the source of so much self-destruction. It's not so much that I know what I should have done. In some instances I do, but I have an intense fear and shame to present myself to her. It's destroying me. My quiet and empty world is disrupted and easily so.
Maybe I should go back to being a creep. I still am. No, there's a weight to this moment that's killing me. It's forcing me into a hastier and hastier retreat from any social reality that I've established. That I've seen her for two weeks now since she spoke to me in a drunken spell about wanting a man to take her, wanting me to do this perhaps. She recalls the event two weeks ago a few days later where I see her. The last thing she remembers is talking with Kendra, the conversation that forced me into the third person. I recall her saying, "I've embarrassed him" or "He's shy." I was kind of listening but not looking her way. Then I came in and touched her on the steps. I put my arms around her. She rubbed her face in mine. The moves were somewhat electric. She leaves soon after. I make a foolish and ill planned attempt at pursuit. The night ends. She gives me the eyes I know so well that Sunday. She's charmed. I see her two times in the week for yoga. I see her again that Friday night at a large show. I attempt to get close. She's keeping me away. She invites me over, and I turn that around to being foolish and stand-offish. I reveal my childish and utterly selfish demeanor. I'm unequipped to deal with a situation. Every moment is a make or break situation. The tension rises. I don't know how to handle myself and begin to bubble over in ways that I can't handle. At one point she hates me, commanding her dog to bite me. It's over? I don't know. I don't know what I am doing.
This idea is killing me. When I'm away she's on my mind. When we're near I try to hold my composure to the point that my lack of action is a measured attempt to hide any interest. Instead I leak an inner reflection of the demons of my desire, my fear, my absolute uncertainty in what to do next. Every second reveals either a chance or an end. I don't know what to do.
The weekend wears on and we see each other again and again. The topic is sex, and I am utterly intimidated. She's the connoisseur, the sipper of a wide variety of sexual experiences. I'm the closeted hide-and-go-seek man child. My last sexual encounter, if I exclude my rather sudden and mostly missing night with her was years, years ago. That was a nagging point that led to my arrival onto the singles scene. I singled her out, and gave her my show, my Fake Sinatra show. I sang her Lady in Red and she was at least impressed. Then again, I think she prefers to be pursued in front of her exes. Most nights where I scored points with her were quite fun and quite public displays of affection toward her with her exes in view. Now, I've crossed the threshold, and I am starting to lose control of my carefree attitude. Now it's serious all the way. Too much I fear and I will lose her. I've lost myself already in a series of foolish steps. I don't even want to open my mouth. Nothing worthwhile comes out. I am consumed by my own obsession with an idea an idea that I fear is killing me but that nevertheless is doing violence to a woman for whom I have respect but who must conform to an idea in my head in order for me to push forward. As she speaks of her sexual conquests I suffer another setback. Each one either fills me with some quiet jealousy or despondency. Tonight she offers me nothing, and one of her exes, Thomas, is treating her well, feeding her, cleaning up her house. I only dirty dishes and foolishly open my mouth. She offers me nothing, for she is realizing that I have nothing to offer her. I am the fake, the phony, the thing I fear most in this world. My only authenticity is in not sustaining any social ties. Without them I have a world totally of my making, and so I mistake my own unbroken artifice for authenticity.
Eleanor is an idea big enough to murder me, but it is me who will be pulling the trigger. My only rationalization at this point for the sorry steps I've taken and perhaps her own growing distaste for me as one who disrespected her or even insulted her by ignoring her overtures is that we're not compatible. Sure, but what's that? I suspect in my case that compatibility is about them submitting to everything I desire--a totally unrealistic proposal. I don't know what I am doing, and I sense I'm doing a lot of wrong things in rapid-fire succession.
I can't sleep. My waking moments are consumed with one preoccupation--her. My sleeping moments reveal a similar preoccupation--her. I am about ready to retreat once again from society. I have made steps, but ultimately I've prepared the grave for my own social life. I am guarded and almost militantly so with the idea of letting someone in my life. But I expect the other person to be completely open with me. Yeah, my lack of compatibility is due to my discovery of another person's independence and sense of her own self. That's the real threat. I can't accept that she's a world unto herself. I can't contend with that. So, I see it as a threat. She deserves my absolute respect and admiration for being strong, independent, resourceful. She knows what she wants. She's not compatible for those same reasons. I fear that the one I will end up with is not the one that I desire. No, it will be the one that I mildly despise for having no will of her own. No, it will be the one that I mildly disrespect because she lowers her gaze and remains submissive before me. For the sake of my own mind, I either opt out of dating or choose what to me is a safe option--a person with whom I have no true affection, no consuming desire, just compatibility, plain old mechanical compatibility.
So there's my diagnosis. I've come no closer to achieving a solution to my problems. Yet the problem I pose is the lack of female companionship only to find the prospect of female companionship a more immediate problem. Eleanor's an idea that's big enough to murder me, and it will be me wielding the stick. I flirt with this ultimate erasure. The presence of another can force a materialization a spectated presence to myself that's frightening and stressful to me. My ripcord is suicide. To consider that I would kill myself than confront my demons concerning indecision and my pride is chilling. Attitudes towards situations and prevailing sentiments spawned from myself are more powerful than the real people that test their filters. Instead of throwing them out dismissively I want to wrestle them over the abyss destroying myself in the process. That's an affirming disconfirmation if you ask me. How poetic and fucking destructive that I'd rather die than to deal with a problem head on. And that's me. I'm letting a girl get the best of me.
She's a wonderful girl, a truly wonderful girl. She's a woman of the world. She's a woman in the world. I'm in my head, lost perhaps. No, I'm locked in, and I oh so rarely let anyone in. I'm a freak, a fool, a child, an obsessive person. I am not in control here, and it's causing my dismay. I am happy to consider that it's over, and perhaps it should be over. I don't know what I am doing. Besides, the ideas that make her appealing to me--her resourcefulness, her carefree attitude, her non-smoking habit are perhaps just as petty as anything else. What makes her a good fit for any reason? I am in love with her body, sure. I am in love with her mind, sure. But I can't put the two together and accept the dynamic entity before me. It saddens me that I cannot accept Eleanor, and I'd rather die than to face another defeat to my own inner demons. How petty.
She's eating me up inside. I act foolish. I'm rendered stupid by the occasion. I don't know what to do.
Here I sit at five in the morning, emerging perhaps from a dream but one remembered as an unbroken feeling in heart and preoccupation in mind. I am consumed by an idea of a person. I am consumed by time. I am consumed by the various steps taken off a well-laid path for me. She had given me a sign. I continued to play along. A week goes by. I come closer, but still I keep my distance. She arrives at a show. I smile at her. She's indifferent to me. I can accept this as a norm for women who are interested. It's part of the game; it can be.
She invites me over to a little party. I arrive. I make myself a fool. She calls me out for what she notes, if I recall correctly, as my vanity, my self-absorption. I've become an ungrateful bordering on obnoxious and self-centered asshole. The night ends with me saying goodbye in my usual virtually stand-offish manner. The word alone is all I can muster with maybe an accompanying hand gesture. I can't hug her. I can't kiss her. I can't even touch her. She's always with someone. I don't stick around long enough or muster the force to speak my interest. No, I'm paralyzed by the moment's possibilities. So I wave goodbye in my all-too-mechanical manner and fade into a long tirade against myself at my car. There I sit for an hour beating myself up for my childish behavior. And that's me--no substance. I'm Fake Sinatra. It's the little joke that's spoken between us about me that has an unvarnished truth to it. And it's that kind of thing that reminds me how she's a truth, an idea of a world big enough to murder mine.
I shouldn't say that it's murder. It's me killing me. But the killing is personally painful and carried out every waking and non-waking moment. She's on my mind. She's been on my mind. And now my actions, which I feel jeopardize any opportunity in the little window she provided become the source of so much self-destruction. It's not so much that I know what I should have done. In some instances I do, but I have an intense fear and shame to present myself to her. It's destroying me. My quiet and empty world is disrupted and easily so.
Maybe I should go back to being a creep. I still am. No, there's a weight to this moment that's killing me. It's forcing me into a hastier and hastier retreat from any social reality that I've established. That I've seen her for two weeks now since she spoke to me in a drunken spell about wanting a man to take her, wanting me to do this perhaps. She recalls the event two weeks ago a few days later where I see her. The last thing she remembers is talking with Kendra, the conversation that forced me into the third person. I recall her saying, "I've embarrassed him" or "He's shy." I was kind of listening but not looking her way. Then I came in and touched her on the steps. I put my arms around her. She rubbed her face in mine. The moves were somewhat electric. She leaves soon after. I make a foolish and ill planned attempt at pursuit. The night ends. She gives me the eyes I know so well that Sunday. She's charmed. I see her two times in the week for yoga. I see her again that Friday night at a large show. I attempt to get close. She's keeping me away. She invites me over, and I turn that around to being foolish and stand-offish. I reveal my childish and utterly selfish demeanor. I'm unequipped to deal with a situation. Every moment is a make or break situation. The tension rises. I don't know how to handle myself and begin to bubble over in ways that I can't handle. At one point she hates me, commanding her dog to bite me. It's over? I don't know. I don't know what I am doing.
This idea is killing me. When I'm away she's on my mind. When we're near I try to hold my composure to the point that my lack of action is a measured attempt to hide any interest. Instead I leak an inner reflection of the demons of my desire, my fear, my absolute uncertainty in what to do next. Every second reveals either a chance or an end. I don't know what to do.
The weekend wears on and we see each other again and again. The topic is sex, and I am utterly intimidated. She's the connoisseur, the sipper of a wide variety of sexual experiences. I'm the closeted hide-and-go-seek man child. My last sexual encounter, if I exclude my rather sudden and mostly missing night with her was years, years ago. That was a nagging point that led to my arrival onto the singles scene. I singled her out, and gave her my show, my Fake Sinatra show. I sang her Lady in Red and she was at least impressed. Then again, I think she prefers to be pursued in front of her exes. Most nights where I scored points with her were quite fun and quite public displays of affection toward her with her exes in view. Now, I've crossed the threshold, and I am starting to lose control of my carefree attitude. Now it's serious all the way. Too much I fear and I will lose her. I've lost myself already in a series of foolish steps. I don't even want to open my mouth. Nothing worthwhile comes out. I am consumed by my own obsession with an idea an idea that I fear is killing me but that nevertheless is doing violence to a woman for whom I have respect but who must conform to an idea in my head in order for me to push forward. As she speaks of her sexual conquests I suffer another setback. Each one either fills me with some quiet jealousy or despondency. Tonight she offers me nothing, and one of her exes, Thomas, is treating her well, feeding her, cleaning up her house. I only dirty dishes and foolishly open my mouth. She offers me nothing, for she is realizing that I have nothing to offer her. I am the fake, the phony, the thing I fear most in this world. My only authenticity is in not sustaining any social ties. Without them I have a world totally of my making, and so I mistake my own unbroken artifice for authenticity.
Eleanor is an idea big enough to murder me, but it is me who will be pulling the trigger. My only rationalization at this point for the sorry steps I've taken and perhaps her own growing distaste for me as one who disrespected her or even insulted her by ignoring her overtures is that we're not compatible. Sure, but what's that? I suspect in my case that compatibility is about them submitting to everything I desire--a totally unrealistic proposal. I don't know what I am doing, and I sense I'm doing a lot of wrong things in rapid-fire succession.
I can't sleep. My waking moments are consumed with one preoccupation--her. My sleeping moments reveal a similar preoccupation--her. I am about ready to retreat once again from society. I have made steps, but ultimately I've prepared the grave for my own social life. I am guarded and almost militantly so with the idea of letting someone in my life. But I expect the other person to be completely open with me. Yeah, my lack of compatibility is due to my discovery of another person's independence and sense of her own self. That's the real threat. I can't accept that she's a world unto herself. I can't contend with that. So, I see it as a threat. She deserves my absolute respect and admiration for being strong, independent, resourceful. She knows what she wants. She's not compatible for those same reasons. I fear that the one I will end up with is not the one that I desire. No, it will be the one that I mildly despise for having no will of her own. No, it will be the one that I mildly disrespect because she lowers her gaze and remains submissive before me. For the sake of my own mind, I either opt out of dating or choose what to me is a safe option--a person with whom I have no true affection, no consuming desire, just compatibility, plain old mechanical compatibility.
So there's my diagnosis. I've come no closer to achieving a solution to my problems. Yet the problem I pose is the lack of female companionship only to find the prospect of female companionship a more immediate problem. Eleanor's an idea that's big enough to murder me, and it will be me wielding the stick. I flirt with this ultimate erasure. The presence of another can force a materialization a spectated presence to myself that's frightening and stressful to me. My ripcord is suicide. To consider that I would kill myself than confront my demons concerning indecision and my pride is chilling. Attitudes towards situations and prevailing sentiments spawned from myself are more powerful than the real people that test their filters. Instead of throwing them out dismissively I want to wrestle them over the abyss destroying myself in the process. That's an affirming disconfirmation if you ask me. How poetic and fucking destructive that I'd rather die than to deal with a problem head on. And that's me. I'm letting a girl get the best of me.
She's a wonderful girl, a truly wonderful girl. She's a woman of the world. She's a woman in the world. I'm in my head, lost perhaps. No, I'm locked in, and I oh so rarely let anyone in. I'm a freak, a fool, a child, an obsessive person. I am not in control here, and it's causing my dismay. I am happy to consider that it's over, and perhaps it should be over. I don't know what I am doing. Besides, the ideas that make her appealing to me--her resourcefulness, her carefree attitude, her non-smoking habit are perhaps just as petty as anything else. What makes her a good fit for any reason? I am in love with her body, sure. I am in love with her mind, sure. But I can't put the two together and accept the dynamic entity before me. It saddens me that I cannot accept Eleanor, and I'd rather die than to face another defeat to my own inner demons. How petty.
Tuesday, May 24, 2011
I've been gone a while
I've been gone a while. I've had a lot on my mind. The usual pain and rejection I've felt have given way to a scary moment of potential hope. I'm taking it very slow.
It appears I have a chance.
It appears.
I have a chance.
I won't put much into the meaning of it right now other than I had a brief semi-sexual run in with a long-time acquaintance. We had it at a wonderful location--Monk's Mound.
We left, had a quiet drive home, and I had the audacity to ask for her number. She told me she had a boyfriend, and that was that.
"I understand." That's what I told her.
A few weeks later she's back in town and my friend Thomas, who is her ex-boyfriend, picked her up from the airport. We sit outside of a bar and she's expressing loudly that she's done with her boyfriend. She's going to try to set him up with this vixen little girl lithely dancing around the tables. Enough said.
I see her a few weeks later at a party, and we chat. She's getting too drunk. I'm getting drunk as well, but not too drunk. I'm trying to pace myself. Her boyfriend is there. She introduced me to him. We say hi. Everything is cordial. As the night extends on I get a little frisky with her. We dance a little. We do a little of anything. She's talking in my ear what she wants. She asks me about my mom. I tell her that my mom is a 'total gypsy.' She's comforted by this. We continue the flirting game. I'm becoming a HAM--a hard ass motherfucker. She talks to me some more. At some point I step back and wander around the room. She's having a loud conversation with a friend named Kendra. It could be about me. I'm not looking her way. I'm partly discomforted and partly flattered by the possibility. It's been a long fucking time--a really long fucking time. I want her. She wants me to pursue her. Perhaps she wants me to be a little aggressive with her. I want that as well. All seems good, maybe. I don't want to over-think or over-fantasize the situation. That will get the best of me.
So far, I've stopped masturbating if only to honor a commitment but with no possible moment when I can release. She's older. She's confident. She's also quite sardonic in how she discusses herself. She called herself 'oldilocks' one night. She's not old. She's in her late thirties. I'm 34. We're of the age range. I'd say this is a good situation. I prefer older women. She has the trappings of an older woman--confidence, some wrinkles, a great attitude, wisdom. This is perfect.
So if I've written my pain on this wall for so long, I'm having a difficult time discussing something that I don't want to blow up. I'd prefer to take this slowly. I would like to get into the habit of less negativity, less woe, and more happiness. We shall see if I reach that point.
This is what I've had to relate. I wanted to post something in May. A year ago this May I was pining over someone who lives above me. She doesn't even look at me. Yes, I miss her. Yes, I miss our friendship. Yes, I want us to be friends again. No, I'm not going to chase after her again. I've got a bigger, better, and much more realistic prize. I just have to not think about her sex life. Mine is sort of non-existent. It's time to bring it back from the dead.
It appears I have a chance.
It appears.
I have a chance.
I won't put much into the meaning of it right now other than I had a brief semi-sexual run in with a long-time acquaintance. We had it at a wonderful location--Monk's Mound.
We left, had a quiet drive home, and I had the audacity to ask for her number. She told me she had a boyfriend, and that was that.
"I understand." That's what I told her.
A few weeks later she's back in town and my friend Thomas, who is her ex-boyfriend, picked her up from the airport. We sit outside of a bar and she's expressing loudly that she's done with her boyfriend. She's going to try to set him up with this vixen little girl lithely dancing around the tables. Enough said.
I see her a few weeks later at a party, and we chat. She's getting too drunk. I'm getting drunk as well, but not too drunk. I'm trying to pace myself. Her boyfriend is there. She introduced me to him. We say hi. Everything is cordial. As the night extends on I get a little frisky with her. We dance a little. We do a little of anything. She's talking in my ear what she wants. She asks me about my mom. I tell her that my mom is a 'total gypsy.' She's comforted by this. We continue the flirting game. I'm becoming a HAM--a hard ass motherfucker. She talks to me some more. At some point I step back and wander around the room. She's having a loud conversation with a friend named Kendra. It could be about me. I'm not looking her way. I'm partly discomforted and partly flattered by the possibility. It's been a long fucking time--a really long fucking time. I want her. She wants me to pursue her. Perhaps she wants me to be a little aggressive with her. I want that as well. All seems good, maybe. I don't want to over-think or over-fantasize the situation. That will get the best of me.
So far, I've stopped masturbating if only to honor a commitment but with no possible moment when I can release. She's older. She's confident. She's also quite sardonic in how she discusses herself. She called herself 'oldilocks' one night. She's not old. She's in her late thirties. I'm 34. We're of the age range. I'd say this is a good situation. I prefer older women. She has the trappings of an older woman--confidence, some wrinkles, a great attitude, wisdom. This is perfect.
So if I've written my pain on this wall for so long, I'm having a difficult time discussing something that I don't want to blow up. I'd prefer to take this slowly. I would like to get into the habit of less negativity, less woe, and more happiness. We shall see if I reach that point.
This is what I've had to relate. I wanted to post something in May. A year ago this May I was pining over someone who lives above me. She doesn't even look at me. Yes, I miss her. Yes, I miss our friendship. Yes, I want us to be friends again. No, I'm not going to chase after her again. I've got a bigger, better, and much more realistic prize. I just have to not think about her sex life. Mine is sort of non-existent. It's time to bring it back from the dead.
Thursday, April 21, 2011
Notes on war
After reading "With the Old Breed" I have come to appreciate something about war. It is a foreign experience. It places in stark relief the horrors of warfare, battle, fatigue, shelling, explosions, fear, sleeplessness, wet, hunger, dysentery, exposure, hate, sadness, resignation, sobbing, gunshots, luck, sheer luck, against a familiar world. The two placed together makes each all the more strange. And since war is the transient state its technology, machinery, and the full experience strikes one as an alien presence. Sledge points this out on Okinawa and is reminded of his grandmother's remark that a blight had settled upon the land during the Civil War. It's the same other-worldly and ultimately damaging presence of technique and knowledge in the service of annihilation. This is a sacred knowledge that is preserved in the hardened bodies of warriors who practice it in the theater of war. This knowledge has an ultimately defensive purpose. It is enlisted to secure the beliefs of a people. But warfare leaves an indelible mark on those people enlisted, drilled, and sent to war. Upon returning they find they cannot re-enter society so easily nor see the world the same again.
The point of warfare is to erase one's competitor completely. This has culminated in exploding the other to bits with bombs or shooting him fatally from afar. A body motivated to annihilate another must meet that body. This is done by so many telepresent technologies, which allow the person's motive to issue from a gun into a projectile aimed at the body to be annihilated.
Burke notes that an ideology takes up residence in a body and makes it dance in peculiar ways. The techniques of warfare quickly drilled into each soldier for that transient event are just this, ideology. The one rule of war is to kill. When this occurs the body dancing to its ideology becomes mute. With no place to hold purchase, no phenomenal accoutrement through which its rules become actions, its values become voices, the ideology fades into a mist of blood, a last breath and dances no more--dead body, dead ideology.
The goal of war is to end it as quickly and decisively as possible as a winner. In accomplishing this goal the machines of war churn up the landscape, redirect resources, and dump raw bodies onto the war effort. War is a catalyst for change. War is a catalyst for social organization. War necessitates rapid advancement of a society. This is labeled 'mobilization.' Unstuck from its pastoral time, this society becomes the machine for war. Vast wealth and riches pour into the war effort. Careers are diverted. Lives are ended. Families are ripped apart. Children are lost. Histories and futures get blown to smithereens. Some get rich. Others become poor. The tenuous bonds of a society are destroyed in war only to be restrung according to a plan designed from without by war planners. Lives are wasted as the profits of war justify the design.
War unleashes the demons that lie within us all. War lets loose the destructive fury inside each of us.
The point of warfare is to erase one's competitor completely. This has culminated in exploding the other to bits with bombs or shooting him fatally from afar. A body motivated to annihilate another must meet that body. This is done by so many telepresent technologies, which allow the person's motive to issue from a gun into a projectile aimed at the body to be annihilated.
Burke notes that an ideology takes up residence in a body and makes it dance in peculiar ways. The techniques of warfare quickly drilled into each soldier for that transient event are just this, ideology. The one rule of war is to kill. When this occurs the body dancing to its ideology becomes mute. With no place to hold purchase, no phenomenal accoutrement through which its rules become actions, its values become voices, the ideology fades into a mist of blood, a last breath and dances no more--dead body, dead ideology.
The goal of war is to end it as quickly and decisively as possible as a winner. In accomplishing this goal the machines of war churn up the landscape, redirect resources, and dump raw bodies onto the war effort. War is a catalyst for change. War is a catalyst for social organization. War necessitates rapid advancement of a society. This is labeled 'mobilization.' Unstuck from its pastoral time, this society becomes the machine for war. Vast wealth and riches pour into the war effort. Careers are diverted. Lives are ended. Families are ripped apart. Children are lost. Histories and futures get blown to smithereens. Some get rich. Others become poor. The tenuous bonds of a society are destroyed in war only to be restrung according to a plan designed from without by war planners. Lives are wasted as the profits of war justify the design.
War unleashes the demons that lie within us all. War lets loose the destructive fury inside each of us.
Thursday, April 14, 2011
Gestalt psychology and the fetish
Gestalt psychology is the study of the how people reconstruct the world around them. Taking in sensory data, people reconstruct into wholes the world around them.
Perhaps in the process of this reconstruction we will find the pathologies that lead people to treat others so dispassionately? Could it be a simple problem of fetishizing another that affects how we reconstruct that person into a whole.
"Are you an ass man or a tits man?"
This seems like a rather pedestrian question, but it does hint at the ways that we focus on some aspect of another person objectively. From this we reconstruct someone and perhaps this view of another on terms that are selfish, albeit visually violent can bleed into the Gestalt.
This is merely an observation. I seek to look at it more.
Marxist fetishism and Gestalt psychology are the watchwords.
Perhaps in the process of this reconstruction we will find the pathologies that lead people to treat others so dispassionately? Could it be a simple problem of fetishizing another that affects how we reconstruct that person into a whole.
"Are you an ass man or a tits man?"
This seems like a rather pedestrian question, but it does hint at the ways that we focus on some aspect of another person objectively. From this we reconstruct someone and perhaps this view of another on terms that are selfish, albeit visually violent can bleed into the Gestalt.
This is merely an observation. I seek to look at it more.
Marxist fetishism and Gestalt psychology are the watchwords.
Thursday, April 7, 2011
To sing a prayer
Dear lord,
Grant me serenity from the things that afflict me.
Grant me the strength to shout once the truth of my affliction and eject it from my mind and my body.
Allow me the strength and prescience to find attainable goals, goals that fortify me with confidence and good manner.
Show me a righteous path toward which I could find workshop for my body.
Keep me company.
Speak to me.
Dance with me.
Kiss me.
Hold me.
Coo at me.
Cry for me when I go.
Remember me when I'm gone.
Say nice things about me when I'm not around.
Water my plants.
Take out the trash.
Answer the door.
Pet my cat.
Grant me serenity from the things that afflict me.
Grant me the strength to shout once the truth of my affliction and eject it from my mind and my body.
Allow me the strength and prescience to find attainable goals, goals that fortify me with confidence and good manner.
Show me a righteous path toward which I could find workshop for my body.
Keep me company.
Speak to me.
Dance with me.
Kiss me.
Hold me.
Coo at me.
Cry for me when I go.
Remember me when I'm gone.
Say nice things about me when I'm not around.
Water my plants.
Take out the trash.
Answer the door.
Pet my cat.
Sunday, April 3, 2011
technique
Gents,
Do you put much stock in the apparatus by which you produce your writing? I know this shit has been batted around at least as long as Sam Clemens’ admiration for the typewriter. The speed and accuracy of the typeset word was essential, so says Beninger, to contain the complexity of the emerging modern corporation in the context of a guilded age society run on horse drawn carts and very little standardized information sharing.
But I digress. I want to address the phenomenology of writing, how it’s experienced, what gives it substance, what validates the time spent ‘creating’ in words ideas that are richer and perhaps much more synesthetic as ideas before being put through the labor of communication.
I am reminded of Hunter S. Thompson’s technique for writing. He set up shop in his kitchen. He preferred to write in a high-traffic and non-private space. He also learned how to write by literally typing out, word for word, the books of authors that he admired.
I am reminded of Slavoj Zizek’s commentary upon his authorship where he basically stands at a computer and pecks with one hand as he edits the notes that he wrote down. He points to the fact that he fools himself into writing by producing complex ideas in his note taking, which then become the stuff of his books with little work in the transition. I’ve done the same. I think I’ve witnessed Michael do the same as well.
Then there’s this.
“According to Wired magazine, McCarthy's Olivetti Lettera 32 typewriter was put up for auction at Christie's. The Olivetti Lettera 32 has been in his care for 46 years, since 1963. He picked up the used machine for $50 from a pawn shop in Knoxville, Tennessee. McCarthy reckons he has typed around five million words on the machine, and maintenance consisted of "blowing out the dust with a service station hose". The typewriter was auctioned on Friday, December 4, 2009 and the auction house, Christie’s, estimated it would fetch between $15,000 and $20,000; it sold for $254,500.[12] The Olivetti's replacement for McCarthy to use is another Olivetti, bought by McCarthy’s friend John Miller for $11.[13] The proceeds of the auction are to be donated to the Santa Fe Institute, a nonprofit interdisciplinary scientific research organization.”
What makes a creator so beholden to one’s artifacts? What makes the habits so persistent? I keep coming back to this over and over—neuroconsolidation. We build a repertoire of habits upon which we hang newer experiences. I would consider the idiosyncrasies of human behavior to be the outward signs of the brute natural limitations of neurology. One’s inability to remember some things can be a consequence of one memory’s place too close to another, creating an inhibition. I’m reminded that to remember George Orwell’s name, I’ve stored it in the shadow of another famous person’s name, Orson Wells. I rarely remember George’s name first, but I’ve grown to find ways of dealing with the limitations of how I’ve established remembering. I find it poetic that I've resorted to some newspeak workaround to recall the name of a famous writer whose very preoccupation was modern power elites' desire to control the masses through their ability to think and speak.
Enough for now. Drinking gets me thinking.
Do you put much stock in the apparatus by which you produce your writing? I know this shit has been batted around at least as long as Sam Clemens’ admiration for the typewriter. The speed and accuracy of the typeset word was essential, so says Beninger, to contain the complexity of the emerging modern corporation in the context of a guilded age society run on horse drawn carts and very little standardized information sharing.
But I digress. I want to address the phenomenology of writing, how it’s experienced, what gives it substance, what validates the time spent ‘creating’ in words ideas that are richer and perhaps much more synesthetic as ideas before being put through the labor of communication.
I am reminded of Hunter S. Thompson’s technique for writing. He set up shop in his kitchen. He preferred to write in a high-traffic and non-private space. He also learned how to write by literally typing out, word for word, the books of authors that he admired.
I am reminded of Slavoj Zizek’s commentary upon his authorship where he basically stands at a computer and pecks with one hand as he edits the notes that he wrote down. He points to the fact that he fools himself into writing by producing complex ideas in his note taking, which then become the stuff of his books with little work in the transition. I’ve done the same. I think I’ve witnessed Michael do the same as well.
Then there’s this.
“According to Wired magazine, McCarthy's Olivetti Lettera 32 typewriter was put up for auction at Christie's. The Olivetti Lettera 32 has been in his care for 46 years, since 1963. He picked up the used machine for $50 from a pawn shop in Knoxville, Tennessee. McCarthy reckons he has typed around five million words on the machine, and maintenance consisted of "blowing out the dust with a service station hose". The typewriter was auctioned on Friday, December 4, 2009 and the auction house, Christie’s, estimated it would fetch between $15,000 and $20,000; it sold for $254,500.[12] The Olivetti's replacement for McCarthy to use is another Olivetti, bought by McCarthy’s friend John Miller for $11.[13] The proceeds of the auction are to be donated to the Santa Fe Institute, a nonprofit interdisciplinary scientific research organization.”
What makes a creator so beholden to one’s artifacts? What makes the habits so persistent? I keep coming back to this over and over—neuroconsolidation. We build a repertoire of habits upon which we hang newer experiences. I would consider the idiosyncrasies of human behavior to be the outward signs of the brute natural limitations of neurology. One’s inability to remember some things can be a consequence of one memory’s place too close to another, creating an inhibition. I’m reminded that to remember George Orwell’s name, I’ve stored it in the shadow of another famous person’s name, Orson Wells. I rarely remember George’s name first, but I’ve grown to find ways of dealing with the limitations of how I’ve established remembering. I find it poetic that I've resorted to some newspeak workaround to recall the name of a famous writer whose very preoccupation was modern power elites' desire to control the masses through their ability to think and speak.
Enough for now. Drinking gets me thinking.
Sunday, March 27, 2011
with the old breed
Quote repository for 'With the Old Breed' by E. B. Sledge:
"What are you going to do after the war, Sledgehammer?" asked a buddy sitting across from me. He was an extremely intelligent and intellectually active man.
"I don't know, Oswalt. What are you planning to do?"
"I want to be a brain surgeon. The human brain is an incredible thing; it fascinates me," he replied.
But he didn't survive Peleliu to realize his ambition. (p. 57)
We moved ahead, watching the frightful spectacle. Huge geysers of water rose around the amtracs ahead of us as they approached the reef. The beach was now marked along its length by a continuous sheet of flame backed by a thick wall of smoke. It seemed as though a huge volcano had erupted from the sea, and rather than heading for an island, we were being drawn into the vortex of a flaming abyss. For many it was oblivion.
The lieutenant braced himself and pulled out a half-pint whiskey bottle.
"This is it, boys," he yelled.
Just like they do in the movies! It seemed unreal. (p. 64)
The corpsman was on his back, his abdominal cavity laid bare. I stared in horror, shocked at the glistening viscera bespecked with fine coral dust. This can't have been a human being, I agonized. It looked more like the guts of one of the many rabbits or squirrels I had cleaned on hunting trips as a boy. I felt sick as I stared at the corpses. (p. 70)
To be under the barrage of a prolonged shelling simply magnified all the terrible physical and emotional effects of one shell. To me, artillery was an invention of hell. The onrushing whistle and scream of the big steel package of destruction was the pinnacle of violent fury and the embodiment of pent-up evil. It was the essence of violence and of man's inhumanity to man. I developed a passionate hatred for shells. To be killed by a bullet seemed so clean and surgical. But shells would not only tear and rip the body, they tortured one's mind almost beyond the brink of sanity. After each shell I was wrung out, limp and exhausted. (p. 79)
We received the password as darkness settled in on us, and a drizzling rain began. We felt isolated listening to moisture dripping from the tress and splashing softly into the swamp. It was the darkest night I ever saw. The overcast sky was as black as the dripping mangroves that walled us in. I had the sensation of being in a great black hole and reached out to touch the sides of the gun pit to orient myself . Slowly the reality of it all formed in my mind: we were expendable! (p. 108)
From our right, where the Japanese had gone into the company on our flank, came hideous, agonized, and prolonged screams that defied description. Those wild, primitive, brutish yellings unnerved me more than what was happening within my own field of vision. (p. 116)
Redifer and I lay prone on top of the bunker, just above the door. We knew we had to get the Japanese while they were bottled up, or they would come out at us with knives and bayonets, a thought none of us relished. Redifer and I were close enough to the door to place grenades down the opening and move back before they exploded. But the Japanese invariably tossed them back at us before the explosion. I had an irrepressible urge to do just that. Brief as our face-to-face meeting had been, I had quickly developed a feeling of strong personal hate for that machine gunner who had nearly blasted my head off my shoulders. My terror subsided into a cold, homicidal rage and a vengeful desire to get even. (p. 125)
The amtrac rattling toward us by this time was certainly a welcome sight. As it pulled into position, several more Japanese raced from the pillbox in a tight group. Some held their bayoneted rifles in both hands, but some of them carried their rifles in one hand and held up their pants with the other. I had overcome my initial surprise and joined the others and the amtrac machine gun in firing away at them. They tumbled onto the hot coral in a forlorn tangle of bare legs, falling rifles, and rolling helmets. We felt no pity for them but exulted over their fate. We had been shot at and shelled too much and had lost too many friends to have compassion for the enemy when we had him cornered. (p. 126)
Someone remarked that if fragments hadn't killed those inside, the concussion surely had. But even before the dust settled, I saw a Japanese soldier appear at the blasted opening. He was grim determination personified as he drew back his arm to throw a grenade at us.
My carbine was already up. When he appeared, I lined up my sights on his chest and began squeezing off shots. As the first bullet hit him, his face contorted in agony. His knees buckled. The grenade slipped from his grasp. All the men near me, including the amtrac machine gunner, had seen him and began firing. The soldier collapsed in the fusillade, and the grenade went off at his feet.
Even in the midst of these fast-moving events, I looked down at my carbine with sober reflection. I had just killed a man at close range. That I had seen clearly the pain on his face when my bullets hit him came as a jolt. It suddenly made the war a very personal affair. The expression on that man's face filled me with shame and then disgust for the war and all the misery it was causing.
My combat experience thus far made me realize that such sentiments for an enemy soldier were maudlin meditations of a fool. Look at me, a member of the 5th Marine Regiment--one of the oldest, finest, and toughest regiments in the Marine Corps--feeling ashamed because I had shot a damned foe before he could throw a grenade at me! I felt like a fool and was thankful my buddies couldn't read my thoughts. (p. 127)
During this lull the men stripped the packs and pockets of the enemy dead for souvenirs. This was a gruesome business, but Marines executed it in a most methodical manner. Helmet headbands were checked for flags, packs and pockets were emptied, and gold teeth were extracted. Sabers, pistols, and hari-kari knives were highly prized and carefully cared for until they could be sent to the folks back home or sold to some pilot or sailor for a fat price. Rifles and other larger weapons usually were rendered useless and thrown aside. They were too heavy in addition to our own equipment. They would be picked up by rear-echelon troops. The men in the rifle companies had a lot of fun joking about the hair-raising stories these people, who had never seen a live Japanese or been shot at, would probably tell after the war.
The men gloated over, compared, and often swapped their prizes. It was a brutal, ghastly, ritual the likes of which have occurred since ancient times on battlefields where the antagonists have possessed a profound mutual hatred. It was uncivilized, as is all war, and was carried out with that particular savagery that characterized the struggle between the Marines and the Japanese. It wasn't simply souvenir hunting or looting the enemy dead; it was more like Indian warriors taking scalps.
While I was remove a bayonet and scabbard from a dead Japanese, I noticed a Marine near me. He wasn't in our mortar section but had happened by and wanted to get in on the spoils. He came up to me dragging what I assumed to be a corpse. But the Japanese wasn't dead. He had been wounded severely in the back and couldn't move his arms; otherwise we would have resisted to his last breath.
The Japanese's mouth glowed with huge gold-crowned teeth, and his captor wanted them. He put the point of his kabar on the base of a tooth and hit the handle with his palm of his hand. Because the Japanese was kicking his feet and thrashing about, the knife point glanced off the tooth and sank deeply into the victim's mouth. The Marine cursed him and with a slash cut his cheeks open to each ear. He put his foot on the sufferer's lower jaw and tried again. Blood poured out of the soldier's mouth. He made a gurgling noise and thrashed wildly. I shouted, "Put the man out of his misery." All I got for an answer was a cussing out. Another Marine ran up, put a bullet in the enemy soldier's brain, and ended his agony. The scavenger grumbled and continued extracting his prizes undisturbed.
Such was the incredible cruelty that decent men could commit when reduced to a brutish existence in their fight for survival amid the violent death, terror, tension, fatigue, and filth that was the infantryman's war. Our code of conduct toward the enemy differed drastically from that prevailing back at the division CP.
The struggle for survival went on day after weary day, night after terrifying night. One remembers vividly the landings and beachheads and the details of the first two or three days and nights of a campaign; after that, time lost all meaning. A lull of hours or days seemed but a fleeting instant of heaven-sent tranquility. Lying in a foxhole sweating out an enemy artillery or mortar barrage or waiting to dash across open ground under machine-gun or artillery fire defied any concept of time.
To the noncombatants and those on the periphery of action, the war meant only boredom or occasional excitement; but to those who entered the meat grinder itself, the war was a netherworld of horror from which escape seemed less and less likely as casualties mounted and the fighting dragged on and on. Time had no meaning; life had no meaning. The fierce struggle for survival in the abyss of Peleliu eroded the veneer of civilization and made savages of us all. We existed in an environment totally incomprehensible to men behind the lines--service troops and civilians. (pp. 129, 131)
At first glance the dead gunner appeared about to fire his deadly weapon. He still sat bolt upright in the proper firing position behind the breech of his machine gun. Even in death his eyes stared widely along the gun sights. Despite the vacant look of his dilated pupils, I couldn't believe he was dead. It seemed as though he was looking through me into all eternity, that at any instant he would raise his hands--which rested in a relaxed manner on his thighs--grip the handles on the breech, and press the thumb trigger. The bright shiny brass slugs in the strip clip appeared as ready as the gunner, anxious to speed out, to kill, and to maim more of the "American devils." But he would rot, and they would corrode. Neither he nor his ammo could do any more for the emperor.
The crown of the gunner's skull had been blasted off, probably by one of our automatic weapons. His riddled steel helmet lay on the deck like a punctured tin can. The assistant gunner lay beside the gun. Apparently, he had just opened a small green wooden chest filled with strip clips of machine gun cartridges when he was killed. Several other Japanese soldiers ammo carriers, lay strung out at intervals behind the gun. (p. 133)
As we talked, I noticed a fellow mortarman sitting next to me. He had a handful of coral pebbles in his left hand. With his right hand he idly tossed them into the open skull of the Japanese machine gunner. Each time his pitch was true I heard a little splash of rainwater in the ghastly receptacle. My buddy tossed the coral chunks as casually as a boy casting pebbles into a puddle on a muddy road back home; there was nothing malicious in his action. The war had so brutalized us that it was beyond belief. (p. 134)
Occasionally rains that fell on the hot coral merely evaporated like steam off hot pavement. The air hung heavy and muggy. Everywhere we went on the ridges the hot human air reeked with the stench of death. A strong wind was no relief; it simply brought the horrid odor from an adjacent area. Japanese corpses lay where they fell among the rocks and on the slopes. It was impossible to cover them, just the hard, jagged coral. The enemy dead simply rotted where they had fallen. They lay all over the place in grotesque positions with puffy faces and grinning buck-toothed expressions.
It is difficult to convey to anyone who has not experienced it the ghastly horror of having your sense of smell saturated constantly with the putrid odor of rotting human flesh day after day, night after night. This was something the men of an infantry battalion got a horrifying dose of during a long, protracted battle such as Peleliu. In the tropics the dead became bloated and gave off a terrific stench within a few hours after death. (p. 153)
There were certain areas we moved into and out of several times as a campaign dragged along its weary, bloody course. In many areas I became quite familiar with the sight of some particular enemy corpse, as if it were a landmark. It was gruesome to see the stages of decay proceed from just killed, to bloated, to maggot-infested rotting, to partially exposed bones--like some biological clock marking the inexorable passage of time. On each occasion my company passed such a landmark we were fewer in number.
Each time we moved into a different position I could determine the areas occupied by each rifle company as we went into that sector of the line. Behind each company position lay a pile of ammo and supplies and the inevitable rows of dead under their ponchos. We could determine how bad that sector of the line was by the number of dead. To see them so filled me with anger at the war and the realization of the senseless waste. It depressed me far more than my own fear.
Added to the awful stench of the dead of both sides was the repulsive odor of human excrement everywhere. It was all but impossible to practice simple, elemental field sanitation on most areas of Peleliu because of the rocky surface. Field sanitation during maneuvers and company was the responsibility of each man. In short, under normal conditions, he covered his own waste with a scoop of soil. At night when he didn't dare venture out of his foxhole, he simply used an empty grenade canister or ration can, threw it out of his hole, and scooped dirt over it the next day if he wasn't under heavy enemy fire. (p. 154)
After we got our gun emplaced, I collected some large scraps of cardboard from ration and ammo boxes and used them to cover the bottom of the pit as well as I could. Fat, lazy blowflies were reluctant to leave the blood-smeared rock.
I had long since become used to the sight of blood, but the idea of sitting in that bloodstained gun pit was a bit too much for me. It seemed almost like leaving our dead unburied to sit on the blood of a fellow Marine spilled out on the coral. I noticed that my buddy looked approvingly at my efforts as he came back from getting orders for our gun. Although we never discussed the subject, he apparently felt as I did. As I looked at the stains on the coral, I recalled some of the eloquent phrases of politicians and newsmen about how "gallant" it is for a man to "shed blood for his country," and "to give his life's blood as a sacrifice," and so on. The words seemed ridiculous. Only the flies benefited. (pp. 157-158)
As we moved past the defilade, my buddy groaned, "Jesus!" I took a quick glance into the depression and recoiled in revulsion and pity at what I saw. The bodies were badly decomposed and nearly blacked by exposure. This was to be expected of the dead in the tropics, but these Marines had been mutilated hideously by the enemy. One man had been decapitated. His head lay on his chest; his hands had been severed from his wrists and also lay on his chest near his chin. In disbelief I stared at the faces as I realized that the Japanese had cut off the dead Marine's penis and stuffed it in his mouth. The corpse next to him had been treated similarly. The third had been butchered, chopped up like a carcass torn by some predatory animal. (p. 160)
As I looked at the flotsam of battle scattered along that little path, I was struck with the utter incongruity of it all. There the Okinawans had tilled their soil with ancient and crude farming methods; but the war had come, bringing with it the latest and most refined technology for killing. It seems so insane, and I realized that the war was like some sort of disease afflicting man. From my experience at Peleliu I had unconsciously come to associate combat with stifling hot, fire-swept beaches, steaming mangrove-choked swamps, and harsh, jagged coral ridges. But there on Okinawa the disease was disrupting a place as pretty as a pastoral painting. I understood then what my grandmother had really meant when she told me as a boy that a blight had descended on the land when the South was invaded during the Civil War. (p. 217)
Mac was a decent, clean-cut man but one of those who apparently felt no restraints under the brutalizing influence of war--although he hardly had been in combat at that time. He had one ghoulish, obscene tendency that revolted even the most hardened and callous men I knew. When most men felt the urge to urinate, they simply went over to a bush or stopped wherever they happened to be and relieved themselves without ritual or fanfare. Not Mac. If he could, that "gentleman by the act of Congress" would locate a Japanese corpse, stand over it, and urinate in its mouth. It was the most repulsive thing I ever saw an American do in the war. I was ashamed that he was a Marine officer. (p. 219)
When the time came at the end of the April for us to leave our little horse, I removed the rope halter and gave him a lump of ration sugar. I stroked his soft muzzle as he switched flies with his tail. He turned, ambled across a grassy green meadow and began grazing. He looked up and back at me once. My eyes grew moist. However reluctant I was to leave him, it was for the best. He would be peaceful and safe on the slopes of that green, sunlit hill. Being civilized men, we were duty-bound to return soon to the chaotic netherworld of shells and bullets and suffering and death. (p. 221)
It was an appalling chaos. I was terribly afraid. Fear was obvious on the faces of my comrades, too, as we raced to the low slope and began to dig in rapidly. It was such a jolt to leave the quiet, beautiful countryside that morning and plunge into a thunderous, deadly storm of steel that afternoon. (p. 227)
Fear has many facets, and I do not minimize my fear and terror during
that day. But it was different. I was a combat veteran of Peleliu. With terror's first constriction over, I knew what to expect. I felt dreadful fear but not near-panic. Experience had taught me what to expect from the enemy guns. More important, I knew I could control my fear. The terrible dread that I might panic was gone. I knew that all anyone could do under shell fire was to hug the deck and pray--and curse the Japanese. (pp. 227-228)
There was a brassy, metallic twang of the small 50mm knee mortar shells as little puffs of dirty smoke appeared thickly around us. The 81mm and 90mm mortar shells crashed and banged all along the ridge. The whiz-bang of the high-velocity 47mm's shells (also an anti-tank gun), which was on us with its explosion almost as soon as we heard it whiz into the area, gave me the feeling that the Japanese were firing them at us like rifles. The slower screaming, whining sound of the 75mm artillery shells seemed the most abundant. Then there was the roar and rumble of the huge enemy 150mm howitzer shell, and the kaboom of its explosion. It was what the men called the big stuff. I didn't recall having recognized any of it in my confusion and fear at Peleliu. The bursting radius of these big shells was of awesome proportions. Added to all this noise was the swishing and fluttering overhead of our own supporting artillery fire. Our shells could be heard bursting out across the ridge over enemy positions. The noise of small-arms fire from both sides resulted in a chaotic bedlam of racket and confusion. (p. 228)
Nearby our regimental Protestant chaplain had set up a little altar made out of a box from which he was administering Holy Communion to a small group of dirty Marines. I glanced at the face of a Marine opposite me as the file halted. He was filthy like all of us, but even through a thickly mud-caked dark beard I could see he had fine features. His eyes were bloodshot and weary. He slowly lowered his light machine gun from his shoulder, set the handle on his toe to keep it off the mud, and steadied the barrel with his hand. He watched the chaplain with an expression of skepticism that seemed to ask, "What's the use with all that? Is it gonna keep them guys from gettin' hit?" That face was so weary but so expressive that I knew he, like all of us, couldn't help but have doubts about his God in the presence of constant shock and suffering. Why did it go on and on? The machine gunner's buddy held the gun's tripod on his shoulder, glanced at the muddy little communion service, and then stared blankly off toward a clump of pines to our rear--as though he hoped to see home back there somewhere. (pp. 261-262)
The mud was knee deep in some places, probably deeper in others if one dared venture there. For several feet around every corpse, maggots crawled about in the muck and then were washed away by the runoff of the rain. There wasn't a tree or bush left. All was open country. Shells had torn up the turf so completely that ground cover was nonexistent. The rain poured down on us as evening approached. The scene was nothing but mud; shell fire; flooded craters with their silent, pathetic, rotting occupants; knocked-out tanks and amtracs; and discarded equipment--utter desolation. (pp. 272-273)
I existed from moment to moment, sometimes thinking death would have been preferable. We were in the depths of the abyss, the ultimate horror of war. During the fighting around the Umurbrogol Pocket on Peleliu, I had been depressed by the wastage of human lives. But in the mud and driving rain before Shuri, we were surrounded by maggots and decay. Men struggled and fought and bled in an environment so degrading I believed we had been flung into hell's own cesspool. (p. 273)
The scene was so unreal I could barely believe it: two tired, frightened young men sitting in a hole beside a machine gun in the rain on a ridge, surrounded with mud--nothing but stinking mud, with so much decaying human flesh buried or half buried in it that there were big patches of wriggling fat maggots marking the spots where Japanese corpses lay--looking at the picture of a beautiful seminude girl. She was a pearl in a mudhole.
Viewing that picture made me realize with a shock that I had gradually come to doubt that there really was a place in the world where there were no explosions and people weren't bleeding, suffering, dying, or rotting in the mud. I felt a sense of desperation that my mind was being affected by what we were experiencing. Men cracked up frequently in such places as that. I had seen it happen many times by then. In World War I they had called it shell shock, or more technically, neurasthenia. In World War II the term used was combat fatigue. (pp. 277-278)
The situation was bad enough, but when enemy artillery shells exploded in the area, the eruptions of soil and mud uncovered previously buried Japanese dead and scattered chunks of corpses. Like the area around our gun pits, the ridge was a stinking compost pile.
If a Marine slipped and slid down the back slope of the muddy ridge, he was apt to reach the bottom vomiting. I saw more than one man lose his footing and slip and slide all the way to the bottom only to stand up horror-stricken as he watched in disbelief while fat maggots tumbled out of his muddy dungaree pockets, cartridge belt, legging laces, and the like. Then he and a buddy would shake or scrape them away with a piece of ammo box or a knife blade.
We didn't talk about such things. They were too horrible and obscene even for the hardest veterans. The conditions taxed the toughest I knew almost to the point of screaming. Nor do authors normally write about such vileness; unless they have seen it with their own eyes, it is too preposterous to think that men could actually live and fight for days and nights on end under such terrible conditions and not be driven insane. But I saw much of it there on Okinawa and to me the war was insanity. (p. 281-282)
Some of the concussion cases could walk and were helped and led (some seemed to have no sense of direction) to the rear like men walking in their sleep. Some wore wild-eyed expressions of shock and fear. Others whom I knew well, though could barely recognize, wore expressions of idiots or simpletons knocked too witless to be afraid anymore. The blast of a shell had literally jolted them into a different state of awareness from the rest of us. Some of those who didn't return probably never recovered but were doomed to remain in mental limbo and spend their futures in a veteran's hospital as "living dead." (p. 287)
It was also common throughout the campaign for replacements to get hit before we even knew their names. They came up confused, frightened, and hopeful, got wounded or killed, and went right back to the rear on the route by which they had come, shocked, bleeding, or stiff. They were forlorn figures coming up to the meat grinder and going right back out of it like homeless waifs, unknown and faceless to us, like unread books on a shelf. They never "belonged" to the company or made any friends before they got hit. (p. 291)
I imagined Marine dead had risen up and were moving silently about the area. I suppose these were nightmares, and I must have been more asleep than awake, or just dumbfounded by fatigue. Possibly they were hallucinations, but they were strange and horrible. The pattern was always the same. The dead got up slowly out of their waterlogged craters or off the mud and, with stooped shoulders and dragging feet, wandered around aimlessly, their lips moving as though trying to tell me something. I struggled to hear what they were saying. They seemed agonized by pain and despair. I felt they were asking me for help. The most horrible thing was that I felt unable to aid them.
At that point I invariably became wide awake and felt sick and half-crazed by the horror of my dream. I would gaze out intently to see if the silent figures were still there, but saw nothing. When a flare lit up, all was stillness and desolation, each corpse in its usual place. (p. 293)
Next to the base of the ridge, almost directly below me, was a partially flooded crater about three feet in diameter and probably three feet deep. In this crater was the body of a Marine whose grisly visage has remained disturbingly clear in my memory. If I close my eyes, he is as vivid as though I had seen him only yesterday.
The pathetic figure sat with his back toward the enemy and leaned against the south edge of the crater. His head was cocked, and his helmet rested against the side of the crater so that his face, or what remained of it, looked straight up at me. His knees were flexed and spread apart. Across his thighs, still clutched in his skeletal hands, was his rusting BAR. Canvas leggings were laced neatly along the sides of his calves and over his boondockers. His ankles were covered with muddy water, but the toes of his boondockers were visible above the surface. His dungarees, helmet, cover, and 782 gear appeared new. They were neither mud-spattered nor faded.
I was confident that he had been a new replacement. Every aspect of that big man looked much like a Marine "taking ten" on maneuvers before the order to move out again. He apparently had been killed early in the attacks against the Half Moon, before the rains began. Beneath his helmet brim I could see the visor of a green cotton fatigue cap. Under that cap were the most ghastly skeletal remains I had ever seen--and I had already seen too many.
Every time I looked over the edge of that foxhole down into that crater, that half-gone face leered up at me with a sardonic grin. It was as though he was mocking our pitiful efforts to hang on to life in the face of the constant violent death that had cut him down. Or maybe he was mocking the folly of the war itself: "I am the harvest of man's stupidity. I am the fruit of the holocaust. I prayed like you to survive, but look at me now. It is over for us who are dead, but you must struggle, and will carry the memories all your life. People back home will wonder why you can't forget."
During the day I sometimes watched big raindrops splashing into the crater around that corpse and remembered how as a child I had been fascinated by raindrops splashing around a large green frog as he sat in a ditch near home. My grandmother had told me that elves made little splashes like that, and they were called water babies. So I sat in my foxhole and watched the water babies splashing around the green-dungaree-clad corpse. What an unlikely combination. The war had turned the water babies into little ghouls that danced around the dead instead of little elves dancing around the peaceful bullfrog. A man had little to occupy his mind at Shuri--just sit in muddy misery and fear, tremble through the shellings, and let his imagination go where it would. (pp. 294-295)
Kneeling on the mud, I had dug the hole no more than six or eight inches deep when the odor of rotting flesh got worse. There was nothing to do but continue to dig, so I closed my mouth and inhaled with short shallow breaths. Another spadeful of soil out of the hole released a mass of wriggling maggots that came welling up as though those beneath were pushing them out. I cursed, and told the NCO as he came by what a mess I was digging into.
"You heard him, he said put the holes five yards apart."
In disgust, I drove the spade into the soil, scooped out the insects, and threw them down the front of the ridge. The next stroke of the spade unearthed buttons and scraps of cloth from a Japanese army jacket buried in the mud--and another mass of maggots. I kept on doggedly. With the next thrust, metal hit breastbone of a rotting Japanese corpse. I gazed down in horror and disbelief as the metal scraped a clean track through the mud along the dirty whitish bone and cartilage with ribs attached. The shovel skidded into the rotting abdomen with a squishing sound. The odor nearly overwhelmed me as I rocked back on my heels. (pp. 301-302)
While searching a small hut, I came across an old Okinawan woman seated on the floor just inside the doorway. Taking no chances, I held my Thompson ready and motioned to her to get up and come out. She remained on the floor but bowed her old gray head and held her gnarled hand toward me, palms down, to show the tattoos on the backs of her hands indicating that she was Okinawan.
"No Nippon," she said slowly, shaking her head as she looked up at me with a weary expression that bespoke of much physical pain. She then opened her ragged blue kimono and pointed to a wound in the lower left side of her abdomen. It was an old wound, probably caused by a shell or bomb fragments. It was an awful sight. A large area around the scabbed-over gash was discolored and terribly infected with gangrene. I gasped in dismay. I guessed that such a severe infection in the abdominal region was surely fatal.
The old woman closed her kimono. She reached up gently, took the muzzle of my Tommy, and slowly moved it so as to direct it between her eyes. She then released the weapon's barrel and motioned vigorously for me to pull the trigger. Oh no, I thought, this old soul is in such agony she actually wants me to put her out of her misery. I lifted my Tommy, slung it over my shoulder, shook me head, and said "no" to her. Then I stepped back and yelled for a corpsman. (pp. 313-314)
We passed through an embankment for a railroad track and entered the outskirts of a town. All buildings were badly damaged, but some were still standing. We stopped briefly to explore a quaint little store. Displayed in its window were various cosmetics. In the street in front of the store lay a corpse clad in a blue kimono. Someone had placed a broken door over the pathetic body. We speculated he had been the proprietor of the little shop. (p. 318)
The weather turned dry and warm as we moved south. The farther we proceeded, the louder the sound of firing became; the bumping of artillery, the thudding of mortars, the incessant rattle of machine guns, the popping of rifles. It was a familiar combination of noise that engendered the old feelings of dread about one's own chances as well as the horrible images of the wounded, the shocked, and the dead--the inevitable harvest. (pp. 320-321)
A couple of us went down to look at the bridge before dark. We walked down to the stream on a trail leading form the road. The water was crystal clear and made a peaceful gurgling sound over a clean pebbly bottom. Ferns grew from the overhanging mossy banks and between rocks on both sides. I had the urge to look for salamanders and crayfish. It was a beautiful place, cool and peaceful, so out of context with the screaming hell close above. (p. 322)
The man next to me was a rifleman and a fine Peleliu veteran whom I knew well. he had become unusually quiet and moody during the past hour, but I just assumed he was as tired and as weary with fear and fatigue as I was. Suddenly he began babbling incoherently, grabbed his rifle, and shouted, "Those slant-eyed yellow bastards, they've killed enougha my buddies. I'm going after 'em." He jumped up and started for the crest of the ridge.
"Stop!" I yelled and grabbed his trouser leg. he pulled away.
A sergeant next to him yelled, "Stop, you fool!" The sergeant also grabbed for the frantic man's legs, but his hand slipped. He managed to clutch the toe of one boondocker, however, and gave a jerk. That threw the man off balance, and he sprawled on his back, sobbing like a baby. The front of his trousers was darkened where he had urinated when he lost control of himself. The sergeant and I tried to calm him but also made sure he couldn't get back onto his feet. "Take it easy, Cobber. We'll get you outa here," the NCO said.
We called a corpsman who took the sobbing, trembling man out of the meat grinder to an aid station.
"He's a damn good Marine, Sledgehammer. I'll lower the boom on anybody says he ain't. But he's just had all he can take. That's it. He's just had all he can take."
The sergeant's voice trailed away sadly. We had just seen a brave man crack up completely and lose all control of himself, even to the point of losing his desire to live. (p. 328)
We passed a large muddy area in the road cut. In it lay the body of a dead Japanese soldier in full uniform and equipment. It was a bizarre sight. he had been mashed down into the mud by tank treads and looked like a giant squashed insect. (p. 331)
The second Japanese officer lay dead on his back next to the wheel of the 37mm gun. He was in full-dress uniform with white gloves, shiny leather leggings, Sam Browne belt, and campaign ribbons on his chest. Nothing remained of his head from the nose up--just a mass of crushed skull, brains, and bloody pulp. A grimy Marine with a dazed expression stood over the Japanese. With a foot planted firmly on the ground on each side of the enemy officer's body, the marine held his rifle by the forestock with both hands and slowly mechanically moved it up and down like a plunger. I winced each time it came down with a sickening sound into the gory mass. Brains and blood were splattered all over the Marine's rifle, boondockers, and canvas leggings, as well as the wheel of the 37mm gun.
The Marine was obviously in a complete state of shock. We gently took him by the arms. One of his uninjured buddies set aside the gore-smeared rifle. "Let's get you outa here, Cobber."
The poor guy responded like a sleepwalker as he was led off with the wounded, who were by then on stretchers. The man who had lost his finger clutched the Japanese saber in his other hand. "I'm gonna keep this bastard for a souvenir."
We dragged the battered enemy officer to the edge of the gun emplacement and rolled him down the hill. Replete with violence, shock, blood, gore, and suffering, this was the type of incident that should be witnessed by anyone who has any delusions about the glory of war. It was as savage and as brutal as though the enemy and we were primitive barbarians rather than civilized men. (pp. 336-337)
A quote from James Jones' WWII:
What it must have been like to some old-timer buck sergeant or staff sergeant who had been through Guadalcanal or Bougainville or the Philippines, to stand on some beach and watch this huge war machine beginning to stir and move all around him and know that he very likely had survived this far only to fall dead on the dirt of Japan's home islands, hardly bears thinking about. (page unknown)
"What are you going to do after the war, Sledgehammer?" asked a buddy sitting across from me. He was an extremely intelligent and intellectually active man.
"I don't know, Oswalt. What are you planning to do?"
"I want to be a brain surgeon. The human brain is an incredible thing; it fascinates me," he replied.
But he didn't survive Peleliu to realize his ambition. (p. 57)
We moved ahead, watching the frightful spectacle. Huge geysers of water rose around the amtracs ahead of us as they approached the reef. The beach was now marked along its length by a continuous sheet of flame backed by a thick wall of smoke. It seemed as though a huge volcano had erupted from the sea, and rather than heading for an island, we were being drawn into the vortex of a flaming abyss. For many it was oblivion.
The lieutenant braced himself and pulled out a half-pint whiskey bottle.
"This is it, boys," he yelled.
Just like they do in the movies! It seemed unreal. (p. 64)
The corpsman was on his back, his abdominal cavity laid bare. I stared in horror, shocked at the glistening viscera bespecked with fine coral dust. This can't have been a human being, I agonized. It looked more like the guts of one of the many rabbits or squirrels I had cleaned on hunting trips as a boy. I felt sick as I stared at the corpses. (p. 70)
To be under the barrage of a prolonged shelling simply magnified all the terrible physical and emotional effects of one shell. To me, artillery was an invention of hell. The onrushing whistle and scream of the big steel package of destruction was the pinnacle of violent fury and the embodiment of pent-up evil. It was the essence of violence and of man's inhumanity to man. I developed a passionate hatred for shells. To be killed by a bullet seemed so clean and surgical. But shells would not only tear and rip the body, they tortured one's mind almost beyond the brink of sanity. After each shell I was wrung out, limp and exhausted. (p. 79)
We received the password as darkness settled in on us, and a drizzling rain began. We felt isolated listening to moisture dripping from the tress and splashing softly into the swamp. It was the darkest night I ever saw. The overcast sky was as black as the dripping mangroves that walled us in. I had the sensation of being in a great black hole and reached out to touch the sides of the gun pit to orient myself . Slowly the reality of it all formed in my mind: we were expendable! (p. 108)
From our right, where the Japanese had gone into the company on our flank, came hideous, agonized, and prolonged screams that defied description. Those wild, primitive, brutish yellings unnerved me more than what was happening within my own field of vision. (p. 116)
Redifer and I lay prone on top of the bunker, just above the door. We knew we had to get the Japanese while they were bottled up, or they would come out at us with knives and bayonets, a thought none of us relished. Redifer and I were close enough to the door to place grenades down the opening and move back before they exploded. But the Japanese invariably tossed them back at us before the explosion. I had an irrepressible urge to do just that. Brief as our face-to-face meeting had been, I had quickly developed a feeling of strong personal hate for that machine gunner who had nearly blasted my head off my shoulders. My terror subsided into a cold, homicidal rage and a vengeful desire to get even. (p. 125)
The amtrac rattling toward us by this time was certainly a welcome sight. As it pulled into position, several more Japanese raced from the pillbox in a tight group. Some held their bayoneted rifles in both hands, but some of them carried their rifles in one hand and held up their pants with the other. I had overcome my initial surprise and joined the others and the amtrac machine gun in firing away at them. They tumbled onto the hot coral in a forlorn tangle of bare legs, falling rifles, and rolling helmets. We felt no pity for them but exulted over their fate. We had been shot at and shelled too much and had lost too many friends to have compassion for the enemy when we had him cornered. (p. 126)
Someone remarked that if fragments hadn't killed those inside, the concussion surely had. But even before the dust settled, I saw a Japanese soldier appear at the blasted opening. He was grim determination personified as he drew back his arm to throw a grenade at us.
My carbine was already up. When he appeared, I lined up my sights on his chest and began squeezing off shots. As the first bullet hit him, his face contorted in agony. His knees buckled. The grenade slipped from his grasp. All the men near me, including the amtrac machine gunner, had seen him and began firing. The soldier collapsed in the fusillade, and the grenade went off at his feet.
Even in the midst of these fast-moving events, I looked down at my carbine with sober reflection. I had just killed a man at close range. That I had seen clearly the pain on his face when my bullets hit him came as a jolt. It suddenly made the war a very personal affair. The expression on that man's face filled me with shame and then disgust for the war and all the misery it was causing.
My combat experience thus far made me realize that such sentiments for an enemy soldier were maudlin meditations of a fool. Look at me, a member of the 5th Marine Regiment--one of the oldest, finest, and toughest regiments in the Marine Corps--feeling ashamed because I had shot a damned foe before he could throw a grenade at me! I felt like a fool and was thankful my buddies couldn't read my thoughts. (p. 127)
During this lull the men stripped the packs and pockets of the enemy dead for souvenirs. This was a gruesome business, but Marines executed it in a most methodical manner. Helmet headbands were checked for flags, packs and pockets were emptied, and gold teeth were extracted. Sabers, pistols, and hari-kari knives were highly prized and carefully cared for until they could be sent to the folks back home or sold to some pilot or sailor for a fat price. Rifles and other larger weapons usually were rendered useless and thrown aside. They were too heavy in addition to our own equipment. They would be picked up by rear-echelon troops. The men in the rifle companies had a lot of fun joking about the hair-raising stories these people, who had never seen a live Japanese or been shot at, would probably tell after the war.
The men gloated over, compared, and often swapped their prizes. It was a brutal, ghastly, ritual the likes of which have occurred since ancient times on battlefields where the antagonists have possessed a profound mutual hatred. It was uncivilized, as is all war, and was carried out with that particular savagery that characterized the struggle between the Marines and the Japanese. It wasn't simply souvenir hunting or looting the enemy dead; it was more like Indian warriors taking scalps.
While I was remove a bayonet and scabbard from a dead Japanese, I noticed a Marine near me. He wasn't in our mortar section but had happened by and wanted to get in on the spoils. He came up to me dragging what I assumed to be a corpse. But the Japanese wasn't dead. He had been wounded severely in the back and couldn't move his arms; otherwise we would have resisted to his last breath.
The Japanese's mouth glowed with huge gold-crowned teeth, and his captor wanted them. He put the point of his kabar on the base of a tooth and hit the handle with his palm of his hand. Because the Japanese was kicking his feet and thrashing about, the knife point glanced off the tooth and sank deeply into the victim's mouth. The Marine cursed him and with a slash cut his cheeks open to each ear. He put his foot on the sufferer's lower jaw and tried again. Blood poured out of the soldier's mouth. He made a gurgling noise and thrashed wildly. I shouted, "Put the man out of his misery." All I got for an answer was a cussing out. Another Marine ran up, put a bullet in the enemy soldier's brain, and ended his agony. The scavenger grumbled and continued extracting his prizes undisturbed.
Such was the incredible cruelty that decent men could commit when reduced to a brutish existence in their fight for survival amid the violent death, terror, tension, fatigue, and filth that was the infantryman's war. Our code of conduct toward the enemy differed drastically from that prevailing back at the division CP.
The struggle for survival went on day after weary day, night after terrifying night. One remembers vividly the landings and beachheads and the details of the first two or three days and nights of a campaign; after that, time lost all meaning. A lull of hours or days seemed but a fleeting instant of heaven-sent tranquility. Lying in a foxhole sweating out an enemy artillery or mortar barrage or waiting to dash across open ground under machine-gun or artillery fire defied any concept of time.
To the noncombatants and those on the periphery of action, the war meant only boredom or occasional excitement; but to those who entered the meat grinder itself, the war was a netherworld of horror from which escape seemed less and less likely as casualties mounted and the fighting dragged on and on. Time had no meaning; life had no meaning. The fierce struggle for survival in the abyss of Peleliu eroded the veneer of civilization and made savages of us all. We existed in an environment totally incomprehensible to men behind the lines--service troops and civilians. (pp. 129, 131)
At first glance the dead gunner appeared about to fire his deadly weapon. He still sat bolt upright in the proper firing position behind the breech of his machine gun. Even in death his eyes stared widely along the gun sights. Despite the vacant look of his dilated pupils, I couldn't believe he was dead. It seemed as though he was looking through me into all eternity, that at any instant he would raise his hands--which rested in a relaxed manner on his thighs--grip the handles on the breech, and press the thumb trigger. The bright shiny brass slugs in the strip clip appeared as ready as the gunner, anxious to speed out, to kill, and to maim more of the "American devils." But he would rot, and they would corrode. Neither he nor his ammo could do any more for the emperor.
The crown of the gunner's skull had been blasted off, probably by one of our automatic weapons. His riddled steel helmet lay on the deck like a punctured tin can. The assistant gunner lay beside the gun. Apparently, he had just opened a small green wooden chest filled with strip clips of machine gun cartridges when he was killed. Several other Japanese soldiers ammo carriers, lay strung out at intervals behind the gun. (p. 133)
As we talked, I noticed a fellow mortarman sitting next to me. He had a handful of coral pebbles in his left hand. With his right hand he idly tossed them into the open skull of the Japanese machine gunner. Each time his pitch was true I heard a little splash of rainwater in the ghastly receptacle. My buddy tossed the coral chunks as casually as a boy casting pebbles into a puddle on a muddy road back home; there was nothing malicious in his action. The war had so brutalized us that it was beyond belief. (p. 134)
Occasionally rains that fell on the hot coral merely evaporated like steam off hot pavement. The air hung heavy and muggy. Everywhere we went on the ridges the hot human air reeked with the stench of death. A strong wind was no relief; it simply brought the horrid odor from an adjacent area. Japanese corpses lay where they fell among the rocks and on the slopes. It was impossible to cover them, just the hard, jagged coral. The enemy dead simply rotted where they had fallen. They lay all over the place in grotesque positions with puffy faces and grinning buck-toothed expressions.
It is difficult to convey to anyone who has not experienced it the ghastly horror of having your sense of smell saturated constantly with the putrid odor of rotting human flesh day after day, night after night. This was something the men of an infantry battalion got a horrifying dose of during a long, protracted battle such as Peleliu. In the tropics the dead became bloated and gave off a terrific stench within a few hours after death. (p. 153)
There were certain areas we moved into and out of several times as a campaign dragged along its weary, bloody course. In many areas I became quite familiar with the sight of some particular enemy corpse, as if it were a landmark. It was gruesome to see the stages of decay proceed from just killed, to bloated, to maggot-infested rotting, to partially exposed bones--like some biological clock marking the inexorable passage of time. On each occasion my company passed such a landmark we were fewer in number.
Each time we moved into a different position I could determine the areas occupied by each rifle company as we went into that sector of the line. Behind each company position lay a pile of ammo and supplies and the inevitable rows of dead under their ponchos. We could determine how bad that sector of the line was by the number of dead. To see them so filled me with anger at the war and the realization of the senseless waste. It depressed me far more than my own fear.
Added to the awful stench of the dead of both sides was the repulsive odor of human excrement everywhere. It was all but impossible to practice simple, elemental field sanitation on most areas of Peleliu because of the rocky surface. Field sanitation during maneuvers and company was the responsibility of each man. In short, under normal conditions, he covered his own waste with a scoop of soil. At night when he didn't dare venture out of his foxhole, he simply used an empty grenade canister or ration can, threw it out of his hole, and scooped dirt over it the next day if he wasn't under heavy enemy fire. (p. 154)
After we got our gun emplaced, I collected some large scraps of cardboard from ration and ammo boxes and used them to cover the bottom of the pit as well as I could. Fat, lazy blowflies were reluctant to leave the blood-smeared rock.
I had long since become used to the sight of blood, but the idea of sitting in that bloodstained gun pit was a bit too much for me. It seemed almost like leaving our dead unburied to sit on the blood of a fellow Marine spilled out on the coral. I noticed that my buddy looked approvingly at my efforts as he came back from getting orders for our gun. Although we never discussed the subject, he apparently felt as I did. As I looked at the stains on the coral, I recalled some of the eloquent phrases of politicians and newsmen about how "gallant" it is for a man to "shed blood for his country," and "to give his life's blood as a sacrifice," and so on. The words seemed ridiculous. Only the flies benefited. (pp. 157-158)
As we moved past the defilade, my buddy groaned, "Jesus!" I took a quick glance into the depression and recoiled in revulsion and pity at what I saw. The bodies were badly decomposed and nearly blacked by exposure. This was to be expected of the dead in the tropics, but these Marines had been mutilated hideously by the enemy. One man had been decapitated. His head lay on his chest; his hands had been severed from his wrists and also lay on his chest near his chin. In disbelief I stared at the faces as I realized that the Japanese had cut off the dead Marine's penis and stuffed it in his mouth. The corpse next to him had been treated similarly. The third had been butchered, chopped up like a carcass torn by some predatory animal. (p. 160)
As I looked at the flotsam of battle scattered along that little path, I was struck with the utter incongruity of it all. There the Okinawans had tilled their soil with ancient and crude farming methods; but the war had come, bringing with it the latest and most refined technology for killing. It seems so insane, and I realized that the war was like some sort of disease afflicting man. From my experience at Peleliu I had unconsciously come to associate combat with stifling hot, fire-swept beaches, steaming mangrove-choked swamps, and harsh, jagged coral ridges. But there on Okinawa the disease was disrupting a place as pretty as a pastoral painting. I understood then what my grandmother had really meant when she told me as a boy that a blight had descended on the land when the South was invaded during the Civil War. (p. 217)
Mac was a decent, clean-cut man but one of those who apparently felt no restraints under the brutalizing influence of war--although he hardly had been in combat at that time. He had one ghoulish, obscene tendency that revolted even the most hardened and callous men I knew. When most men felt the urge to urinate, they simply went over to a bush or stopped wherever they happened to be and relieved themselves without ritual or fanfare. Not Mac. If he could, that "gentleman by the act of Congress" would locate a Japanese corpse, stand over it, and urinate in its mouth. It was the most repulsive thing I ever saw an American do in the war. I was ashamed that he was a Marine officer. (p. 219)
When the time came at the end of the April for us to leave our little horse, I removed the rope halter and gave him a lump of ration sugar. I stroked his soft muzzle as he switched flies with his tail. He turned, ambled across a grassy green meadow and began grazing. He looked up and back at me once. My eyes grew moist. However reluctant I was to leave him, it was for the best. He would be peaceful and safe on the slopes of that green, sunlit hill. Being civilized men, we were duty-bound to return soon to the chaotic netherworld of shells and bullets and suffering and death. (p. 221)
It was an appalling chaos. I was terribly afraid. Fear was obvious on the faces of my comrades, too, as we raced to the low slope and began to dig in rapidly. It was such a jolt to leave the quiet, beautiful countryside that morning and plunge into a thunderous, deadly storm of steel that afternoon. (p. 227)
Fear has many facets, and I do not minimize my fear and terror during
that day. But it was different. I was a combat veteran of Peleliu. With terror's first constriction over, I knew what to expect. I felt dreadful fear but not near-panic. Experience had taught me what to expect from the enemy guns. More important, I knew I could control my fear. The terrible dread that I might panic was gone. I knew that all anyone could do under shell fire was to hug the deck and pray--and curse the Japanese. (pp. 227-228)
There was a brassy, metallic twang of the small 50mm knee mortar shells as little puffs of dirty smoke appeared thickly around us. The 81mm and 90mm mortar shells crashed and banged all along the ridge. The whiz-bang of the high-velocity 47mm's shells (also an anti-tank gun), which was on us with its explosion almost as soon as we heard it whiz into the area, gave me the feeling that the Japanese were firing them at us like rifles. The slower screaming, whining sound of the 75mm artillery shells seemed the most abundant. Then there was the roar and rumble of the huge enemy 150mm howitzer shell, and the kaboom of its explosion. It was what the men called the big stuff. I didn't recall having recognized any of it in my confusion and fear at Peleliu. The bursting radius of these big shells was of awesome proportions. Added to all this noise was the swishing and fluttering overhead of our own supporting artillery fire. Our shells could be heard bursting out across the ridge over enemy positions. The noise of small-arms fire from both sides resulted in a chaotic bedlam of racket and confusion. (p. 228)
Nearby our regimental Protestant chaplain had set up a little altar made out of a box from which he was administering Holy Communion to a small group of dirty Marines. I glanced at the face of a Marine opposite me as the file halted. He was filthy like all of us, but even through a thickly mud-caked dark beard I could see he had fine features. His eyes were bloodshot and weary. He slowly lowered his light machine gun from his shoulder, set the handle on his toe to keep it off the mud, and steadied the barrel with his hand. He watched the chaplain with an expression of skepticism that seemed to ask, "What's the use with all that? Is it gonna keep them guys from gettin' hit?" That face was so weary but so expressive that I knew he, like all of us, couldn't help but have doubts about his God in the presence of constant shock and suffering. Why did it go on and on? The machine gunner's buddy held the gun's tripod on his shoulder, glanced at the muddy little communion service, and then stared blankly off toward a clump of pines to our rear--as though he hoped to see home back there somewhere. (pp. 261-262)
The mud was knee deep in some places, probably deeper in others if one dared venture there. For several feet around every corpse, maggots crawled about in the muck and then were washed away by the runoff of the rain. There wasn't a tree or bush left. All was open country. Shells had torn up the turf so completely that ground cover was nonexistent. The rain poured down on us as evening approached. The scene was nothing but mud; shell fire; flooded craters with their silent, pathetic, rotting occupants; knocked-out tanks and amtracs; and discarded equipment--utter desolation. (pp. 272-273)
I existed from moment to moment, sometimes thinking death would have been preferable. We were in the depths of the abyss, the ultimate horror of war. During the fighting around the Umurbrogol Pocket on Peleliu, I had been depressed by the wastage of human lives. But in the mud and driving rain before Shuri, we were surrounded by maggots and decay. Men struggled and fought and bled in an environment so degrading I believed we had been flung into hell's own cesspool. (p. 273)
The scene was so unreal I could barely believe it: two tired, frightened young men sitting in a hole beside a machine gun in the rain on a ridge, surrounded with mud--nothing but stinking mud, with so much decaying human flesh buried or half buried in it that there were big patches of wriggling fat maggots marking the spots where Japanese corpses lay--looking at the picture of a beautiful seminude girl. She was a pearl in a mudhole.
Viewing that picture made me realize with a shock that I had gradually come to doubt that there really was a place in the world where there were no explosions and people weren't bleeding, suffering, dying, or rotting in the mud. I felt a sense of desperation that my mind was being affected by what we were experiencing. Men cracked up frequently in such places as that. I had seen it happen many times by then. In World War I they had called it shell shock, or more technically, neurasthenia. In World War II the term used was combat fatigue. (pp. 277-278)
The situation was bad enough, but when enemy artillery shells exploded in the area, the eruptions of soil and mud uncovered previously buried Japanese dead and scattered chunks of corpses. Like the area around our gun pits, the ridge was a stinking compost pile.
If a Marine slipped and slid down the back slope of the muddy ridge, he was apt to reach the bottom vomiting. I saw more than one man lose his footing and slip and slide all the way to the bottom only to stand up horror-stricken as he watched in disbelief while fat maggots tumbled out of his muddy dungaree pockets, cartridge belt, legging laces, and the like. Then he and a buddy would shake or scrape them away with a piece of ammo box or a knife blade.
We didn't talk about such things. They were too horrible and obscene even for the hardest veterans. The conditions taxed the toughest I knew almost to the point of screaming. Nor do authors normally write about such vileness; unless they have seen it with their own eyes, it is too preposterous to think that men could actually live and fight for days and nights on end under such terrible conditions and not be driven insane. But I saw much of it there on Okinawa and to me the war was insanity. (p. 281-282)
Some of the concussion cases could walk and were helped and led (some seemed to have no sense of direction) to the rear like men walking in their sleep. Some wore wild-eyed expressions of shock and fear. Others whom I knew well, though could barely recognize, wore expressions of idiots or simpletons knocked too witless to be afraid anymore. The blast of a shell had literally jolted them into a different state of awareness from the rest of us. Some of those who didn't return probably never recovered but were doomed to remain in mental limbo and spend their futures in a veteran's hospital as "living dead." (p. 287)
It was also common throughout the campaign for replacements to get hit before we even knew their names. They came up confused, frightened, and hopeful, got wounded or killed, and went right back to the rear on the route by which they had come, shocked, bleeding, or stiff. They were forlorn figures coming up to the meat grinder and going right back out of it like homeless waifs, unknown and faceless to us, like unread books on a shelf. They never "belonged" to the company or made any friends before they got hit. (p. 291)
I imagined Marine dead had risen up and were moving silently about the area. I suppose these were nightmares, and I must have been more asleep than awake, or just dumbfounded by fatigue. Possibly they were hallucinations, but they were strange and horrible. The pattern was always the same. The dead got up slowly out of their waterlogged craters or off the mud and, with stooped shoulders and dragging feet, wandered around aimlessly, their lips moving as though trying to tell me something. I struggled to hear what they were saying. They seemed agonized by pain and despair. I felt they were asking me for help. The most horrible thing was that I felt unable to aid them.
At that point I invariably became wide awake and felt sick and half-crazed by the horror of my dream. I would gaze out intently to see if the silent figures were still there, but saw nothing. When a flare lit up, all was stillness and desolation, each corpse in its usual place. (p. 293)
Next to the base of the ridge, almost directly below me, was a partially flooded crater about three feet in diameter and probably three feet deep. In this crater was the body of a Marine whose grisly visage has remained disturbingly clear in my memory. If I close my eyes, he is as vivid as though I had seen him only yesterday.
The pathetic figure sat with his back toward the enemy and leaned against the south edge of the crater. His head was cocked, and his helmet rested against the side of the crater so that his face, or what remained of it, looked straight up at me. His knees were flexed and spread apart. Across his thighs, still clutched in his skeletal hands, was his rusting BAR. Canvas leggings were laced neatly along the sides of his calves and over his boondockers. His ankles were covered with muddy water, but the toes of his boondockers were visible above the surface. His dungarees, helmet, cover, and 782 gear appeared new. They were neither mud-spattered nor faded.
I was confident that he had been a new replacement. Every aspect of that big man looked much like a Marine "taking ten" on maneuvers before the order to move out again. He apparently had been killed early in the attacks against the Half Moon, before the rains began. Beneath his helmet brim I could see the visor of a green cotton fatigue cap. Under that cap were the most ghastly skeletal remains I had ever seen--and I had already seen too many.
Every time I looked over the edge of that foxhole down into that crater, that half-gone face leered up at me with a sardonic grin. It was as though he was mocking our pitiful efforts to hang on to life in the face of the constant violent death that had cut him down. Or maybe he was mocking the folly of the war itself: "I am the harvest of man's stupidity. I am the fruit of the holocaust. I prayed like you to survive, but look at me now. It is over for us who are dead, but you must struggle, and will carry the memories all your life. People back home will wonder why you can't forget."
During the day I sometimes watched big raindrops splashing into the crater around that corpse and remembered how as a child I had been fascinated by raindrops splashing around a large green frog as he sat in a ditch near home. My grandmother had told me that elves made little splashes like that, and they were called water babies. So I sat in my foxhole and watched the water babies splashing around the green-dungaree-clad corpse. What an unlikely combination. The war had turned the water babies into little ghouls that danced around the dead instead of little elves dancing around the peaceful bullfrog. A man had little to occupy his mind at Shuri--just sit in muddy misery and fear, tremble through the shellings, and let his imagination go where it would. (pp. 294-295)
Kneeling on the mud, I had dug the hole no more than six or eight inches deep when the odor of rotting flesh got worse. There was nothing to do but continue to dig, so I closed my mouth and inhaled with short shallow breaths. Another spadeful of soil out of the hole released a mass of wriggling maggots that came welling up as though those beneath were pushing them out. I cursed, and told the NCO as he came by what a mess I was digging into.
"You heard him, he said put the holes five yards apart."
In disgust, I drove the spade into the soil, scooped out the insects, and threw them down the front of the ridge. The next stroke of the spade unearthed buttons and scraps of cloth from a Japanese army jacket buried in the mud--and another mass of maggots. I kept on doggedly. With the next thrust, metal hit breastbone of a rotting Japanese corpse. I gazed down in horror and disbelief as the metal scraped a clean track through the mud along the dirty whitish bone and cartilage with ribs attached. The shovel skidded into the rotting abdomen with a squishing sound. The odor nearly overwhelmed me as I rocked back on my heels. (pp. 301-302)
While searching a small hut, I came across an old Okinawan woman seated on the floor just inside the doorway. Taking no chances, I held my Thompson ready and motioned to her to get up and come out. She remained on the floor but bowed her old gray head and held her gnarled hand toward me, palms down, to show the tattoos on the backs of her hands indicating that she was Okinawan.
"No Nippon," she said slowly, shaking her head as she looked up at me with a weary expression that bespoke of much physical pain. She then opened her ragged blue kimono and pointed to a wound in the lower left side of her abdomen. It was an old wound, probably caused by a shell or bomb fragments. It was an awful sight. A large area around the scabbed-over gash was discolored and terribly infected with gangrene. I gasped in dismay. I guessed that such a severe infection in the abdominal region was surely fatal.
The old woman closed her kimono. She reached up gently, took the muzzle of my Tommy, and slowly moved it so as to direct it between her eyes. She then released the weapon's barrel and motioned vigorously for me to pull the trigger. Oh no, I thought, this old soul is in such agony she actually wants me to put her out of her misery. I lifted my Tommy, slung it over my shoulder, shook me head, and said "no" to her. Then I stepped back and yelled for a corpsman. (pp. 313-314)
We passed through an embankment for a railroad track and entered the outskirts of a town. All buildings were badly damaged, but some were still standing. We stopped briefly to explore a quaint little store. Displayed in its window were various cosmetics. In the street in front of the store lay a corpse clad in a blue kimono. Someone had placed a broken door over the pathetic body. We speculated he had been the proprietor of the little shop. (p. 318)
The weather turned dry and warm as we moved south. The farther we proceeded, the louder the sound of firing became; the bumping of artillery, the thudding of mortars, the incessant rattle of machine guns, the popping of rifles. It was a familiar combination of noise that engendered the old feelings of dread about one's own chances as well as the horrible images of the wounded, the shocked, and the dead--the inevitable harvest. (pp. 320-321)
A couple of us went down to look at the bridge before dark. We walked down to the stream on a trail leading form the road. The water was crystal clear and made a peaceful gurgling sound over a clean pebbly bottom. Ferns grew from the overhanging mossy banks and between rocks on both sides. I had the urge to look for salamanders and crayfish. It was a beautiful place, cool and peaceful, so out of context with the screaming hell close above. (p. 322)
The man next to me was a rifleman and a fine Peleliu veteran whom I knew well. he had become unusually quiet and moody during the past hour, but I just assumed he was as tired and as weary with fear and fatigue as I was. Suddenly he began babbling incoherently, grabbed his rifle, and shouted, "Those slant-eyed yellow bastards, they've killed enougha my buddies. I'm going after 'em." He jumped up and started for the crest of the ridge.
"Stop!" I yelled and grabbed his trouser leg. he pulled away.
A sergeant next to him yelled, "Stop, you fool!" The sergeant also grabbed for the frantic man's legs, but his hand slipped. He managed to clutch the toe of one boondocker, however, and gave a jerk. That threw the man off balance, and he sprawled on his back, sobbing like a baby. The front of his trousers was darkened where he had urinated when he lost control of himself. The sergeant and I tried to calm him but also made sure he couldn't get back onto his feet. "Take it easy, Cobber. We'll get you outa here," the NCO said.
We called a corpsman who took the sobbing, trembling man out of the meat grinder to an aid station.
"He's a damn good Marine, Sledgehammer. I'll lower the boom on anybody says he ain't. But he's just had all he can take. That's it. He's just had all he can take."
The sergeant's voice trailed away sadly. We had just seen a brave man crack up completely and lose all control of himself, even to the point of losing his desire to live. (p. 328)
We passed a large muddy area in the road cut. In it lay the body of a dead Japanese soldier in full uniform and equipment. It was a bizarre sight. he had been mashed down into the mud by tank treads and looked like a giant squashed insect. (p. 331)
The second Japanese officer lay dead on his back next to the wheel of the 37mm gun. He was in full-dress uniform with white gloves, shiny leather leggings, Sam Browne belt, and campaign ribbons on his chest. Nothing remained of his head from the nose up--just a mass of crushed skull, brains, and bloody pulp. A grimy Marine with a dazed expression stood over the Japanese. With a foot planted firmly on the ground on each side of the enemy officer's body, the marine held his rifle by the forestock with both hands and slowly mechanically moved it up and down like a plunger. I winced each time it came down with a sickening sound into the gory mass. Brains and blood were splattered all over the Marine's rifle, boondockers, and canvas leggings, as well as the wheel of the 37mm gun.
The Marine was obviously in a complete state of shock. We gently took him by the arms. One of his uninjured buddies set aside the gore-smeared rifle. "Let's get you outa here, Cobber."
The poor guy responded like a sleepwalker as he was led off with the wounded, who were by then on stretchers. The man who had lost his finger clutched the Japanese saber in his other hand. "I'm gonna keep this bastard for a souvenir."
We dragged the battered enemy officer to the edge of the gun emplacement and rolled him down the hill. Replete with violence, shock, blood, gore, and suffering, this was the type of incident that should be witnessed by anyone who has any delusions about the glory of war. It was as savage and as brutal as though the enemy and we were primitive barbarians rather than civilized men. (pp. 336-337)
A quote from James Jones' WWII:
What it must have been like to some old-timer buck sergeant or staff sergeant who had been through Guadalcanal or Bougainville or the Philippines, to stand on some beach and watch this huge war machine beginning to stir and move all around him and know that he very likely had survived this far only to fall dead on the dirt of Japan's home islands, hardly bears thinking about. (page unknown)
Friday, March 25, 2011
software to think
I work for UoP. It's a for profit educational model. Surely some can find value in that. I know the shareholders of the stock ticker for UoP do.
A student recently sent me a message apologizing for not getting her title page right. I told her not to worry too much about it. She mentioned a word or a name saying she's going to get it. I asked her about that. She said it was formatting software that her academic advisor suggested that she get.
That's the for profit model.
Knowledge shouldn't be displaced into another piece of software. I don't understand how someone thinks that she is learning by buying a product. That's the shame of it. Even the discipline required to think is being displaced into products that are doing the thinking for us.
But how could this happen? How does someone actually believe that she needs to buy a product to learn something in order to learn it herself? Well, the for-profit model does make the academic advisor into a salesperson.
A student recently sent me a message apologizing for not getting her title page right. I told her not to worry too much about it. She mentioned a word or a name saying she's going to get it. I asked her about that. She said it was formatting software that her academic advisor suggested that she get.
That's the for profit model.
Knowledge shouldn't be displaced into another piece of software. I don't understand how someone thinks that she is learning by buying a product. That's the shame of it. Even the discipline required to think is being displaced into products that are doing the thinking for us.
But how could this happen? How does someone actually believe that she needs to buy a product to learn something in order to learn it herself? Well, the for-profit model does make the academic advisor into a salesperson.
Tuesday, March 22, 2011
social networking
What is social networking? Do we really need to tag our content and format our messages in order to broadcast our communication to select strata of our friends lists?
What is a friends list? Is it a standing reserve of opportunities for fun, meeting up, getting to know you, getting to know me, staying in touch, maintaining friendship?
Aristotle saw friendship as the highest form that human relations could attain. In friendship one could achieve virtue. I suspect that much of what these social networking sites do is to reduce friends to a list, a stacking list, a standing reserve.
The potential for scripted, tagged, and formatted conversations are quite rife in the vast architecture of a social network. That's not virtue. That's an engineering fix for a problem that he's defined from the outset, a problem of how to relate with as many people as possible.
That sounds like marketing to me.
And that's probably all that it is in the end.
I read that social networking technologies enabled grassroots democracy uprisings like what occurred in Egypt. They also enabled a presidential hopeful reach millions of young and enfranchised Americans. He was elected, and it was the biggest advertising, branding, and marketing campaign the world has seen.
Welcome to the future.
We've left Aristotle's views on friendship in the dustbin of the history of ideas. We've replaced that with the marketing savvy companion. The person who you think looks better when she's wearing name brand shoes. A connection like that requires psychoanalysis, and I'll cut to the chase.
Over years of having advertising messages drilled into your head, you've come to believe that you're experiencing the fleeting feelings conveyed in the flash-bang media spreads for fashion items. Now that you're older, your response to seeing these shoes is almost Pavlovian. You drool at the site of that stack of french fries. The smell alone conjures up the moments of fun in the sun you had with your mother, when she still smiled, before the cancer stole her from you. Now you take your child to the same restaurant and recreate the same event.
Now that we've had advertising messages grafted onto our very being, we're ready to do the advertising for the company. Social networking is an authentication vehicle for product marketing. If it isn't happening yet, oh it will. Twitter reduces conversation to soundbites. Facebook turns our online identity into a homepage with interface points, walls, for marking, and tools for saying hello. As we stack our friend list high and take to the game of networking socially like an addict takes to his drug, we're poised to market not only ourselves and our lifestyles, but the very products, which enable it.
There is no Aristotelian virtue in my friends list. It's merely an opportunity to exploit that network of friends as a resource, a resource who we confusingly believe that we've shared an experience with. No, we've only authored that experience by applying standard nomenclature, a narrative genre, and a mark-up language for broadcasting this story to that list.
In Schindler's time the list was a tool of bureaucracy to expedite the mass slaughter of an ethnic group, keep it orderly, and measure progress. Now the list is a standing reserve of potential opportunities for contact. The social network is an interpellation mechanism. After all, how persuasive is it to get an automated message letting you know that your friends have joined, and why don't you?
There is no virtue in exploiting humans as a resource. There is no virtue in the standing reserve, just potential, potential energy. How will this potential energy get tapped? Probably to further ensconce us in technical relations, and little more.
Only in a context of vast separation and a diurnal rhythm dictated by a 'schedule' where everyone has their own personal contact interface with a vast database of media, fame, friends, funny, facts, and the like would we need to use such a social networking tool. As a sign of the times in which we live, the pragmatic use of this tool is clear. It's hard too coordinate meeting, and maintaining contact when we need each other so little.
How sad that the challenge of living doesn't require so much of our partner. Love and attraction once weren't calculated by psychological algorithms. They were incidental to a relationship of necessity. We need each other to raise a family, feed the chickens, and harvest the crops. The farming community was a great ribbon of cooperation that emerged out of absolute necessity. With machines running on energy tapped from millions of years of the sun's rays, we let the robots substitute for the necessary contacts we once maintained. They help us to deal with the increasing complexity of our society. As an organism we are being flung apart at the speed of combustion. We compensate for this rapid pace by speaking at a faster pace, the speed of electrical conduction. That approaches the speed of light.
Here we are, under the ceilings of theoretical limits, relating via machines with others. Rarely do we consider them other than the number of common interests we share with them. Rarely do we consider them other than the pictures they post.
There is no virtue in this social network of ours. Its artifice cheats us of serendipity, chance encounters, chance meetings, chance itself.
In chance's stead we now have random. Random emerges in interface design as shuffle. And we purposely shuffle our list of friends according to some criteria dictated by the tags that we choose. Some friends hear about our sports. Others hear about our socialization habits.
In the face of complexity, the rapidly growing stack of friends, we let the machine do the thinking for us. Shuffle.
The irony? Here I am using a blog intended to be shared with no one. I'm using one of a sundry collection of social networking tools to journal, no more. I have no list other than that represented by my phone contacts. I've yet to use the function that allows me to send texts to more than one at a time. I fear dipping into that deep stream. It may wash me away .
What is a friends list? Is it a standing reserve of opportunities for fun, meeting up, getting to know you, getting to know me, staying in touch, maintaining friendship?
Aristotle saw friendship as the highest form that human relations could attain. In friendship one could achieve virtue. I suspect that much of what these social networking sites do is to reduce friends to a list, a stacking list, a standing reserve.
The potential for scripted, tagged, and formatted conversations are quite rife in the vast architecture of a social network. That's not virtue. That's an engineering fix for a problem that he's defined from the outset, a problem of how to relate with as many people as possible.
That sounds like marketing to me.
And that's probably all that it is in the end.
I read that social networking technologies enabled grassroots democracy uprisings like what occurred in Egypt. They also enabled a presidential hopeful reach millions of young and enfranchised Americans. He was elected, and it was the biggest advertising, branding, and marketing campaign the world has seen.
Welcome to the future.
We've left Aristotle's views on friendship in the dustbin of the history of ideas. We've replaced that with the marketing savvy companion. The person who you think looks better when she's wearing name brand shoes. A connection like that requires psychoanalysis, and I'll cut to the chase.
Over years of having advertising messages drilled into your head, you've come to believe that you're experiencing the fleeting feelings conveyed in the flash-bang media spreads for fashion items. Now that you're older, your response to seeing these shoes is almost Pavlovian. You drool at the site of that stack of french fries. The smell alone conjures up the moments of fun in the sun you had with your mother, when she still smiled, before the cancer stole her from you. Now you take your child to the same restaurant and recreate the same event.
Now that we've had advertising messages grafted onto our very being, we're ready to do the advertising for the company. Social networking is an authentication vehicle for product marketing. If it isn't happening yet, oh it will. Twitter reduces conversation to soundbites. Facebook turns our online identity into a homepage with interface points, walls, for marking, and tools for saying hello. As we stack our friend list high and take to the game of networking socially like an addict takes to his drug, we're poised to market not only ourselves and our lifestyles, but the very products, which enable it.
There is no Aristotelian virtue in my friends list. It's merely an opportunity to exploit that network of friends as a resource, a resource who we confusingly believe that we've shared an experience with. No, we've only authored that experience by applying standard nomenclature, a narrative genre, and a mark-up language for broadcasting this story to that list.
In Schindler's time the list was a tool of bureaucracy to expedite the mass slaughter of an ethnic group, keep it orderly, and measure progress. Now the list is a standing reserve of potential opportunities for contact. The social network is an interpellation mechanism. After all, how persuasive is it to get an automated message letting you know that your friends have joined, and why don't you?
There is no virtue in exploiting humans as a resource. There is no virtue in the standing reserve, just potential, potential energy. How will this potential energy get tapped? Probably to further ensconce us in technical relations, and little more.
Only in a context of vast separation and a diurnal rhythm dictated by a 'schedule' where everyone has their own personal contact interface with a vast database of media, fame, friends, funny, facts, and the like would we need to use such a social networking tool. As a sign of the times in which we live, the pragmatic use of this tool is clear. It's hard too coordinate meeting, and maintaining contact when we need each other so little.
How sad that the challenge of living doesn't require so much of our partner. Love and attraction once weren't calculated by psychological algorithms. They were incidental to a relationship of necessity. We need each other to raise a family, feed the chickens, and harvest the crops. The farming community was a great ribbon of cooperation that emerged out of absolute necessity. With machines running on energy tapped from millions of years of the sun's rays, we let the robots substitute for the necessary contacts we once maintained. They help us to deal with the increasing complexity of our society. As an organism we are being flung apart at the speed of combustion. We compensate for this rapid pace by speaking at a faster pace, the speed of electrical conduction. That approaches the speed of light.
Here we are, under the ceilings of theoretical limits, relating via machines with others. Rarely do we consider them other than the number of common interests we share with them. Rarely do we consider them other than the pictures they post.
There is no virtue in this social network of ours. Its artifice cheats us of serendipity, chance encounters, chance meetings, chance itself.
In chance's stead we now have random. Random emerges in interface design as shuffle. And we purposely shuffle our list of friends according to some criteria dictated by the tags that we choose. Some friends hear about our sports. Others hear about our socialization habits.
In the face of complexity, the rapidly growing stack of friends, we let the machine do the thinking for us. Shuffle.
The irony? Here I am using a blog intended to be shared with no one. I'm using one of a sundry collection of social networking tools to journal, no more. I have no list other than that represented by my phone contacts. I've yet to use the function that allows me to send texts to more than one at a time. I fear dipping into that deep stream. It may wash me away .
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