Random Notebook #8: Transitional Narratives, From Here to There

I feel as if I had abandoned better thoughts or things to write about due to, perhaps, a lack of focus.  But in all of this nonsense there is a hidden lesson: I dare any of those “professionals” I left behind to match my writing, even then I was finishing notebooks left and right.  It really is a whole lot more than simply finishing notebooks; it’s the development of thoughts I might simply browse in the waking hours and days ahead of me, day after day.  I wonder what I would be doing if I never gave a thought or examination to life in general.  Life might be even better.  To live in ignorance of these complex questions and deep examinations of my most basic thoughts; live as if nothing of this mattered but was just entering life and exiting at the other end without having a single existential question, or perhaps thinking about it but not recognizing it as such.  Even in writing about it here, I have a tendency to believe all of this, of course, has been thought and examined before, as if in all the things and their essence nothing about be solely original, but a rethinking or reorganizing of a thought examined years before. 

I have little idea as to why I chose to write on these things.  Like I said, I think they are universal thoughts, and that is all I can think of right now.  Reading “The Deer Park,” by Norman Mailer, but I must have written about this already.  I had a feeling while traveling here, that I should write something based on K.B.’s life.  The girl was raised as a Jehovah Witness and was damaged for life.  I would probably write in the first person, that and talking in the intimate side of telling another person’s life story in a sort of episodic form—traveling from present tense to past as any whim in the story pushes out.  Where to begin?  Perhaps make it contemporary—it was my first college class since being discharged from active duty… Having done four combat tours (three in Afghanistan and one in Iraq), I had had enough of the “brotherhood,” and being “always faithful.”  Of course, there are people that would disagree with me for not re-enlisting, but one has to take opinions like that just like the ones coming from the assholes who hold those same ideas.  I don’t mean to sound like a cynic, but I simply felt it was time to move on.

I enrolled at B. University on a whim.  I saw the name and it sounded good and round and resolute—I never cared about researching anything.  There were officers I disliked for throwing their Ivy League names around, disclosing their privilege backgrounds.  Some earned the respect of their men because they were careful, high-spirited but careful and not subject to “gut feelings” while on patrol.  Those officers were in a microscopic minority to the other so-called “risk takers,” the ones who trusted their gut more than what intelligence reported, never even looked at the GPS and got us lost for hours.  Luckily, the loss of men was small when these idiots came along barking orders to enlisted men who had been in-country for close to a year and a half, gone on hundreds of patrols.  Sometimes, these officers got us in troubles that only the Staff Sergeant and other senior NCOs could get us out of.  Because under fire, and I don’t mean IEDs or insurgent snipers, the Staff Sergeants were the ones in command and when the odd-ball officer saw the NCOs take the initiative, they would sit and watch how it was done.  They would learn this way more than they ever could at the Naval Academy or West Point or whatever sorry ass ROTC programs they came from.  The men knew right away whom to trust and whom to despise.  Only occasionally we would have one of those assholes who, fearing of losing face, would shout out an NCOs plan to get out of an ambush.  Those were the real dangerous ones—the ones with only a handful (or less) patrol experiences but acting as if they knew it all.  I can’t even count the list of men—fine Marines—that dumb officers got either killed or wounded, just on the strength of pushing around their lieutenant bar.  The more moderate ones listened to the NCOs and watched carefully at how masterfully these lower rank men pin-pointed locations, called in air support and medical evacuations as needed; all of this while still engaging the enemy and directing precise flank movements that, at least in my experience, never failed to get us out of a jam and take the upper-hand from the insurgents.

That was my war.  That’s how I spent my time serving my country.  Maybe even 90% of the time I spent reading the officers, at least the lieutenants.  The captains one could trust because these were a different breed of men; men who had fought in Panama in 1989, Kuwait in 1990-91 and in Somalia in 1993-94, and most of them got field commissions.  Other older brass had been part of the Beirut “peace keepers” that got blown to bits in 1983.  We trusted these men as we distrusted the “pale-faced,” which was what we began calling them because as green as they were their faces would be pale-white even into their fourth or fifth patrol.

"Drown" by Junot Diaz

Now I am back reading at the pace I like. Last night I read about 50 pages and I could not put the book down when it was time to sleep. It is definitely engaging and the way that Diaz describes his early childhood should make us all feel the beneficiaries of a good life. This is a hard fictionalized memoir (no doubt the stories are filled with biographical details), and the way the stories tie together is really a masterful touch. The stories go back and forth between New Jersey and Santo Domingo, where Diaz is originally from. There are some description of slums in New Jersey that remind me of my own childhood in the South Bronx. The book is full of the feeling of displacement immigrants have to deal with. The stories based in Santo Domingo are more in tune with the pains of growing up. In "Ysrael" the narrator Yunior is accompanied by his brother Rafa as they set out to "see" a boy whose face was eaten up by a pig while he was still a baby. "Ysrael" (the boy they set out to see) now wears a mask. Little do the reader know that Yunior and Rafa's intention is to take off the mask and "disrobe" Ysrael. This they do, besides beating poor Ysrael brutally. It is certainly a story of those lazy summers when boys have little to do and too much in their heads. The stories are peppered with the fact that Yunior's father abandoned the family and moved to New York. Eventually they all make it to New York and begin to deal with the displacement. In "Aurora," the narrator recounts his love life with a crackhead girl and his own selling drugs business. It's a hard story, and I felt both the desperation and hopelessness of love. It is incredibly well-written and lovingly poetic.

What I do find a little strange is the praise offered to Diaz. The backcover reads: "Junot Diaz is a major new writer. His world explodes off the page into the canon of our literature and our hearts." And also, "Talent this big will always make noise..." Definitely I agree with Diaz's talent. I remember that a few years ago (when I applied for one myself) Diaz won a Guggenheim and funding from the NEA on the same year. I guess some people have all the luck. Another thing that is important to point out is that Diaz infuses his stories with a great deal of vernacular... IN SPANISH... I have no idea how a person unfamiliar with Spanish street talk makes sense of some parts of the book. I don't have a problem with it, but again, I wonder.

The other book I am reading is Carl Jung's "The Undiscovered Self." It deals with collective and individual consciousness and unconsciousness. The book is an inquiry into the stresses that face humanity today. Even though this book was written at the height of the Cold War, if one supplants the Soviet threat with present day terrorism the book still makes a great deal of sense. Perhaps I will get more into it as I finish "Drown." That's another action shot from yesterday.