I’m hopelessly stuck in the sixties, seventies and eighties. That’s as far as I go unless I’m forced to function in the present as I am today. I’m pretty good with technology, I guess. I majored in math and economics. God know’s why, as they say, those who believe. Then I ran a restaurant. You get to know a lot about people running a restaurant. Sometimes what you see is very funny but most of the time it’s just the same old, same old. So, I became an investment advisor because I got bored watching people eat. Watching people’s behavior around money was equally hilarious but, ultimately, just as boring as watching people eat. Still, I hung on for thirty years or so. “We work, sleep, eat, screw, drink and keep on going, and that’s all there is,” says Henry Stamper in Ken Kesey’s Sometimes A Great Notion. Kesey was at Stanford just before I was there. He worked at the Menlo Park Veterans Hospital as did I for a short while. Some people called the place “Sleepy Hollow.” I’m retired now and that scares me because we all know what comes next.
Thankfully I can draw some comfort from Kurt Vonnegut’s lovable character, Billy Pilgrim, in Slaughterhouse-Five: “The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past… All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist.”
I wrote about this in my book Behind The Locked Door (buy it please), and it does comfort me at odd moments when I get “unstuck in time” like Billy Pilgrim who time travels back and forth at will or at random, and this is one of those times as America once again lurches into war, something I’ve seen before and expect to see again. “So it goes.”
I’m in the Vietnam generation. I’ve never been to Vietnam except on television where I enjoyed Anthony Bourdain and Barack Obama eating lunch there in the rain. I’ve read a lot about it, though.
The best book and one I recommend is Last Night I Dreamed Of Peace: The Diary Of Dang Thuy Tram. If you don’t cry after reading that book, you need to visit the Tralfamadorians. I’ve made a list of some of the war books I recommend at the bottom of this blog for what it’s worth.
In the first chapter of Slaughterhouse-Five which is different from the rest of the book Vonnegut talks about how wars are as difficult to stop as glaciers. It’s easier simply to ignore them. It’s all a matter of vocabulary. Just as climate deniers call global warming “normal climate cycles,” war deniers call war “special military operations.”
In his short novel The Abortion: An Historical Romance, Richard Brautigan described a library where people brought in books instead of checking them out, The Library Of Unpublished Books. (It reminds me of Borges’s short story The Library Of Babel, but I digress.) One particular book in Brautigan’s fictional library caught my attention: “VIETNAM VICTORY by Edward Fox. The author was a very serious young man who said that victory could only be achieved in Vietnam by killing everybody there. He recommended that after we had killed everybody there we turn the country over to Chiang Kai-shek, so he could attack Red China, then. “It’s only a matter of time,” he said.”
“So it goes.”
Brautigan is well known for his eccentric metaphors and short poems. I picked out a few of his poems that may or may not be appropriate in this month of March, named after Mars, the Roman god of war. Whether you think they are apropos and whether you like them or not is up to you.
“So it goes.”
The titles of the poems are usually the first lines.
from: THE PILL VERESE THE SPRING HILL MINE DISASTER
General Custer Versus the Titanic
For the soldiers of the Seventh Cavalry who were killed at the Little Bighorn River and the passengers who were lost on the maiden voyage of the Titanic. God bless their souls.
Yes! it’s true all my visions
have come home to roost at last.
They are all true now and stand
around me like a bouquet of
lost ships and doomed generals.
I put them away in a
beautiful and disappearing vase.
Oranges
Oh, how perfect death
computes an orange wind
that glows from your footsteps,
and you stop to die in
an orchard where the harvest
fills the stars.
“Star-Spangled” Nails
You’ve got
some “Star-Spangled”
nails
in your coffin, kid.
That’s what
they’ve done for you,
son.
Death Is a Beautiful Car Parked Only
Death is a beautiful car parked only
to be stolen on a street lined with trees
whose branches are like the intestines
of an emerald.
You hotwire death, get in, and drive away
like a flag made from a thousand burning
funeral parlors
You have stolen death because you’re bored.
There’s nothing good playing at the movies
in San Francisco.
You joyride around for a while listening
to the radio, and then abandon death, walk
away, and leave death for the police
to find.
From: ROMMEL DRIVES ON DEEP INTO EGYPT
—San Francisco Chronicle Headline
June 26, 1942
Rommel is dead.
His army has joined the quicksand legions
of history where battle is always
a metal echo saluting a rusty shadow.
His tanks are gone.
How’s your ass?
Propelled by portals whose only shame
is a zeppelin’s shadow crossing a field
of burning bathtubs,
I ask myself: There must be more to life
than this?
Lions are growing like yellow roses on the wind
and we turn gracefully in the medieval garden
of their roaring blossoms.
Oh, I want to turn.
Oh, I am turning.
Oh, I have turned.
Thank you.
The elbow of a dead duck:
A transparent bridge across
the elbow of a dead duck
beckons, friends, like a boiled
radio station
toward a better understanding
of yourself in these crisis-ridden
times.
Cameo Turret:
That’s where I
see your face,
baby, on a tank
all around the
cannon
From: LOADING MERCURY WITH A PITCHFORK
Finding is losing something else.
I think about, perhaps even mourn,
what I lost to find this.
On pure sudden days like innocence
we behold the saints and their priorities
keypunched in the air.
Curiously young like a freshly-dug grave
the day parades in circles like a top
with rain falling in its shadow.
War Horse:
He stands alone in a pasture
but nobody can see him.
He has been made invisible
by his own wounds.
I know how he feels.
We were the eleven o’clock news
because while the rest of the world
was going to hell we made love.
Voluntary Quicksand
I read the Chronicle this morning
as if I were stepping into voluntary
quicksand
and watched the news go over my shoes
with forty-four more days of spring.
Kent State, America, May 7, 1970
Good Luck, Captain Martin
Part 1:
We all waved as his boat
sailed away. The old people
cried. The children were
restless.
Carol The Waitress, Remembers Still
Part 6:
Yes, that’s the table where Captain Martin
Sat. Yes, that one. By the window.
He would sit there alone for hours at
a time, staring out to sea. He always
had one plain donut and a cup of coffee.
I don’t know what he was looking at.
Put The Coffee On, Bubbles, I’m Coming Home
Part 7:
Everybody’s coming home
except Captain Martin.
Comet Telegram
Two words:
Camelot
gone.
Richard Brautigan was not primarily a political writer, but Vietnam does surface in his work, usually obliquely, ironically, or as background absurdity rather than direct protest. The extremity of the “kill everybody” proposal in The Abortion is presented deadpan, letting its monstrosity expose itself through absurd calm. Rather than protest directly, he creates a parallel world where war feels like part of the absurd machinery of modern life. His poems often treat war as surreal theater, as emotionally distant machinery, as something both tragic and strangely unreal. Some of his later poems reflect a darker national mood. The war appears not as subject but as residue, part of the psychic climate.
Richard Brautigan and Kurt Vonnegut were writing at roughly the same moment, yet their responses to war (especially Vietnam-era anxiety) could not be more different in method or tone. Brautigan used indirect satire versus the explicit anti-war structure Vonnegut uses in Slaughterhouse-Five. Vonnegut’s book was about World War II but it was published in 1969, at the height of Vietnam, and readers immediately saw the parallel. Vonnegut wants you to feel the grotesque repetition of violence. Brautigan wants you to feel how unreal and disconnected the logic of violence has become. Vonnegut shouts softly but unmistakably. Brautigan whispers and lets the absurdity echo. Vonnegut became a major anti-war voice of his generation. Brautigan became a countercultural mystic of gentleness and estrangement.
Both authors use humor because only the mask of comedy allows one to look at a world that has lost its mind and stumbled into a tragedy so great as to be incomprehensible. War is insane but real. We must find a way to face it. Vonnegut had a horror of people who took things too seriously but was also obsessed with the consideration of the most serious things (like the firebombing of Dresden). He and Brautigan in very different ways combine the surrealism of the times in which we live with a detached, almost stunned tenderness that helps us get through to the other side as each of us must do in our own way.
“And so on.”
Some Books I Read:
Last Night I Dreamed Of Peace: The Diary Of Dang Thuy Tram
Fire In The Lake, Frances Fitzgerald
Matterhorn, Karl Marlantes
Nothing Ever Dies, Viet Thanh Nguyen
One REMF’s Tour Of Duty In Vietnam, James Paul Lott
The Wounded Generation, American After Vietnam, A.D. Horne editor
Chance and Circumstance: The Draft, The War, and the Vietnam Generation, Lawrence M. Baskir and William M. Strauss
What We Did In Vietnam, Our War and What it Did To Us, David Harris
The Tin Drum, Günter Grass
Catch-22, Joseph Heller
Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.