The Things They Carried
Best book of the century.
People fall into two categories. They either go to war. Or, they don’t. You can’t have one without the other. Or, another way of saying this, is, in one way or another, everyone ‘goes to war.’ Eventually.
The Things They Carried by Tim O-Brien makes this point very clear. If you are a millennial you get this. Everything’s a paradox. Hypocritical. Hypercritical. An oxymoron. Forced complementary. Yin and yang is zero and one. No questions asked. No doubt about it.
If you are the grandparent (or a parent) of a millennial, you also ‘get this.’ But in a very different way. You went to war. Literally. Not just figuratively. It’s impossible to parent without war.
So, if you want to know what war ‘feels’ like, read O’Brien’s book. If you are a boomer, and you haven’t read it, or, better, listened to it, read, or listen to, it, now. It will bring back Vietnam and all the pain and suffering with it.
Fifty years forward, now, backward, just the same, we can re-experience the important things about a life, we can relive our life, through someone else’s words, experiences, death. Again, a visit to the Vietnam memorial makes this exceedingly clear. War is continual. Perpetual. Sustainable.
I write about the circle. There is a circle between life and death, meaning, from the circle’s point of view, no life, no death. Just an unrelenting circle. Yin and yang. Zero and one. This means the things we carry with us are temporary, all of them, and, at this point in time, all of us are painfully aware of this. Or not. Depending. On our point of view. Place in time.
We are witnessing a war between a war-hero and a president. One served. The other didn’t. One won. The other lost. Whichever way you want to view it. If your body is buried in a shit field, even if your friends go back to retrieve it, you gave it up. To God. To Nature. To Reality. Your god, nature, reality. Our god, nature, reality. God’s nature. Nature’s reality. Reality’s god. A circle doesn’t care. Whether you served. Or, you didn’t. Whether you believe in God, nature, reality. Whether you win. Or lose.
If you came home from a war, you made it through one shit field, to face an other. And, then, an other. And this can never stop because it is a simple circle. A shit field nourishes the earth. It’s all relative.
If you haven’t read O’Brien’s book, you will follow me (and it) if I tell you war deserters need courage, parents who lose their children to cancer need courage, men and women who sign up for war, who dictate war, need courage. We all need courage. In order to survive. In order to read books. About courage. In order to survive courage.
If you read the book, you’ll cry somewhere near the end. Whether you were a teenager during Vietnam or not. You will find all the lost parts of your self in O’Brien’s words about the things they carried.
For what they really carried was a heart and soul. A mind and body. Our heart and soul, mind and body. Where mind and soul are abstract concepts tying us to a concrete reality. They took us with them. Then. And, now.
There is a circular relationship between an individual and a group. This is the only constant we can be sure about, in nature.
War never ends. It’s the conservation of a circle. Nothing more. Or less.
There is a circular relationship between mind and matter, virtual and real. By now, we’re all getting this. We’re all ‘living’ it. Zero and one are yin and yang.
Conservation of the circle is the core dynamic in nature.
