Most of life consists of simply avoiding monsters. Kids turn up in trash barrels and creek beds. Wild world. It’s when a monster walks into the room and you’re in it that the world truly makes sense.
There’s an exception in everyone’s mind. War’s a big monster. And everybody’s scrambling all over it. War has community, teams, sides. And that’s fun.
War’s mutable; the Taliban watch for pigeons across the valley because they fly above American soldiers looking for food. Then they drop their mortars and shoot their machine guns into the woods below the birds. American soldiers have planes with thermal imaging to detect body heat. They score fatalities in huge, huge numbers: blow their bodies up so they’re not around anymore, knock off their furry little buttons when they’re not looking. I'd have to say I’d root for the bird-watchers if asked straight-up.
Then it starts to look like us.
Then it starts to look like us.
Mostly it walks in plain cotton clothes into some gas station with a gun and tells everyone to lie on the floor then blackness or whatever God is real happens to them. All the people act crazy because they want to live more. Then the living walk in after the dead and say, “Oh my God.”
6 comments:
A lot going on here that is really nice.
"Gotta say I’d root for the bird-watchers if asked straight-up." voice ...
this paragraph is great: Mostly it walks in plain cotton clothes into some gas station with a gun and tells everyone to lie on the floor then blackness or whatever God is real happens to them. All the people act crazy because they want to live more. Then the living walk in after the dead and say, “Oh my God.”
The next two paragraphs seemed weaker to me, "everyone is insane.. such faith two years ago" is a cop out answer and frustrating to me here; the last paragraph doesn't get me back to monsters necessarily.
Again, I really like the play with associations here, how they all follow in an order that is not necessarily logical but felt, as in a dream. We struggle to make meaning and understand how the different "monsternesses" of different phenomena relate, and reason fails, especially when we confront the monsters. This piece represents that, I think. Have you seen "The Tree of Life?" I think its logic is similar.
Anyway, here's some war monsters for you:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rXPrfnU3G0&feature=player_embedded
This was awesome. I shared it with some of my friends who are marines, and they agreed. It feels honest and no bullshit and I think it's great. I like it's brokenness as far as ideas vs situations goes. Great job.
It seems like you really did your research for this piece, which makes it very believable. That leads me to the question, what part of this is fictional? The methods? Your perspective? Or just the ideas of these monsters? I really liked this but I read as creative non-fiction (maybe that's just because I'm used to reading your creative non-fiction though).
A fine example of metaphor made explicit, extended to the big picture and then zoomed in to the specific instance. I'm not sure about the "plain cotton clothes," wonder if something more specific, more specifically American would do here. The ending is working well, though "the living walk in on the dead, to find the dead..." (not after the dead--a spatial rather than temporal relationship here). I too like the narrator's confession in the middle ("I'd have to say..."), which is the only place the "I" appears. Perhaps a return in the end, another statement I'd have to say? Is the I one of the living walking in on the aftermath of this monster? One of us hearing about it on the news? Is there a connection here to the difficulties of veterans returning to society from war?
I am wondering about the line about the world making sense when a monster walks into the room and you are in it--is that because so much of our consciousness is taken up by all of the various monsters that we are avoiding that it is almost expected and right when one appears? That is such an interesting thought--that maybe it is harder to embrace the sane world than the insane world...we are so much better prepared for it...
Ann
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