making your own mistakes

The writing life, I suppose, is what you make it. While there may be certain characteristics found in the lives of many writers, there is not a single "writing lifestyle"; the discipline--if I can call it that--is too wayward and elusive to be pinned down in a definite approach.

In reading James Carroll's House of War yesterday, I came across his mention of how he had given up the Catholic priesthood--his initial vocation--in the wake of angst and disillusionment over the Vietnam War and the peace movement, and decided to take up writing. He had broken off contact with his father, who had been in charge of intelligence at the Pentagon, to live in a small apartment north of Boston, devoting himself to the crafting of words.

I felt a sense of admiration for and kinship with Carroll in his making of that decision. In my own way I made a similar decision, at a younger age, turning my back on other occupations and possibilities to take up writing as my...what, profession? vocation? path? In my case I can pinpoint the time: it was a day in early December 1979, in the Sedgewick Library at UBC, where I was doing last-minute studying for the final exam of Math 100. An unhappy and alienated student, I did not in any way feel part of the university, or part of anything. I had no specific career or goal in mind. I was trailing along, going through the motions. The only thing I felt any passion for was writing, but I was not enrolled in and was not interested in taking any "creative writing" courses at the university, which I felt sure would be a painful waste of time.

Sitting at a table, with pale winter sunlight coming in the windows, I felt a sense of crisis grow as the clock swept closer to the time of the exam. It was a short walk away in the Math building, but I would still need to allow some time to get there. The minute-hand clicked, closer to the hour--and clicked again, then again. I still hadn't got up. With a feeling of alarm I wondered whether I was going to just sit there and not go to the exam, which would mean, in effect, dropping out of math, and therefore, in effect, out of university. No point in going if you're not going to write the exams...

Butterflies entered my stomach. What am I doing? I wasn't sure, but I was aware that I was on the brink of allowing a whole life--a life of normality, achievement, and social acceptance--to crash down behind me while I faced something else: another kind of life, an unknown kind.

Exam-time arrived, and I was still in the library. I had made my choice. Exhilarated, I packed up my books and walked into the cool sunny air, away from the library, away from the Math building, up to the gravel expanse of "C" Lot to the yellow Volkswagen to drive home. I stopped at Safeway on 4th Avenue to pick up a Christmas turkey for the household. I was a different person. For better or for worse, I had taken a step toward my own life, a decision that had come from within me. I knew it would bring difficulty, would be hard to explain. But it was genuine and authentic to myself, so I felt good--very good.

Since then I've had some successes, and quite a few failures, and I still feel some of the awkwardness and misfit-ness that I felt in university. I live in society, but I'm not really of it. It's a solitary path and it often bothers me, in the sense that it doesn't count as a normal "career".

But deep down I have no regrets. Indeed, I wish everyone the same thing: to feel able to do what they really want to do, and not simply flow with the swift-running current of society.

So I've cobbled together a life in a suburb that seems to work for me. There are dissatisfactions and difficulties--but who doesn't have those? I'd rather have my own set of dissatisfactions, and not someone else's hand-me-downs. Even if you're making mistakes, big ones, they should be your own, and not merely someone else's idea.

Now if I could just cast off my nagging bourgeois preoccupation with productivity and revenue...

aging (dis)gracefully

Speaking for myself, these are uncertain times. As one gets older, it seems reasonable to suppose that one should get wiser, more mature, and generally acquire a better outlook on life.

But this isn't necessarily so. I think about the saying that some people "forget nothing and learn nothing". But I worry that there could be another saying, that some people "study everything and learn nothing". Or simply that in one's older age, the chickens of one's youthful folly and hubris come home to roost.

Yesterday I continued to make my way through James Carroll's House of War, his history of the Pentagon. The book is not exactly what I expected it to be, but I am enjoying it very much--maybe more than if it had been what I expected. I was expecting a kind of institutional history of the Pentagon. Instead, the book is a thoughtful examination of the ideas and policies of the U.S. military since the Pentagon was created in World War II, particularly as these ideas were held and pursued by various significant individuals. Distressed by the current and growing militarism of his country, Carroll is asking, "what went wrong?"

One of the most significant players in this history was Robert S. McNamara, Secretary of Defense under John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. McNamara, a young statistician attached to the Air Force in World War II, went on to become CEO of Ford, and made a name as a brilliant and highly capable and successful executive. From there he was recruited to join Kennedy's cabinet in 1961.

The Pentagon, the largest office building in the world, had been built to its full Army-specified size in 1941, in direct defiance of President Roosevelt's order that it be cut to half its planned size. From the word go it was a cockpit of interservice rivalry. With the advent of nuclear weapons, its budget ballooned in the fear and paranoia of the Cold War.

Kennedy was elected after engaging in the most powerful scaremongering ever used by any presidential candidate. People were terrified of the "missile gap" (which did exist--but hugely in the United States' favor), and the citizens were urged to build bomb shelters for what was increasingly looking like an inevitable and imminent nuclear war. The terror came to a head with the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, and twitchy fingers hovered on the hair-trigger of nuclear attack.

Kennedy was able to defuse that crisis, but he had a change of heart about talking tough to the Soviets. He came to see it as his mission to lead the world away from nuclear Armageddon. (Looking at it now, I suspect this was the real reason he was whacked in 1963.)

Robert McNamara, for his part, saw it as his mission to bring the Pentagon under civilian control--his control--and to move the "nuclear trigger" out of the hands of paranoid hawks such as Curtis LeMay, head of Strategic Air Command, who believed ardently in the preemptive and massive first-strike use of atomic weapons. In Vietnam, McNamara sought to rationalize the use of bombing as a tool, not to destroy everything and everyone in sight, as was done eventually in World War II, but to push the Viet Cong toward a political, negotiated solution.

This idea proved to be a complete failure. Even by 1967 more ordnance had been dropped on Vietnam than on Europe in all of World War II, and the Viet Cong showed no sign whatever of giving up. Meanwhile, McNamara was becoming a nervous wreck. He was weeping at his desk in the Pentagon. Lyndon Johnson was afraid that McNamara was going the way of the first Secretary of Defense, James Forrestal, who, in 1949, had degenerated into acute paranoia and wound up committing suicide while under psychiatric care. When McNamara, at a key meeting, yelled and pleaded that the bombing in Vietnam had been a total waste and had to stop, Johnson had him removed from his post. McNamara was 100% right, of course--but the bombing went on.

Robert McNamara is 91 now. It seems that the Vietnam War proved to be a humbling and shattering experience for him: a time when his intelligence and self-confidence met their Waterloo. Or, switching to a metaphor used by James Carroll, he was Ahab meeting his Moby-Dick in the Pentagon, the great beast that he sought to subdue but which dragged him under. The brilliance of his youthful achievements led on to pain and no doubt remorse in his older years.

So age is not any kind of safe haven. Not unless, perhaps, you've lived prudently and wisely in your youth. And how many of us have done that?

House of War, House of Death

Two days ago I finished reading the Iliad, as translated by Robert Fagles. Over all it was very good, and much more accessible than I was expecting.

Now I'm keying notes from the book's introduction by Bernard Knox and from its end-notes.

One thing that's striking about the Iliad is its unapologetic and graphic violence. Picking one example at random (there are many to choose from) from Book 17, "Menelaus' Finest Hour", the warrior Hippothous is trying to drag the corpse of Patroclus away from the battle-front:

Hippothous out for fame...Pelasgian Lethus' son,
lashing a shield-strap round the ankle tendons,
was hauling Patroclus footfirst through the melee,
hoping to please Prince Hector and all the Trojans,
Hippothous rushing on but death came just as fast.
No Trojans could save him now, strain as they might--
Ajax son of Telamon charging quickly into the carnage
speared him at close range through the bronze-cheeked helmet,
the horsehair crest cracked wide open around the point,
smashed by the massive spear and hand that drove it.
His brains burst from the wound in sprays of blood,
soaking the weapon's socket--
his strength dissolved on the spot, his grip loosed
and he dropped the foot of brave Patroclus' corpse.
There on the ground it lay--he rushed to join it,
pitching over the dead man's body face-to-face,
a world away from Larissa's dark rich soil...
Never would he repay his loving parents now
for the gift of rearing--his life cut short so soon,
brought down by the spear of lionhearted Ajax.

The poem contains much mayhem of this sort. I would not say that it particularly glorifies violence so much as looks it unflinchingly in the face. In Homer the warriors are mostly brave, but subject to fear and even terror. They fight and kill, but they don't want to die, and when they do they claw at the dirt and clutch their entrails, whimpering their last as the darkness swirls down over their eyes (a common image in the Iliad) and they descend unwillingly to the hated House of Death.

The killing in the Iliad is up close and personal: the result of arduous hand-to-hand combat. I think about another book I'm reading, House of War by James Carroll, a history of the Pentagon. The book's subtitle suggests Carroll's viewpoint: The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power. The 20th century saw great "advances" in the technology of killing. Weapons became more mechanized even as the institutions using them became more impersonal and bureaucratized, with the soldier becoming subsumed in the growing fungus of The Organization Man as described in William H. Whyte's 1956 classic. The result in World War II was the deliberate slaughter, especially of civilians, by aircraft flying far overhead, launched not so much by individuals as by committees and teams of bureaucrats.

The darkness swirling over the eyes of all those women and children, though, was just as real. When Dresden was fire-bombed people leaped into the rivers to escape the gigantic walls of flames, only to be boiled alive there. They descended reluctantly to the hated House of Death.

People who claimed the mystique of the warrior had in fact become functionaries of the slaughterhouse, not different from the illegal immigrants who work at meatpacking plants, killing animals in an efficient, high-volume process worked out by industrial engineers. What do you do with all that blood? All those intestines and brains? It's all been worked out. The math has been done, the drawings rendered on drafting-tables.

Yes, we live in a sniper's world: a place of killing the defenseless from positions of impregnable safety.

In Homer's world, violence was still dangerous to the perpetrators. But the mystery remains of its mystique, its fascination, the whirlpool-like attraction of it for us primates (for chimpanzees commit murder too). It's a somber puzzle.