The Things We Carry

People often tell me me writing is raw. I think that’s an interesting word. I know when food is raw that means it is not cooked. I know that when my skin is raw it means it has been somehow abraded and is sensitive to the touch. I watched Jenny Slate’s documentary Stage Fright and I think her performance could be labeled raw because I felt like she was telling me the truth about intimate details of her life.

The one scene in particular I would use as evidence is when she talks about masturbating in her parents’ house as she looks at the moon, and howling at it in ecstasy as she orgasms. That one seems particularly raw to me because, at the time of the filming, she was living in her parents’ home, her childhood home, and so that means that if her parents watched this movie and then they were all sitting down to breakfast, her dad could look at her thinking, “I know what you did last night,” and that’s the kind of knowing that, I think, has people opt to write “cooked” things rather than “raw”.

It’s funny the things we don’t talk about. I don’t write about having a miscarriage, two miscarriages I think— sometimes it’s hard to tell what is actually going on down there! So much stuff! The reason I don’t write about it is because I was so alone in the process. The reason I don’t write about it is because when I went to the doctor and he moved the wand over my belly and he said as if solving a math problem, “See, there’s no heartbeat. The baby is dead.” I wanted to shove the wand up his ass.

See? See your life, you fucking asshole? There’s no heartbeat.

Instead I got cold and quiet inside. I guess the death of a baby was no big thing. I could always make another one. This one didn’t even have a name or a fully formed face yet, so, whatever, right?

The other miscarriage happened at The Boardwalk in Santa Cruz and that was just bizarre. Nothing like losing what might have been a baby into a toilet and then having to go home with your panties in a bunch before you got to take your child onto the log ride.

Losing stuff can leave us so raw.

I love Tim O’Brien’s book The Things We Carried because he tried to write the impossible, a true war story. What I love about it is not the war part, for I have never been interested in reading about violence, about men killing men, women, children, and babies for the sake of ideology or the belief that land rightly belongs to one group of people and not the other. What I love about this book is that he focused on a subject I would never normally touch with a ten-foot pole and that I read the book cover to cover numerous times because the prose was so beautiful, so true. So raw.

How did he get me to stay, chapter after chapter? How did he write about brutality and death and loss and grief and keep me turning the pages?

Partly it was that as someone who has never gone to war, never witnessed a friend being blown up, never seeing someone get shot in the face, never carried explosives in my backpack, never killed another person, for me, Tim O’Brien wrote what seemed to be a true war story, and so there was the human part of feeling deeply privileged that someone was showing me what it was like to have been in the Vietnam War in a way that I found tolerable (barely, at times, but still tolerable).

Or does creating a person in your body and then perhaps doing something (Did I go too deeply into that yoga pose? Should I not have been greedy with my desire to twist? Did my body do something that killed that other little body?) that terminates the life inside equal its own kind of war story?

So maybe one reason I kept reading was that the book was not as far from my own experience as I had thought. Maybe there are many ways of killing, of dying, of doing things that seem so reprehensible we feel we can never talk about them to another person who was not in the same situation, for, we fear, those people outside of our small circle of experience would, after hearing our story, judge us inhumane and we, because of our actions, because we tried to share our stories, would become an outsider, dangerous, a bad person.

In The Things They Carried, one result of loss is a star-shaped hole. This is the space into or out of which things disappear, the space between what was and what now is not. One minute there was life, the next there was black space and, for those left behind, a rush of excruciating feelings or cold numbness.

(Passages in italics now are from The Things They Carried)

A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil.

How do you write about something the rest of the world would judge obscene and evil? And if you carry this story inside of you, untold, how do you not then judge yourself in the same way?

I think raw writing walks the edge of what we can bear to tolerate. Raw writing risks being so true that it leads to Doubting Thomas putting his finger in the wound because he cannot believe Jesus went through what he said he did, even though the proof is right there in front of him—a living Jesus. To tell your story and then to have someone doubt you is so painful! Jesus probably hurt when Thomas stuck his finger inside his damaged body. He was bearing, baring, the wound, was that not enough?

No. When things are outside the realm of the understanding of others, you need to bare your way to belief. The way through to understanding, I’m thinking, is to be raw.

When I was in graduate school, Tim O’Brien came to Corvallis to read from his book In the Lake of the Woods, and a group of us went, excited. He wore a Red Sox hat, and, as he read, all I could think about was how tired he looked, how worn out. I had tried to read this book, but it was not The Things They Carried, and I’m afraid that once you’ve been to the top of that mountain, any other view is less compelling.

I survived, Tim O’Brien wrote in The Things They Carried, but it's not a happy ending. I am grateful that Tim O’Brien has struggled to do the impossible: to both write and live in a world that disappeared for him when he was sent to Vietnam. I am grateful because I got to see the world he offered to us, and it was a world I never would have seen otherwise. I am more of myself because I have seen more of the world and have a better sense of what it is to be a human being after reading his book.

I am grateful that Jenny Slate talked about her stage fright, her love life, her sex life, her life, in her documentary. There’s a scene in the movie The Piano where the mute mother sign languages a story to her daughter about the relationship the mother had had with the girl’s father. The mother, played by Holly Hunter, says she could lay her feelings out like a sheet and the girls father would understand them.

To me, that is raw: to lay yourself out like a sheet so that others can understand you, and in that way, understand their own selves more clearly, also. We carry so much that is fisted inside of us, and when the fist opens and the bird flies free or the flower blooms, we see the life we were intended to live.

I think raw is another way of saying open and open is another way of saying honest.

The older I get, the more Botox confuses me. Why, at 55, do I want no lines on my face? That is such a lie. It tells the world I have no worries. It tells the world I am a blank slate. It tells the world I am willing to put shit called Botulinum toxin type A in my body so that I won’t scare you when you see my face and see that I look sad and old or happy and old or just plain old.

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So now both my writing and my face are raw. It’s so weird to not walk around with a variety of protective masks, just to walk around as myself, not trying to look or be better. It’s amazing. It’s so easy.

Sometimes I feel embarrassed that I am getting old and that the world can see it. I feel like I owe the world to try harder, to look better. I feel like aging is a fault. My fault.

But I’m letting my hair go grey, too. It’s hard to look like you do—I mean it’s hard to look like I do—when you (I) wake up in the morning. It’s so tempting to smack a bunch of pancake batter or whatever over your (my) face to hide the truth of what living looks like.

But I also think that’s crazy. Fuck you, Vogue Magazine. Fuck you, airbrushing. Fuck you, soft focus.

You know what I mean?