I'm currently reading THE things THEY carried, by Tim O'Brien. He is a wonderful writer. As he writes, one shouldn't believe a story is a true war story until you feel it in your stomach. Whether truth or fiction, all his stories are felt in the gut. I could point to endless paragraphs that have deeply affected me but this one really resonated:
""To generalize about war is like generalizing about peace. Almost everything is true. Almost nothing is true. At its core, perhaps, war is just another name for death, and yet any soldier will tell you, if he tells the truth, that proximity to death brings with it a corresponding proximity to life. After a firefight, there is always the immense pleasure of aliveness. The trees are alive. The grass, the soil - everything. All around you things are purely living, and you among them, and the aliveness makes you tremble. You feel an intense, out-of-the-skin awareness of your living self - your truest self, the human being you want to be and then become by the force of wanting it."
What occurred to me is that there are moments in that paragraph when he could be commenting on a BDSM experience and the after effects..."the aliveness makes you tremble". I can only speak for myself when I say that experimentation in these activities somehow places me closer to my "truest self"; that pain brings me closer to joy; that there is an "aliveness" once I have been objectified.
As O'Brien makes clear, war is not just death and destruction. It's hell, mystery, terror, adventure, courage, holiness, pity, despair, longing; love. There are no generalizations to be made, just as there are no generalizations to be made about living. We all put one foot in front of the other and the story continues on. Our memories will fade, but if the stories are written down they will be immortal. Thus, we write stories, with the exact details being less important than the essence, the truth of the story.
I sometimes sit and remember an episode of sub-space; the extraordinary experience not just of those divine minutes, but the time thereafter; the experiencing of being alive in the fullest way. In ways, it is getting closer to death, or rather, to the time before one was born; the feeling of being reborn. It creates a very special bond between two people that just goes on and on. How could it not.
""To generalize about war is like generalizing about peace. Almost everything is true. Almost nothing is true. At its core, perhaps, war is just another name for death, and yet any soldier will tell you, if he tells the truth, that proximity to death brings with it a corresponding proximity to life. After a firefight, there is always the immense pleasure of aliveness. The trees are alive. The grass, the soil - everything. All around you things are purely living, and you among them, and the aliveness makes you tremble. You feel an intense, out-of-the-skin awareness of your living self - your truest self, the human being you want to be and then become by the force of wanting it."
What occurred to me is that there are moments in that paragraph when he could be commenting on a BDSM experience and the after effects..."the aliveness makes you tremble". I can only speak for myself when I say that experimentation in these activities somehow places me closer to my "truest self"; that pain brings me closer to joy; that there is an "aliveness" once I have been objectified.
As O'Brien makes clear, war is not just death and destruction. It's hell, mystery, terror, adventure, courage, holiness, pity, despair, longing; love. There are no generalizations to be made, just as there are no generalizations to be made about living. We all put one foot in front of the other and the story continues on. Our memories will fade, but if the stories are written down they will be immortal. Thus, we write stories, with the exact details being less important than the essence, the truth of the story.
I sometimes sit and remember an episode of sub-space; the extraordinary experience not just of those divine minutes, but the time thereafter; the experiencing of being alive in the fullest way. In ways, it is getting closer to death, or rather, to the time before one was born; the feeling of being reborn. It creates a very special bond between two people that just goes on and on. How could it not.
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