The Naked and the Dead (85 page)

            Yet when he wrote in it, the journal always had a touch of the clandestine as though he were a boy locking himself with guilty anticipation in the bathroom. On a higher level, many of his feelings were the same -- almost unconsciously he would prepare an excuse in case he was discovered. "If you'll wait a moment, Major [or Colonel or Lieutenant], I'm just jotting some memorandum."

            Now he turned to the first blank page in his journal, held his pencil, and thought for a moment or two. Any number of new ideas and impressions had evolved on the trip back from the battery, and he waited, knowing his mind would produce them again. Once more he experienced the smooth ovoid surface of the lanyard handle. Like holding the beast at the end of a string, he thought.

            The image set off a round of ideas. He inscribed the date at the head of the page, rolled his pencil once between his fingertips, and began to write.

            It's a not entirely unproductive conceit to consider weapons as being something more than machines, as having personalities, perhaps, likenesses to the human. The artillery tonight started it all in my mind, but how much it is like a generative process except that its end is so different.

The imagery was a little unfamiliar to him; he noted the sexual symbols with some distaste, thought of DiVecchio.

            The howitzer like a queen bee I suppose being nurtured by the common drones. The phallus-shell that rides through a shining vagina of steel, soars through the sky, and then ignites into the earth. The earth as the poet's image of womb-mother, I suppose.

            Even the language for artillery commands, the obviously coarse connotations. Perhaps it satisfies an unconscious satisfaction in us serving the Death-Mother.
Spread trails, level your bubbles, lay the piece.
I recall that training class I inspected, the amusement of the trainees at that terminology, and the junior officer saying, "If you can't put the shell in that big hole, I don't know what you'll do when you get older." Perhaps it's a notion worth analyzing. Any psychoanalytical work on it?

            But there are other weapons too. These booby traps in Europe that the Germans use, or even our own experience at Hill 318 on Motome. Dangerous things like a plague of vermin, squat black ugly little things, undermining the men with nausea and horror until the act of straightening a picture might make one weep -- from anticipation of the explosion or the fear that a few dark roaches might dart across the wall from the space one has uncovered.

            The tank and truck like the heavy ponderous animals of the jungle, buck and rhinoceri, the machine gun as the chattering gossip snarling many lives at once? Or the rifle, the quiet personal arm, the extension of a man's power. Can't we relate all of them?

            And for the obverse, in battle, men are closer to machines than humans. A plausible acceptable thesis. Battle is an organization of thousands of man-machines who dart with governing habits across a field, sweat like a radiator in the sun, shiver and become stiff like a piece of metal in the rain. We are not so discrete from the machine any longer, I detect it in my thinking. We are no longer adding apples and horses. A machine is worth so many men; the Navy has judged it even more finely than we. The nations whose leaders strive for Godhead apotheosize the machine. I wonder if this applies to me.

            He sat back and lit a cigarette. The mantle in the Coleman lantern was beginning to buzz, and he sat up to adjust it, remembering for an instant Hearn's expression as he had sat before him asking for a transfer. The General shrugged, sat back again, staring at his desk. In transcribing his thought to paper it seemed somehow less profound, more contrived, and he was dissatisfied vaguely. He might have written no more, but the image of Lieutenant Hearn upset him, almost uncovered a trap door of his mind. He pushed back the picture resolutely, drew a line under his last sentence, and began to write about something else.

            I was considering a little earlier a rather fascinating curve whose connotations are quite various. The asymmetrical parabola, the one which looks like this --

or this --

or this

or this

Re: Spengler's plant form for all cultures (youth, growth, maturity, old age, or bud, bloom, wilt, decay). But the above curve is the form line of all cultures. An epoch always seems to reach its zenith at a point past the middle of its orbit in time. The fall is always more rapid than the rise. And isn't that the curve of tragedy; I should think it a sound aesthetic principle that the growth of a character should take longer to accomplish than his disaster.

            But from another approach that form is the flank curve of a man or woman's breast.

Cummings halted, feeling an unaccustomed nervous play of needles along his back. The comparison disturbed him, and the first few sentences he wrote after this had little meaning to him.

. . . of a man or woman's breast, the fundamental curve of love, I suppose. It is the curve of all human powers (disregarding the plateau of learning, the checks upon decline) and it seems to be the curve of sexual excitement and discharge, which is after all the physical core of life.

            What is this curve?
It is the fundamental path of any projectile,
of a ball, a stone, an arrow (Nietzsche's arrow of longing) or of an artillery shell. It is the curve of the death missile as well as an abstraction of the life-love impulse; it demonstrates the form of existence, and life and death are merely different points of observation on the same trajectory. The life viewpoint is what we see and feel astride the shell; it is the present, seeing, feeling, sensing. The death viewpoint sees the shell as a whole, knows its inexorable end, the point toward which it has been destined by inevitable physical laws from the moment of its primary impulse when it was catapulted into the air.

            To carry this a step further, there are two forces constraining the projectile to its path. If not for them, the missile would forever rise on the same straight line.
 
These forces are gravity and wind resistance and their effect is proportional to the square of the time; they become greater and greater, feeding upon themselves in a sense. The projectile wants to go this way
 and gravity goes down
 and wind resistance goes
 . These parasite forces grow greater and greater as time elapses, hastening the decline, shortening the range. If only gravity were working, the path would be symmetrical