All posts by John Eden

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About John Eden

What a long strange trip it's been! Born in the southland 70-some-odd years ago... Been here and there, done this and that - from flying airplanes in southeast Asia and teaching children in southeast Georgia to digging carrots in Oregon and growing bamboo in Georgia. Been on the Way for half my life and finally realized that the Path is the destination, that no-path as path means you can't be off the path, and that 'gone beyond all aversion and attachment' means enjoying everything. I live on a little piece of earth just south of the Altamaha River and just east of Trail Ridge in the homeland of the Creek Nation and the Longleaf/Wiregrass ecosystem, about 50 miles from the Atlantic coast. I look for love in every sunrise, peace in every sunset, and beauty in the moonlight through the pines.

Ondaatje!

On writing, , , , , ,

Just finished reading Micahel Ondaatje’s 1982 work Running in the Family… what an experience!

Had not heard of it, discovered it by accident while looking for his new book The Cat’s Table, which I’ve been meaning to read for some time, having read about five of his books and loved them… and am just speechless with wonder at the magic he does. This book, which I read over the weekend, has reached into nearly every part of my own heart and opened it up for better or worse, and now I’m feeling washed over. Burned clean. Nothing I can say can approach what this book opens up. It is truly a spiritual experience to read his work.

It really catches up the whole great thing of family… all the beauty and pain of it wrapped into one account. And so much more…

It’s also an intense look into the personal aspects of 20th Century colonial life, all the beauty and pain of that! It was like a vast flood that raised several generations of people up in this fantasy of aspirations and accomplishments and then just smashed them down into the rocks of reality. He has this wonderful, probably mostly allegorical, story of his grandmother’s death that depicts that so beautifully.

It is – one of the levels it touches – a rare clear look into the impact of Empire on the lives of the aristocracy in a country which was washed over by wave after wave of European colonialism. We generally know, if we have thought of the subject at all, that colonialism vastly degraded the lives of the poor and ordinary peoples of the world, but often I think we have wrongly assumed that the upper classes, the wealthy, the elite benefited from it.

In fact, as Ondaatje shows in his lyrical way, they were as devastated by Empire as any street beggar or farmer. A member of the Asian diaspora, he revisits his home country, Ceylon (Sri Lanka), and delves deeply into his own family, his ancestors and contemporaries, their friends and enemies, revealing lives and families and a whole culture torn apart by the exotic influences of Dutch, English, and American invasions – peaceful, benign, courteous, even kind invasions though they were.

It’s a powerful account, with deep social, cultural and personal strains that I’m still sorting out.

A Chorus of Stones – Susan Griffin

A War Journal, On writing

[I will insert this into the pieces, maybe as a preface, or otherwise as separate quotes along the way….]

Susan Griffin’s A Chorus of Stones is the most powerful book I’ve ever read. It was a major influence in my decision to write my story of this war and its impacts on a few lives. A few excerpts:

–-pg. 32

There are events in our lives that we cannot understand because we keep a part of what we know away from understanding. War is one of those events.

–pg. 178

The telling and the hearing of a story is not a simple act. The one who tells must reach down into deeper layers of the self, reviving old feelings, reviewing the past. Whatever is retrieved is reworked into a new form, one that narrates events and gives the listener a path through these events that leads to some fragments of wisdom.

–pgs. 260-261

In the fifth year of writing this book I met a man who had been shell-shocked in the Vietnam War. I asked him to tell me his story, and he tried. But he had lost the capacity to make a meaning from the events of his life…. The war was not what he had imagined…. He wanted to leave the army as a conscientious objector. But he was sent to a psychiatrist and threatened with dishonorable discharge. Then he simply ceased to care…. I began to suspect his lassitude concealed a state of paralysis, not of the body, but of the soul. He was as if suspended in the past, disbelieving the old values, yet unable to act on his own beliefs.

–pg. 363

And you, though you don’t know him, though you will never even see him, will retain some sense of him as you begin, after the war, to put down on paper all this that you saw and heard.

Done II

On writing, , ,

I actually think I am done now.

Well, I’m been thru everything again and re-edited. There are no major additions or changes to the order of pieces yet… but that may happen.

I do appreciate all of you who are reading this, as I know the story is not so sweet sometimes, and may actually be offensive to some sensibilities… but it’s just how things were from my perspective… and filtered thru my particular set of social understandings. Some of those understandings have moved along, changed, and expanded, but I’m not trying to re-formulate things based on my current perspective, as I wanted to present this story the way it seemed to me as I went thru it and as I looked back on it some years ago when I began the arduous process of writing it all down. (It’s been over 10 years, shall we say. All began with Jan’s writing group, the chapter on the Cabin beginning life as a short story for that group, who all said, “But it’s not believable.” To which I said, hmmm, well it happened! So I started writing to give enough back story to make it believable that someone would actually do such stupid things.)

I will probably do an afterword or foreword or something to bring it into my present perspective on things. I’m still too involved in it to do that at the moment.

Re-editing…

On writing, Uncategorized, ,

I’m going thru the War Journal again, re-editing all the chapters and pieces, opening everything up to public, thinking about some kind of approach to publishing it all.

Not sure what direction I’ll take, but am open to suggestions.

I came across this bit that I like a lot, so thought I’d put it out here, maybe entice some casual readers to delve into the whole thing. This is from “Desperado Connection” – Ch. 3 of The Trip, the story of my cross-country odyssey with another vet:

“Yeah, I had been ready to go, get out of Florida, get out of the country maybe. Hell, I’d been wanting to go to Canada since graduation – probably should’a gone – so why not? It had been easy to take Charlie’s suggestion. I was lost in my thoughts now, lost in the anger, half-scrubbing at the counter, absently putting away pots and pans…. I don’t even want to stay in this country any more, not after what it’s done to us. Disemboweled, that’s the word. The War, and what they’ve done to everybody so they could keep having the war, it’s all just spiritually disemboweled us. That’s why we feel so empty. We eat and drink and smoke and snort and it all just blasts out the bottom. There’s nothing there, so we just keep moving. Blow it out your ass, the jet jockeys loved to say. That’s what we’re doing. Just like that F-4 jock that lost it in the O-Club at DaNang, jumped up on the bar and started shooting up all the mirrors and the bottles with his Smith & Wesson .38 Caliber Combat Masterpiece, the sidearm we all carried so we could get rescued or otherwise if we crashed in the jungle. Blowing it out his ass, they said.”

An Introduction…

On writing

I have significantly revised the Introduction, so I’m posting it here for those who may have begun reading earlier without the benefit of an introduction!

[The Pages listed in the dropdown are the chapters/pieces of my book, which is now complete except for this Introduction, though all are still subject to revision and possible reordering. I will try to note in posts if I change anything.]

A War Journal

My Encounter with Empire: Vietnam

INTRODUCTION

In the first half of the 20th Century, the United States began to dabble in the affairs of a tiny country in Southeast Asia known as Vietnam. The French spent a number of years there, learning much of the iron will of the Viet people before they decided to leave. The US, imbued with great optimism and hubris about its military prowess, jumped in behind the French, first with advisers and later with troops.

The intervention became, famously, a quagmire. By the mid-sixties, most everyone who wasn’t blind or biased realized that the US involvement there was unwise, but the political and military realities of the country, its inclination toward Empire, kept us plodding along through this foolishness for almost another decade.

I had the misfortune to be dragged into this conflagration by virtue of my age and social status, so in 1968, I found myself enlisting in the US Air Force, despite my distaste for the US invasion of Vietnam, and despite my opposition to war and aversion to the military in general.

What follows is the story of how I came to be in the Air Force, a bit of what it was like being in SEA during the declining years of ‘The War’ that wasn’t really a war, how I eventually got out, and what the effects of it all were on me. In addition, it is the story of another Vietnam era veteran with whom I became friends and journeyed across the US in search of some kind of absolution.

Before you begin reading the book, a few words of warning are in order! Though this introduction is incomplete, it may help with reading the book:

This is an experimental work and so asks of the reader a bit of work and patience.

This is written as creative non-fiction, so it’s true, in the sense that all these things actually happened, just maybe not exactly as I’ve written it, due to the vagaries of memory or the needs of the story.

It is a multi-genre work, which means it includes straight narrative, stories, journal entries, re-created journal entries, poems, songs, graphics, news accounts, quotations from other works, and pieces in other voices both real and imaginary. All these various genre pieces are intended to work together to tell the story and paint the picture of my experience; some of them may stand alone as individual pieces as well.

This work employs an exploded timeline – thus each entry is dated to help you keep the sequence clear. There are two main streams, however: the first is the time prior to and during my service in the Air Force (most of these have a date in the title), and the second is a trip that I took with another vet about a year after I got out of the Air Force. (The pieces in the Trip sequence are numbered as Chapters in the list.) The story more or less alternates between these two streams, with some exceptions… This serves to juxtapose various elements of the story in ways that would not happen in a straight, time-order narrative.

Good luck! And thanks again for your willingness to undertake this journey.

[If you don’t have the password for the protected pieces, leave a comment, include your email address or other contact info, and I’ll get in touch.

Thanks for being willing to read this. If you have questions, please leave a comment. I would appreciate comments on the story and the format – please be honest, and try to be kind…. As Miss Erika Badu said, “I’m a artist and I’m sensitive about my shit!”]