The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [267]
In the tent, he hesitated a moment, and then unlocked a small green filing cabinet on the side of his desk, removing from it a heavy notebook bound in black like a law ledger. It was a journal in which he had jotted down his private ideas for many years. There had been a time when he had told them to Margaret, but after the first year or two of their marriage, when they had turned away from each other, the importance of the journal had increased, and in the years that had followed he had filled many ledgers, sealed them, and stored them away.
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.