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I just started a novel this morning. They are littered like deadfall, all around me these novels that come with the cache of literary and emotive powers. I often fear to pick them up, for they are not deadfall, they are bombs, true, love bombs, but still, I don’t know what it is next that they will blow apart within me. So, I circulate them, admire them, admire those who have referred them to me. Often, I think the gunpowder won’t go off if I’m careful; if I pick up the book and read just a line, gingerly put the book back down on the pile, which despite my fears, is stacked like a Jenga pile made by a rat on LSD.

But I do pick them up, subtract a line out of them, as if I have a pair of scissors, and carry that line around like a wisp of a talisman, carrying it around in my mind for comfort, like a teddy bear, or perhaps Linus’ blanket. I am OK, some part of me tells myself; despite my disabled veteran status from my active participation in the Internal War Years, the Gulf Wars, as in the gulf between my expectations and my capacity, despite my status as disabled veteran from this very intense and wounding combat, not only scars, but missing parts big and as obstructive as phantom limbs, despite all this, I go back to the empty battlefield hoping to find at least crows telling the tales of the killing field, from a different slant than I see it. It is something I greatly hope for, but more often I can’t hear the crows, as the memory of the cacophony of battle is as deafening as the battle itself was. I look second to find rusty armor, now of no use, as what lies beyond the battle is vulnerability, the shedding of armor into a kind of warriorship that’s bravery is simply being naked. There, a very helpful inventory of liabilities and assets after the fall reveals that when all is lost, all Is not lost. But enough of this kind of writing, there’s something suspect about it, something a bit piteous and more than a little unempowered; still I admire it much because it has memory, and so much of our modern culture has forgetfulness as its objective. Staying with memory is staying with the soul, James Hillman might say. Thank goodness I still have some little memory of that.

These novels, they can’t hurt me, unless I open them. I fault myself for this timidity, toss that word cowardice around in my mind, and yet I also heard yesterday: “You can’t heal your wounds if you keep opening them.” The sword is double edged.

The name of the novel I started reading, appropriately, is entitled “Vulnerables,” by Sigrid Nunez.

It begins with these words: “It was an uncertain spring.” I know nothing of Virginia Woolfe except one story I was taught; but this writing strikes me as influenced by Woolfe — as the author examines this opening statement over and over again, from so many different angles, as if it were a spot on the wall, and not the least of them is the disdain that literary critics have for a discussion of the weather. I am not of that camp, the weather is in my blood, it is part of what makes me alive, and discussing the weather is simply a reverent contemplation of the blood that pulses outside my skin.

In her own way, the author comes to a similar conclusion, and ends with something very important. I truly love it when authors come at things in a roundabout way, as if starting at the edge of a labyrinth in emotive meditation, they start broad, but tend inexorably towards a pinpoint center that seems to capture everything outside that point as dense as a black hole, everything, even beyond the edge of the labyrinth, as if to make the entire cosmos a part of the labyrinth by extension, by inference.

And here is the point she made: “I want to understand why I write.” I feel this intensely these days, as I am in many measures bored with the same piece I keep writing, and here is yet another one right here. Writing pieces are like children; you know exactly what they are going to do, because you understand what they have already done, and still, despite all that, you still love them.

But she didn’t stop there. She went on to say that she wanted to know why she wrote because it seemed to express that every living moment seemed to be imbued with, an expression of some unnamed grief, some grief, that despite all the writing, continues to not yet be fully expressed.

I will be reading more chapters of this novel; these little nuggets are just one or two of the 6 or 7 seven nuggets of gold she laid down in about 4 pages. They are not feeling like bombs right now, or at least, the fuse is burning at such a placid level, that I can read them; take notes, and then, have them explode onto the pages of my writing, instead of getting a shame pie bursting all over my face.

Wars never end; it’s easy to see that in the real world, the VN war is being fought right here still, both within me and out there. If wars never end, the best we can do, I guess is go into the medical corps, and have a wicked sense of humor like Hawkeye Pierce, and do our best to save all the internal lives within us giving all the care we would give to any dying friend.

My original intention was to do a riff off of “an uncertain spring,” along the lines that “It has been an uncertain winter…” And certainly, it has been a very uncertain winter, in several domains at least.

That piece remains for another day, as this piece ended with a reflection on “dying friends,” that is to say, all of us. And for the moment it seems most properly invested to end this piece with those words, that contemplation: “dying friends.”