Fragmented Self

War is dull. I don’t think that this is something people write about or want to hear about. Years ago, I was having lunch with a friend in a nice, North Buffalo Greek restaurant. As we were eating our chicken souvlaki and drinking liters of American coffee, the very same topic came up. I made a statement that war was the most boring experience I have ever been through. Although he agreed with me on almost everything, my friend was unwilling to hear such a claim.

“But people show courage under fire. They are tested. They are called to do extraordinary things. There is nothing dull about that,” said my friend aggressively.

All true. He was not wrong. But the everydayness of war became endlessly boring. Like being stuck in a DMV all day with smelly people. Courage? Yes, some have shown courage and sacrifice. But more often than not, people became abject about their own existence and the existence of their fellow man. The psychology and the anatomy of war is such that it rapidly contributes to the demise of the human spirit.

For me, it is this inevitable dullness, which prevents me from writing about the war. Something drives me to be a witness to evil and to put it into words. I think about this all the time. And at the same time, I face an incredible difficulty in saying anything intelligent or coherent about these formative experiences. But I can’t help but feel some kind of responsibility as someone who has survived.

Apart from the dullness of the war, there is also a question of memory. In something as strange and disorderly as war, memory moves backwards and forwards. It does not have a typical spacio-temporal definition and linearity that we might expect from memories that bring us a particular joy. After some time has gone by and you did a good job at suppressing any last bit of evil that has stained you, you start to wonder what really did happen. But chronology is the least of your troubles. The big trouble that follows you truly like your own shadow is the why. And since the why can take a whole life to be answered or not even fully, you give up on it altogether. You say to yourself that you have more important things to do: like do laundry, or work on a philosophy paper, or get another degree, or make soup. Moving on is a great quality and reality but you can’t run away completely from your past. Sounds trite, doesn’t it? But it’s that simple.

After the recognition of dullness, the inability to write about boredom of war, and the question of memory comes another thing that drives you to further restlessness and existential irritability. And that is the inarticulate flame, which resides in your soul and is not going anywhere. This flame, which represents the order of things and human movement towards God, is what drives me to say something about the war which I have experienced, about the evil, which was perpetrated upon my homeland and the soil that I come from.

I say “inarticulate” because all you do is scream silently, and cry dry tears. Hollowness. The past lives within you and it seems to be perpetuating the madness even further. You end up writing the beginning of this story over and over again, draft after draft without ever getting to the heart of the matter. Because you cannot come up with words. Because you fear that you might actually have a nervous breakdown if you go back into the blackness of the loss. And then how will you do the laundry or make soup or write a philosophy paper?

Perhaps it is fear, which turns to dread which makes me avoid the war. Perhaps I focus on the dullness as a way to not say anything about it. The memories are scattered throughout my mind and I make a matter of fact list of them in my head in order to stay sane. But is avoiding them considered sane?

The more I avoid the war, the more I avoid the integral part of who I am. My identity consists of that gruesome experience and more importantly, where I come from. The more you deny your roots, the more you’re carving out a false self it seems. And there is another fear, perhaps most important one: fear of forgetting myself altogether.

I consist of many different identities. This is true of all of us in many ways. But I am fragmented. And in an effort to integrate, you become a kind of “nowhere man.” And I am yearning to be whole in whatever human way that could be possible. I am yearning to be somewhere.