Sunday, March 16, 2025
D+129/56
1968 My Lai massacre occurred when American soldiers killed ~400 unarmed Vietnamese civilians in one of the most controversial incidents of the Vietnam War
1977 US President Jimmy Carter pleaded for a Palestinian homeland
1978 US Senate accepted the Panama Canal treaty
2019 A beached dead whale was found to have 88 pounds of plastic inside it, including 40 pounds of plastic bags, in Mabini, Philippines
In bed by 9:30, awake at 4:15, and up at 4:30
Prednisone, day 329; 4 mg., day 12/21; Kevzara, day 12/14. 2 mg. of prednisone at 4:45 a.m. and 4:45 p.m. Other meds at 3 p.m.
Former selves. There is a guest essay by the novelist and memoirist Dani Shapiro in today's New York Times, "I Don’t Want Anyone to Read My Diaries. Yet I Can’t Burn Them." She relates that she kept diaries and journals for years and some time ago decided to burn all of them but discovered that she couldn't do so.
I grabbed more pages from the 1990 box, but before I had a chance to incinerate them, a few sentences caught my attention. I was writing about what it had been like for me as a young writer in New York just starting out. . . I stopped feeding more pages into the fire after making acquaintance with the self who wrote them. It felt like killing her somehow, to destroy evidence of who she had been. Maybe she still had things to teach me. . . Joan Didion wrote “I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not"
She added:
As the author of multiple memoirs, I was accustomed to controlling my own narrative. People would often tell me they knew everything about me. “You didn’t read my diary,” I’d joke. “If you had, I’d have to kill you.” . . .
I had always thought of my diaries as garbage cans into which I tossed all the detritus: the obsessions, petty jealousies, fantasies, secret crushes, stinging rejections, all to clear the path to my “real” work, which is to say the attempt to make meaning and even beauty out of the chaos of being human. Memoirs are crafted, edited stories, no matter how close to the bone. The decision to include or leave out certain details or scenes or even characters are strategic literary ones. What serves the story? Whereas diaries are, at least initially, dumping grounds. And yet dumping grounds can yield the most fertile soil.
The essay made me wonder again why i bother writing words that I expect no one but myself to read. Some day when I've got a little energy and nothing else to do (including reading and writing), I hope to browse through the 2 and ½ years of daily entries in these notes ("journals" seems too presumptious, maybe precious) to find out how often I have reflected about why I keep writing into the void, to no one. I write and post them on the Blogspot/Blogger platform but not to attract "followers," but rather because (1) I could never manage to write as much as I do by hand, or holographically as we lawyers say, and (2) the blog format allows me to include photos which please me, as in the case of my paintings and drawings, or which have some relevance to what I write about. In any event, the most common reasons I have come up with for composing daily notes are (1) it's a poor substitute for the text conversations I had every morning with my sister Kitty, also my dear friend, (2) it's a way to try to clarify my thoughts about whatever I am writing about, and (3) it's a way of trying to keep track of how many of my mental marbles I am losing. Dani Shapiro and Joan Didion suggest another reason: it's a way of "staying on nodding terms with" [the guy] I used to be, whether [I] find him attractive company or not." This is to say, it's a bit like lying on a couch in a psychiatrist's office where I am both the patient and the psychiatrist. I suppose that was what I was doing yesterday when I reflected on whether I was "a quitter," comparing myself perhaps unjustly though not maliciously to my Dad. It's what I was doing whenever I reflected on my troubled relationship with my Dad from my earliest memories of him after the War until we became friends, thank God, late in life, or when I reflect how I kind of deserted my birth family when I left for college at age 18, and to the Marines at age 21. Tom St. John, Ed Felsenthal, David Branch, and Kitty are all gone now. I don't often see friends anymore and those I do see are considerably younger than me, none with similar backgrounds, and all busy with their own lives, children, and grandchildren. So, I pick up my laptop early each morning and start writing to myself.
And speaking of my Dad, 80 years today was his last full day on Iwo Jima. He offloaded from the island on St. Patrick's Day, 27 days after he landed on D-Day, February 19, 1945. He may have left on an LCVP, an LCM, an Amtrak, so other means on his way to a troop ship or some other vessel configured to haul Marines in cramped troop quarters. The island was completely occupied by the Marines on March 14th but not declared secure until March 27th. More than 6,000 Marines died on the island along with almost all of the 21,000 Japanese defenders, unimaginable carnage. Each year, I think of him on Iwo's D-Day and on St. Patrick's Day, but also on the days before D-Day and St. Patrick's Day, when he wondered if he would die on Iwo and when he was pretty sure he had survived, but in what condition. I've often noted that despite serving from February 1944 until November 1945, and serving on Iwo Jima, my father was discharged aas Private E-1. What happened on or after Iwo that he never made even PFC, E-2? I'll never know. He shared precious little of his experiences in the Marines with me, though I clearly knew he had no love for the Corps. The photo was taken at MCRD San Diego wearing "Dress Blues" that were provided to him for the photo to send home to his family.
Some Facebook notes:
Charles D. Clausen was remembering my father.
February 18, 2019 ·
Tomorrow is the 74th anniversary of the assault on the island fortress of Iwo Jima by my 23 year old father and thousands of other Marines. He was on the island for a month, returning to an offshore troop carrier on St.Patrick's Day. He would never be the same as the young man who landed on February 19th, carrying his emotional and spiritual wounds throughout the rest of his life, until his death 61 years after the battle. I think of him and of the thousands of other war veterans who carry hidden wounds throughout their lives. I remember visiting Paris and riding on public conveyances with seats reserved for the "mutiles de guerre" disabled veterans. How accurate it seems to think of these men and women in terms of mutilation, for mutilated they were and are. Some gave all, all gave some. Let's not forget them.
March 17, 2022 ·
On this date in 1945 my father trudged through black sand on the beach of Iwo Jima to board the landing craft that carried him to the ship that would carry him back to America after Japan surrendered post Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He was physically intact but emotionally and spiritually wrecked by what he had experienced there. For the rest of his life, St. Patrick's Day was never a day for revelry, but rather for remembrance and hurt. I think of him, and of the many millions of lives, of souls, that are now being damaged in Ukraine and indeed in Russia. And I fear that this war, like all wars, in a very real sense will never end for those who are wounded by it. I'm reminded of the seats I saw on buses in Paris reserved for the "mutile de guerre," the war-wounded, and of how fitting the descriptor "mutilated" seems.
Geri is really miserable again today. Her pain medication is taking a toll on her poor body. It's hard to watch and much harder for her to live with. Tomorrow morning, I pick up the oxycodone, hoping its side effects will be less pernicious, but well aware of its dangers.
O frabjous day, calloo callay. A plump Eastern bluebird at our feeders this afternoon.
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