Yesterday my otherwise reliable barber gave me a close trim. He is a former Marine, and though he typically respects my request to leave a healthy amount of hair up there, this time he chatted and clipped away more energetically than usual. When he was finished, my “high and tight” resembled that of your average Parris Island leatherneck.
Earlier in the week I spent a few days with my family for a short vacation. My older brother, himself a military man, hasn’t had a quarter inch of hair on his dome for a good many years. Traveling to and from the vacation town where our family enjoyed beaches, pools, big box restaurants, and good books, my wife and I had to ride a few planes. There are quite a few military personnel coursing through our nation’s airports these days, returning from or traveling to locales that share nothing in common with the ones we inhabited, save for the heat and the many grains of sand.
At some point during these recent intersections with military culture, I had one of those realizations that is no less compelling for being entirely self-evident:
The martial lifestyle tolerates no variance.
The first notes of reveille are never two minutes tardy. Boots always shined, shirts always tucked, hair always trimmed. The two hundred footsteps in a company parade always sound as one. Officers speak, soldiers obey.
As Foucault probably would have observed, this incessant mission to hammer chaos into order only reifies the indomitable force of chaos in our lives. We live in a world where people cross lines and weapons are used to kill them. Violence, greed, and fear are all catalysts of war, and subsequently fuel this manic push toward order. As former New York Times war reporter Chris Hedges once put it, “War is a force that gives us meaning.”
Smarter people than I have observed that the only way to break???truly break???the power of chaos in our lives is to stop fearing it. When we fearlessly allow chaos to wash over us, we understand how insignificant it really is. Instead of dulling our chisels into blunt stubs by pounding them against the unmalleable granite of existence, we would better expend our energies by staring at the granite, taking a breath, and watch it crumble into dust.
Now I’m talking about writing. Because that’s the war that most of us know, right? I’ve never held a gun, but I have committed the folly of pounding my thoughts into words by following the advice, the orders, the rules of other writers. Absurd.
Take a breath. Put your fingers on the keys. Write. Nothing else will endure.