The iPods They Carried

When Tim O'Brien set forth on his writer's journey to provide us with The Things They Carried, he was prescient in ways we could only experience at the time of first reading as a tingle of mammalian anticipation.  He was defining us and our complex amalgam of thought, intent, and feeling, representing us as we were from the Ice Age and earlier, through the recent past of the misbegotten Vietnam War, and tipping us into what we have evolved into.

The characters in The Things They Carried tote about government issue ordinance as well as things transported from home or sent them from home, things that define who they are, their approximate military and social ranking and their states of emotional development.  To that last, you might even include the stage of their emotional and intellectual development.  By focusing on the individual tool kit, O'Brien broke ground in demonstrating how the tool kit reflected its user, the thing or things defined the person as surely and deftly as the fingerprint identifies the carrier.

We no longer question the uniqueness of the fingerprint; it imprints our identity on whatever we touch, a lingering pattern of our presence in a place, our use of a thing, perhaps even our admiration of a thing.  We have been presented with growing evidence that our DNA is in a larger sense than mere fingerprint a record of our presence in the world as a sensate being, a metaphoric ATM receipt of our having lived.  Soon the matter will become even more expansive:  some forensic anthropologist or archaeologist will be able to pick an iPod or iPhone from a group of similar devices and, after a few moments of checking such things as phone numbers, text messages, photos, music, and even the choice of aps (applications) will be able to provide a profile of the uniqueness of us, leaving us to conclude that the iPhone or iPod is indeed the fingerprint writ large because of the fact that the device will have that element, too, the fingerprint, as if to nail down the deal by assuring our identity.

It is no great leap of imagination to posit a time when all of us will have built into our iPhone or iPod an ap that contains our medical history, making it possible for us to connect in yet another way with yet other useful sources.  It requires a bit more of a leap to posit a personal or emotional record which we could share, say, with a prospective mate, effectively precluding the lengthy surveys required by on line dating and mating services.  Wanna compare emotes?  Emote being emotional profiles.  Before we date, our iPods date.

Truth--what a funny and difficult word to describe--to tell, we all of carry with us our tool kit of self, using portions of it to get us from precipitous ledge of existence to the next existential precipitous ledge, and although iPhones and iPods are great fun (the pod more so because it does not require a monthly fee) we have in our original tool kits all the aps we need, just as our Cro-Magnon forbears did.  This is not at all Luddite; I have no wish to return to the simpler ways, not when I can simultaneously carry about the complete piano works of Maurice Ravel or hear the lush landscapes of Frederick Delius nor the sublime late quartets of Beethoven or the soaring solos of John Coltrane or the stunning inventiveness of Art Tatum; not when I can quickly find my place in Twelfth Night or a mind candy thriller.  It always comes down to the lowest common denominator, the use we make of our tools in the search for who we are and how to navigate who we are across the forests of existential night.

It would be splendid to be able to access the Ap Store whereby to download the greatest tool of all, empathy, then set forth to discover if empathy has fingerprints that can be left as traces of having handled it.

Wile E. Coyote: The Things He Carried

products--equipment, merchandise, devises used by characters to advance story; material goods used by writers to denote living conditions, relative affluence, degrees of decadence, boredom inherent in characters; things people want or conspicuously do not want in stories.

Nowhere in stories are products given a more substantive and metaphoric treatment than the cartoon adventures of Wile E. Coyote. In these iconic dramatic ventures, Coyote lurches forth, a faithful replication of Mark Twain's description of the species from Roughing It. Coyote's hunger prods him to consider as prey The Roadrunner; the extensive number of Coyote-Roadrunner cartoons a monument to Coyote's abject failure. The rules surrounding the Wile E. Coyote landscape are myriad and inflexible, at once rendering the terrain a cross breed between Beckett and Krazy Kat. Coyote must not catch Roadrunner. Coyote's attempts at catching Roadrunner invariably end in his humiliation. Coyote may use devices such as explosive tennis balls, giant mouse traps, do-it-yourself tornado kits, and female Roadrunner costumes, but these and all others like them must come directly from the Acme Corporation. No other organization, neither Kafkan bureaucracies nor Orwellian imperialists, is so catholic in its offered menu of product; no government or manufacturer has such a smorgasbord of devices which, taken in totality, could be seen to represent the quintessential formula for curing all ails and supplying answers for all needs. In point of fact, some of the items on the Acme Corporation's list work, they simply do not work for Wile E. Coyote. But rules are rules, meaning Coyote has no recourse; if he is to use products, they must come from Acme.

Probably based on the ubiquity and comprehensiveness of the original Sears-Roebuck mail order catalogues, the Acme Corporation's arsenal of products and their built-in exclusivity for Wile E. Coyote become a metaphor for the writer who is setting forth, beginning with a particular landscape or locale, then basic rules of engagement between the major characters, then the source of materials the characters have at their disposal.

Wile E. Coyote's credit seems to be good so far as Acme Corporation is concerned; there don't seem to be any issues about accounts receivable. There are neither long, elaborate rationales about the Coyote-Roadrunner landscape nor the rules governing it. Neither, for that matter, are there distracting questions about the landscape within Beckett plays; Beckett stories hold up while being read, then become iron filings attracted to the magnet of the mind after the reading or witnessing ends. Similarly with Coyote and Roadrunner.

The message from Beckett ("Fail again, only next time, fail better.") inheres in the Wile E. Coyote cartoons; the after-the-fact paradigm of the cartoons with respect to story also becomes apparent with a personal deconstruction of the entire, precipitous southwestern mesa-butte landscape of the cartoon series.

Tim O'Brien has written a splendid account of American servicemen in Vietnam, The Things They Carried, a novel in which products play a major role in defining character and dramatic outcome. In the cartoons, Wile E. Coyote's frequent fate is having his hair singed off, falling to bottoms of steep declivities, being squashed by falling rocks or even the occasional debris from an Acme Corporation product; sometimes Coyote sustains all these fates simultaneously. O'Brien's characters inevitably reveal a distinct, moving relationship to a product, whether the product is a letter from a loved one (or a Dear John letter), a keepsake, a weapon. Coyote and O'Brien's "grunts" are set forth in an atmosphere and landscape that could not have suited Beckett better, thus is there a transcendent plateau reached and recognized when the writer brings characters with purpose and products to a locale, imbues them with constraints, restraints, and possibly even conscience.