![]() ![]() He argued that rational man feared and dreaded the irrational, or what he called the mythopoetic-myth-making-imagination. As early as the 1950s, Carl Jung noted modern man’s disdain for indigenous rituals. ![]() Magical objects, chants, drumming, tattoos, scarifications held the customs and traditions of a culture and were part of the “space” of ritual, itself a place where transformation and renewal could occur. A condom-carrying soldier might seem like a sensible thing to be, but O’Brien is pointing to something beyond practicality when he tells us what the soldiers’ carry: for men engaged in war, condoms and toothbrushes represent life bodies that are dead have no use for such things.Īs our ancients knew through ritual and ceremony, symbolic objects serve to embody a society’s longings and desires, hopes and dreams as well as its deepest fears. Not unlike the soldiers in Tim O’Brien’s novel, our talismans mediate feelings of unease, anxiety and fear. Our rational minds may reject the notion that these items protect us, but another part of us says: What the hell. We sense it as a strategy for survival.Īs adults, we may wear a cross or a Star of David, hang giant dice from our car mirror, carry a beloved’s photograph, or even a poem or a prayer. Toddlers may have their “blankies,” a favorite toy or teddy bear, and older children a lucky penny or stone tucked into a pocket, but our instinct to feel safe in the world transcends childhood. Pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Woods Winnicott famously coined the term “transitional object” to refer to an object a child uses to feel secure during the developmental stage when she is learning to separate from her primary caretaker. “The ability to hope,” writes Jon Elster in Sour Grapes: Studies in the Subversion of Rationality, “is a hallmark of a healthy personality because it allows individuals to reconcile the opposing forces of reality and want.” In situations where we face the unknown, especially when it’s dangerous or threatening we reach for symbolic objects that offer a sense of normality, safety, and hope. We don’t have to have served in combat to feel the gut punch of what O’Brien describes. Kiowa carried his grandmother’s distrust of the white man and his grandfather’s hunting hatchet. Dave Jensen carried a toothbrush and dental floss Mitchell Sanders carried condoms Rat Kiley, comic books. He was especially fond of canned peaches. ![]() In the late afternoon, after a day’s march, he would dig his foxhole, wash his hands under a canteen, unwrap the letters, hold them with the tips of his fingers, and spend the last hour of light pretending…” “First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried letters from a girl named Martha… They were not love letters, but Lieutenant Cross was hoping, so he kept them folded in plastic at the bottom of his rucksack. In the opening of Tim O’Brien’s heart-wrenching novel The Things They Carried, a fictional account of the author’s experiences in Vietnam, he lists items soldiers in Alpha Company carried into battle: ![]()
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