Learning to Think and Write, Again
Reflections on Occupational Psychosis as a Demobilizing Reserve Officer
It seems strange that one would have to re-learn how to think. But neuroplasticity giveth, and it also taketh away. Even if we maintain full brain function, neurons that have wired together will quickly atrophy if we stop engaging them to fire along those same pathways.
For the past year, I underwent just such a de-wiring experience. Now I fear it will be difficult to regenerate the same wires that I regularly engaged for so many years as a student and teacher.
The result is the most severe version of writer’s block. The prospect of staring at an empty page is more daunting today than perhaps ever in my adult life. January was the last time I sat down to compose anything in earnest, and that was short lived because, for the past 10 months, I have been under the bewitching influence of an occupational psychosis. This striking phrase stuck with me ever since I first encountered it while reading Kenneth Burke’s Permanence and Change.1 It refers to a pattern of normalizing practices that would appear crazy to those outside of a particular environment. Burke argued that it was among the most powerful trained incapacities (i.e, If you use a hammer every day, all tasks appear to be a nail).
Military officers, especially those operating amidst the inherent contradictions of the European theater, become socialized to a culture with a similar, albeit distinct, dynamic. In retrospect, it would be more apt to describe it as an occupational schizophrenia. What I experienced did not produce in me an occupational psychosis of the sort Burke and Dewey would recognize. Rather, these occupational norms lack any coherent logic about how things were to be done. Analysis was post hoc. Military strategy and published doctrine did not apply. To function in this theater, I had to habituate myself to disorganized thinking and embrace contradictions.
To live through this experience is to feel as though reality itself is transforming right in front of you. I felt like Don Quixote, believing I was fighting gallantly to remedy injustices, when really I was just tilting at windmills, absorbed into an illusory experience that with each passing month felt more and more real. It became real because my brain convinced itself that it was.
As I prepare to transition back to my full time career, I need a full purge of my brain if I ever plan to write something perceptive again. The computational metaphor, about which I have decidedly mixed feelings, actually is appropriate here. After disuse, the programs in my brain that performed close reading, appreciated aesthetics, and became excited by theoretical puzzles have been uninstalled. Conversely, the operating system (OS) is cluttered with loads of programs I now need to delete, since they will not be of use once I step outside of this chivalric romance I, with the Army’s help, have concocted.
To deploy is a transformative experience, especially for reservists and members of the National Guard. While stateside and on part time status, these service members never become fully institutionalized until they deploy. This reality is one I felt very acutely when it began to set in around Thanksgiving last year.
What the experience did was entrench me into a system that required strict adherence to a modus operandi, one which relies on efficiency, prioritization, and metrics. I developed a script around these principles. Unfortunately, that script (with “prioritization” as the only arguable exception) acts as a trained incapacity for what I consider my actual mission in life: to create.
Virginia Woolf famously contended that to write fiction, women needed money, time, and a room of one’s own. Her idea applied more broadly than the specific claim about women writers. Writing was indeed harder for women, but many of the obstacles that make it challenging apply across the board. Above all, solitude and the license to pursue leisure are necessary conditions for good writers to emerge. Woolf observed, “[in the Elizabethian age] a genius like Shakespeare’s is not born among the labouring, uneducated, servile people… it is not born today among the working classes. How, then, could it have been born among women whose work began… almost before they were out of the nursery.”2
This truism applies to those engaged in military service, at least when they are trapped in an environment so anathema to creativity. I’ve no idea how Siegfried Sassoon, Ernest Hemingway, Joseph Heller, and other writers masquerading as Soldiers managed to produce as they did.3 They had no solitude, they may have had time, and money felt irrelevant under the circumstances. But much more than that: they had become institutionalized to an environment that is inimical to sustained reflection. And yet they overcame it. Of note, however, is the crucial fact that their creativity (with Sassoon as an exception) was only able to fully emerge after their term of service.
How then, can one begin to reset my brain to enable it to again function as it should?
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Step one was forcing myself to put these musings on paper, however inelegant they may be.
Step two is to read again— and by that I mean reading seriously and perceptively, as a critic must.
Step three is to gradually let the old/new neural pathways strengthen, and hope, however Quixotic, to reclaim some semblance of the person I was before this experience.
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If it was not evident from the reading this far, I am totally making this plan up as I go. If anyone has done this before and could shed some light on what some best practices are, I would welcome that feedback.
The origin of the phrase is not with Burke but rather with the American sociologist John Dewey. See Kenneth Burke, Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984), 40-49.
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own. London: Hogarth Press, 1935), 73.
All three men served in war, Sassoon in the trenches of World War I, Hemingway as an ambulance driver for the Red Cross during the same, and Heller as a bomber pilot in World War II. All were influenced by their service and used it to inform their writing.