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WHEN I TEACH writing classes, I often talk about the “ladder of abstraction.” It’s a helpful craft tool, and I’ve also found it to be helpful in life when I’m trying to wrap my mind around something big or difficult or unfathomable.
At the top of the ladder are big ideas, the abstractions, the things you can’t touch—concepts like democracy, faith, or silence. At the bottom of the ladder are the concrete things you can touch or see or hear that are connected to those ideas. Think: voting booth, rosary, the rest in between some notes on a page of music. Usually, the concrete, sensory detail helps us get a foothold on the big, sometimes overwhelming ideas or mysteries. Writing should go up and down that ladder.
Even very real concrete things can risk becoming abstractions. You may have heard the quote “a single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic,” often attributed to Stalin. During the pandemic this started to make more sense to me. I’d read the papers, keep up to date, but it was hard to wrap my mind around the sheer number of people succumbing to COVID-19. The number was the abstraction. But when I focused on the single person, her kids, her interests, the loss hit home.
It can be this way with war, too. To be clear, in truth, there is nothing more concrete than war. There is nothing at all abstract about a bomb and the damage and harm it causes. But if the war is far away or if the war is in the distant past, the risk of thinking of it in abstract terms goes up. The writer has to work against this human impulse.
When I started talking with retired Air Force colonel Mike Burton ’71, ’74 about his wartime experiences in Laos more than 50 years ago, I admit it was hard for me to wrap my mind around the sheer number of bombs dropped there (about 270 million) or the 80 million that never went off and are still contaminating the land and killing people today. The “secret war” may have been long ago and far away, but Mike’s story, his pain, brought the war home. The bracelet he wears that is made from bombs dropped in Laos was another concrete foothold. And yet another was a story I recently read in the Laotian Times of a young mother of five who was clearing land for vegetables in Laos in December, when a cluster munition detonated and killed her. Her first name was June. The dire need to clear the bombs in Laos is no longer abstract for me.
The work that Mike and the leaders of Legacies of War are doing to clear the bombs is hard but important work. I’m grateful to them for doing it.
— Jessica Murphy Moo, Editor
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