Darkness and Light
Dearest Nancy:
I also love laughter. Like you, humor, hilarity are the sweet underbelly of the world that keep me going. How I long to laugh. To eat those orange circus peanuts and watch silly movies and laugh so hard my stomach hurts. And yet I do not laugh easily.
In the closet in my study is a portrait of my great-great grandmother. My father, who is prone to tall tales like the father in that film I love, Big Fish, has told me various stories about that ancestor. In one story, her name was Nethaladia. My great-great grandfather met her when she was the bearded lady for a carnival. In the portrait, I see nary a sign of a whisker, but I do see the saddest eyes. A lover of old photographs, I have many more. On my wall as I type you this letter, there’s a photograph of a somber great aunt and her sister standing in a pasture by a fence. There’s one of my unsmiling grandmother as a child, her head adorned with a huge, white bow. Another of little me at Christmas with my father and my granny. I’m looking gravely at my cousin. None of us in any photo I’ve put up in the room where I write are smiling very much. We’re a serious lot.
Truth be known, I have never been much good at humor. At parties, I’ll dive into a joke and forget the punch line at the last minute. I’ll tell a joke I loved earlier and change important details just enough so that everyone looks at me, puzzled and not the least bit amused. I never did think he was funny when, years back, I dated this guy who loved nothing more than silly jokes. He would stand in my kitchen, pick up the cutting board and say, hi, I’m bored! Or he’d tell me this one. What did the Dalai Lama say to the hot dog vendor? Make me one with everything! Har, har.
Like I said, I come from good gravitas stock. I love nothing more than all the serious stories about my ancestors. An uncle, locked out by an aunt after he drag-assed in after one more night of serious card-playing and drinking, how it was winter and he died sleeping in the front seat of his truck with the heater running. The cousin who died from a shotgun’s blast. The grandfather who saw a hole into eternity in the middle of the kitchen floor. The aunt with visions of the Holy Ghost. Show me a story about what hurts and I’m salivating all the way to my writer’s notebook.
Here of late, though, what I’m struggling with is not so much humor, exactly, but hope. Like a friend said in a Facebook post about reading dark work, maybe I’m getting too old to enjoy things that are relentlessly bleak. I don’t need to be left in despair at the end of a book–the world has enough of that for me to seek it out. What I’m struggling with is how to write, not exactly the funny stuff, but light in the midst of darkness. And this, as we all know, is no easy task. Not easy when I come from generations of sadness, of depression, of loss, of tragedies. Not easy at all when I watch the news from Gaza where, according to reports from the United Nations, one child dies each hour. Stories from the Ukraine where land mines keep mourners out of the field where a plane was shot down and 295 civilians died.
How do we as writers summon light in the midst of darkness? I honestly don’t know, most days. As Anne Carson says in an essay, “It is easier to tell a story of how people wound one another than of what binds them together.” Far easier for me to summon pain, to translate darkness to the page. Yet I feel myself reaching again and again toward tiny jars of gold from my spirit to illuminate. It hurts to be happy. Joy hurts when I summon it, but I try daily to teach myself the power of beauty, of radiance. I have to believe in the power of words to transform not only the lives of the characters I create, the lives of readers, and my own. Am I foolhardy to believe that stories are gifts?
Pardon if I’m writing about something that I’ve written about to you before, but I think about this moment a lot. That time in Thailand so many years ago now. I was traveling with the boyfriend and we’d crossed whole worlds to end up in Bangkok outside a Buddhist temple. I remember how we solemnly took our shoes off and tiptoed across a huge marble floor, our hearts pounding and our heads bowed as we passed begging bowls laid with blossoms and mounds of hennaed butter on plates and walls adorned with photographs of nuns attending to bodies laid out ceremonially on stretchers. All manner of things that we, two young Westerners in a strange world, did not understand. At the center of the temple there it was, the main statue of The Buddha. He was a fat, laughing Buddha, that one. Around him stood orange-robed monks, pitching pennies at his navel.
Love you, Nancy.
Karen
