River of words
Dearest Nancy:
It’s comin’ on Christmas, as that song I love goes. I wish I had a river, I could skate away on. That song, with its wintertime, holiday sigh and its customary longings. Family far away, family ghosts and thinking about the tree my granny used to have, the one with blue angel hair. Table with all those pies mile-high with merengue. But this season, the world keeps shaking me out of my own skin.
As you say so well, “events around Ferguson, Missouri and the nation have me thinking of the limitations of empathy, and the limitations of my work as a novelist.”
The events pile up and up, more than snow. A siege in a Sydney café. And in Michigan. The “Religious Freedom Restoration Act,” a bill that allows people with “deeply held religious beliefs” to deny LGBT people services, including life-saving healthcare or medication, was passed by statehouse Republicans this weekend. And yesterday. UC Berkeley students found enlarged photos of lynched African Americans hanging from the university’s famed Sather Gate and a tree near campus Saturday morning. Art protest? Malicious intent? Unclear. And in the days before that? The U.S. Senate passed a measure authorizing the nation’s defense programs Friday, and along with it managed to give lands sacred to Native Americans to a foreign company that owns a uranium mine with Iran.
As much as I love the community, the chatter on Facebook leaves me unable to breathe some days. I scroll through article after article about CIA rectal hydration, American terrorists plotting to blow up Muslim holy sites, the latest high school shooting in Portland. I wish I had a river so long and I could teach my feet to fly…..
Is that what I can do? Crank up the Joni Mitchell and wrap presents in pretty, silvery paper. Or better yet, head to my computer and write pretty lyric essays.
Like you, “I am paralyzed with the shame I feel over our current system.” And not just racism. Sexism. Homophobism. Capitalism. Fundamentalism. Ageism. Classism. The ism’s roll off my tongue like a language I don’t want to know, and I want to dive deep into my safe bed, my safe home, my marriage, my cute little dog.
In fact, to be honest about it, I’ve wanted to hide since way, way back. When I was a kid, even though I was raised Southern Baptist, I gravitated toward every movie about nuns I could find. In This House of Brede. The Nun’s Story. Black Narcissus. Raised with books as one of my only safe havens, one of my loves was reading about religious orders, about saints and martyrs. Nothing stirred my girl heart more than reading about St. Stephen and his rise in status to sainthood. “To such a degree of madness were they excited, that they cast him out of the city and stoned him to death…[with] his ascension the following spring.” The resilience of saints fascinated me. Was I merely a perverse, morbid child, or was I on to something that I wish I were onto even now?
What I have been asking myself over these last weeks of news and more news is whether a contemplative life can matter. Does it matter that I get up each morning at 5:30 and sit my butt down in front of the seventh revision of a novel, day after day? Does it matter that I, Voltaire-like, am tending my own garden as well as I know how? Do essays matter? Does this blog with its words about “a writer’s life” even matter? And I don’t mean whether we have only a handful of readers, but do words about humility, compassion, beauty, gratitude, kindness, even love, truly matter?
Do words have power, and how? I honestly don’t know these dark post-Ferguson days.
I do know that I watched one of those Netflix series a couple of weeks ago. It was called “Enlightened” and it was about this nearing forty corporate administrator who finds herself suffering a nervous breakdown on the job and, in the process of recovery, sees the work around her for what it is—its machinations, plots, subplots, back stabbings. She wants, she says, to be “an agent of change” in the world, to do some good, somehow. Self-help? Daily meditations? Prozac? How she ends up seeming is like a self-absorbed romantic who fails to listen well to the people right in front of her, so intent is she on redeeming everyone but, on the deepest level, her own self.
And here I am, also wanting to do SOMETHING. To lead a more spiritual life. A more compassionate life. To head on down to the local women’s shelter, come January, and volunteer in the clothes closet. To not be so dang lazy I don’t go to Baltimore for a march. To teach. To shout it all from the rooftops, if I could figure out what “it” is. To be, as you once said of me, fierce, with a capital “F.” And, somewhere in there, to write something that matters, somehow.
I come back to the words of Thomas Merton, who I have quoted in these letters before. From his book called Love and Living: “We must begin by frankly admitting that the first place in which to go looking for the world is not outside us but in ourselves. We are the world…through our senses and our minds, our loves, needs, and desires, we are implicated, without possibility of evasion, in this world of matter and of men, of things and of persons, which not only affect us and change our lives but are also affected and changed by us…the question, then, is not to speculate about how we are to contact the world – as if we were somehow in outer space – but how to validate our relationship, give it a fully honest and human significance, and make it truly productive and worthwhile for our world.“
Productive? Worthwhile? Is the life of the writer that? Submissions, conferences, readings, teaching even. Worthwhile? I want to believe so. And so I keep on word by word, page by page. Believing, as I have told my often skeptical students, that we must write and discuss our work with the possibility of that work’s deepest intentions in mind. Most days, I believe the personal has power, political power, even.
At this season of celebrating and wine and tinsel, that song comes back to me. I wish I had a river, I could skate away on. A word river that matters.
Love,
Karen
