“As the sound of ranchera music from Esta Noche blasted me to sleep, I thought of the skull lodged in my own head. How it would one day emerge after everything that could be recognized as Caitlin–eyes, lips, hair, flesh–was no more. My skull might be crushed too, fragmented by the gloved hand of some hapless twentysomething like me.”
                -Caitlin Doughty, Smoke Gets In Your Eyes: and Other Lessons from the Crematory, in describing the night after she first held a human skull.

                Okay, so: I’m going to die. Not soon, I think, unless we’re talking on a geologic or cosmic scale–but sooner or later the Scythe of the Shadow will swing, the last gain in my hourglass will fall, the bucket will be soundly kicked, and the rest, as the poet said, will be silence.
                Except it won’t. In that same moment, somewhere, someone will say, “It smells terrible in here,” and someone else will say “I love you,” and someone else, I hope, will laugh while reading Smoke Gets In Your Eyes. Not to mention the crows who will go on crowing and the ducks who will go on ducking beneath the water and the fish (barracudas, perhaps) who will go on fishing. I’ve heard lots of people talk about how humans come to grips with the reality of their own death. (Maybe the fact that I wrote “sooner or later” means that reality, in my mind, is still behind a gossamer curtain of youth). In the middle of her book about life, death, what cremation and embalming actually look like, and why a culture should pay attention to all that, Ms. Doughty brings us close to that conversation. She brings us next door, not to the moment of our death, but to a moment afterward, when someone else is living.
                I’m glad she made me imagine that moment. I’m glad she made me wonder about my own skull: what it will look like, where it will be when Azlan’s thoughts aren’t flashing around (and around and around) inside it anymore. My end isn’t the end of the world. There will be someone who moves my body, and then goes on with the day. There will be night clubs playing ranchera music. I hope there will be barracudas. That’s reassuring, and that reminds me to think about the world I’ll leave behind for the someone who picks up my skull.

                “As Irwin Shaw once said, ‘A writer does not write just one story at  a time. A person who writes is on a long journey, and he or she is saying, ‘Here is where I am today and here is what this place looks like today.’ A body of work should be looked at from a far horizon. You look at a person’s career, you’ll see it rise to a peak and then settle to a lower plain, and then rise to a lower peak…” -Harlan Ellison

                It’s tempting to look at life as a task: a class to teach, a book to write, a job to land, an election to win. It’s tempting to look at a task as a singular challenge: a shot to make, a speech to give, a jump to land. In a culture that likes pointing out who’s winning and who’s losing, looking at life that way can seem comforting. It lets me know who’s on top. It also makes every problem one good moment–one great success–away from being solved. All the same, I think looking at life that way distorts everything in front of me.
                When I look at the people I admire, I don’t see one clever move and then a retreat from the game. I don’t see a “game” at all, with clear rules and clear winners. I see work, day after day. I see uncertainty, day after day. I see love, day after day. I don’t think a good teacher gives one great lesson: I think she lets her students know that they matter, and that their thoughts can matter. I don’t think a novel’s written in one great burst: even the stream of consciousness writers come back to writing, again and again, to practice, and the rest of them walk through a narrative with lots of steps. If I look at anything important I’ve done, I don’t see a single race:  I see a thread in the wider weaving of learning, hurting, making friends and eating (perhaps too much) chocolate.
                A few months ago, I wrote down this line, looking for a poem: “…and forgetting my high intentions, add my feather’s weight.” I haven’t found the poem yet, but the idea is important to me. I don’t think that what’s in front of me is one grand performance. It’s a “long journey” of confusions and ideas. It’s a chance to build what we are, what we give the world, not with a grand gesture but with the long, sometimes shaky, sometimes inspired effort of every day.

                “Our lives in the north and the south are so different that they seem, to you others, incoherent, incomplete. And we cannot connect them rationally. We cannot explain or justify our Madan to those who live only one kind of life.”
                -Ursula Le Guin, “Seasons of the Ansarac,” Changing Planes

                My first six months in India, I kept my water heater off and shivered while I washed. My first winter in Oklahoma City, I kept my thermostat at 36 degrees Fahrenheit. After dinner I lay on my couch in sweatpants, sweatshirt, and a coat. In the mornings I scurried to the shower, and tried to dry off before the steam had drifted away. (It didn’t really work). I think I was fumbling, in my own dramatic way, toward something Emersonian, or maybe (to make him Russian) Thoreau-ski. At the time, it just felt–not right, but potent. Fitting. I didn’t like how much I insulated myself from the seasons. I wanted to notice them. I wanted to feel them. My way of going about that was immature and silly, but every now and then I think back to it. I think there’s something there.
                We use our technology to stay dry in the rain and to find our way, with a compass, through the woods. In those instances, our intelligence lets us move through the world. I’m glad of that. Even when I was shivering, I was beneath a nice strong roof that kept the snow outside. You can tell because I’m still alive. But sometimes we use our technology to do even more: we try to make the world amenable to our whims, whenever they come and wherever they lead. We make hot rooms cold, and cold rooms hot. We shine lights, and hang blackout blinds so the lights outside don’t interfere with our sleep. We have drugs to wake us up, drugs to help us sleep, drugs to give us energy without sleeping, and drugs to make a 60 year old’s body more like a 20 year old’s in all sorts of ways. At that point, we’re not learning to walk through the snow. We’re insisting that the snow (and the biology of our bodies) shouldn’t restrict our choices. We’re assuming that anything we choose to do we we should be able to choose at any time. In Changing Planes, Le Guin asks, “Why?”
                The Ansarac live on a planet with seasons that are much, much longer than ours–in his whole life, an old man will have only seen four years. A child, born in a little cabin high up in the mountains, will live there for a summer–it would seem like ten years, to us–before migrating down to the winter city on the plains. The Ansarac live differently in their two homes. In the summer homestead, they live in little family groups beneath big spreading trees. They make new families. In the winter city, they live close together, they exchange ideas. They don’t have sex or bear children. When young people first move from the mountains to the city, it seems noisy, chaotic, crowded. When they first go back to the mountains, it can seem quiet, boring, lonely. But the Ansarac live both ways, and get used to both ways. Their “Madan” is their path, their way–spiritual, physical, practical–of living. Their Madan gives time for (and demands) two very different kinds of walking.
                I wonder why we work so hard against the cycles that change us. I’m not as young as I once was; I’m not as old as, I hope, I’ll live to be. How would life be if, like the Ansarac, I embraced a pattern that gave up (or didn’t pretend to take) some control and so gave me different times for different dances? Already, I think, I might live in a winter city sometimes, and sometimes in a cabin beneath the trees. When I do, I often tell myself that something’s wrong. I tell myself I should be able to go back and forth whenever I choose, however I choose. But why should I? Why shouldn’t my Madan have its seasons?

                “Exposing atrocity means articulating atrocity–being that voice of ugly truth, and that is not fun. Fighting injustice is so often mobilizing people to stop other people, rather than getting them to act on their own creative impulse.”
                -Sabina Murray, Valiant Gentlemen, p. 289

                Yesterday, one of my favorite students turned in an essay about concussions and high school athletics. It was heartfelt, honest, aware, kind. It showed her confusion, her pain, her determination to protect herself and her friends. At the end she wrote: “Azlan, I seem to keep writing about sad stuff, because that feels like it might make a difference. Any ideas on how I could find a happier topic?”
                I looked at her paper.
                I didn’t know what to say.
                A few months ago, this student wrote a powerful letter to Senator Lankford about gun violence in American schools. Before that she wrote about income inequality. They weren’t fun papers. They hurt to read. And they mattered. I think this student, with her fire and her passion and her willingness to stop, learn, and raise her voice, is already making the world a better place. I also understand her question. I didn’t want to post this piece today, because I wanted to post something playful, something funny; something that would make both of us smile and believe. Instead, I’m writing about what hurts the people around me, and hurts me. There is so much that is wrong with the world, so much we need to know, to think about, to respond to. In my classes, I find the same struggle: I want to help students celebrate themselves and each other and the world, and I want them to see injustice, apathy, cruelty, and their results. So what do I do?
                I think we need both. Without a little joy, with the muse of her “own creative impulse,” I’m not sure how long my student will be able to keep helping before grimness and despair sets in. When the Irish patriot Roger Casement, Murray’s “voice of ugly truth,” is cut off from his friend and his art, he ends up hopelessly transporting guns he doesn’t want to an uprising he knows will be slaughtered. If the thread of Casement’s love, kindness, and good humor had gotten a little less frayed, could his voice have led to something better?
                I hope we can find a balance, not just by mixing the two together, but by taking turns with both. They’re different. They’re not always fun, and they don’t always go together–I think we have to be willing to put one on the shelf while we work with the other.
                I watch my student smile. I hear her laugh. I see her learn, and hurt, and look for ways to help. She is entranced by the world, by its possibilities, and she is horrified by our cruelties. I want her to know that the world can be that beautiful place she sees. I want her to remember that, sometimes, it isn’t, and that it’s our duty to pay attention, to learn, and to help. I want her to build her hopes and tell good jokes. I want her to let herself be “the voice of ugly truth,” and I want her to let herself shine with her “own creative impulse.” Then I want to learn from her, so I can do both, too.

“The world had shrunk by then to become them.” -Noy Holland, Bird, in describing lovers

                This one scares me. One of the wonders of love–of sex–is how it redefines the world, how it obsesses, how it makes a universe of one touch or one room or one song you’re singing together. Each touch, each room, each song probably is that deep, so love’s (lust’s?) obsession doesn’t lie to us. It tells the truth: here, just here, is everything.
                As far as I can tell, that’s true–and that’s a lie. That’s one of the gifts love gives, and that’s one of the curses it casts. There is so much outside of “them,” of “us,” even if “us” means lovers. There are the friends we each have and the work we each do and the ways we affect the world. Even that phrase, “the world,” is one of these loving, shrinking redefinitions: when I say “the world” (as in, “the end of the world”) I often mean more than just this planet. I mean everything. I know (at least intellectually) that there’s more out there, but I love this rock, with its blues and its greens. And so the universe shrinks to become Earth.
                All that makes this question sound abstract, but for me, it isn’t. When I’m falling into romantic love, I want to fall in deep. I want to hold her and listen to her and look at her. I want–or part of me wants–the world to shrink to become just us. If I do that, I discover something: the depth of a moment, the realization of a touch, the glimpse of another. If I do that, I’m worried I lose something: everything that was outside of just us. I think there must be a rhythm that includes both: a kind of heartbeat that balances a shrinking world, intense, intimate, involved, and an expanding one, inconclusive, opening. But my heart doesn’t seem to have learned how to beat like that quite yet.

“We were young, we were reckless, arrogant, silly, headstrong…and we were right!”
                -Abbie Hoffman, in describing himself and other young activists

                If I step into my life, I feel a difference between the passionate creation of working on something and the careful discernment of refining it. The first is writing; the second is revising. The first is throwing things into a pan, excited and not quite sure about how the flavors will mix; the second, I imagine, is learning a recipe, though I’ve almost never done that.
                When I was younger, the first was a lot easier. Stories happened to me. Ideas grabbed me and carried me, and threw me into rivers to swim. That still happens, but it doesn’t happen as much. As I get older, the second is easier: I can see the cracks in something I’ve started, the contradictions, and I can work away at mending them. Maybe my mind used to feel like a wild orchard, long gone to seed, with unexpected fruits growing on every side. If that’s true, then these days my trees have fewer fruits, but I’m better at tending to them. Maybe the change comes from my habit. Maybe it’s getting older. Maybe there are two different kinds of thinking.
                In any case, my high school students almost always seem more inclined to the first than the second. They think in bursts of inspiration; they don’t often want to go back and fill in the holes of a path they’ve already run. I’m often tempted to push them to revise, but reading Abbie Hoffman, I’m not sure if that’s a good idea. If I had known how hard it was to write a novel, I’m not sure I would have started. If I dwelled a little more on how hurt my students are, on how much they’re struggling, I think I would realize that what I can do would never be enough. That’s what I realize on the bad days. On the good days, I look at the person in front of me, and I try. Maybe that’s what Abbie Hoffman did: he was reckless, arrogant, silly, headstrong. He didn’t understand the impossibilities. He was insane enough to think that a few kids could change the world. And they did. There is a place for wild creation, and it’s often by going there that we face the challenges that would otherwise be too much for us.
                Of course, there’s also a place for revision, for careful planning, for compromise. Earlier in that speech, Abbie Hoffman said, “We ended the idea that women are second-class citizens.” I don’t think he did that. He tried to: he thought he did. With the passion to fix the world with one great burst, he pushed us toward where we need to go. Perhaps that push must be tempered, continued, directed by minds who revise, who see the roots of our sicknesses, the complications of changing any piece of what we do. These other people will help, and when they get tired, I hope we’ll have another reckless, arrogant, silly, headstrong child to lead with wild inspiration.
                I wonder if we can be both. I’d like to think we can.

                “A spell is not instead of a thing. It is only to help that thing.”
                                -Diana Wynne Jones, The Magicians of Caprona

                “We already live in a world of flying robots killing people. I don’t worry about how powerful the machines are, I worry about who the machines give power to.”
                                -Randall Munroe, xkcd.com/1968

                I tend to think of magic as a replacement for movement, or science, or effort: the mop figures go marching down to gather water, while the sorcerer’s apprentice sits back to conduct the music. A unicorn’s tears wash the wound away, as though it had never existed. But maybe magic–real magic–isn’t a replacement for work; maybe it’s the way that insight, creativity, study and experience can take our efforts and support them, carrying them further than we thought they could ever go.
                Monroe offers a similar thought, but in his world, it’s darker. We make movie after movie about the “rise of the machines,” about the steel faces who turn on us, but the real worry (he says) isn’t then. It’s now. We’re not making Skynet: we’re making poor decisions, day after day, year after year, to alienate others and pollute water and turn toward war as a solution. If we listen to Diana Wynne Jones, a spell wouldn’t wash away all fear or remove the technology that lets us make weapons. A spell would give us a little help as we struggle to deal with that fear, as we decide what to do with that technology.
                I read a good comic a few weeks ago. A mother and her son, teaching holding cell phones, are sitting on a bench in the park. Across from them is another bench, another mother and son, but these two are holding books. The first mother looks over and says, “I’m so jealous. How did you get him to read?”
                Children’s books tell children what we think, what we value, how we approach challenges. They don’t give us answers: they give us a way to look for answers. It’s nice to be a child gain, to listen to Diana Wynne Jones. It’s nice to grow up, and practice humming something that might be a spell. Perhaps this melody will help (a little bit) what what I’ll do today.

                “A drawing is simply a line going for a walk.” -Paul Klee

                This week I did something I haven’t done in a long time: I drew. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve put a pencil on paper fairly regularly in the last years. I’ve made grocery lists. I’ve written poems. I’ve filled in o’s. I’ve even, a few times, made funny faces on post it notes to put on someone’s window. But on Monday, I drew.
                My friend helped me. She teaches art. I kept getting frustrated, kept getting lost, kept feeling like I was at a dead end. I like sculptures, I like words; it’s nice to be around things whose language you speak, but with a pencil, I’m a baby spitting up on myself. Sometimes my friend asked me to look at the values on my page, at the values in the shoe I was drawing. Mostly, when I asked “What do I do now,” she just said, “Keep drawing.”
                I remember my dad asking me to go walk with him. I always wanted to know how far, and even if I knew how far and agreed, I wanted to get there and get back. I don’t think those were really walks. Since then, sometimes, I’ve found myself out on the beach or under the trees. I’ve found myself listening to a friend’s ideas, or watching how the ice melts, or gathering the cold in my hands. I’ve gone for a walk, not knowing where or when it ends, but following it.
                I think that’s how walks work. If Klee’s to be trusted, that’s how drawings work. Just now there are puddles in the woods near my house. Just today a friend came to see me, and our conversation stepped from thought to thought. Just now there’s time and space to walk.

                “Ruins, for me, are the beginning. With the debris, you can construct new ideas. They are symbols of a beginning.”  -Anselm Kiefer
                “There is life outside your apartment–” –Avenue Q

                Supported by a Watson Fellowship, my friend spent a year climbing fences, finding abandoned buildings, and making art about what she saw. I was in Germany (through Amherst’s Schupf Scholarship–thank you, Mr. Schupf!) during her Berlin tour, so I tagged along to Beelitz-Heilstätten and other places where vines and age and spray-painted figures pulled apart the brickwork and tore down the roof. Paint bubbled and fell. Stone crumbled. Roots dug. The metal stair of a spiral staircase broke beneath my foot. We spent a heart-thumping twenty minutes navigating a pitch-black tunnel by flashes from my camera. When she first told me what she was doing, I couldn’t understand her project–why set out to find these lost spaces? Strangely enough, in the time we traveled together, in all the conversations we had, I never asked her that question. Maybe sharing part of the adventure with me was the fullest answer she could have given. In any case, as went from room to room, I started realizing I’d stumbled into my own reason. There was a magic to these shattered places.
                Buildings, rooms–apartments–are one way in which we measure out this space, and call it ours. (It’s a bit like the vaulted ceilings of a cathedral: whenever you step outside, the space above you is higher than any room; the builder cuts off a piece of sky, he ties it to us, and now that its reference is a human, not a planet, the space seems larger while being smaller). They’re our redefinition of the world as our environment. Day after day, my friend showed me places where that definition–inevitably, inescapably–had crumbled. The trees came back. The grass came back. The words in newspapers, so important in their day, so racy or ribald or inspired, faded away on the walls. We were watching humanity’s insistence that we are the center of things, and we were watching it torn apart like wet paper, or, perhaps, like stone in the face of time. I loved those quiet rooms. I loved whispering with my friend. It felt right to lower our voices, although, really, it felt even more right to walk quietly, witnessing the change, the rubble, the end that was not an end but always a kind of beginning.
                Avenue Q was uproariously funny, but it wasn’t just funny. I was in my senior year in college, and I watched adults around me double up over the lines, “I wish I could go back to college / In college you know who you are.” That was a little threatening. They looked like they had their lives together. They looked like they knew, more or less, what they were doing. And here they were laughing about how lost they were. Was it true? Was that where I was headed?
                Ten years out, I can say, yes. And no. More importantly, I can remember the buildings with fallen walls and open ceilings. We work so hard to manufacture a moment, a place that is ours, but I think I’ve always been more inspired–and, in truth, more at home–in spaces that have something of mine and more of everything else. When I manage to build my walls, to order my room, I end up pretty bored and lonely. When I’m outside my apartment, when there’s someone else walking by and a storm blowing in and the sun’s going down and something furry just moved in the grass, rattling dry leaves, I feel more alive. I feel like I have more of myself. Perhaps that’s because, in that space, all life doesn’t have to come from just me.

                “We affected an air of complete boredom and the feeling that nothing was worth making an effort for. One result of my illness has been to change all that.” -Stephen Hawking describing his Oxford days in My Brief History

                Most of us don’t flourish handkerchiefs like Hawking did when he was a student (which is a pity, really),  but I see a lot of that feigned indifference. I see it in young people, brilliant and capable, who push their minds into whatever shallow advertisements are pushed toward them. I see it in people who can and who don’t, or who might and still don’t begin. I see it in myself. It’s tempting, oh so tempting, to not care. To stop trying. To pretend or try to believe that nothing’s worth making an effort for.
                For me, I think, that comes from fear. Fear that my efforts wouldn’t be ‘good enough,” that I wouldn’t be suited to the task I took up. Fear that, no matter how well and how hard I work, I couldn’t make a difference. Not with what’s in front of me. I wonder if you ever find yourself in that place. If you do, I wonder what leads you there–and what leads you back out.
                Hawking tells us what led him out. After he was diagnosed with the disease that took so much from him, he writes, “I dreamed that I was going to be executed. I suddenly realized that there were  lot of worthwhile things I could do if I was reprieved.” Later he adds, “What really made the difference was that I got engaged to a girl called Jane Wilde, whom I had met about the time I was diagnosed with ALS. This gave me something to live for. If we were to get married, I had to get a job.”
                We talk about what frightens us, but when Hawking saw the face of what he feared, he saw the stars behind it, too. He was going to die. Well, okay, but first he was going to live. Perhaps the opposite of fear is not courage. It’s hope. It’s love. It’s work for what you believe in. Hawking found someone he loved, and to marry her, he needed a job. That led to finishing his PhD, that led to his work. There was a world in front of him, and, for love and the chance at living, he set off into it in whatever ways he could.