“Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy.” -Jack Kerouac, in Belief and Technique for Modern Prose, who didn’t edit anything.

                “Only they’re not writers. They’re typists. Sweaty typists blacking up pounds of bond paper with formless, eyeless, earless messages.” -Truman Capote, in The Paris Review, who did.

                I could get up in arms on either side. I could join Capote, and say that the carpenter who drops the nails and the screws and the hammer and the beams and the boards on your head isn’t honest. He’s not really a carpenter. Art, life, and identity are about the choices we make. They’re about how we hold ourselves. Spitting out another word and another word and another word in something you call “stream of consciousness” isn’t raw creativity: it’s giving up on the task of writing.
                I could join Kerouac: we pretend so damn much. We poise and perform and polish away the us in us, but we don’t need to. That’s a choice. Sound your barbaric yawp, howl, hoot, cough, scratch, “Be in love with yr life” and live it. (That’s Kerouac’s fourth point in Belief and Technique). Say what you are. Be what you are. Be it fully, and be it now.
                And Capote again: I’m not anything until I choose to be. I’m mad and I’m kind and I’m tired and I’m bored and I’m interested, or I could be, but what I really am is the collection I make by choosing which one to follow when, and what work to direct it towards.
                Kerouac: no, you’re just mad and kind and tired and bored and interested and wild and rough and drunk coy hopeless helpful cruel cautious curious spiteful meandering inspired. Own that. Doing anything else is cutting off a piece of you.
                Capote: if you want cutting metaphors, then carve me a duck without removing anything from the lump of wood. You’ll end up with the same eyeless, earless monsters you write. If you had a knife you might find form. An honest look comes from understanding your perspective, and walking around your subject so you can see from different sides; it’s not from pretending perspectives don’t exist.
                Kerouac: your perspectives makes what you see into lies.
                It’s kinda fun, watching them argue. I could get up in arms on either side. Sometimes I want to. Really, though, I think they both have a point. As far as I can tell, the two of them would never have gotten along in real life. I wonder if their ideas can in my head.

                Data: Strictly speaking, sir, it is not my playing. It is a precise imitation of the techniques of Jascha Heifetz and Trenka Bronkin.
                 Picard: Is there nothing of Data in what I’m hearing? You see, you chose the violinists. Heifetz and Bronkin have radically different styles, different techniques, and yet…you combined them.
                –Star Trek: The Next Generation, “The Ensigns of Command”

                It’s supposed to be dangerous when you hear voices, but the truth is, I have lots of voices in my head. I’m not sure if there could be a me if I didn’t. I have my mother’s voice, and my father’s voice. They have their different perspectives, their different values, their different jokes. I have both of my brothers’ voices. I have voices from Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ursula Le Guin, Ian Flemming (that’s the guy who wrote James Bond), and a whole lot of commercials. That’s what commercials are designed to do–stick in your head. Some of the voices I don’t want there. Some of them I do. Some of them I try to ignore. Some of them I listen to.
                I wonder if a lot of life comes from which voices you have inside, and how you listen to them.
                We talk so much about finding yourself, and about developing your ideas. Those are good things. They’re not the only things. There are a lot of sayings I could go to for help with this: Sir Isaac Newton, “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” T. S. Eliot: “The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique […]; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion.” Whatever good ideas and insights I’ve had, they were made from borrowed pieces: lessons I took from my parents, habits and hopes from my friends, perspectives from poets. Little seashells of grace, borrowed from the beach, and raindrops caught in my open hands. There’s that old question: is Data human? I don’t know, but I want to be more like him. He’s open to learning from so many others.
                This, all of this, it’s not my playing. But in playing it I’m becoming me. I’m making myself from you, and you, and you. As I do, I become something: a collection, an intention, a person. I become the kind of thing that other people can use in their threading, too. And I can wonder: when I braid tomorrow, what strands will I choose?

                “Children like being frightened by fairy tales. They have an inborn need to experience powerful emotions. […] Andersen had the courage to write stories with unhappy endings. He didn’t believe that you should try to be good because it pays (as today’s moral tales insistently advertise, though it doesn’t necessarily turn out that way in real life), but because evil stems from intellectual and emotional stuntedness and is the one form of poverty that should be shunned.”
                -Wisława Szymborska, Unrequired Reading

                It’s been a long time since I read Hans Christian Andersen, but I remember clever children and tricky troubles and shapes inside the shadows. I remember adults who did not mean well. I remember wolves.
                If I understand her, Szymborska says we should stop trying to scrub the fear from our children’s lives. We should stop telling them that everything will be okay. It’s not true, and besides, we don’t need that crutch. It’s okay to be frightened. It’s okay to get hurt. It’s okay to die, and you’re going to, and along the way, I hope, you’re going to do something else. Inside our fears of spiders and burning flames and commitment’s restrictions there are the beauties of fire and life and love. We don’t want a fire that doesn’t burn. It wouldn’t warm us. We want to learn how to tend a fire carefully. We want to learn how to treat the world with respect, and so live in it. We want our hearts to grow.
                If we accept that the reward for our goodness will not be the end of our pain, we’re free to see what the reward really is. We’re free to walk across sharp rocks, not immune to their edge, but aware of how to set down our feet. We’re free to grow tall, to feel deeply, to live in a world that hurts and heals. We’re free to build our house, invite in new friends and listen to the wolves.
                I’m not sure I’ll ever get beyond prejudice. I’m not sure I’ll ever get beyond hate, or anger, or thoughtless fear. Those things, Szymborska says, aren’t evil. Evil is the fruit of a tree that never grew. We can grow up, intellectually and emotionally, until we’re mature enough to be afraid and still be brave. Until we can walk through the forest of prejudice and keep looking for the spring of connection. To get there, Szymborska says, we’d better accept our fear. We’d better give our kids a chance to feel their own.
                So bring on the stories: the wild ones, the frightening ones. Bring on the the monsters and the unsettling dreams. Maybe my hate will always be with me. Maybe I’ll read (or write) stories about it. Maybe, that way, I’ll learn to never give it a knife.

-Randall Munroe, xkcd.com

                Me too, little man with a round head. Me too. But I don’t think it really IS too honest.
                Sure, containment is important. There are lots of people bouncing around together, and we can’t all throw our AAAHHHH! at each other all the time. There’d be too much AAAHHHH to ever hear anything else. Sometimes things can be going on inside, and I don’t need to share that because the moment’s not about me. But there’s another side, too.
                A couple months ago my friend was having a hard time. I gave her a hug. I asked her if she wanted to talk about what was going on. She said she was scared–really scared. She said she was confused. She said she didn’t want to tell me, because she didn’t want to make me “carry all that.” I don’t remember how exactly I responded, but I’ve been looking back at that moment. In it, there’s something important to say.
                We get stuck thinking that we’re supposed to be “positive,” that we’re supposed to show how bright and happy (and successful and productive and beautiful and cool and OKAY) we are. We get stuck thinking that we help those we love by always smiling. And I don’t think it’s true. I think we help each other and inspire each other by showing our hurts as well as our hopes, our confusions as well as our revelations. When we only show the “best” of ourselves, we push everyone else to do the same. We push each other to be okay; we push each other to hide the hurts we have. When we come out hiding, when we share that we’re hurting, we can come home to ourselves. We can realize that it’s possible to be scared and confused and struggling–and, in all of that, to be doing pretty well. The lumber of our lives might seem heavy, but it’s also the stuff that ships are made of, and it’s also ballast for the storm. I think together we can carry it.
                So me too, little man with a round head. Me too.

                “When we wish to correct with advantage, and to show another that he errs, we must notice from what side he views the matter, for on that side it is usually true; admit that truth to him, but reveal to him the side on which it is false. He is satisfied with that, for he sees that he was not mistaken, and that he only failed to see all sides. No one is offended at not seeing everything […].” -Blaise Pascal, Pensées

                I’ve been wrong a lot. My favorite example, for sheer style, was an argument in college. I’d heard people talk about a passage in the Torah, so I repeated as fact the little I could remember. This guy said, “That’s not right at all.” He quoted the Hebrew in question (which I couldn’t do), translated the Hebrew (which I couldn’t do), discussed the difficulty in translating a few of the key words (which I–you get it), mentioned some of the noteworthy commentaries written on that passage, and told me I was an idiot. Six months later I was ready to admire how completely he demolished me. We actually became friends. At the time, in front of the people watching, I got defensive.
                I’m not proud of that. I acted like an insecure, posturing jerk, probably because part of me is an insecure posturing jerk. I try to acknowledge that part and recognize him, so he doesn’t get the mic too often. He does help me understand some things. I’ve heard of psych research suggesting that, if you want to change someone’s mind, presenting them with facts that go against their foundational beliefs usually doesn’t work. In fact, it usually makes them cling to ‘their side’ even more. It’s easy to feel like people who do that must be morons, madmen, or egomaniacs, until I remember that I’ve done the same thing…
                The first lesson here we can learn from The Oatmeal: practice getting less defensive. The second lesson, I think, comes from Pascal. If you want to convince someone (he says), don’t start by telling them they’re wrong. Start by looking at the issue from their side. If they’re convinced they’re right, they’re probably right about something. Find that something, down in the roots of their perspective, and point it out to them. Tell them it’s important. Tell them they’re right. Then–then–there’s an opening for you to say, “But what do you think of this other side.”
                In that Oatmeal article, I looked at some arguments I had with my father about gun control. They got loud. They got angry. They didn’t get anywhere. Looking back, I realize that I missed what was important to him. In his mind, our conversation was about individual responsibility. In my mind, our conversation was about the safety of a community. Those are both important, but instead of seeing the roots of each other’s argument, we kept hitting each other with the branches.
If you start with, “You’re wrong,” most of us feel like you’re attacking the ideal we hold dear. Responsibility. Safety. Honor. Big things like that, big things we’ll rush to defend. If you start with, “Here, you’re right,” then you give our ideal its moment. After that, I’m ready to consider that I might have missed something else. Another conflicting ideal, maybe. (Of course freedom of speech is important; not yelling “fire” in that infamous crowded theater is important, too). I might have gotten the roots right, but twisted around the plant above them. I might’ve gotten stuck on one idea without noticing some others. All of us have seen something. None of us have seen everything.
                So if you want to to change someone’s mind, Pascal reminds us, start by looking for how they’re right.

                “Freedom is an illusion. It always comes at a price.”
                                -Jonathan Stroud, The Amulet of Samarkand

                I clearly remember the first time someone got me to question freedom as an ideal. It freaked me out. I’d grown up watching Westerns; Huckleberry Finn still lounged somewhere nearby, smoking when he wanted to smoke, fishing when he wanted to fish. Then someone looked into my head, saw the picture of a homestead where each man (and yeah, it was a man) was sovereign over all he saw, and said, “That’s not free. That’s lonely.”
                In the next years, I tried to adjust my freedom-loving worldview so that it could make room for the swell of whatever I’d felt in that wild, stormy moment. “Maybe,” I thought, “Maybe we’re only free with support; when I raise my walls around a little patch of ground, I don’t have friends, family, I don’t have connection, so the freedom to do as I please isn’t freedom at all. It’s just emptiness. Maybe freedom is the openness in which there’s love.” I think there’s something to that, but I also know I was trying to rework my definitions so that I had to change as little as possible. I didn’t want to accept that I might have picked ideals that led to someplace I didn’t want to go. And I might have. That’s something we do.
                What if freedom isn’t what I’m after? What if, truth be told, I choose something else–purpose, or compassion, or respect, or growth, or engagement, or the hum of a forest filled with countless insects doing their insect thing? What if, as Stroud says, freedom as an absolute doesn’t even make sense? Huckleberry can smoke, but the smoke will do what smoke does to his lungs. He can fish, but if there are enough Huckleberries who aren’t careful about it, they’ll get rid of all the fish. There’s always a price.
                I don’t know what I’m doing, and I don’t know anyone else who has this living thing 100% figured out. With that in mind, freedom’s important because it lets each of us flail around while we try to figure out how to help, and where we’re going. But that says freedom is part of our path forward; it doesn’t say freedom is the land we’re walking to. And I’m not sure it is. I’ve never felt more sure of the world than when I was caring for my little niece, and she took every ounce of concentration I had. Standing there (well, running, actually; and sitting and holding and swinging and spinning around), I wasn’t free to do as I pleased. But I want to go back.
                To put the same thought in a different place, it’s important to me that I’m free to teach my classes in the way I want. But I don’t teach classes to protect my freedom to teach however I want. I teach to try and help my students learn.

                “He could not speak for Mama without commanding how he himself was to be looked upon.” -Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March

                It’s surprising, and hard to remember, and wonderful that most of what happens–almost everything that happens, really–is not about me. It’s so easy to forget that. When I’m with my students, it’s easy to see what they learn and believe as a reflection of my (in)abilities as a teacher. When I’m with my little brother, it’s easy to see his actions as a commentary on the kind of big brother I am. In my little brat’s mind, it’s easy to think that I’m the only one in the whole wide world, and everything that’s happening is happening to me.
                In The Adventures, Simon puts his aging, almost-blind mother in a retirement home. Bored, she asks for a job, and starts putting together political pins for an upcoming election. When Simon sees her working with her hands, he explodes. He grew up poor, but he married rich and has made it rich, and he wants everyone to know that his mother doesn’t need to work with her hands. It doesn’t matter that she wants to. It matters that he’s important, and if they don’t treat her this certain way, they’re not recognizing his importance.
                We hurt the ones we love, when we look at them the way Simon looks at his mother. We turn what could have been our support into a kind of entrapment. We turn our love into our self-regard. We can even lie to ourselves, tell ourselves it’s for their good–because they need to learn. Because we can decide better. I know a father who chose his son’s college, not by where the boy could learn, but by where the father could brag about.
                We hurt ourselves, too. Simon loses his mother. He steals her from himself. Throughout the book, he steals away everyone he loves: his brother, his wife, his mistress. He makes them all into reflections of how he should be viewed (as the man who provides; as the man who made it rich; as the man who came from nothing; as the man who can have anyone and anything) and lives alone in the middle of all of them.
                I don’t want to do that. I want to have my brother, and my students, and my friends. I want them to be different. I want to live in a world of not-mes. In whatever ways I can, I want to protect that world for you.

                “People think they are coming to me for advice, but really they come to me for permission. If you want to do something, do it.”
                -Mampanyin, a wise woman in Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing

                The man Mampanyin’s talking to isn’t thinking about some crazy, scatterbrained scheme: he’s thinking about the hurts around him, and about how to make his little corner of the world a little better. He’s been thinking for a long time. And he has an idea. “If you want to do something,” she says, “do it.”
                I think Mampanyin may be right: most of what we need from the wisewomen of our lives is permission. Permission to try: to start working with what’s in front of us. Permission to get hurt. Permission to believe, and hope, and be disappointed, and cry, and hope again. Permission to not know everything, and to learn.
                That reminds me of another story. In the movie, Moana gets caught between the call she hears toward the open sea, and her father’s insistence that she stay on their island. When the waves frighten her, when they hurt her, she makes a sudden, harsh decision: it’s time to let go of the open sea. It’s time to silence that part of her heart. Moana expects her grandmother to stop her, to talk her out of it, but grandmother just says, “Okay.” Grandmother wades into the ocean, dancing. Somehow Moana can’t walk away. Turning back, she asks,
                “Is there something you want to tell me?”
                Grandmother smiles.
                “Is there something you want to hear?”
                Moana knew that the decision she’d just made couldn’t be right. She knew that giving up her heart, giving up the call toward the ocean, would be giving up too much. She knew all that. Sometimes it hurt to know it. Sometimes she didn’t know how to carry it–but all of it was hers, and in her heart of hearts, she was finding her way already. That’s way she asked her grandmother to stop her. That’s why she said, “Is there something you want to tell me?”
                For Moana, the something she had to hear was the story of her ancestors. It was the knowledge that she wasn’t betraying her people, but following them in a way that was also leading them. It was permission to be who she was, and give the gifts she had. Lately I’ve been thinking about that. I’ve been wondering about these two wisewomen. I think we can all go to Mampanyin. I think Grandmother hears you. She smiles. She asks,
                “Is there something you want to hear?”

                When I was a student at Amherst, I recited Richard Wilbur’s “The Ride” at a funeral.  A few months later I was in Professor Wilbur’s office. I almost didn’t mention what I’d done. Saying the poem had been important to me, it had been important, I hope, to the deceased man’s family, but it didn’t seem like it would be that important to Wilbur. His poems had already brought inspiration around the world. What was one more anecdote from a silly college student?

                In the end I told him anyway. Wilbur had been letting his thoughts drift, and his attention wasn’t really on me; but as I described the funeral and told him which poem I’d said, he turned and listened. Afterwards he thought for a long, quiet moment, and then he said something I didn’t expect. He said, “Thank you.”

                He thought for a moment more, and added, “You know, Azlan, as a poet, I’ve always felt the need–not to be appreciated–but to be,” and he paused, settling into the right word, “of use.”

                When I started teaching English, I started there. I wasn’t sure what he had meant. I wasn’t sure how I could do it. But I remembered, and listened to my students, and wanted to try. I think he meant “of use” like a hand that helps me up into the open space of a mountain, where I can see things a new way, or a hand resting on my shoulder while I cry. I think he meant “of use” like the clear statement of a thought I’ve always meant to figure out, or the playful, hopeful song that reminds me of my heart. That reminds me my heart connects with others’. Richard Wilbur is all of those things, for me and for so many others. And so I know we can be them for one another.

                “On the battlefield called Vigrid,the gods will fall in battle with the frost giants, and the frost giants will fall in battle with the gods.” -Neil Gaiman, Norse Mythology

                Norse mythology makes me laugh, and frightens me, and confuses me, and pulls me into worlds of wind and fire. (And Gaiman’s telling is beautiful: full of mead and smoke, friendship and fear, coarse humor and the coursing currents of story). Ragnarok, the final fate of the gods, is a catalogue of old enemies ending each other: Thor kills the giant serpent Iormungand, and dies to Iormungand’’s poison breath. Loki kills Heimdall, and Heimdall kills Loki. We have these legendary pairs swinging for each other, as they always seemed “fated” to do, but there’s another story from long before Ragnarok that sticks in my mind and changes the entire world of Norse myths.
                In the first part of the story, a storm giant named Thiazi kidnaps the goddess Idunne and steals the golden apples she guards. The apples give the gods eternal youth; without them, the gods will grow old and die. Loki steals the apples back. Thiazi dies beneath Thor’s hammer. Thiazi’s daughter, Skadi, comes to avenge him. So far there’s trickery and treachery and fire, but it’s the next part that makes this myth stick out to me.
                Everything’s set up for another fight: instead, for a moment, there’s wisdom, compassion–and peace. Odin makes Thiazi’s eyes into stars, a monument to shine for as long as the world lives. Skadi marries Niord, the gentle god of the shallow seas. For a moment the two sides, the giants and the gods, come together, and then something happens that catches me so much that I’ve been trying for years to write my own version of this long myth.
                Skadi grew up in Thrymheim, her father’s mountain fortress, where the wolves howl and the winds sing sharp across the stone. Niord lives at Noatun, a coastal palace as beautiful and gentle as he is. The sea breeze lounges through long curtains, and the ocean laughs along the sand dunes. Married, Skadi and Niord try to split their time between these two worlds. Niord goes up to Thrymheim–but in his eyes the open cliffs look like fear, not passion. Skadi goes to Noatun–but in her hands the soft, malleable sand doesn’t feel real. So they let each other go. Niord stays by the sea, Skadi stays in the mountains. They stay in love, and see each other between their two worlds when they can.
                And if they were in love, if they shared their days and nights, there might have been a child. A child born of the breaking, rising, reaching mountains and the resting, swaying, breathing seas. I think there was. I wonder what she, or he, was like.
                Ragnarok isn’t the end of the world–it’s the end of these worlds. There will be something, again, afterward. I wonder what this child will do in Ragnarok. Her mother came from one side, her father from the other; both probably die in the battle. But I don’t think the child does. I don’t think she goes to the battlefield. Niord and Skadi recognized each other’s pride. They made space for it. They tended to their love. Each saw the other’s world and shared it as much as they could, and respected it when they couldn’t. They held each other, loved each other, let each other go. They came back together in the space between their homes.
                What is their child like? Having grown up in both their worlds, what world will she help make?