“Americans seem to be obsessed with exercising, doing mental puzzles, consuming various juice and protein concoctions, sticking to strict diets, and popping vitamins and supplements, all in a valiant effort to cheat death and prolong life as long as possible. This has become so pervasive that it now defines a cultural type: what I call the American immortal.” -Ezekiel J. Emanuel, “Why I Hope To Die At 75”

                “Get over it!” -The Eagles

                I’m going to end up bald. My uncle’s been promising it for years: before his sons and I hit our teens, he started taking off his hat, presenting us with the reflective cue ball of his head, and announcing, “It’s coming for you!” It hasn’t come yet, but it will. The forest–that’s self aggrandizing; the shrubbery?–is definitely getting thinner. A few months ago, someone started suggesting treatments that would “let me keep my hair.” I listened. I didn’t know what to say.
                Here’s another one. For as long as I can remember, I’ve had a spot of white hair on the side of my head. The hairs there are thinner and crinklier. To be honest, I’ve always kind of liked them. They’re there. They’re mine. Five years ago a friend said, “You know, a spot of mascara could cover that up.” My friend wanted the best for me. I appreciate that. In his mind the best involved mascara, but I had never even considered covering up the little spot.
                I don’t have anything against people who are trying to “keep their hair.” That’s their choice, and they should make it. But culturally, I do have something against the American Immortal. I have something against my shampoo which promises an “anti-aging formula” and the ads which question whether my skin is strong enough. I don’t think that Azlan, that this bit of functioning stuff, needs to go on for almost-forever, and I don’t think I need to be handsome and flawless for all that time. Don’t get me wrong, I want to connect and help while I’m here. But 2058 doesn’t need a toned, tanned, dark haired me in it. If our culture talked less about preventing balding, and more about how, yeah, you’ll go bald, you’ll age, and that’s okay, then I think we’d learn to be more accepting. I think we’d learn to walk more gently across the earth, and to participate more kindly in our communities. Maybe we wouldn’t be so mean. Maybe we wouldn’t be so self centered, so scared, so desperate. I’ll go bald, and in the mean time, my life doesn’t need to be about how handsome and young I’ll always be. It can be about ants on a fallen log. It can be about the trees. It can be about the kids playing outside my window.
                The next time I look in the mirror, and feel sad because I’m balding or aging or just generally falling apart, I’m going to pick up my soap like a mic and let the Eagles remind me: get over it.
                Then there’s the electric guitar.
                RINNNRRRRR.

-“Summer Resort,” by avogado6

                I often start my English classes by asking us to look at some contemporary artist’s work, and talk about what we see. It’s a nice door into thinking about themes, metaphors, and symbolism, and it helps us start out by exploring instead of deciding. That’s why I found avogado6 this fall.
                I know people who spend all five weekdays miserable, and then go crazy on the weekend. I know other people just counting down the days until they can go to a “summer resort,” go on vacation, get away from here and all their usual patterns. I think it’s important to take time to reconnect and rejuvenate, but when our relaxation is a refrigerator’s freezer in the middle of a desert, I think we’re in trouble.
                That little refrigerator is going to run out of energy. It’s spilling its guts out, and you can see everything it has to give disappearing in little wisps on the wind. Holding the door open so you can breath in winter isn’t just inefficient, it’s destroying the thing you’re after. It’s cutting down the tree so you can reach the first ripe fruit of the season. It must be possible to recharge ourselves in other ways. Besides, putting your head in a box doesn’t change what’s around you. It must be possible to make a society that isn’t a desert–socially, politically, economically–for so many people; and in whatever ways the heat and sand are inevitable, it must be possible to build a civilization that thrives within them. The answer to misery isn’t one day of insanity. The answer to inequality and existential angst isn’t a weekend in a four star hotel.
                I’m going to watch myself for the moments when I stick my head in the freezer. I’m going to keep my eye out, and watch for paths that lead beyond the dunes, or else for places where we could live open-eyed in the desert. I think we can live, not only in the few nice (expensive, walled off, pampered, sunscreened) moments of a summer resort, but in the quiet, meaningful, working moments of every day.

                “The plain fact is that the planet does not need more successful people. But it does desperately need more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of every kind.”
                -David W. Orr, Earth In Mind: On Education, Environment, and the Human Prospect (1994)

                I think we all navigate by the stars in our sky. These stars give us a way to chart our course, to decide where we are and where we’re going. Steer towards knowledge. Steer towards money. Steer towards love.  These stars give us a way to understand our actions. Pushing around two chunks of melted, refrozen rock-stuff doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but “health” and “shallow self love” might both lead towards lifting weights. I don’t know if it’s possible to live without stars, without looking up to check your progress against some set of goals and values–I suspect it is, and I’d like to think about that–but as long as I’m doing this kind of celestial navigation, I should be careful about the lights I steer by.
                Growing up in America, I kept seeing people point out “success” as the most important guide. Were you succeeding?  That’s how you knew when you were doing terribly–or, sometimes, when you were doing well. The thing is, if I go out on a clear night and look up at the sky, I’m not at all sure that “success” is my favorite star. In college, I spent some months living by friendship. I gauged my days by how much time I’d spent with the people I loved. I liked that.
                These days, as I watch my students, I’m reminded again and again how we point out these constellations for each other. Young people pick their stars, but they usually pick the ones that other people seem to talk about. It’s easy to do that, and it’s hard to leave the talked-about ones behind.  When I try to go ahead as a peacemaker, I sometimes find myself wondering why I feel like a failure. In that moment, Orr walks by, and asks, “Well–has your ship gotten off course, or did you choose another star to steer by?”
                I’d rather be a lover of any kind, I think, than a success. And I wonder: if you’re honest, if you’re brave, if you go outside on a clear night and look at all those stars, what do you want to be?

                “We sit in the house, and slowly the world we are living in is getting smaller, and all we say is: ‘Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials and I won’t say anything. Just leave us alone.’
                Well, I’m not gonna leave you alone.”
                -An honest TV commentator speaking to his frightened country in Network

                “You may say I’m a dreamer  / But I’m not the only one.” -John Lennon, “Imagine”

                When we’re disappointed, when we’re scared, it’s easy to retreat to smaller goals. If a country (our country) can’t be just, we’ll just make ourselves safe, and call that good enough. If I can’t make good friends and close connections, I’ll just keep myself entertained. If the world is going crazy, if it’s getting smaller, just let me have my toaster, just leave me alone and that will be enough.
                In January I was accepted to a graduate program. In June I gave up my spot because I didn’t get the funding I needed. The graduate program had been a big dream, an expansive leap, a hope; as the door closed, I felt myself retreating. I found myself settling for smaller goals, for weaker hopes, for caffeine and sugar and entertainment instead of fire and water and love. I played video games. I stayed alone in my room. I told myself it was comfortable, and it was okay.
                I’m letting that go, now. Everything calls to you when you listen. It’s not going to leave you alone. That’s a good thing. I think we need the world to shout at us every now and then. That reminds us to shout back. That reminds us that the world isn’t as small as we’ve been pretending. There is more to it than the room we picked when we were frightened, when we were discouraged; there is more to it than the ‘safety’ of a closed heart. I’m afraid, but I’m not only afraid. You don’t need to leave me alone. There are dreams and there are dreamers, and we don’t need to give them up. If you weren’t holding onto your toaster, if you knew you weren’t the only one–what would you hope for? What would you do? What would you dream?

                “The word ‘weird’ descends from the old English wyrd, by way of the Old Norse urðr, meaning fate.”
                […]
                “I am not inclined to elect you arbiter of normal.” -Mishell Baker, Borderline

                A fantasy/crime novel that, on its way to a stakeout, stops to talk about the etymology of “weird”? Cupid has his arrows, and this one’s for me. Here’s a word, slipping along through time and changing as it goes. As a self-respecting sleuth, how could you not follow it? What will you find if you follow along in its tracks?
                The transition Baker describes from “fate” to “strange, different, otherworldly, unusual” comes with the “weird sisters,” the German interpretation of the three Greek fates, who originally did a whole lot of weaving and later did witchy dances in Macbeth. Here’s another: the Latin word “arbiter” is used to describe a witness or judge, but it’s root, baetere, means ‘to come, go.’ An arbiter is someone who travels out to hear and decide a case. One more: ‘normal’ is from the Latin norma, meaning ‘carpenter’s square’ and therefore, more generally, the usual pattern or the rule to be followed.
                I like those three words. I like them even more together, lit by the changing lights of their history. Maybe you have to go (baetere) and see what’s really happening in order to settle a dispute or set a rule; or to put it another way, maybe the norms we set–our normals–are about the places we go, in the world, in our community, in ourselves. Maybe your rule (norma) is about the tools you’ve made for building, the patterns you’ve learned to recognize–but things don’t always fit in the right angles we hold up to the world, and there are different tools, different patterns, different paths to pick up. And the forces that govern our journey, that draw us this way and that, tying us to each other and to the world, they’re not always what we would expect. They’re wyrd.

                “His song in the Tower had been defiance rather than hope; for then he was thinking of himself.”
                -J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, published 1955.

                The last two years have been hard for me. I’ve been sad a lot, frustrated a lot, lost a lot. I’ve been hurt by all the hurt I see around me, by the injustice and the cruelty and the thoughtless ambition. No matter how much I try to do, I don’t seem to help very much toward a place with more peace and compassion.
                And then there’s Sam in The Lord of the Rings. I don’t think I’m very much like Sam. I’m not as wonderfully short, I’m not as good a cook, I’m not as steady. But he tells me that the difference between hope and defiance is a difference in scope. Defiance is about setting your individual power against the injustice around you. It’s about Sam, walking towards the mountain where he might be able to burn away a big part of what threatens his world. Hope is about the stars and the grass and all the people he’s never met, before him, after him. Hope is about the wideness that goes beyond our world.
                I think defiance is important. I haven’t done enough, but in the last years, I’ve tried to educate myself, write to senators, attend marches. I’ve tried to add my little push to the side of justice. We need to keep doing that. But we need Sam’s hope, too. I learned recently about the vaquita, the rarest marine mammal in the world, and the scientists who’ve spent their lives trying to keep it from going extinct. It’s going extinct anyway. Their act of defiance might have failed, but whatever happens, their love for vaquitas existed. So did the vaquitas themselves. There is all the depth of history, all the wonder of uncounted species and a planet and a future that includes splashed light, love, and far stars. I–we–are a little, little part of all that. Look up. Look around. Look in. That’s why there’s hope.

                “Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip. […] Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them. What the writer is doing, he’s writing, perpetrating hooptedoodle, perhaps taking another shot at the weather, or has gone into the character’s head, and the reader either knows what the guy’s thinking or doesn’t care. I’ll bet you don’t skip dialogue.”
                -Elmore Leonard, “Writers on Writing,” The New York Times

                “the night was clere though i slept i seen it. though i slept i seen the calm hierde naht only the still. when i gan down to sleep all was clere in the land and my dreams was full of stillness but my dreams did not cepe me still”
                -Paul Kingsnorth, The Wake

                I think Leonard broke my writing. He also helped form it: he has a brilliant ear for voices, and I thoroughly enjoy his novels. (I suppose most of us do a little breaking a little healing for most of the people we know).  In any case, Leonard’s advice made me afraid to write “the part that readers skip.” I think I mistook him, but I understood that to mean the part that asks a reader to work. Dialogue is easy. It snaps back and forth, like the game of questions in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. It lends itself to competitions, confusions, comedies. Great last lines wave their ideological flag and high five themselves, or bow. That’s great for putting stars in the sky for us to steer by, but it’s less suited to showing the slow truth, day by day, of growing.
                All of The Wake asks me to work. That’s part of its gift. Kingsnorth’s intensity demands my intensity. He’s writing about the Norman invasion of England in 1066, and to tell that story, he’s created a “shadow tongue:” a language that’s as close as he can get to what was spoken then while still being intelligible to readers now. His “shadow tongue” can be daunting, but if I stay him, he’ll show me to another world–and he’ll show me how this other world helped create my own. If you want an example of the lasting influences The Wake explores, look at your food. The poultry and beef we eat comes from chickens and cows. The first two words are from French, from the rich Normans who could afford meat. The second two are Germanic, from the poor Saxons who tended flocks and herds. To tell us the story of this divide, to make us see and feel it, Kingsnorth insists that we hear what is familiar in the confusion of what is foreign.
                I’m not separating Easy Entertainment from Difficult Art. Art can be entertaining, accessible, and good. It can also be hard. I think Leonard’s right to remind us to do something that matters, that’s alive, and that’s not obsessed with its own (perceived) cleverness. I think Kingsnorth’s right to have a wild idea, an idea that will make us struggle, and to dive into it with joy and determination. the night was clere though i slept i seen it. Some things we can only see strangely, passionately, bewilderingly, as though through changing glass, as though through our dreams.

silence doesn’t mean
we have run out of things to say,
only that we are trying
not to say them.
So, let’s do this.
I’ll ask you a question,
then you ask me a question,
and we’ll just keep asking until
we can both get some answers.
                -A father speaking to his son in The Crossover, by Kwame Alexander

                It’s a beautiful thought, and it leads to a beautiful scene in the book. A father and son are face to face, unsure of how to come back together. They have so many questions, so many pains, so many uncertainties and different perspectives on what’s happened. Feeling all that, the father suggests they start saying their questions. They don’t answer them–they just say them out loud, back and forth, one and then the other. In the scene there are never answers, but at first, the questions and the people seem far apart. Thirty eight questions later, they seem to have realized that they’re close.
                It makes me wonder what questions are hiding in my life, pretending to be silence. It makes me wonder what I would say–what you would say–if we sat down, if we started wherever we could, and asked our questions.
                I tried writing some of my questions here, but I think that’s mistaking Alexander’s idea. In the book, the experience is deeply personal. It belongs in that relationship. They ask the questions they need to ask, but somehow, those questions also need to be between those two people. Trying to do the same thing alone feels a bit like being in a raft and paddling on just one side, still expecting to go forward. Sometime soon, with someone, I’d like to try opening the silence. Perhaps, sometime soon, you’d like to try that, too. If you’d like to try with me, just me know. Either way, maybe “we can both get some answers,” or at least realize that silence doesn’t mean there’s nothing to say.

                “I want you to imagine a landscape with its full complement of beavers.”
                -Ben Goldfarb, Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter. I might be biased, as Ben’s a friend, but Eager has me reading more playfully, more intently, and more–I’m sorry–eagerly than anything else in a long time.

                It turns out beavers used to swim and build and look adorable all over North America, and it turns out they have a habit of changing things. The mountain streams I love, the ones I grew up with, are streams that have lost their beavers. They’re streams with clear, fasting moving water, and narrow beds cut down into the ground. As a boy, I stuck my feet in those streams, I swam in them, and bit by bit I decided that’s how mountain streams should be. I thought the clearness was cleanness.
                If I could walk those same streams, back before the beavers were killed off for their pelts, I wouldn’t walk a laughing little ribbon. I’d wade and slip and stumble through a “sluggish, murky swamp, backed up several acres by a messy concatenation of woody dams.” Imagined Me doesn’t like the sound of that: it sounds messy, yucky, and it would certainly be hard. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve gotten covered in muck and thought, “Oh, good.” (Which, come to think of it, is a problem, and something I should remedy). My favorite swimming holes–the ones I would tell you about, if you were looking–all have nice, clean sand bottoms, and bare rocks to sun on.
                Then again, even as a boy, something bothered me about the High Sierra mountains. I could listen to the water, but not much else. I could wander across meadows to the thin stream, but even if I was lucky, the only other creature I’d find wandering was a marmot. (Or my dad, who’d call me a varmint, but that’s another matter). Ben writes, “In the intermountain West, wetlands, though they make up just  2 percent of total land area, support 80 percent of biodiversity.” There were other critters here. They miss their trees, their grasses, their places to live; they miss their year-round water. They miss their beavers. We miss them, too. I want to go on and on about all the ways beavers could help us–recharging groundwater, preventing floods, lessening damage from forest fires, and probably all sorts of other things I don’t even know yet–but Ben already did that. You should read his book.
                My post, I think, is more about how Ben pushed me to reexamine one of my “shoulds.” We all have a lot of “shoulds”–conversations should sound this way, a bed should (or shouldn’t–it’s going to get messy again, right?) be made every morning, a work day should be this long, a stream should have clear water. It doesn’t always have to happen, but it should. Lots of these shoulds are buried deep, and lots of them are so quiet, so “obvious,” that it’s hard to see them. Some are useful, and help guide you; but if you’re me, then some of your shoulds are just plain wrong, and you need a Ben Goldfarb to come tell you about beavers and swamps.
                Also, I need to go get covered in muck and think, “Oh, good.” I bet Ben would come along for that, too.

                “Everything we see hides another thing. We always want to see what is hidden by what we see, but it is impossible.”
                -René Magritte, in an interview about his painting, The Son Of Man

                “I know that I have never met these characters. I made them up. I read about the things they did, I studied them and then imagined what they felt and thought and said and wanted from their lives. What they were really like, of course, no one will ever know. This is, I am convinced, a blessing, a blessing, and I feel dismay for all the people who, a thousand years from now, will have our times on tape and film to study. They will see our faces, hear our voices, know it all and be deceived. They will be dealing with the surface, and the truth of things is always underneath. It has to be imagined.”
                -John Goldman, in his 1980 introduction to The Lion In Winter. Goldman’s play imagines the private lives of Henry II, Eleanor of Aquitaine, and their children.

                Back when I was seventeen or eighteen, I remember sitting at the beach and looking at a palm tree. My mind, tense, shifting, chased another dozen thoughts at the same time. I was bored. On edge. Disengaged. So I started to look at the tree. I looked at its jagged fronds, shifting in the breeze. I looked at its rough trunk. I remembered, and imagined, the feel of that trunk–the brown stubbs of old fronds, fibrous and serrated. On a whim, I wondered if I could get my whole mind to gather around the tree. What would it sound like, if I knocked my knuckles against it? What would it taste like? Not the fruit–the trunk itself. What mixture of dust and sand, salt and wood? My brother had climbed the tree yesterday, so I’d been close to it–I thought back to its smell, and held that in my mind. Layered on top of each other, my senses wrapped me around and around this growing thing. At first I had to keep leading my mind back to the tree. Then it was easier for my focus to gather, like water to the bottom of a bowl. Then, for a few moments, all I did was see, touch, hear, taste and smell the tree, there from where I was sitting.
                Maybe all things are hidden to us. In Magritte’s painting, the man’s face is hidden behind an apple–but even if the apple wasn’t there, we’d see the surface of a face, not the person underneath. If we looked beneath the skin and the eyes, we could see the surface of the skull, the surface of the brain. We couldn’t see the person. Goldman takes Magritte’s idea and brings it to history, to politics. We have so much information about people, so many pictures, so many soundclips–and “the truth of something” he says “is always underneath” all that. In a way, Goldman’s thought reminds me of how different people see Donald Trump: the people I know who admire him are not talking about the same individual as the people I know who are horrified by him. There is an actual human there, of course, a person with a mind that believes certain things; but the supporters I know are sure this person is one way, and the critics are sure he is another. In “liking” or “disliking” him, they seem to be talking about two different people, and disagreeing about which one exists. I wonder what would happen to the argument if you could resolve that disagreement.
                Maybe it’s only through concentration (or playful awareness) and imagination that we can come close to seeing. There are depths to every person, and sounds and tastes to every tree. Instead of thinking about the world as a face behind a veil, maybe we need to think about it as the face and the veil together, and the blood and bone beneath, and the hidden lips and the unseen air they’re breathing. It is a mystery. Seeing shows us some surfaces. With imagination and time, and the work of making, maybe we can start to understand.