“We fight. We try not to be killed. Sometimes we are. That’s all.” –All Quiet On the Western Front

                “Surely her cockiness, her optimism and energy, her pizzazz, will get her out of this. She will think of something. But I know this isn’t true.” -Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

                The Handmaid’s Tale is the chilling portrait of a fallen United States, where fundamentalist religion has become government and people have once again become property. Atwood gives us two powerful figures: a wild, resourceful friend, and a cocky, loud, energetic mother. Reading, we want these people to change things. We want them to turn into heroes. Atwood gives us moments of hope, but moment by moment, page by page, most hope breaks in the America she’s envisioned.  Why does she do that?
                We like stories about those who beat the odds and “win,” or about those who die on their feet rather than live on their knees; about heroes who turned their suffering into something grand, something important, something shining. Maybe wars don’t look like that. Torture doesn’t work like that. That is a kind of alchemy we cannot do. As much as we like a story about a homeless person who turns their struggle into brilliance and wisdom, the truth is, going hungry is cruel, it’s lessening. It breaks you apart. We can heal afterwards, we can try to make something good with the ashes, but wood burns. No matter how solid it’s grown, no matter how firm its heart, no matter how tall it stands, wood burns. History has proved that bodies do, too. Atwood won’t let us forget the horror of that.
                There is something beautiful, even here in Atwood’s horror. There is something to hope for. These days, many of the moments that break us and others are at least in part man made. We engineer them. And if we do that, that means we don’t have to. The trick isn’t to practice courage so that we can face our torturer with a witty quip and an unbreakable will. The fight happens before that. The fight isn’t even a fight: it’s law, it’s practice, is the slow creation day by day of a society that refuses torture. The trick is not to kill and be untouched by killing. The trick is not to battle victoriously. Atwood’s truth comes before that. It comes when we will not let our garden become a place for tanks and drones, cruelty and hate. When we fight, we’re hurt. Sometimes when we’re hurt we heal. But we can fight less. We can.
                We should be careful, breathlessly, intensely careful, about what we ask our troops to do. I don’t think I’m a pacifist. I believe there can be just war. I admire those who are willing to fight it. But the fighting itself is not pretty. It is not good.  As a culture, I think we need less tales about those who took horror and would not be broken, and more gardeners who give their plants the daily water with which they grow, and let them feel the sun. We need days, not moments; we need lives, not gestures.We can like the unbreakable Man of Steel, but we do not have the many chances he has, and our minds, torn, may not regrow. Perhaps sometimes, instead of hoping for heroism, we can work to be humane.

                While talking about the year after his mother’s death: “To try to tell it is like trying to tell the passage of a sleepless night. Nothing happens. One thinks, and dreams briefly, and wakes again; fears loom and pass, and ideas won’t come clear, and meaningless words haunt the mind, and the shudder of nightmare brushes by, and time seems not to move, and it’s dark, and nothing happens.” -Orrec in Gifts, by Ursula K. Le Guin

                I’ve had a bit of a funny connection with Le Guin’s books. I started by not reading them–I picked up the Earthsea cycle when I was fifteen, and got bored, and stopped. Later I picked them up again, and it was like picking up a fire, or a seed that grew and grew until it was an oak I held, an oak that was holding me. Occasionally I still find myself bored by one of her pages, and yet her books are among the most powerful stories to ever sit down beside me, tap my eyes, and remind me that I can see. Why is that?
                I think there’s a theory of literature somewhere in here, and within it, a theory of being alive. Lots of modern writers write go go go. We get a series of events and twists. (Before the credits, before everything but the music, James Bond shoots the audience). We’ve asked for stories with a hook, and they have hooks, and we’re reeled along from line one. “One of the worst mistakes writers make,’ a professor once told me, ‘Is thinking they have time. You have no time.’ He’s right–depending on what you’re writing. Or reading.
                Le Guin has all the time in the world. She sits, and stares, and walks. “Nothing happens.” When we talk about sadness, it’s easy, it’s tempting, to tell it in turning points: he picks up his mother’s comb, and cries, awash in loss; he picks up her pen, and realizes he can continue the stories she wrote. But Le Guin says that doesn’t happen. That’s not true. “Nothing happens.” Sorrows and lives spell themselves out in shades and dappled light, not clear cut letters. If we want to understand where we stand, who we are, then we need to be willing to read those quiet signs. Le Guin insists on it.
                Some of my students say that Gifts moves slowly. The truth is, sometimes it does. The truth is, why not. Life isn’t a series of happenings. The truth is, nothing happens–nothing but moments, ages long and overlapping, and we can choose to stand in them. When we do, we find a moment of presence. When we do, we mourn for our loved ones. When we do, we fall in love again.
                How did we fall in love?
                Who can say? How can we know? After all,
                            –nothing happened–
                                            and what poignant, beautiful, heart-filling nothing it was, there in the moments I cannot say.

        “The time has come,” the Walrus said,
        “To talk of many things:
        Of shoes–and ships–and sealing-wax–
        Of cabbages–and kings–”
                -Lewis Carroll, “The Walrus and the Carpenter”

        There’s a sound to words, but there’s also a rhythm, a feel, and a taste. Carroll’s lines are simply a delight to say. Go ahead, say them. Purr them. Feel them dance in your fingers. If these words were in a language I didn’t know, I’d think, while I listened, that they were some charm being cast. And there are so many things to talk about.
        It reminds me of a story: an art critic is taking a train through Europe. When he gets to his seat, he realizes he’s beside a famous painter. The painter’s next to the window. He seems entranced: outside, some power lines run along the tracks, and beyond them are rolling hills, a river slipping in and out of view, and little villages.
        The critic has always admired this painter: his work shows a clear eye for what’s there, for light and shadow, movement and stillness. The critic wants to say something–he’ll never get a chance like this again! He looks out the window, too, trying to find something to comment on. Eventually he goes with the obvious:
        ‘It’s beautiful, isn’t it?’ He says
        ‘Yes,’ says the painter. ‘The way a powerline go on and on, mile after mile, a single sweeping stroke…’

        There are so many different things to see. When I was eight or so, I was getting into the car with my dad for a seven hour drive. “I don’t even have a toy to play with,” I said. He looked around, and picked up a piece of dried tar from the road–at least, I think that’s what it was. It was black, and it had been liquidy once, though now it was hard to the touch.
        “How about this?” he asked.
        I didn’t play with it at all during the drive–I tried to, and didn’t see how. I was a stubborn kid. Perhaps part of me didn’t want this thing to be a toy, because I’d wanted some other toy. Then again, looking back, I’ve thought about that piece of tar as much as some of my favorite childhood toys. Perhaps I knew, even then, there was a mystery inside it, a mystery I was missing.
        At my grandpa’s funeral, one of his friends stood up to say something. I don’t know the man’s name, but he started with: “‘The time has come,’ the Walrus said…”
        ‘Me and Jack,’ he went on, ‘We never knew which one of us was the Walrus, and which one wasn’t. I don’t know who wrote those lines, but we decided a long time ago they were at least a bit about us. We talked about a lot.’ Later that day, I told him who’d written the lines. He told me something better. Apparently, if an old man’s to be trusted, talking to a walrus (or being one) is quite enough to make a life.

        This week isn’t a quote: it’s an idea Professor Kim Townsend gave me, and I want to give it to you. After all, ideas belong to those who need them.
        I sometimes wonder, while writing these, “Why am I so dang dark? Lighten up! Make jokes!” I wonder the same thing when I write fiction: it can be pretty heavy, and sometimes I think, “Come on now, where’s the humor, the gentle, playful connection? Where’s the bounce?” And I think those things are good–and I think you can practice them. Looking back over these posts, I see some darkness and I see some light, I see some play and I see some pain. And I want to tell a story.
        When I was nineteen I walked into Professor Townsend’s office. I wanted to ask something, though I didn’t know how to say it. Looking back, I wanted to ask whether there was something wrong with me. I loved being in college, but I also had hard times: times when I left my dorm room, running and crying. Times when moments pulled tight around me, and I felt myself crushed to something small by the pressing need of the world, by the pressure I put on myself, by the seeming impossibility of doing something. I tried to explain that to Townsend. Was there something wrong with me? Was I broken?
        Townsend is one of the warmest, kindest, wildest, most willing teachers I’ve ever had. He used to say things you’re just not allowed to say, but that needed to be said, and he shook many of us out of our sleepwalking. In this moment, he listened carefully, thought for a long time, and then answered, gently, with a metaphor.
        In order to pump blood through your body, he said, your heart goes through two phases. Diastole is when your heart expands, bringing in new blood; systole is when your heart contracts, pushing blood through your body. Our hearts do both of those: systolic motion, contracting, tightening, confining; diastolic motion, an exuberant release, a forward rush, a new discovery. And that’s not a problem. The problem comes if you get stuck in one of these: that’s a heart attack. That’s death.
        Townsend told me to see the cycle, instead of focusing on one side. He said our emotional lives can beat like our hearts, and we need both phases: if all my moments were emotionally diastolic, I would drain myself away as power seeped out in all directions. If all my movements were systolic, I’d clench my heart tight and tighter until I’d wrung the life from my body like blood from a cloth.
        “But as long as you have both, Azlan,” he told me, “as long as that pressure finds its movement, and your movements find their pause, I think you’re okay.”
        Over the next years, we talked a lot. I learned a lot. I know my teacher had his pains, and I know he gave to the world. We wondered and laughed and shared meals. Sometimes the world gathered in, and sometimes it opened up: a beating heart, alive within its cycle.

“A Request”
        Ursula K. Le Guin

Should my tongue be tied by stroke
listen to me as if I spoke

and said to you, “My dear, my friend,
stay here a while and take my hand;

my voice is hindered by this clot,
but silence says what I cannot,

and you can answer as you please
such undemanding words as these.

Or let our conversation be
as mute as patient amity,

sitting, all the words bygone,
like a stone beside a stone.

It takes a while to learn to talk
the long language of the rock.”

        When I think of kindness and connection, I sometimes think of a man I met in Vietnam. I don’t remember his name. I called him chú. We never said more than two words to each other, and they were always the same two words. He would shake my hand with a warm, supportive strength, he’d smile at me with a loose affection, bottomless as the sea, and I’ll remember him forever.
        It was in Hue, halfway down the Vietnamese coast. I was traveling alone, and one of my stepfather’s friends sent an email to a family who lived there. The parents didn’t speak any English, and they let their two teenage children (a daughter who was a little younger than I was, and a son who was a little older) speak for the family. I didn’t speak any Vietnamese.
        Sitting in front of their house, they started to teach me. “Chào em,” they said. I repeated it: “Chào em.” I asked the daughter what it meant, and she said, “Hello.”
        Then the daughter said, “Chào ahn.” We played, laughing, until I could pronounce the new sounds well enough.
        “What’s it mean?” I asked.
        “Hello,” she said. And her brother started teaching me: “Chào chú,” he said. I practiced, and asked what that meant; “Hello,” he said. I was confused for a little while. Then I understood. In Vietnamese, “hello” changes depending on who you are talking to. So they weren’t just teaching me “Hello.” They were teaching me to say, “Hello little sister,” “Hello big brother,” “Hello aunt” and “Hello uncle.” They were teaching me to be part of the family. Every time I came back to the house, the father would hold out his hand and smile, and I would say, Chào chú. We wouldn’t say anything else to each other for the rest of the evening, but I would see the smile in his eye, and I’d feel his kindness, his consideration, his quiet, well-meaning company.
        Le Guin’s poem has a darkness to it, a sense for the kind of loss that leaves us unable to talk. When she wrote this she was getting older, and I can feel death behind the lines; but she doesn’t seem to fear death. The poem isn’t about death or the dying. There is something in the mute silence of “patient amity,” even for the young and the wild. Looking back, I wonder if chú was teaching me a little of “the long language of the rock.” While I can talk, I’ll talk, while I can listen I’ll listen; while I can look, I’ll look. But if it were all I had, I think simply sitting side by side with you would be enough, once I learned to do it.

        “When you pour out your strength to help, there must be a result, whether you can see it or not.”
                -J. Krishnamurti, At The Feet of the Master

        How wonderful would it be to believe that? Here’s my image: I see a man pouring the water that is his love into the world, but he’s standing in a desert and the water seeps away through the sand. After a few minutes, the sand isn’t even wet anymore. There is no sign of what he’s done. But Krishnamurti insists that he has done something: your “strength to help” has a result. It must, just like fire must warm and water must run downhill. The water you poured out travels somewhere beneath the sand. There are roots. There are seeds. Sooner or later, somewhere, what you have done will help them.
        I often find it hard to believe that. I often feel like I haven’t done enough, or that what I’ve done wasn’t clever enough, so it won’t have an effect. And then Krishnamurti stands and smiles, somewhere just beyond the light of the little campfire I’ve made, and whispers there is something there, “whether you can see it or not.”
        Sometimes, when I feel as though others don’t care or notice that I’m working, when I feel the grinding pain of telling myself I haven’t done enough, Krishnamurti’s thought can wash away that hurt. It is easier to work, then, and sweat, and rest for a while, and smile. The water that evaporates, that seems to disappear, is moisture somewhere, and somewhere it falls as rain.

“Nowadays I’m concerned to be right rather than righteous.” -Stephen Hawking, My Brief History

        I don’t know what Hawking means, here. (That’s an experience, by the way, for which I’m very grateful: near the end of My Brief History, there’s a chapter that ran laughing circles around my head until I thought the floor might be the ceiling, and I stood up into it. That was frustrating: but it was also wonderful to come face to floor with something I just didn’t understand). In context, Hawking’s talking (hehehe–say that out loud) about one of his early books, and how the book is “highly technical” because he was “trying to be as rigorous as a pure mathematician.” In writing this book ‘rigorously,’ he was trying to prove that his study was a worthwhile study, that he Was Excellent. Now, he says, he’s trying a new approach. And maybe that’s the distinction he’s making: the difference between things that try to prove themselves, and things that try to be themselves.
        That reminds me of two stories. First, there’s an old, wonderful story about the Baal Shem Tov, an 18th century Jewish rabbi and mystic. One day the Baal Shem Tov steps down from a carriage on his way to teach. He’s old, so his students stand on either side to help him. The town drunk, sitting in the gutter beside the road, looks up and recognizes this famous teacher:
        “You!” yells the drunk. “You’re the Baal Shem Tov.”
        The drunk struggles to pull himself up to standing. The students are offended that this wreck of a man would dare speak to their teacher, and speak to him so rudely, but the old, wizened Baal Shem Tov waves them back when they step towards the drunk. So the drunk goes on, slurring his words and barely keeping himself on his feet:
        “Teach me all of the Torah while standing on one foot.”
        The Torah, of course, isn’t an easy thing to learn or teach. It’s been carefully read and pondered and argued about for thousands of years. The students are offended. The Baal Shem Tov leans on his walking stick. After all, he’s an old man. But he motions to one of his students, and hands the stick over. He tries to lift one foot off the ground, stumbles, and falls back to both feet. He almost falls over entirely. He tries to lift one foot off the ground again. For a moment he stands, frail, his weight shifting from side to side,  and he looks at the man and he smiles:
        “Try to be kind to people,” says the Baal Shem Tov. “The rest is commentary.”
        One of the joys of telling that story is getting to stand on one foot, barely managing it, and another joy is getting to talk in the loud, slurred voice of the drunkard. And telling it now, I realize for the first time that they’re both people struggling to stand.
        The other story comes from Superman. I like having Superman and the Baal Shem Tov so close together, and I think that they (at least, the better versions of Superman; there are so many) would like it, too. In any case, a great warrior comes to earth to search for Superman. He’s heard how strong the Man of Steel is, and he wants to prove himself by beating Superman in a duel. When he finds our hero in Metropolis, he says hello by tackling Superman into a building.
        Superman tries to ask what’s going on, but the alien warrior isn’t interested in talking. They fight. They’re pretty evenly matched, and most of the comic book deals with these two titans, slugging it out across the skyline, pummeling each other into the landscape–and leaving wrecked streets and buildings behind them.
        And then Superman figures it out: the alien warrior wants to win. He wants to prove that he’s the toughest. So Superman drops his guard a little bit, and the alien catches him a good one on the chin. The Man of Steel goes down like a meteor, breaking the street below him. The other warrior feels proud and goes away.
        “Ouch,” says Superman, and after a minute he pulls himself up.
        “Righteous” comes from the Old English rihtwis. Riht means “right” (as in just, good, and fitting). Wis means “learned” (as in wise; as in “wizard;” Gandalf!), but it also means “way,” “manner,” “appearance,” or “form,” as in “clockwise” and “likewise.” So righteous can mean ‘learned in what is right,’ but it could also mean trying for the appearance of what is right. The first is concerned with being right; the second is concerned with looking right: wearing right’s clothes, imitating right’s accent. Taking right’s prescription glasses and looking serious serious in them.
        Perhaps we don’t need to prove our strength: instead, we can step into it, learn it, share it when we can, and let it be what it is. If we did that, perhaps, like Stephen Hawking, we’d end up more interested in being “right rather than righteous.”

        “But I care about you, Bam,” Ned told him. “That’s what I’ve been teaching all the time–I care about you.” -Ernest Gaines, The Autobiography of Jane Pittman

        Ned’s a teacher in The Autobiography, and I wonder if this is the one lesson that, at heart, all teachers are trying to share. “I care about you.” You matter, to me; your life is your own, but your life reaches out past you. It reaches at least to me. Speaking of me looks like shifting the focus away from you, and I don’t want to do that: caring lets me see you as you, value you as you, not as what I want you to be, not as what you’ll give me, not as what you’ll do for others. In caring for a plant, we give it the water and the space it needs to grow. In caring for another, we give them the space they need to become themselves.
        Caring, as far as I can tell, is always something of a grand leap–I cannot know you, cannot understand you, cannot fathom you. There are haunts inside your head, and there are heavens; but caring for you doesn’t ask to see them. It is a gift given, without any thought of a return. It is standing, respectful, heart open, and looking in your direction, ready to see something that is not me or mine, something that I do not fully understand, something that I witness and am choosing to love.
        Caring looks toward you, looks carefully and intently, but in the end it shifts the focus away from you. It has to. No plant grows without reaching its roots down or its branches up. All healthy roots touch something, and all branches give off a little shade. No person grows without connecting to something larger than themselves: science or music, art or social justice, or cooking a perfect s’more. For once we are ourselves, we can be something for another. When we were not really in the world, when we doubted our own reality, then we had nothing to offer others; but when, perhaps supported by a caring gaze, we choose to see ourselves as real, then we realize that there are listeners outside us, and that our voice (and our silence) speaks. We have grown into ourselves. And in growing, we have learned that our lives reach beyond ourselves.
        The Autobiography follows the lives of freed Southern slaves and their children. They are surrounded by a world of hate, ignorance and violence, but they learn and share (and try to learn and share, and, human, stumble) this lesson there. Gaines insists that this awareness, this connection, grows in and between our hearts. Perhaps that means we can grow it on any ground, in any climate, though it can be difficult to cultivate.
        I think we all need this connection. I think we all can offer it to anyone. Offering this might even be the fundamental human act: the most wondrous magic we practice: the simple truth of caring.

        “The world is too much with us.” -William Wordsworth

        “The world is too much with us,” says Wordsworth: we are “out of tune” with its endless splendor, its muchness, its wave after wave of water and light and hilltop and life. Being out of tune, we often don’t hear the melody. Perhaps that’s precisely because it is “too much:” in a single flower, in a field of grass, in the grains of dust on my table, there is the touch, the color, the taste of more days than I’ll ever spend on any of them. How do we dance with all the endless forests that sway before the breeze?
        Wordsworth ends his poem by wishing that he could have been born an ancient mystic. Then he could look out and “glimpse” a sea-god rising from the water: then he could hear, at the edge of the wind, the sound of the ocean’s messenger calling the waves to rest with his conch-shell horn. The symbols come from Greek mythology, when the water was full of magic. Why shouldn’t it be full of magic now? Richard Feynman, the physicist, insists that simple questions followed deeply lead us beyond the realm of what anyone can explain. Within five feet of me, within the bacteria on my hand, within the patterns of light coming through the window, there is more that I don’t understand than that I do. That doesn’t mean we need to give up on understanding, or on the achievements of technology. “Technology” comes from the Greek tekhne, “craftsmanship:” the practical application of force and understanding. At the same time, tekhne can also mean art and weaving: it can mean taking strands from different places and wrapping them together. It can mean feeling. Perhaps we can keep our planes and computers, and still find our way to an ancient’s awe before the wonders of the world.
        There are storms above us, wider than our sky. We see the storm by glimpsing, for only a moment, the millions of soft flashes from countless snowflakes as they fall. We can also try to make the storm small, by calling it a disturbance in the air, by marking it out with colored dots on TV screens. But it isn’t small. Like the silent glory of the rising sun, which loses nothing in the face of facts about our solar system (and perhaps gains something), that storm is something of awe. It is the weaving of magic, art, and science. It is too much, unless I open my arms and let it wash over me.
        And there, where the paths fade into leaves and grass and the shadows beneath trees, where I am confused and a little lost, there wonder walks, overwhelming, illusive, complete beyond my knowing. There, perhaps, I heard, on the edge of the wind, a conch-shell horn blowing, soothing the waves to sleep. There many things weave together. Somehow I seemed enough, and so it did not seem too much.

        “The action of helping her had tumbled him from his world into hers.” -Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere

        I wonder: what’s so special about my world, my own little me, that I insist so loudly upon it? I’m not talking about my own heart–I want to keep (and add to) that identity, that collection of emotions and weaknesses and talents and perspectives, as it is the only one I can have. I’m talking about my world, my life: my habit of walking this way, having the room quiet for these hours, spending my time here and there. That, perhaps, I could tumble away from. There are so many worlds.
        I think that, by insisting so much on my own world, I make myself more alone. That’s the cost to American freedom: the only place I can be “free” in the sense of “able to do whatever I want” is alone on an imagined frontier. On any real frontier, of course, if I look beyond myself, than I am not alone and this strange, mythic sense of “freedom” fades. If I let myself see that the Cherokee are people, than I need to consider their perspectives. If I realize that the earth can break and bleed and heal, than I need to walk gently. If I acknowledge that the rains only come some times, than I must drink softly, and share this water with the prairie grass. If I ever want to have a family, there will be children’s toys where once there were my books, and more laundry drying before the view I called my own. Perhaps any time we help another–any time we care for another, we tumble a little bit from our world into hers.
        I think I am okay with that. I think I love that. My own stable, comfortable construction of rhythms (conscious and unconscious) is not so perfect as to have me preempt all alterations. I do not want to be “free” and alone, in a room so barren that it cannot have neighbors, or earth beneath it, or clouds above, or walls that were once trees. I would rather have the messiness of you and I together. I would rather go tumbling, a little way, into a world where everything is not ordered by my designs; a world larger than just me.
        It is not easy. Sometimes this frustrates me, this tumbling, and it can certainly leave me dizzy; but there are so many rewards. Look, there is grass here. The clouds blow dark from the horizon, bringing cool, gentle life to the many of which I am one, and this afternoon, perhaps, a neighbor may become a friend and send me tumbling. There is so much more here than I thought when I was the only one thinking.