Almost Everything Page 5

  The willingness to look at and maybe change addictive behavior results only from internal pain, severe hangovers, and public disgrace, the sense of being soiled, inside and out, craving a shower with something rough to scour it all off, like an extra-strength loofah. The courage to change the things we can means the stuff inside the snow globe, not where it sits on the mantel. Of course we hate the corporate evildoers and what they are doing to us and to the earth, assuring a future for our grandchildren that is more horrifying than anything we’ve lived through. Of course we hate the man who raped our friend or abused our child. And I’m going out on a limb here, but almost everyone hates the spokespeople for the NRA.

  Awareness helped me make progress in my evolution, like going from finger paints to potato prints. I began to hear people who busted me. One morning recently at the beginning of her sermon, my pastor cited the same Dr. King quotation I’d just come upon, that hate cannot drive out hate, only love can, and I thought, “I heard it the first time.” Then at the end of the sermon, wrapping up, she said, sighing, “Just don’t let them get you to hate them.”

  I have not been the same since. She ruined hate for me.

  Of course my first response was like Dana Carvey’s Church Lady, “Well! Isn’t that special,” but the pastor’s words really got to me. I shared my experience at lunch not long after with someone whose feelings had led to a ten-pound weight gain and a persistent rash: her hate showed. I told her about my project and sucked her into my web; we got into the juiciest discussion about the origins of hate. She said that as a child she’d hated her father for how he treated her mother while he pretended to the world to be such a good guy. And yet she desperately wanted his approval. But he didn’t respond to her, and she was left alone with her own shame and self-loathing about wanting to be appreciated by a mean man. It felt like there was domestic violence going on inside her, between the bully and the mother. The conflict left a mucky mess within her, like a cake that wouldn’t completely bake, no matter how long you left it in the oven. Without intervention, she turned on herself by feeling ashamed, and she could settle into that, because it was home: bullying, shame, longing.

  Of course you would hate any man who made you feel like this. Talking about it that day helped her break out of the cake, like a showgirl.

  Everyone with whom I shared my pastor’s words experienced something similar. Haters want us to hate them, because hate is incapacitating. When we hate, we can’t operate from our real selves, which is our strength. Now that I think of it, this is such a great reason to give up our hate—as revenge, to deprive the haters of what they want.

  Some people are able to distance themselves from the people they can’t stand by simply not watching the news. Not me. Also, avoiding the news sometimes just suppresses the angry, scared feelings, which can do damage internally, and unconsciously, I had always been more apt to fixate and spew, until recently when the hate started kicking my butt.

  Something that helps is to look at adversaries as people who are helping you do a kind of emotional weight training, Nautilus for your character. They may have been assigned to you, to annoy or exhaust you. They are actually caseworkers. When my pastor calls the most difficult, annoying people in her life her grace-builders, I want to jump out the window. I am so not there yet, but I understand what she’s talking about.

  Awareness spritzes us awake. Being awake means that we have taken off the blinders. We can choose to see or to squinch our eyes shut like a child, which looks silly on people over eighty pounds. Awareness means showing up, availing oneself of the world, so there is the chance that empathy will step up to bat, even in this lifetime. If we work hard and are lucky, we may come to see everyone as precious, struggling souls.

  God is better at this than I am.

  In my defense, it is my understanding that God is both here and on another, gentler plane, and does not have my sensitive digestive system. Frederick Buechner addresses this: “And then there is the love for the enemy—love for the one who does not love you but mocks, threatens, and inflicts pain. The tortured’s love for the torturer. This is God’s love. It conquers the world.” The book this came from is called The Magnificent Defeat, which is about surrender—something else that is a bit of a stretch for me. My secret belief is that if we surrender, then we give up all hope of delaying the effects of our global catastrophe, of creating a world that is less excruciating for children and the poor.

  Surrender might have come more naturally to us if we had not had families. I’m just saying.

  Having ruled out surrender as the solution to my self-righteous agitation, I decided to at least make hate a nice cup of tea. I sat with it and listened to it. I saw that I was not in charge of correcting it. But to my credit, I didn’t run. I was raised to believe that politeness covered a multitude of sins, so I sat there pleasantly, got it a little more tea, then eventually handed it its hat and thanked it for coming. Then I got on with the work I can actually accomplish: Picking up litter. Sending donations to organizations that make the world more fair and kind. (I’ll never give up on this.) I am in charge of feeding my animals, as they have no opposable thumbs. I am in charge of making my grandson’s lunches. I am not in charge of making legal decisions about gun rights, although I am positive my thoughts about gun rights are the right thoughts, that they are God’s thoughts.

  I know that if I saw a child hurt an animal, God would agree with me that it wouldn’t be a good idea to buy that child a gun when he becomes a teenager. While my tea with hate helped me see my rage toward rabid gun lobbyists, it also allowed me to notice love and compassion for that screwed-up little child who must have been so violated to want to hurt animals. He must have been nearly destroyed, and thus he destroys. (Remind you of anyone?) But I am also sure there are precious, indissolubly good parts in him. The right teacher could work miracles. I was snatched off the path of self-loathing by teachers who were on the ball and saw ways to redirect my fear into creation. This would be my prayer for the child—one amazing teacher.

  Ah, prayer. In all the excitement, I’d sort of forgotten to pray. Make me a channel of Thy peace, that where there is hatred, let me sow love, or at least not fertilize the hate with my dainty bullshit.

  There was progress over the course of the time I spent in my private hate workshop. There were setbacks, too. The white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, our government’s halfhearted response to the hurricane that devastated Puerto Rico. I returned again and again to my favorite hate story in the New Testament, the story of the Good Samaritan, which Jesus tells in Luke. This story would have horrified any good Jew within earshot, as Jews despised Samaritans (long story, family feud). “Good Samaritan” to them would have been a paradox, like “saintly Muslim” to some of our elected officials. They likely would have said, “The only good Samaritan is a dead Samaritan.” And yet Jesus makes a Samaritan the hero of the story, because he alone is moved to compassion to help someone in need.

  The part I like most about Luke’s story is the lawyer who tries to trap Jesus with a trick question about who his neighbor is, so he can find a loophole in Jesus’ appeal to love thy neighbor. The lawyer wants to narrowly define neighbor so he can say, “In my view, this person is not a neighbor, so I can continue to hate, to fear him and treat him as badly as I want,” which is straight from today’s front pages. That, I am sorry to admit, is what I might have tried.

  Curiously, the word for moved is from the word for guts: in Jesus’ day, Jews thought, somewhat like us, that the strongest feelings resided not in the heart, but in the deepest innards, which are hard—for good reason—to ignore. It is a word that’s used elsewhere in the New Testament for what Jesus feels when he looks at ordinary struggling people who don’t know how to get through the day. He is moved. Can the traveler left for dead be in a position to feel moved, or feel anything other than surprised gratitude for the Samaritan? Is surprised gratitude the same as lov
e? I don’t know. But I think it can be where love begins.

  Becoming intimate with hate slowly increased my self-respect. I did not inherit the genetic coding to feel sure of myself. (I’m sure your DNA is just fine.) Hate helped me meet my inner traffic cop, employed to stand in for self-care, who ticketed and shamed my brothers and me as a misguided public service when we fell short. An innocent mistake.

  But there are ways to shake him: surrender, empathy, and celebration throw him off.

  To surrender is to give up to. You can hold up your hands, palms forward, like someone is pointing a gun at you, or palms up, begging for help, or arms and hands upward, as if lifting something to the sky. In every case, though, you first have to put down your weapons.

  Empathy begins when we realize how much alike we all are. My focus on hate made me notice I’m too much like certain politicians. The main politician I’m thinking of and I are always right. I, too, can be a blowhard, a hoarder, needing constant approval and acknowledgment, needing to feel powerful. This politician had an abusive father, but he managed to stay alive, unlike his brother. I don’t think he meant to grow up to be a racist who debased women. But he was raised afraid and came to believe that all he needed was a perfect woman, a lot of money, and maybe a few more atomic weapons. He must be the loneliest, emptiest man on earth, while I am part of a great We, motley old us. We show up, as in the folktale about stone soup, and we bring and give and put what we can into the pot, and this pot fills up, and we know it.

  Celebration as a command? How great is that? Outdoor concerts, community hikes, birthday parties, worship services, street fairs. Have another bialy. That’s an order.

  This country has felt more stunned and doomed than at any time since the assassinations of the 1960s and the Vietnam War, and while a sense of foreboding may be appropriate, the hate is not. At some point, the hate becomes an elective. I was becoming insane, letting politicians get me whipped up into visions of revenge, perp walks, jail. And this was satisfying for a time. But it didn’t work as a drug, neither calming nor animating me. There is no beauty or safety in hatred. As a long-term strategy, based on craziness, it’s doomed.

  No one can take this hatred off me. I have to surrender it every time I become aware of it. This will not go well, I know. But I don’t want my life’s ending to be that I was toxic and self-righteous, and I don’t know if my last day here will be next Thursday or in twenty years. Whenever that day comes, I want to be living, insofar as possible, in the Wendell Berry words “Be joyful though you have considered all the facts,” and I want to have had dessert. Maybe insanity will not change to wisdom and a focus on the common good anytime soon, but I can bring less hate to the pot of stone soup, the common well, less of my unbaked cake batter. More rosemary, more carrots. (That is not a bad mantra.)

  Hating the way I was feeling helped me give up Camel cigarettes thirty-two years ago, and then alcohol. It is good to surrender things that poison us and our world. Am I free of such toxicity now? Well, about forty percent, and that is a pretty good deal. I’ll take it.

  Hate weighed me down and muddled my thinking. It isolated me and caused my shoulders to hunch, the opposite of sticking together and lifting our hands and eyes to the sky. The hunch changes our posture, because our shoulders slump, and it changes our vision, as we scowl and paw the ground. So as a radical act we give up the hate and the hunch the best we can. We square our shoulders and lift our gaze.

  SIX

  Writing

  So, writing. What a bitch. I suppose being any kind of artist is hard at times, most times, and while my aim is to bring hope to anyone creating art, my specialty is writing, so I will use this one modality as shorthand to discuss the challenges of creation.

  Writing almost always goes badly for everyone, except for Joyce Carol Oates.

  If you do finish what you’re writing, you will probably not sell your book, although you may, for much less than you were hoping (or deserve).

  No one cares if you continue to write, so you’d better care, because otherwise you are doomed.

  If you do stick with writing, you will get better and better, and you can start to learn the important lessons: who you really are, and how all of us can live in the face of death, and how important it is to pay much better attention to life, moment by moment, which is why you are here.

  Sometimes I tell rooms full of adults everything I know about writing, which takes about an hour. Sometimes I tell small rooms full of my young grandson’s colleagues a shorter version of the same thing, which takes twenty minutes. The longer version begins with this:

  The stories we have loved, beginning with our earliest days, are how we have survived, grown, and not ended up in gutters barking at ants (knock wood). These stories have saved us, like Jesus and the Buddha and Martin Luther King have saved our lives and souls, and Molly Ivins, Mary Oliver, Gandhi, and E. B. White have saved our sanity, our hearts, and our families.

  Both versions almost immediately mention that the authors of all the books we love (these salvation stories) knew that the great secret of writing is to keep one’s butt in the chair. (My first-graders go crazy at the word butt; they could die laughing. Now I’ve got them where I want them—paying attention is ninety percent of writing.) These authors tell the stories that come through them, one day at a time. I tell the kids an old story: Fifty-five years ago, when my older brother’s fourth-grade term paper on birds was due the next day and he hadn’t started, my dad sat him down with his Audubon books, paper, and pencils. My brother was in tears. Dad said to him, “Just take it bird by bird, buddy.” All he had to do was read and then write about pelicans in his own words. Then chickadees. Then dark-eyed juncos. My brother drew beautifully. Bird by bird, magical things come to be.

  My kids know that they get to ask people to read their stories and help make them better, while my grown-up students have forgotten this, how much help we need, deserve, and can ask for. My grown-ups know that if you are a writer, everything that happens is grist for the writing mill, for transformation, and just as important, for revenge. Also, you will have great stories and details to heap into your subconscious mind’s buckboard, for later literary use or blackmail.

  The first year I gave my grandson’s class the writing talk, when he was in kindergarten, the kids paid attention fairly well for five-year-olds. I talked about bird by bird, and writing really poopy first drafts, which they loved. But Jax came up afterward, pulled me aside, and said sotto voce, “Nana, that was terrible.”

  I was shocked. “What?”

  “You said you could teach us how to write books, but you only taught us how to write one bad page.” He was disappointed in me, and maybe bitter.

  “Oh, dearest,” I said. “That’s pretty much all I have to offer.”

  But one bad page a day becomes a book. The only problem is, from where does that page spring?

  Memory, research, early-morning visions, and imagination. I tell little kids mostly about the last one, that there is a movie screen in their minds called the imagination, which they can see if they close their eyes. Writing means you scribble down what you can see on the screen and all around you. Close your eyes, or open them and look around, at one another’s faces, look out the window at that shameless diva, nature. Wild, right?

  I want to tell them to savor and delight in everything they write from now until junior high, because after sixth grade they will never think they are any good at anything. It’s never, ever, ever good enough until you learn it’s good enough. You need to reestablish the purpose of writing. If it’s fame, money, or power, you’re doomed. One friend, the loveliest, dearest man you can imagine, thirty years clean and sober, happily married, won an Oscar for a song he wrote—among the greatest achievements for a songwriter. And it bought him one day. One day of self-esteem and satisfaction.

  If it’s creative release, or you have a story to tell, or if you’ve just
always wanted to write a novel, or you just love to write, the way other people like to garden, you’re good.

  I once shared this belief at a writing conference in a place of extraordinary beauty and wealth, in the hourlong version of the talk I give to younger kids. When I got to the part where I promise, swearing on my soul, that publication will not make the writer whole, healed, and joyful, for any length of time, there was an outburst from a seat halfway down the lecture hall. A round, beet-red man about my age, drunk at ten-thirty in the morning, shouted about how wrong I was to say people would not be made whole if they got a book published. Yes, they would! He had made a fortune and was so happy, he yelled, shaking his fist at me, and had been ever since publication. He owned two houses in this town of Alpine beauty. “You are telling these people lies!”

  This is not an isolated example. Many of the saddest, meanest, most jealous and destructive people I have known or dated have been highly successful writers. So don’t write thinking that publication will fill in the Swiss-cheesy holes in your soul or hoping that it will bring you personal improvement, because it won’t. Write because you have to, because the process brings great satisfaction. Write because you have a story to tell, not because you think publishing will make you the person you always wanted to be. There is approximately zero chance of that happening.

  When my grandson was in first grade, I asked one of his colleagues to explain to the rest of the class what a story was: “The telling part.” That’s exactly right. I asked the class if there was another way to say that, but my using the word say gave them an unfair advantage, because another child said, “The saying thing, of what happens.” Flannery O’Connor once gave her neighbor at the end of the road some of her stories, and when the neighbor returned them, she said, “Well, them stories just gone and shown you how some folks would do.”