Dear Questioner who writes Love Poems, who writes Poetry: I love you for this. I love your question and I love your willingness to ask it. You say you are an old woman and that you are disillusioned by the behavior of your fellow humans, and I want to ask: are you really? For if you have lived a long time, you have lived through terrible times, yes, but you have also seen change happen, positive change. The road to beauty is pocked with holes and sand traps, but it’s always there. That’s not to say that I, too, am not also disillusioned. I am out of my mind at the current moment. And I am something I’ve never been before in my life. I am somewhat panicked. I calm myself by looking around, by grounding my reality, by drinking the coffee my husband brings me, by gazing at the olive tree in my yard. I am okay, right now. I am here. And I am communicating with you, you lovely old woman, who worries for the future. I extend my hand toward yours, right here, right now. I tell you we will get through these awful times. I imagine you writing a love story right now. It is the story of your life. It is a long, intricate poem, with many ups and downs. And it sings in harmony with my story, with my long, intricate poem. Am I crazy? Or are we here, together? I hope you will write what you will write, as George says. There is no right or wrong, only the page and your heart on the page. Be well.
Oh Mary. Isn't it an extraordinary thing that we (you!) can extend such warmth out into the world, to be gathered by strangers, who hold it close and are warmed. That must give us all such hope.
Oh, Mary, what a heart-felt sweet response. Thank you. The first 6 months of the pandemic, I had a mantra I repeated at times almost continuously: "I'm alright, right now." Sometimes, now in these days, I feel that same panic that I thought I would never have to feel again. But that's not the way things are.
Just when I get tired of calling Story Club Therapy Club, a situation arises that makes it inevitable. This place is so incredible. I have tears in my eyes after this one. Thank you gifted and sweet questioner for allowing yourself to be so vulnerable in public, to share this with us, thousands of your closest friends. And thank you George, you incredibly f---- wise and insightful teacher and observer of life, who can take someone's wail of pain and reflect it into a song of hope and beauty. I mean really, how did I get here? I am too lucky. This place is too good.
I recall a dialog between Kurt Vonnegut and John Barth. Vonnegut argued that writers write to change the world while Barth rejoined that he just liked to "horse around with words".
There are many reasons to do many things and catharsis can be found in pursuits from writing to yoga to philately. Rather than seeking refuge on the fainting couch as a delicate flower wilted from the oppressive rays of the cruel world's harsh light (which world has beamed that light since Adam and Eve were dismissed from Eden), the despondent in search of succor would do better to align their endeavors with Barth than to commit to Vonnegut's sisyphean ambitions.
Thanks Jay. And bravo for working Philately and Sisyphean into a story club comment..! ( I mean, despondent, succor and endeavors were already pretty great, but the other two, OMG)
A (slightly) alternative view (although maybe it’s really just another version): sometimes despair can be liberating. When you drop all pretenses of hopefulness, you can become grateful for everything, and move forward, perhaps without hope, yet with love, and resolve.
there are many kinds of hope, David. So while it can--yes!--be liberating to give up all hope of, say, a love affair going the way we had wished, i think it is a different thing altogether to give up hope on humankind. If I were to lose that sort of hope right now, I'd turn out the light and never want to wake up.
I feel like I have (at least temporarily) given up hope on humankind, but am trying to push forward anyway. (Possibly I’m deluded?) I probably would just die if I didn’t have a child depending on me. Maybe that love is a form of hope, though I tire of trying to hang on to hope. I’d rather have clarity than hope. But the two may contain one another.
I hear you on giving up on humankind, but we're all humankind, too. I try to remind myself of all the people who keep trying to solve problems...like climate change, or working on peace agreements. I despair, too, but look at all these people doing impossible work. It blows my mind.
True. In the depths of despair (or the heights of elation) we don’t see the whole picture. I keep thinking we’re going to get past killing one another. But if we don’t, it might be true that still there are more angels than devils among us. Maybe the darker angels are just easier to notice, a lot of the time.
Prolly there's many shocking and horrible things going on, and have been going on (think about how the news used to be reported, what was highlighted, what was ignored, things we now know were terrible, etc) but the human brain can't cope with knowing all of this. We didn't evolve knowing everything that was going on everywhere. So here we are, on overwhelm, dipping in and out of despair.
Possibly. Thinking about this one. I can’t make the bad actors be good, but some of them might be good characters, opening themselves to become mirrors of all the good, bad and indifferent creatures that make up all of us. All of us, just a shot away from torture, murder, or love.
Yes, humankind will probably always be crazy, violent, loving, greedy, tribal, stupid etc. Lots of suffering and tragedy. But individual humans can be nice, though, and there's nature, and dogs, and chocolate. There are lots of good things too. I always thought life should be fair. Each person should have the same amount of happiness. It just isn't fair. But still. It's what we've got. I think you can have simultaneous clarity and hope. Or lose hope at times and then get it back. I hope.
Real wisdom here, David. And there is of course a step 'below' even the one you describe.
With this one there's not even the possibility to 'drop all pretenses', because there's barely an 'us' remaining at all. With this one we are smashed, a scattering of shards, and to hope/despair or not is completely out of our hands.
Now we just need to wait and see what happens. It might be psychosis. Or it might be grace, liberation, and a new course of action we’d never have been open to without that smashing. It might be the whole lot (King Lear). But it's not up to us, and part of the psychosis/liberation might be to see that nothing ever really was.
Happened to me once, in a Spanish Burger King. :-)
After that everything became Before Burger King and After Burger King. Terrifying and transforming, as you suggest, and I wouldn't swap it for anything.
Yes! But it’s not the despair itself that is liberating. When we accept the despair as how we feel right now and don’t try to fight it, we no longer look for something to save us and we don’t have to depend on hope to sustain us. All we have to do is to broaden our perspective to allow a wider view of reality, knowing despair can be a legitimate reaction but so can other responses, and to keep moving on, not expecting success or salvation, just continuing to engage with life as it is as best we can.
This resonates with me, David. Maybe "dropping all pretenses" simply means we get to a state where we accept we can't fix certain things beyond our control, and we can more fully observe.
Such a wise, wonderful question and such a thoughtful response from George. I’ve lately not been able to engage with fiction and read/write as much and therefore the external world and despair from world events hits harder these days - couldn’t have asked for a better response than this as a salve for this moment from George. I might actually print this and put it by my writing desk to remind myself to read/write - especially when the world bears down:
“So: avoiding despair can be a form of positive action. And, for me, writing a little every day is one of my best ways of fighting back against despair. Sometimes, yes, it feels like a guilty pleasure (“Why am I making up a theme park when the world is going all to hell?”) But, in a way, it’s like, you know, eating, or bathing: it might not save the world but 1) it’s not making it worse and 2) it’s putting my heart into fighting shape, should a fight arise in which I can actually make a difference.
Writing and reading are gentle actions, that create subtle tides of gentleness in an ungentle world.”
Humaira, thanks for calling out that great statement from George: "putting my heart into fighting shape." What a lovely way to frame empathy and strength.
There's a Talmudic teaching that when it comes to making the world whole: “You are not obligated to complete the task, but neither are you free to desist from it.” Your answer, George, reminds me of this and of how we as writers, by writing honestly and from the heart, with self-knowledge and self-questioning are, at our best, at least not desisting from the call to work toward wholeness.
Recently, I've been thinking about writing a story about the Columbine shooting in order to give it meaning in my head. The story touched my family directly--three sons/stepsons at Columbine (none hurt), friends killed, one of the killers having attended prom with one of my sons, funerals, profound sadness, and a dozen kids hanging out at my house trying to make sense of it all. (They never really did.) It was also a brutally difficult time for me.
This is not a confessional, I promise, but I think some of the craziness in the world today is what's making me want to write about Columbine as a form of sense making.
My best to all of you. We write, we read, we live, we cry, we hug, we pray, we love.
I would love to read this, Patrick. Please do write it. My own life was affected by Virginia Tech. What a tragic and ever-growing club we are of Americans familiar with some version of this story.
I believe I will get to it within the next six months, whether I seek publication or not. If you ever want to check in to see how it's coming, my email is pat.partridge124@gmail.com
Sorry to hear how close to home that tragedy struck, Patrick.
It may seem like a non-sequitur; but it might be worth watching The O.A., which (for me) manages the near impossible: it sort of looks out of the corner of its eye at big topics, wraps them up in wild fantasy, but somehow still manages to say something meaningful.
"What a thing to consider: no matter how long we live, life will always be capable of surprising us, because of the mismatch between Mind, Thinking and World As It Is." Thank you dear questioner and dear George--this is such an insightful, wise way to frame the world, the necessity of fiction in finding and imagining deeper truths, and of reckoning with a world as it is. Fiction lets us imagine a different reality--not as an escape but as seeking, inventing, learning, thinking about the world that might better match our minds thinking. I love this post so much and am so grateful to be in community with writers and readers like this, who ask vulnerable hard questions, and for a response that meets it with such care and wisdom. Thank you George. 💜
As one of my writing teachers always said, the story is smarter than you are. We don't do much decide what to write as decode what we have written, by trusting in our gut and seeing what comes together.
I have a newsletter about this coming out in a couple of days, but stories are kind of magic, the way they can connect people through space and time. And in the worst of times, that magic, whether creating it or receiving it, can be such a balm.
I loved this: "avoiding despair can be a form of positive action. And, for me, writing a little every day is one of my best ways of fighting back against despair. Sometimes, yes, it feels like a guilty pleasure (“Why am I making up a theme park when the world is going all to hell?”) But, in a way, it’s like, you know, eating, or bathing: it might not save the world but 1) it’s not making it worse and 2) it’s putting my heart into fighting shape, should a fight arise in which I can actually make a difference."
My father wrote a book called the 'Look of Distance - Reflections on Suffering and Sympathy in Modern Literature'. He died before the internet but I want him to be part of this conversation, so I'm sharing some of his words. In his introduction he wrote: "...the debate is about whether the reading and teaching of literature can be decent occupations in a universe so much ordered by suffering as this one and about the appropriateness of various responses to suffering--by authors, fictional characters, and readers.... it is about whether in my reading and teaching I am performing something ugly, voyeuristic, and evasive or am doing one of the best and least harmful things I know how to do."
I decided when in college that I couldn't be a world leader and save the world or even part of it, but I could be nice to the people around me, and in writing (and reading) fiction, it is important to me that there be a glimmer of hope somewhere no matter how dark the material. I am continually inspired by the memoir of a holocaust survivor who was a child in a concentration camp. I don't remember her actual words, but one day in the camp, she walked past a beautiful tree and she saw the beauty of the tree and was glad of it.
Perhaps you are remembering the story of the woman and the tree from Victor Frankl's "Man's Search for Meaning." Here it is, in part: Through that window she could see just one branch of a chestnut tree, and on the branch were two blossoms. "I often talk to this tree," she said to me. I was startled and didn't quite know how to take her words. Was she delirious? Did she have occasional hallucinations? Anxiously I asked her if the tree replied. "Yes." What did it say to her? She answered, "It said to me, 'I am here-I am here-I am life, eternal life.”
Joan and questioner, you have indeed asked exactly the question that I have continued to try to understand by writing and by reading, and in this setting. And as an elder, with children and grandchildren, I am grateful for all the responses generated. I especially am nourished by the generosity of how gathering resources for fighting despair is enough. Most of the time.
There are also stories of people in the camps who, despite being starved themselves, shared their meagre food with others, and of people there getting married.
Oh, dear questioner----anybody with the heart & strength to ask such a question as to how to get through already has the answer within her! I, too, am an old woman---oh, let me correct: old-ish, my dotage far ahead of me, if my calculations are right---and I've seen & experienced, like you, lots, and, in unequal measure, joy & heartbreak & everything in between. Through it all, reading & writing have been my sustenance, as, clearly, they have been for you. What gets me through, every time, is beauty. By which I mean I read a beautiful sentence. Which, because it is beautiful, is already true. And then I try to write one. Just one. I fail more often than I succeed, but it is in the attempt that I'm sustained. I think we've all been through too much, and it seems as if this might be recently so but I think that the awful times have always been with us, that there's really no escaping them so much as there is abiding. We may, as "old" women, or older humans of whatever form, have come to our full measure of what we can bear, the horribleness of it all, and maybe that's what's wearing you out, wearing us all out. But I say again, that if you can find one thing of beauty, just one---and I, as I believe you also, find this thing most often in the written word, one beautifully written sentence, and that if you try, within your poetic powers, to answer with your own beauty, you will be if not saved, exactly, then certainly buoyed, made able to survive. Beauty, in all its various forms, is what I believe it comes down to, what keeps us all.
To the questioner - if you ever doubt the power of your words to cast light, just look at George's answer, and the conversation below. You have - with just 200 words - helped us see what a community we are, how at times we share the same feelings of despair, how we persevere despite of it. Just sharing this stuff - and realising we are not alone - eases the burden, just a little.
Becoming a writer - perhaps inevitably, and by necessity - involves an increase in empathy. With that increased empathy, if we all look at every aspect of the world that needs to be addressed, we will be overwhelmed. But to know there are such caring people out there - writers who are trying their best to write stories that matter, that move people - helps me accept on a truly deep level that I don't have to address every aspect of the world that needs addressing.
If I attempt any of this whilst (mistakenly) imagining I am alone, it will be like being the only blood donor in the world. If I give all of my blood in one go, that's it, I'll never give blood again; and even giving all of my blood will only help a tiny number of people. Knowing that there are other donors means I can give a little blood, take the time for my body to replace it, then give again.
Thank you, thanks George, and thanks to you all for helping me see this. It is a precious gift, and one I appreciate very, very deeply.
Thanks Edward. Loved your emphasis on not feeling alone and how the questioner, by sharing their feelings with us, and George, with his acknowledgement of the same, have brought us all together a bit more.
I don't believe the only writing that matters is about real-world issues, by the way! If you write stuff that isn't serious, but makes people laugh (for example), it's doing good in the world.
Agree, Edward! But making people laugh, that can sometimes be very hard work. Not always, of course. As for "real-world issues", it's finally all real-world in the end, although it may not always seem so. That's all we really have. Maybe by "real-world" you mean current events & if so, that word "current" is unstable & will finally pass until we come to the next "current".
Yeah, I agree, writing genuinely funny humour is tough! I was just clarifying that I don't consider writing about 'serious' subjects to be the only meaningful writing.
This is one of the most beautiful and astute observations I’ve read about the nature and purpose of literature, perhaps because you’ve delivered it with such warmth and caring. And a beautiful question as well. I am so enriched by this conversation.
Garrgh, this: " Iwonder if, these days, the mind might find itself in a similar fix – designed to work in small, localized settings, with input from a couple of dozen people we know and care about. And then here comes the world, via media, and the poor nervous system starts responding sympathetically, wanting to help, to solve, to intervene, suffering at other people’s hardships, as it should (as it is designed to do), feeling outraged…but because of the shift in scale, it’s being asked to do more than it can realistically do, and the result is agitation and, sometimes (in my experience) despair." I think this is so true, and that's where stories are a salve and why they have to focus in on the specific, the detail, and through the grain of sand reveal something of the universe to us, because we can understand so little, which is both our flaw as a species and (I hope) our saving grace. The world is too big for our little brains but stories become a filtration system for us - both in by stories we hear and read and out in the stories we tend and grow and put out on the page. Thank you for all of these words.
I too feel the pull of despair if I engage too closely with the darkness in the world.
What I tend to focus on are images and thoughts of hope. As someone [I forget who] told their child, 'Even in the worse disaster, if you look, there are people trying to help'.
The truth is, I don't watch the news on television, I don't listen to the news on the radio, I don't read newspaper articles about any of the horror and darkness in the world. Not because I don't care, but because to open the door even the slightest crack to any of this darkness is, for me, to be overwhelmed. It will infect my heart, my mind, my body, my soul.
I will drown in it.
I will be lost.
I still have a sense of what's going on in the world; I just avoid engaging with it in a way that makes me feel like a direct witness, who is doing nothing about it.
I guard my mental, emotional and spiritual health rigorously. Spending time with family and friends; doing tai chi; getting out for walks, preferably in the countryside; not drinking too much alcohol; protecting my sleep patterns - there's quite a list. Given how isolating being a writer can be, I find it absolutely essential to find things to act as ballast and counterbalance.
Not engaging with darkness is an absolutely vital part of that list.
I do not ignore completely what's going on in the world. This is part of the reason I write: I can engage with a single issue for a time, as long as I feel I'm doing SOMETHING about it. I don't fool myself that writing a play will make any real or lasting difference in the world; I just merely try to shine a little light.
That is all I can do. I can only look at one issue at a time, and even then not forever. I am not built to wrestle with darkness. This is not a choice; if I even try, the darkness will win.
And sometimes - just sometimes - you find out you have made a difference. Someone really 'gets' what you were trying to say with a piece of work, or someone thanks you for taking their struggles seriously enough to put pen to paper, even though that issue doesn't affect you directly.
I've even had questions asked in the Irish Parliament, because of some of what my research for a play about the Irish mother and baby home system uncovered. It's not much; but it's not nothing.
I'm also reminded of an observation by someone whose identity I've long since forgotten. They saw that two places had independently come up with tartan-patterned fabric: Scotland and Patagonia. Their take on this was that both places have wild, rough, jagged, irregular landscapes, with limited colour palates; and hypothesised that tartan was a sort of antidote to this, with it's regularity, wide range of contrasting hues, and grid-like pattern.
It seems to me that, at least some of the time, this can be what art does: provides what is missing in that particular time and place. So in a time of injustice, for example, it can be more profound to write about justice rather than injustice; or about peace in a time of war.
Edward, I do believe you're right about the little things making a difference, all of it adding up. Which put me in mind of this story. Years ago when I was working on a series of books about WWII, I came upon an account of an elderly woman in occupied Paris who was enraged by the Nazis but not sure what she could do about them. She was old and alone and they were brutal and all over the city by the thousands. And then she hit on an idea that soon became her mission. She decided she'd ride the Metro all day every day and whenever a Nazi solider came on board she'd whack him a good one with her cane. Beat that sucker black & blue. This was the job she set for herself, to whack a Nazi, and which you might, rightly, conclude, was a form of madness: they were half her age or less, strong and armed. All she had was a stick. Maybe a very nice stick, but still a stick. She'd counted her age (arguably unwise!), as part of her advantage, and her felicity in wielding that stick/cane to do what she'd determined was her duty. Not bravery (or craziness, as my cowardly self would have said!), but her duty. I don't know how many Nazis she succeeded in clobbering, how long she kept it up, her name or what became of her. But I do believe that her actions made a difference. It was what she could do in the moment, scant though it may have been, but it contributed. Maybe not in any grand way--frail and armed only with a stick!--but she made a difference. Whenever it was that she finally went to her grave, I do believe she knew this, that what she did had mattered. I always think of her when I'm at my most lost or feeling helpless, thinking there's nothing I can do. And then I realize that there is, that stick taking several forms (not all of them necessarily violent!).
"Human beings - we don’t know what they are. Not yet, not fully. The day we do, I suppose, all fiction writing could stop." It is comforting to know that we will never fully know. Or else, or and, the human portrait can change in a nano-second. I love creating a character I think is "good," and then have him or her turn and do something truly damaging. Or vice versa. And I also love getting a character at a crossroads of understanding. And duck. Maybe a seed of comprehension has been planted. But as in life - maybe not.
Thank you for helping us along the road of recovery in our violent and estranged world. I have long believed that writing should provoke thought and, when needed, be a call to action. It's good you have reminded us that writing can also be other things, important things, which are to be valued.
Dear Questioner who writes Love Poems, who writes Poetry: I love you for this. I love your question and I love your willingness to ask it. You say you are an old woman and that you are disillusioned by the behavior of your fellow humans, and I want to ask: are you really? For if you have lived a long time, you have lived through terrible times, yes, but you have also seen change happen, positive change. The road to beauty is pocked with holes and sand traps, but it’s always there. That’s not to say that I, too, am not also disillusioned. I am out of my mind at the current moment. And I am something I’ve never been before in my life. I am somewhat panicked. I calm myself by looking around, by grounding my reality, by drinking the coffee my husband brings me, by gazing at the olive tree in my yard. I am okay, right now. I am here. And I am communicating with you, you lovely old woman, who worries for the future. I extend my hand toward yours, right here, right now. I tell you we will get through these awful times. I imagine you writing a love story right now. It is the story of your life. It is a long, intricate poem, with many ups and downs. And it sings in harmony with my story, with my long, intricate poem. Am I crazy? Or are we here, together? I hope you will write what you will write, as George says. There is no right or wrong, only the page and your heart on the page. Be well.
Beautifully said Mary. Beautiful, wise and honest. Thank you.
Oh Mary. Isn't it an extraordinary thing that we (you!) can extend such warmth out into the world, to be gathered by strangers, who hold it close and are warmed. That must give us all such hope.
Oh, Mary, what a heart-felt sweet response. Thank you. The first 6 months of the pandemic, I had a mantra I repeated at times almost continuously: "I'm alright, right now." Sometimes, now in these days, I feel that same panic that I thought I would never have to feel again. But that's not the way things are.
“You’re not okay. And that’s okay!”
From NPR, To the Best of Our Knowledge:
ttbook.org
I love this response and extend my (dare I say feeble... no-- strong at just turned 64...) hand too.
Just when I get tired of calling Story Club Therapy Club, a situation arises that makes it inevitable. This place is so incredible. I have tears in my eyes after this one. Thank you gifted and sweet questioner for allowing yourself to be so vulnerable in public, to share this with us, thousands of your closest friends. And thank you George, you incredibly f---- wise and insightful teacher and observer of life, who can take someone's wail of pain and reflect it into a song of hope and beauty. I mean really, how did I get here? I am too lucky. This place is too good.
Is this Story Club? Maybe I'm in the wrong room. I thought Group Therapy was three doors down the hall on the left.
Ha! All doors lead to therapy club. We write to better understand ourselves and the world, don't we?
I recall a dialog between Kurt Vonnegut and John Barth. Vonnegut argued that writers write to change the world while Barth rejoined that he just liked to "horse around with words".
There are many reasons to do many things and catharsis can be found in pursuits from writing to yoga to philately. Rather than seeking refuge on the fainting couch as a delicate flower wilted from the oppressive rays of the cruel world's harsh light (which world has beamed that light since Adam and Eve were dismissed from Eden), the despondent in search of succor would do better to align their endeavors with Barth than to commit to Vonnegut's sisyphean ambitions.
Thanks Jay. And bravo for working Philately and Sisyphean into a story club comment..! ( I mean, despondent, succor and endeavors were already pretty great, but the other two, OMG)
Just trying my best to follow Barth's dictum.
It’s possible to monkey around with words while sowing rays (or rats) of light.
A (slightly) alternative view (although maybe it’s really just another version): sometimes despair can be liberating. When you drop all pretenses of hopefulness, you can become grateful for everything, and move forward, perhaps without hope, yet with love, and resolve.
there are many kinds of hope, David. So while it can--yes!--be liberating to give up all hope of, say, a love affair going the way we had wished, i think it is a different thing altogether to give up hope on humankind. If I were to lose that sort of hope right now, I'd turn out the light and never want to wake up.
I feel like I have (at least temporarily) given up hope on humankind, but am trying to push forward anyway. (Possibly I’m deluded?) I probably would just die if I didn’t have a child depending on me. Maybe that love is a form of hope, though I tire of trying to hang on to hope. I’d rather have clarity than hope. But the two may contain one another.
I hear you on giving up on humankind, but we're all humankind, too. I try to remind myself of all the people who keep trying to solve problems...like climate change, or working on peace agreements. I despair, too, but look at all these people doing impossible work. It blows my mind.
True. In the depths of despair (or the heights of elation) we don’t see the whole picture. I keep thinking we’re going to get past killing one another. But if we don’t, it might be true that still there are more angels than devils among us. Maybe the darker angels are just easier to notice, a lot of the time.
Prolly there's many shocking and horrible things going on, and have been going on (think about how the news used to be reported, what was highlighted, what was ignored, things we now know were terrible, etc) but the human brain can't cope with knowing all of this. We didn't evolve knowing everything that was going on everywhere. So here we are, on overwhelm, dipping in and out of despair.
If there were no dark angels, what would stories be, David? Would we need them? Would we even be capable of imagining them?
(Or, to paraphrase Philip K Dick, do bright angels dream of dark angels?)
Possibly. Thinking about this one. I can’t make the bad actors be good, but some of them might be good characters, opening themselves to become mirrors of all the good, bad and indifferent creatures that make up all of us. All of us, just a shot away from torture, murder, or love.
Yes, humankind will probably always be crazy, violent, loving, greedy, tribal, stupid etc. Lots of suffering and tragedy. But individual humans can be nice, though, and there's nature, and dogs, and chocolate. There are lots of good things too. I always thought life should be fair. Each person should have the same amount of happiness. It just isn't fair. But still. It's what we've got. I think you can have simultaneous clarity and hope. Or lose hope at times and then get it back. I hope.
Me too, Joan. I lose clarity all the time, too. Until it shows up out of nowhere at my door at four in the morning, wagging its tail.
Hoping for hope.
David, how are you doing with hope and clarity today?
David the fact that you exist in the world gives me hope. That’s not a joke. I mean it.
That’s a two-way street, my friend, my love.
xo
Real wisdom here, David. And there is of course a step 'below' even the one you describe.
With this one there's not even the possibility to 'drop all pretenses', because there's barely an 'us' remaining at all. With this one we are smashed, a scattering of shards, and to hope/despair or not is completely out of our hands.
Now we just need to wait and see what happens. It might be psychosis. Or it might be grace, liberation, and a new course of action we’d never have been open to without that smashing. It might be the whole lot (King Lear). But it's not up to us, and part of the psychosis/liberation might be to see that nothing ever really was.
Or never was what we always thought it was.
“I am poured out like water…”
Been there, pretty darn close to there. And maybe was changed, by being scattered to the wind.
Happened to me once, in a Spanish Burger King. :-)
After that everything became Before Burger King and After Burger King. Terrifying and transforming, as you suggest, and I wouldn't swap it for anything.
The incredible lightness of being....letting go.
Sometimes letting go is a way of hanging on.
Yes
Love this David!
Yes.
Yes! But it’s not the despair itself that is liberating. When we accept the despair as how we feel right now and don’t try to fight it, we no longer look for something to save us and we don’t have to depend on hope to sustain us. All we have to do is to broaden our perspective to allow a wider view of reality, knowing despair can be a legitimate reaction but so can other responses, and to keep moving on, not expecting success or salvation, just continuing to engage with life as it is as best we can.
Agency.
This resonates with me, David. Maybe "dropping all pretenses" simply means we get to a state where we accept we can't fix certain things beyond our control, and we can more fully observe.
Which might be a way of creating a change wave, almost inadvertently.
Such a wise, wonderful question and such a thoughtful response from George. I’ve lately not been able to engage with fiction and read/write as much and therefore the external world and despair from world events hits harder these days - couldn’t have asked for a better response than this as a salve for this moment from George. I might actually print this and put it by my writing desk to remind myself to read/write - especially when the world bears down:
“So: avoiding despair can be a form of positive action. And, for me, writing a little every day is one of my best ways of fighting back against despair. Sometimes, yes, it feels like a guilty pleasure (“Why am I making up a theme park when the world is going all to hell?”) But, in a way, it’s like, you know, eating, or bathing: it might not save the world but 1) it’s not making it worse and 2) it’s putting my heart into fighting shape, should a fight arise in which I can actually make a difference.
Writing and reading are gentle actions, that create subtle tides of gentleness in an ungentle world.”
Humaira, thanks for calling out that great statement from George: "putting my heart into fighting shape." What a lovely way to frame empathy and strength.
Oh, I noted the same George excerpt too- (before I read everyone else's responses)
There's a Talmudic teaching that when it comes to making the world whole: “You are not obligated to complete the task, but neither are you free to desist from it.” Your answer, George, reminds me of this and of how we as writers, by writing honestly and from the heart, with self-knowledge and self-questioning are, at our best, at least not desisting from the call to work toward wholeness.
I love that quote, thank you so much.
Recently, I've been thinking about writing a story about the Columbine shooting in order to give it meaning in my head. The story touched my family directly--three sons/stepsons at Columbine (none hurt), friends killed, one of the killers having attended prom with one of my sons, funerals, profound sadness, and a dozen kids hanging out at my house trying to make sense of it all. (They never really did.) It was also a brutally difficult time for me.
This is not a confessional, I promise, but I think some of the craziness in the world today is what's making me want to write about Columbine as a form of sense making.
My best to all of you. We write, we read, we live, we cry, we hug, we pray, we love.
A story about Columbine is a very cool idea. I hope you try it!
I would love to read this, Patrick. Please do write it. My own life was affected by Virginia Tech. What a tragic and ever-growing club we are of Americans familiar with some version of this story.
I believe I will get to it within the next six months, whether I seek publication or not. If you ever want to check in to see how it's coming, my email is pat.partridge124@gmail.com
I'll set a reminder on my calendar! I'm at aliciamkenworthy [at] gmail.com
My best to you, as well, Patrick.
Sorry to hear how close to home that tragedy struck, Patrick.
It may seem like a non-sequitur; but it might be worth watching The O.A., which (for me) manages the near impossible: it sort of looks out of the corner of its eye at big topics, wraps them up in wild fantasy, but somehow still manages to say something meaningful.
"What a thing to consider: no matter how long we live, life will always be capable of surprising us, because of the mismatch between Mind, Thinking and World As It Is." Thank you dear questioner and dear George--this is such an insightful, wise way to frame the world, the necessity of fiction in finding and imagining deeper truths, and of reckoning with a world as it is. Fiction lets us imagine a different reality--not as an escape but as seeking, inventing, learning, thinking about the world that might better match our minds thinking. I love this post so much and am so grateful to be in community with writers and readers like this, who ask vulnerable hard questions, and for a response that meets it with such care and wisdom. Thank you George. 💜
Amen, Freya!
As one of my writing teachers always said, the story is smarter than you are. We don't do much decide what to write as decode what we have written, by trusting in our gut and seeing what comes together.
I have a newsletter about this coming out in a couple of days, but stories are kind of magic, the way they can connect people through space and time. And in the worst of times, that magic, whether creating it or receiving it, can be such a balm.
I loved this: "avoiding despair can be a form of positive action. And, for me, writing a little every day is one of my best ways of fighting back against despair. Sometimes, yes, it feels like a guilty pleasure (“Why am I making up a theme park when the world is going all to hell?”) But, in a way, it’s like, you know, eating, or bathing: it might not save the world but 1) it’s not making it worse and 2) it’s putting my heart into fighting shape, should a fight arise in which I can actually make a difference."
My father wrote a book called the 'Look of Distance - Reflections on Suffering and Sympathy in Modern Literature'. He died before the internet but I want him to be part of this conversation, so I'm sharing some of his words. In his introduction he wrote: "...the debate is about whether the reading and teaching of literature can be decent occupations in a universe so much ordered by suffering as this one and about the appropriateness of various responses to suffering--by authors, fictional characters, and readers.... it is about whether in my reading and teaching I am performing something ugly, voyeuristic, and evasive or am doing one of the best and least harmful things I know how to do."
I decided when in college that I couldn't be a world leader and save the world or even part of it, but I could be nice to the people around me, and in writing (and reading) fiction, it is important to me that there be a glimmer of hope somewhere no matter how dark the material. I am continually inspired by the memoir of a holocaust survivor who was a child in a concentration camp. I don't remember her actual words, but one day in the camp, she walked past a beautiful tree and she saw the beauty of the tree and was glad of it.
Perhaps you are remembering the story of the woman and the tree from Victor Frankl's "Man's Search for Meaning." Here it is, in part: Through that window she could see just one branch of a chestnut tree, and on the branch were two blossoms. "I often talk to this tree," she said to me. I was startled and didn't quite know how to take her words. Was she delirious? Did she have occasional hallucinations? Anxiously I asked her if the tree replied. "Yes." What did it say to her? She answered, "It said to me, 'I am here-I am here-I am life, eternal life.”
Gosh, that gave me goose bumps, Mary.
Hi Richard. Yes, it's so very powerful.
Thanks Mary G. It's not the one I remembered but I like it. Talking to trees is always good.
Joan and questioner, you have indeed asked exactly the question that I have continued to try to understand by writing and by reading, and in this setting. And as an elder, with children and grandchildren, I am grateful for all the responses generated. I especially am nourished by the generosity of how gathering resources for fighting despair is enough. Most of the time.
There are also stories of people in the camps who, despite being starved themselves, shared their meagre food with others, and of people there getting married.
Oh, dear questioner----anybody with the heart & strength to ask such a question as to how to get through already has the answer within her! I, too, am an old woman---oh, let me correct: old-ish, my dotage far ahead of me, if my calculations are right---and I've seen & experienced, like you, lots, and, in unequal measure, joy & heartbreak & everything in between. Through it all, reading & writing have been my sustenance, as, clearly, they have been for you. What gets me through, every time, is beauty. By which I mean I read a beautiful sentence. Which, because it is beautiful, is already true. And then I try to write one. Just one. I fail more often than I succeed, but it is in the attempt that I'm sustained. I think we've all been through too much, and it seems as if this might be recently so but I think that the awful times have always been with us, that there's really no escaping them so much as there is abiding. We may, as "old" women, or older humans of whatever form, have come to our full measure of what we can bear, the horribleness of it all, and maybe that's what's wearing you out, wearing us all out. But I say again, that if you can find one thing of beauty, just one---and I, as I believe you also, find this thing most often in the written word, one beautifully written sentence, and that if you try, within your poetic powers, to answer with your own beauty, you will be if not saved, exactly, then certainly buoyed, made able to survive. Beauty, in all its various forms, is what I believe it comes down to, what keeps us all.
“Beauty in all its various forms,” I do believe this is what holds us.
True. Without beauty, no light.
Yes, beauty. And the beauty of the sentence or story in which the syntax of thought and life opens the mind to previously unconsidered possibilities.
This is a gorgeous and necessary reminder Rosanne. thank you.
To the questioner - if you ever doubt the power of your words to cast light, just look at George's answer, and the conversation below. You have - with just 200 words - helped us see what a community we are, how at times we share the same feelings of despair, how we persevere despite of it. Just sharing this stuff - and realising we are not alone - eases the burden, just a little.
Becoming a writer - perhaps inevitably, and by necessity - involves an increase in empathy. With that increased empathy, if we all look at every aspect of the world that needs to be addressed, we will be overwhelmed. But to know there are such caring people out there - writers who are trying their best to write stories that matter, that move people - helps me accept on a truly deep level that I don't have to address every aspect of the world that needs addressing.
If I attempt any of this whilst (mistakenly) imagining I am alone, it will be like being the only blood donor in the world. If I give all of my blood in one go, that's it, I'll never give blood again; and even giving all of my blood will only help a tiny number of people. Knowing that there are other donors means I can give a little blood, take the time for my body to replace it, then give again.
Thank you, thanks George, and thanks to you all for helping me see this. It is a precious gift, and one I appreciate very, very deeply.
Thanks Edward. Loved your emphasis on not feeling alone and how the questioner, by sharing their feelings with us, and George, with his acknowledgement of the same, have brought us all together a bit more.
You're very welcome.
What a beautiful analogy, Edward. That really helped me today. Thank you.
You're very welcome.
I don't believe the only writing that matters is about real-world issues, by the way! If you write stuff that isn't serious, but makes people laugh (for example), it's doing good in the world.
Agree, Edward! But making people laugh, that can sometimes be very hard work. Not always, of course. As for "real-world issues", it's finally all real-world in the end, although it may not always seem so. That's all we really have. Maybe by "real-world" you mean current events & if so, that word "current" is unstable & will finally pass until we come to the next "current".
Yeah, I agree, writing genuinely funny humour is tough! I was just clarifying that I don't consider writing about 'serious' subjects to be the only meaningful writing.
This is lovely, Edward. Thank you.
You're very welcome.
This is one of the most beautiful and astute observations I’ve read about the nature and purpose of literature, perhaps because you’ve delivered it with such warmth and caring. And a beautiful question as well. I am so enriched by this conversation.
Garrgh, this: " Iwonder if, these days, the mind might find itself in a similar fix – designed to work in small, localized settings, with input from a couple of dozen people we know and care about. And then here comes the world, via media, and the poor nervous system starts responding sympathetically, wanting to help, to solve, to intervene, suffering at other people’s hardships, as it should (as it is designed to do), feeling outraged…but because of the shift in scale, it’s being asked to do more than it can realistically do, and the result is agitation and, sometimes (in my experience) despair." I think this is so true, and that's where stories are a salve and why they have to focus in on the specific, the detail, and through the grain of sand reveal something of the universe to us, because we can understand so little, which is both our flaw as a species and (I hope) our saving grace. The world is too big for our little brains but stories become a filtration system for us - both in by stories we hear and read and out in the stories we tend and grow and put out on the page. Thank you for all of these words.
What a profoundly important question!
I too feel the pull of despair if I engage too closely with the darkness in the world.
What I tend to focus on are images and thoughts of hope. As someone [I forget who] told their child, 'Even in the worse disaster, if you look, there are people trying to help'.
The truth is, I don't watch the news on television, I don't listen to the news on the radio, I don't read newspaper articles about any of the horror and darkness in the world. Not because I don't care, but because to open the door even the slightest crack to any of this darkness is, for me, to be overwhelmed. It will infect my heart, my mind, my body, my soul.
I will drown in it.
I will be lost.
I still have a sense of what's going on in the world; I just avoid engaging with it in a way that makes me feel like a direct witness, who is doing nothing about it.
I guard my mental, emotional and spiritual health rigorously. Spending time with family and friends; doing tai chi; getting out for walks, preferably in the countryside; not drinking too much alcohol; protecting my sleep patterns - there's quite a list. Given how isolating being a writer can be, I find it absolutely essential to find things to act as ballast and counterbalance.
Not engaging with darkness is an absolutely vital part of that list.
I do not ignore completely what's going on in the world. This is part of the reason I write: I can engage with a single issue for a time, as long as I feel I'm doing SOMETHING about it. I don't fool myself that writing a play will make any real or lasting difference in the world; I just merely try to shine a little light.
That is all I can do. I can only look at one issue at a time, and even then not forever. I am not built to wrestle with darkness. This is not a choice; if I even try, the darkness will win.
And sometimes - just sometimes - you find out you have made a difference. Someone really 'gets' what you were trying to say with a piece of work, or someone thanks you for taking their struggles seriously enough to put pen to paper, even though that issue doesn't affect you directly.
I've even had questions asked in the Irish Parliament, because of some of what my research for a play about the Irish mother and baby home system uncovered. It's not much; but it's not nothing.
The little things we do, do make a difference.
I'm also reminded of an observation by someone whose identity I've long since forgotten. They saw that two places had independently come up with tartan-patterned fabric: Scotland and Patagonia. Their take on this was that both places have wild, rough, jagged, irregular landscapes, with limited colour palates; and hypothesised that tartan was a sort of antidote to this, with it's regularity, wide range of contrasting hues, and grid-like pattern.
It seems to me that, at least some of the time, this can be what art does: provides what is missing in that particular time and place. So in a time of injustice, for example, it can be more profound to write about justice rather than injustice; or about peace in a time of war.
Edward, I do believe you're right about the little things making a difference, all of it adding up. Which put me in mind of this story. Years ago when I was working on a series of books about WWII, I came upon an account of an elderly woman in occupied Paris who was enraged by the Nazis but not sure what she could do about them. She was old and alone and they were brutal and all over the city by the thousands. And then she hit on an idea that soon became her mission. She decided she'd ride the Metro all day every day and whenever a Nazi solider came on board she'd whack him a good one with her cane. Beat that sucker black & blue. This was the job she set for herself, to whack a Nazi, and which you might, rightly, conclude, was a form of madness: they were half her age or less, strong and armed. All she had was a stick. Maybe a very nice stick, but still a stick. She'd counted her age (arguably unwise!), as part of her advantage, and her felicity in wielding that stick/cane to do what she'd determined was her duty. Not bravery (or craziness, as my cowardly self would have said!), but her duty. I don't know how many Nazis she succeeded in clobbering, how long she kept it up, her name or what became of her. But I do believe that her actions made a difference. It was what she could do in the moment, scant though it may have been, but it contributed. Maybe not in any grand way--frail and armed only with a stick!--but she made a difference. Whenever it was that she finally went to her grave, I do believe she knew this, that what she did had mattered. I always think of her when I'm at my most lost or feeling helpless, thinking there's nothing I can do. And then I realize that there is, that stick taking several forms (not all of them necessarily violent!).
"Human beings - we don’t know what they are. Not yet, not fully. The day we do, I suppose, all fiction writing could stop." It is comforting to know that we will never fully know. Or else, or and, the human portrait can change in a nano-second. I love creating a character I think is "good," and then have him or her turn and do something truly damaging. Or vice versa. And I also love getting a character at a crossroads of understanding. And duck. Maybe a seed of comprehension has been planted. But as in life - maybe not.
Thank you for helping us along the road of recovery in our violent and estranged world. I have long believed that writing should provoke thought and, when needed, be a call to action. It's good you have reminded us that writing can also be other things, important things, which are to be valued.