My friend Malcolm told me a story about pronghorns recently, the North American creatures sometimes confused with antelopes. They can run at speeds of nearly sixty miles an hour, much, much faster than any of their existing predators. Some biologists think they’re still outrunning the dangerous species that went extinct at the end of the Pleistocene, specifically the cheetahs that existed on this continent. And then Malcolm asked what each of us is still outrunning and whether we can tell when our predator has been extinct for ten thousand years.
She was so many people on the long road downhill. When I read my own old letters in which I talk about her, I see someone I hope I no longer am, someone who didn’t see the earliest stages of Alzheimer’s as anything more than a new phase of a capricious, demanding personality, though I think I was kinder in person than in the venting letters written after I’d done my best. I read those old e-mails and letters and remember the person who wrote them who no longer seems to be me. I blush, but to look at them is to recognize that I’ve also metamorphosed.
Sometimes I get mail for people who lived in my home before I did, and sometimes my own body seems like a home through which successive people have passed like tenants, leaving behind memories, habits, scars, skills, and other souvenirs. Even much later, my heart lagged behind, for I was still sometimes struggling against the extinct mothers of bygone years, working out the past, or working over the past, when the present was something else entirely. It didn’t interfere with tending the person who had been pared back to essentials and still had that to teach me. Toward that person I could be entirely solicitous and unguarded.
Neither of those people exist any longer, and they called each other into existence in a peculiar way. My sister-in-law once said I was like an electrical ground; my mother sparked and her current ran into me when I entered the room, and I realized that someone else existed when I wasn’t around, someone I never met. I was perhaps also someone she never met. I was obdurate, stern, heavily armored for survival when she was around in those years. I survived, and then everything changed.
When I look back at those decades that she was furious that I was different from her and I was terrified of being like her and trying hard not to be, I see how much alike we were, how much she shaped some of my most essential tastes, interests, and values. She was preoccupied all her life with moral questions and principles, and thought one’s life had to be justified by achievement and contribution, and that I inherited. More ethereal things came too, a pleasure in flowers and the bare branches of trees, in books, a certain kind of restlessness and uncertainty. And of course I look a great deal like her.
The ancient Greeks used a word, sungnômé, that means to understand, to sympathize, to forgive, to pardon, a word that refuses to distinguish between thinking and feeling. It proposes that understanding is the beginning of forgiveness or the thing itself. The scope of this word implies that it takes empathy to try to understand and understanding to reach the empathy that is forgiveness—that they proceed together, helping each other along the way. Or that they were never separate in the first place. We use the word understanding that way in English, and a request for forgiveness often asks for understanding (which can veer into peddling excuses).
When I was younger, I studied the men I was involved with so carefully that I saw or thought I saw what pain or limitation lay behind their sometimes crummy behavior. I found it too easy to forgive them, or rather to regard them with sympathy at my own expense. It was as though I saw the depths but not the surface, the causes but not the effect. Or them and not myself. I think we call that overidentification, and it’s common among women. But gods and saints and boddhisattvas must see the sources of all beings’ actions and see their consequences, so that there is no self, no separation, just a grand circulatory system of being and becoming and extinguishing. To understand deeply enough is a kind of forgiveness or love that is not the same as whitewashing, if you apply it to everyone, and not just the parade through your bed.
Now I see my mother in her prime as a woman driven by unseen forces, unclear on the consequences of her actions, unclear on her own desires and contradictions, hemmed in by the unexamined, suffering and occasionally celebrating: an intricate landscape whose various parts were not acquainted with one another, a labyrinth in which she was lost. It was always clear that her reaction to me came out of misery that flowed through her as a set of conventional stories, commands, values, and standards. We were the worthless gender together.
Vengeance and forgiveness, two of the principal methods of resolution we’re offered, seem to me to come out of accounting (and we even say accountable to mean responsible and say forgiven about monetary debts). It’s as though a wrong is a debt, and vengeance collects it. You did something terrible; I do something terrible as payback; the score is settled (in theory, though cycles of revenge have a tendency to be endless). Or I forgive you, and your debt is canceled because of my magnanimity.
Maybe the word forgive points in the wrong direction, since it’s something you mostly give yourself, not anyone else: you put down the ugly weight of old suffering, untie yourself from the awful, and walk away from it. Forgiveness is otherwise a public act or a reconciliation between two parties, but what goes on in the heart is a more uncertain process; suddenly or gradually something no longer matters, as though you have traveled out of range or outlived it. Then sometimes it returns just as you congratulate yourself on its absence.
My mother regretted not going to college, but she did take classes for free for a while when she was a clerical worker at New York University in her early twenties. She took bookkeeping classes because it seemed more practical than whatever transformation she yearned for, whatever elevation the word college conjured for her. And it was practical; for a decade after her divorce, she was the bookkeeper for a theatrical and modeling agency, keeping accounts in order as beautiful people rushed in and out. She was a bookkeeper in other things as well, in that she expected the accounts to all come out even, and brooded over the old imbalances in the ledgers of life.
She had wanted recompense, fairness, columns of numbers that added up, credit that could be cashed in. Catholicism’s economy of sin, virtue, repentance, punishment, and reward still oriented her long after she left the church, but forgiveness is also a powerful force in Christianity. Finally, all that reckoning and accounting faded away, the sense of poverty, the conviction she was owed, the chessboard war. Vengeance and forgiveness are about reconciling the accounts, but accounting is an ugly description of the tangled ways we’re connected. I sometimes think everything comes out even in the end, but an end that arches beyond the horizon, beyond our capacity to perceive or measure, and that in many cases those who trespass against you do so out of a misery that means the punishment preceded and even precipitated the crime. Maybe that’s acceptance.
One branch of medieval Chinese Buddhists focused on filial piety toward mothers, rather than the fathers at the center of Confucianism. David Graeber describes this perspective in his book Debt: “A mother’s kindness is unlimited, her selflessness absolute; this was seen to be embodied above all in the act of breastfeeding, the fact that mothers transform their very flesh and blood into milk. . . . In doing so, however, they allow unlimited love to be precisely measured.
“The kindness of our parents is said to be as vast as the horizon of heaven.” These matriphile Buddhists quantified the milk with an arbitrary figure—180 pecks, or about 1,500 gallons—but made its value unquantifiable. The debt was so boundless it could not be repaid and did not have to be—except by donating to the Inexhaustible Treasuries of the monasteries, so that, like Jean Sans-Peur, the mothers would have monks praying for them—saying sutras for them in this case. What I have to say could count as a sutra or another sin.
13 • Apricots
Two pints of those apricots from a summer long ago still survive. I live a few miles away from where I did when I canned them, my mother’
s house from which the apricots came was sold years ago, both of us are different people, and so much has happened, so much has changed, but not inside those glass jars. The fruit as I look at it now on the table before me is a solid deep orange color, halves heaped up on top of one another to the rim of the lid, the syrup still clear, though the length of vanilla bean has disintegrated into black crumbs at the bottom of the jar.
The fruit is in wide-mouth jars whose golden lids are a little dusty, but whose vacuum seal has held. Each jar is full, though not so full that the halves crush or confine each other; they float free in their tiny ocean of sugar water. I no longer know what occasion would be momentous enough to open the jars or who I would feed them to, this fruit from a tree in the garden of a long-gone house, this windfall that arrived one faraway August day.
The two jars before me are like stories written down; they preserve something that might otherwise vanish. Some stories are best let go, but the process of writing down and giving stories away fixes a story in its particulars, like the apricots fixed in their sweet syrup, and the tale then no longer belongs to the writer but to the readers. And what is left out is left out forever.
The mountain of apricots that briefly occupied my bedroom floor was so many things besides food. It was a riddle and an invitation; it fed imagination and inquiry first. Upon its arrival it seemed to be an allegory for something yet to happen. A year later that unstable heap seemed like a portrait of my life at that time, my life that also had to be sorted, the delicious preserved, the damage pared away. Processed and turned into jam, preserves, and liqueur, the actual apricots went onward as gifts to the people I was close to and the people who helped me during that era of emergency. I ate some myself and drank plenty of thimblefuls of that liqueur.
But I now see the apricots as an exhortation to tell of the time that began with their arrival. As a gift from my mother, or her tree, they were a catalyst that made the chaos of that era come together as a story of sorts and an invitation to examine the business of making and changing stories and locate the silences in between. “It is only by putting it into words that I make it whole,” Virginia Woolf once wrote.
She continued, “This wholeness means that it has lost its power to hurt me; it gives me, perhaps because by doing so I take away the pain, a great delight to put the severed parts together. Perhaps this is the strongest pleasure known to me. It is the rapture I get when in writing I seem to be discovering what belongs to what. . . . From this I reach what I might call a philosophy; at any rate it is a constant idea of mine; that behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we—I mean all human beings—are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art.”
The sudden appearance of the patterns of the world brings a sense of coherence and above all connection. In the old way of saying it, tales were spun; they were threads that tied things together and from them the fabric of the world was woven. In the strongest stories we see ourselves, connected to each other, woven into the pattern, see that we are ourselves stories, telling and being told. Stories like yours and worse than yours are all around, and your suffering won’t mark you out as special, though your response to it might.
One evening, while listening to a blues program on the radio, I heard the blues musician Charlie Musselwhite tell about how he stopped drinking himself to death. In 1987 a toddler fell down a well in Midland, Texas, and the story of her rescue dominated the news for the fifty-eight hours it took hundreds of rescuers to get her out. Jessica McClure, not yet two years old, stuck twenty-two feet down a well eight inches in diameter, sang nursery rhymes and a song about Winnie the Pooh, while workers frantically drilled through the hard bedrock of her backyard.
Radio personalities talked about her, television news programs swarmed the site and focused obsessively on her plight, and newspapers made it a national front-page story. The event was said to be the accursed birth of cable-network news and round-the-clock news coverage. Musselwhite heard about her on the radio when he was driving to work and thought, “Man! My problems were small compared to hers. Why couldn’t I be even half as brave as she’s being? I thought ‘That’s it. Until she gets out, I’m not having another drink.’ It was a form of prayer for her from me. By the time they got her out, I was out too.” He never drank again.
A physical therapist told me that chronic pain is treatable, sometimes by training people to experience it differently, but the sufferer “has to be ready to give up their story.” Some people love their story that much even if it’s of their own misery, even if it ties them to unhappiness, or they don’t know how to stop telling it. Maybe it’s about loving coherence more than comfort, but it might also be about fear—you have to die a little to be reborn, and death comes first, the death of a story, a familiar version of yourself.
It was as though Musselwhite forgot himself, got lost in the forest of stories, and came back not so attached to his story. That stopping drinking was his first thought shows how much it was already on his mind. It was as though he had been staring at the door when a key fell through the window, and of course he himself was the prison, the door, the window, and the key. Like a fairy-tale protagonist, he was rescued by his empathy with an even more fragile creature, and if the story of the girl in the well was a ladder out of his own hell, compassion was the force that got him to the ladder and maybe up it. His will to rescue her rescued him.
What the singing child at the bottom of the well means depends on whose life you look at. A photographer got the Pulitzer Prize for his image of the swaddled, injured, dirt-smeared girl being returned to the surface of the earth in a crowd of men in jumpsuits and hard hats. The slender firefighter who got her out was overwhelmed by the attention he received and maybe given no room to be traumatized by what was supposed to be a triumph. His mother collected all the stories of his feats and subsequent honors in a scrapbook he took to throwing across the room.
He had gone headfirst down the parallel hole the rescuers drilled, trapped in a narrow stone passage that pressed on his chest, using lubricant and props to inch the child out of her trap—one account compared him to an obstetrician delivering a child, upside down and underground, but he was also like a man who was forced back down the tight passage of birth that was also potentially a grave. After the fanfare died down, his marriage failed, he lost his job because he was strung out on painkillers, and several years later, at the age of thirty-seven, he drove out to his parent’s ranch, borrowed their shotgun and some shells, telling his mother he wanted to shoot a rattlesnake, and killed himself.
The story meant something else to the philosopher Peter Singer, who used the incident of the child in the well as an example of the irrationality of our impulses. People moved by the story sent the child at its center money, perhaps as much as a million dollars. The donations didn’t get her out of the well, though the money did help her teenage parents move to a better home. The rest of it was put in trust for her to collect when she turned twenty-five in 2011. Singer pointed out that worldwide about 67,500 children died of poverty-related causes during the two and a half days that Jessica McClure was down the well, and the money that didn’t save her could’ve helped them.
He talked about our “two distinct processes for grasping reality and deciding what to do: the affective system and the deliberative system.” As he explains it, the former deals in images and stories, and generates emotional responses; the latter works with facts and figures and speaks to the rational, reasoning mind. It’s clear which one he values most. But it must be the affective system that brings something to the rational mind, that chooses to listen to a story about a child or 67,500 children, that is convinced they matter and that you must respond.
Stories of suffering and destruction are endless and overwhelming these days, and you cannot respond to all of them. If you don’t shut them out entirely, you must choose which to respond to and how to respond via both affect
ive and deliberative processes. The two horses are harnessed to the same wagon; maybe there is only one horse who thinks and feels, and maybe there should be one word for the process too, like the word understanding we use to mean forgiving or being aware.
Jessica McClure avoided the public eye, went to college, married, had children of her own, grew old enough to collect her trust fund. Poor children continue to die of preventable causes, and other poor children live because of strangers’ kindness expressed in money and involvement. Charlie Musselwhite got out of his well thanks to his empathic involvement in McClure’s story. You can’t calculate in advance who will be saved, how effect ripples outward. His most recent album, his first entirely of his own material, tells the story of his hell and his salvation. It’s called The Well, and the tidal rhythms of the title song demand dancing.
The child had fallen down the well because her mother went inside to answer a ringing phone and because someone had removed the well cover. The dei ex machina are all around us, all the time. Julia Princep Jackson Duckworth was happy with her first husband, who one day in 1870 reached up to pick a fig for her, ruptured an abscess, and died quickly of the resultant infection, leaving a widow whose second husband would beget Virginia Stephens and three other children upon her. A phone call, a fig. It almost didn’t happen, and then it did, and lives were changed for the worse and the better.
Virginia, the second daughter born of that union brought about by a fig or an abscess or both, grew up, married a kind outsider who gave her the name of a wild animal, and began producing a miraculous cascade of books in between her descents into madness. And then came the last descent, a literal one into a river with a big stone or stones in her pocket, when she was already dragged down by grief and dread, by the pain of depression that is in part fear that the pain will never end. But Virginia Woolf killed herself partly out of compunction, out of unwillingness to put her husband, Leonard Woolf, through another bout of her suffering, or so her last letter said.
The Faraway Nearby Page 19
