Even well-intentioned educational endeavors like carefully edited nature films, and the easy access to exotic animals offered by zoos, are tailored to our impatience. They lead us to expect nature will be all storm and no lull. It's a dangerous habit. Natural-history writer Robert Michael Pyle asks: "If we can watch rhinos mating in our living rooms, who's going to notice the wren in the back yard?"
The real Wild Kingdom is as small and brown as a wren, as tedious as a squirrel turning back the scales of a pine cone to capture its seeds, as quiet as a milkweed seed on the wind--the long, slow stillness between takes. This, I think, is the message in the bottle from Thoreau, the man who noticed a clump of seeds caught in the end of a cow's whisking tail and wondered enviously what finds were presenting themselves to the laborers picking wool in nearby factories. "I do not see," he wrote, "but the seeds which are ripened in New England may plant themselves in Pennsylvania. At any rate, I am interested in the fate or success of every such venture which the autumn sends forth."
What a life it must have been, to seize time for this much wonder. If only we could recover faith in a seed--and in all the other complicated marvels that can't fit in a sound bite. Then we humans might truly know the glory of knowing our place.
CAREFUL WHAT YOU LET IN THE DOOR
Once in a while I've heard people in my profession claim, with the back of a hand thrown across their foreheads, that it's a curse to be a writer. I am inclined to tell them: Get real. It's a curse to be one of those people who have to put asphalt on the highway with what looks like the back of a janitor's broom in the middle of July. I've never done that, and I'm deeply happy about it. But I have held about twenty jobs in my life that I might call a curse, including babysitting a pair of twins named Aristotle and Alexander, who had the energy and will of spider monkeys and a language of their own invention; also, scrubbing toilets for people who spoke of me as The Cleaning Lady. (I was barely twenty years old; in no other setting did I get called, at that time, a lady.) If there's no statute of limitations on this list, I'll even mention picking tent caterpillars off my Dad's apple trees for the salary of a penny apiece. (Caterpillar disposal, involving gasoline, was included in the price.)
Writing is no curse. The writing life has incomparable advantages: flexible hours, mental challenge, the wardrobe--you can go to work in bunny slippers if you want to. The money, well, that is sometimes a snag, but if you keep your nose to the grindstone the benefits accrue. You can support yourself. And in time, if you're truly blessed, you'll begin to get mail. You'll bring it home by the carload, tear it open, and find out everything you've ever done right in this world, and wrong. The mail will bring you more applause and brickbats and requests and advice and small, perfect bouquets than you can ever answer or even acknowledge. Its presence will cheer you on gloomy days, and guide you through the straits of your own conscience. It will stand as proof that you're blessed.
I have received, entirely unsolicited: advice on dog racing ("conventional wisdom has it that the outside post positions are bad and--over the long haul--more low numbers come in than high") and natural pest control ("I have never had success combatting flea beetles with diatomaceous earth"); information on how to order foam clothing; a Christmas card from the Dan Quayle family; and outlines for approximately ten thousand novels based on other people's relatives' lives. I've received works of art that I adored, many of which are hanging on my walls. After publishing a novel called Pigs in Heaven, I received via U.S. mail more pig-oriented items than you might have imagined to exist. (I'm pretty sure I'm going to call my next novel Mustang Convertible Dreams.)
I've received this information on how to live forever: "I suggest a petition to Masauwu, Spirit of Death, Owner of Fire and Master of the Upper World. Sanction may be gained to the sipapuni for shelter during the destruction of the Fourth World and re-emergence to the Fifth. Even if it doesn't work, it's worth a shot."
Also this useful tip: "Dear Barbara Kingsolver, It appears to me that your last name is to be derived from Gundisalv, a name compounded by the Visigoths of Northwestern Spain from the Old Germanic elements gundi, meaning 'battle,' and alf, meaning 'elf.'"
(When I passed this on to my relatives, they started calling me the old Battle-Elf.)
A New York City reader wrote: "Dear Ms. Kingsolver, Your novels have to be the most implausible, coincident ridden, knee jerking exhibits of liberalism and corny sentimentalism that I have ever read. P.S. I like them pretty well."
And a befuddled fan in California wrote: "...I am very interested in animal consciousness, as well as dreams, and I bought your book Animal Dreams because I believed it to be a book I had heard about on the radio once, called (as I am now aware) Animal Dreaming. When I sat down and saw it was fiction and that I had paid $20 for it, I thought: Mistake!"
I haven't found a use for this information: "Dear Ms. Kingsolver, I am 23 years old, have 3 tattoos, and 2 college degrees that are doing me no good."
This one was slightly more upbeat: "I lent my library copy of The Bean Trees to a friend who normally hates everything (seriously, she's very depressing). She loved it! That is, until it was stolen from her car. We had to pay the $16 replacement cost plus library fine."
There is a type of letter that comes from remarkable adolescent girls, like this one: "Dear Mrs. Kingsolver, I wrote you before that I was writing a novel and you encouraged me to do so. I finished it. It's called The Little Cabin in the Woods. Then I wrote The Dark Crystal, followed by Sky Eyes, and Fireball in the Night, The Clue, Blue Dawn, The Princess Bride, and Emily, which is a hypothetical look at what might happen to me if my parents suddenly died."
There are also ever so many assorted requests from people who would like you to do them some small favor. For example:
Dear Ms. Kingsolver, Enclosed is something I've written. I'd appreciate it if you could get Harper & Row to publish it. I suggest it be marketed as an Inspirational Essay.
Dear Ms. Kingsolver, Our book club would appreciate my sharing any materials from you. Would you send me:
Photos
Interviews/Statements
Biographical Data
Your comments on the book
Reviews
Career Plans/Goals [Apparently they are still expecting me to do something productive....]
Dear Mrs. Kingsolver, I am doing a paper for school, on why you should be considered a great American author. In this paper I must classify your writing as following an American tradition: Puritanism, Romanticism, Trancendentalism, Rationalism, Idealism, and Realism. I also must prove that you contribute something to American Literature....I would greatly appreciate having your opinion on this matter and any suggestions you might have. My paper is due in two weeks.
Best, of course, are the letters that go straight to your head, like this one:
Dear Barbara, I just finished reading The Bean Trees for the fourth time since I bought it through a book club. Please, please, please write more books!
I walked on air for days, imagining someone actually reading my book four times, scanning it for every alliteration and metaphor I'd buried in its pages. Then I considered the return address: South Padre Island, Texas. I've been to South Padre Island, Texas, and so I know. If you lived there, you would have no choice but to read whatever washed up on shore, or otherwise fell into your hands, four times at a dead minimum. My hunch bore out a few years later when I heard from the correspondent again:
Dear Barbara, I wrote you in 1988 to express admiration for your novel, The Bean Trees. Since then I understand you have two more books out....Things move slowly in South Texas. The bookstore filed Chapter 7 two months ago. In two years they managed to get me a copy of Holding the Line by Dwight D. Eisenhower (it was soporific)....I will send money order, personal cheque, bank card, jewels, or whatever is necessary. I'll eat sand. [I immediately sent copies of everything I'd ever written.]
I'm grateful beyond words for reader mail, which keeps me going through the days when I can't
believe in myself, or literature in general. That is the blessing. And perhaps it's also the curse, if the writing life is cursed, because readers tug on the writer's solitude and complacency. One of the few pieces of advice I ever give other writers, if they ask for it, is to try to write with no one looking over your shoulder. It's heaven, if you can do it. But inevitably they come, those ghosts and battle-elves peeking in through the study door left ajar, and even if they are not allowed a vote, they force the writer to answer all the disparate voices rattling inside her own psyche. The compliments must be accepted, and so, too, the thoughtful complaints. Once in a while a letter rocks my foundations, causing me to question once again the things I thought I knew about art and responsibility.
This was one of those:
I've decided you might like to hear [she wrote] about one woman's response to Animal Dreams. I sailed through the book till I got to Hallie's kidnapping. Then I stopped cold and skimmed ahead, reading only with my head, keeping my heart out of it, because I began to realize that if she was going to get killed I didn't want to read the rest.
Like many women, and men, in America, I was abused as a child, and when I started censoring TV for my own small children, I decided to stop watching violent TV shows myself. It really made life better....Yes, there is violence all around us. I read the news and even sometimes watch it on TV. But that's real. To invent violence that didn't really happen, even for the noblest of motives, like, making everybody see how stupid war is, also puts it out there as entertainment. On a certain level, even people who are moved by the nobility and poignance of it all are also going to get off on it in a way that is absolutely counterproductive to the end of ending violence....
I replied to this letter with a brief, inadequate response, and I haven't stopped thinking about it since. Oddly, in the same week I got another letter addressing the violence in Animal Dreams from a different perspective, from a Sister of St. Agnes, in Milwaukee:
I am writing to thank you. I picked up Animal Dreams because I was eager to read any book dedicated to Ben Linder and daring to hold up a mirror to the horrible devastation our country has visited upon Nicaragua....All through the eighties, Reagan's policy was driving me nuts....Then in early 1990 it hit home. It was then we got word that two of our sisters were ambushed on a lonely road in Nicaragua. Killed by U.S.-supplied armaments. One was a North American, a Milwaukee native, and the other was a Miskito Indian woman who had been in vows less than a year....I want to thank you for your novel, which says something hopeful about death and the life that can come from death.
The sentiments in the second letter don't change the significance of the first. I can't in good conscience ignore either one. I don't know whether my convictions about art--and particularly, art that contains violence--will ever be allowed to settle into a comfortable position. They have been revising themselves for a long, long time, roaming restlessly over the options, continually exhorted by the ghosts that bless and curse.
As an adolescent girl, I had a secret yellow notebook I filled with stories. They were written in a crabbed cursive, set mostly in places I had never been, like Mexico and the Andes, and the protagonists of these stories were always boys. What's more, they were almost always maimed in some way. One of my heroes, I remember, had been blinded, and yet he still managed to canoe across a lake and climb a mountain. Another one had a clubfoot, and he won a scholarship to leave his small folkloric village and study art. When I was eleven, I'm sure I didn't know what a clubfoot was; I think I had some vague idea that if someone clubbed you on the foot, then you would have a clubfoot.
I was very much like that girl who has written The Princess Bride and The Dark Crystal and thirty-five other novels and is now wondering how the plot possibilities will open up if she knocks off her parents. When I was her age, I wasn't remotely conscious of what it took to make good writing. I was just looking for drama and impact, and the only way I could see to get that onto a page was to write about events that, if they happened to you in real life, would tend to make a big impact.
I didn't realize that it's emotion, not event, that creates a dynamic response in the mind of a reader. The artist's job is to sink a taproot in the reader's brain that will grow downward and find a path into the reader's soul and experience, so that some new emotional inflorescence will grow out of it.
Of course, the writer has to do this for many readers at a time, without ever having met any of them, knowing nothing about them except that they're human and have mostly all lived on the same earth. So it's a challenge. Lacking the skills to pull that off, it's common for beginning writers to fall back on the put-out-his-eyes-and-make-him-climb-a-mountain tract. Some years ago as a judge in a fiction contest, I read the unscreened entries of a few hundred aspiring writers and, I swear, three out of four contained unfortunate wretches trapped in wheelchairs in burning buildings. That job was a curse.
In time, with practice, you learn that violence isn't a necessary component of exciting art. You can substitute metaphor and imagery for the clubfoot. And then comes the question: If you don't have to, why would you want to create violence in art? Are there any good reasons? Maybe yes. Maybe no.
To some extent I agree with my correspondent who wrote that inventing violence, even for the noblest of motives, might necessarily be promoting violence as entertainment. The equation of fun-for-pay with the infliction of pain makes me very uneasy. Very often it's done with a cast of morality thrown over the whole thing, as though that might redeem it--for example, in the genre I call Slice & Dice movies, to which teenagers flock in droves. For an hour and a half you get to see attractive, terrified young women and a good deal of spurting blood; then the colorful criminal is apprehended and we get to see his spurting blood; so justice was served. It wasn't really okay that he was going around damaging people with farm implements, so it's not really condoning violence. But then, I wonder, why did we have to watch? And more to the point, why did we pay to watch, enabling legions of grown-ups to earn their living fabricating the realistic illusion of terrified young women spurting blood?
Sometimes the same formula is passed off as something more noble, because of higher production values and more imaginative criminals. The film Silence of the Lambs was one of the great critical successes of our time, and for that reason I felt obliged to see it, even though I hate feeling sick with fear and suspense, and have never understood why I should pay for that sensation when it's easy enough to come by it for free. But I watched, on a friend's VCR; got up and left the room every time somebody's flesh was in danger, which was most of the movie; and afterward felt ripped off. It turns out, I'd rented the convincing illusion of helpless, attractive women being jeopardized, tortured, or dead, for no good reason I could think of after it was over. You may disagree. Obviously most people in the world do. But I'm uncomfortable with the huge popularity of that film. I know, now, I should have stuck with my instincts and skipped it. I felt the way many African Americans probably felt watching the old Star Trek plots in which, any time you saw an anonymous lieutenant in an Afro beaming down to Planet X with the landing party of white guys, you knew somebody was going to bite the dust on Planet X, and you knew who it was going to be. Anyone who complained about that kind of story line, at the time, probably would have seemed overly sensitive. When nobody else can see what's driving you crazy, it's easy to feel you're making it up. Even when you're not.
When I watch a film whose plot capitalizes on the vulnerability of women to torturers, maimers, rapists, and maniacs, I take it personally. I feel preyed upon. I don't enjoy sitting through another woman's misery, even if I keep telling myself that her big problems there are really all just ketchup. It still hurts to watch. For me, a recreation of simple violence has no recreational value. So why would I ever create an act of violence in a novel?
My answer has to do with the fact that I don't consider a novel to be a purely recreational vehicle. I think of it as an outlet for my despair, my delight, my considered opinion
s, and all the things that strike me as absolute and essential, worked out in words. When I wrote in my secret yellow notebook, it was not for other people, and I still write for mostly the same private reasons. It's my principal way of becoming reassured I'm still alive: I have come through this many of my allotted days, watched the passing of life on earth, made something of it and nailed it to the page. Having written, I find I'm often willing to send it on, in case someone else also needs this kind of reassurance. Art is entertainment but it's also celebration, condolence, exploration, duty, and communion. The artistic consummation of a novel is created by the author and reader together, in an act of joint imagination, and that's not to be taken lightly.
One of the extremely valuable things to be done with the power of fiction is the connection of events with their consequences. And violence, above all else, is a thing with consequences. The difference between the violence in great novels like War and Peace or Beloved, and the contents of a Slice & Dice movie (or a Slice & Dice book; there are plenty of those) is the matter of context. Occasionally I make the error of seeing an adventure movie that I've been assured isn't violent, and inevitably, throughout the movie people are dying like flies. But like flies they don't have personalities, they are just there. They fall off of things or they get shot and they are gone, like the unfortunate lieutenant of color on Planet X. We never knew the guy so we don't feel a thing, and we don't have to sit through the funeral. If you had to sit through all the funerals, most TV shows would be seven hours long. But you don't.
See enough of this bang-you're-dead kind of thing and you'll start to go numb around the edges, I guarantee. On some level you will start to believe that a violent act has no consequences. Researchers in social psychology have known for decades that watching violence makes a person more likely to participate in violence. Many people in the entertainment industry would have us believe otherwise, and so these studies are controversial, but they are mostly unequivocal. A review article written in 1991 by Wendy Wood, Frank Wong, and Gregory Chachere examined the body of research in this field, conducted in both laboratory and natural social settings, and they found that exposure to media violence significantly enhanced viewers' aggressive behavior. Hundreds of other psychologists stand in agreement. They suggest many different mechanisms for the causal link between watching and doing: increased physiological arousal; decreased inhibitions; instrumental learning and modeling of aggressive acts; and decreased sensitivity toward violent acts. It boils down to one thing: we learn about the world through our senses, like any other creature. Watch your mother make a hundred tortillas, and you know how to love, live with, and manufacture a tortilla. Watch a hundred violent deaths and that, too, is your familiar. That the deaths were all faked is apparently incidental to the hardware in our heads that brings us learning. A trick on the eye works a trick on the psyche as well, for although our brains know it is only ketchup, in our animal soul it registers as blood. Blood without consequence.
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