That is who I'd like to be when I grow up, a creator of radical compassion. The idea actually came from one of those Facebook memes, perhaps the one titled "what's your solar eclipse identity? It is all frivoulous, and meaningless, and yet the idea resonates simply I yearn to see more compassion in the world. I don't think I could ever quite measure up, but its one hell of a goal to strive for. Perhaps I need to make a sign above my desk, embroider or needlepoint something, just to remind me, especially on those days I am tired or stressed, days I all too often need reminding of good goals.
This summer has been a summer of questioning for me, and I certainly don't have any answers. Perhaps that little internet meme resonates because it seems that I haven't really seen a lot of compassion, and that is exactly the kind of thing I fret about. And this sense of things falling apart, of a loss of compassion, of concern for each other, is not unique to me. It has been a year of hard questions in many ways for many of us. To some extent the upset revolves around change and the fear of the unknown. We live in a world that changes rapidly, that has changed rapidly even since I was a child, and I suspect many fears are rooted there, rooted before my memories even began. But the fear reproduces itself. As we see the world becoming more uncertain, we cling to our own "certainties" more tightly and the entire cycle perpetuates itself, growing in on itself.
But the thing is, we change all the time. The world changes, and yet it doesn't. Our bodies change daily, replacing old cells with new cells and if we didn't change we would die. Sometimes we hold on to things tightly, thinking there is security in that, but more likely by the time we grab hold of it, what we seek is already past, we have already lost it.
I was reading Manjit Kumar's book about Einstein and Bohr, Quantum and, although the science and the biographies were interesting, the part of the book that struck me most forcefully this particular summer came near the end when the author was writing about the fundamental disagreement between Einstein and Bohr, and the energy surrounding that disagreement. According to Kumar, this battle was perceived, at least by some, if not many, as the old guard struggling against the young guns, or the seemingly eternal war between comfortable truths as opposed to new insights. But, that idea was really missing the crux of the question, at least as Einstein apparently perceived it. (It is more than possible I misunderstand). Others felt that Einstein had grown settled and could not accept the new idea of quantum mechanics as opposed to classical physics. But I got the impression the author was telling us that the inverse was true, Einstein felt Bohr and his peers were still defining quantum mechanics in relation to classical physics, they still used classical physics as an underlying frame of reference. Einstein felt the question wasn't classical physics OR quantum mechanics at all, If my understanding is correct, he felt the entire frame of reference was wrong, that there had to be something else that no one understood (yet) (if ever) a frame of reference that would include both.
But don't we always do this? We make decisions and judgements, often on little information, on fleeting perceptions, and those are based on our own biases: our own history, what the world has taught each of us, and our own confidence that our perceptions are universal when they aren't. If we don't question, are we not trapped in an endless circle? If my understanding of what Einstein was saying is correct, what appears conservative could actually be radically liberal, and what appears progressive could be regressive. What appears safe and secure could be a trap, like the trap the rabbits find in Watership Down, when they learn they have been lured into what at first appeared to be a safe haven and later proved to be a trap. But the trick is, the rabbits knew something was off, they had that uncomfortable feeling of something being not quite right, but they were tired, and so wanted security, that they ignored all the signs.
I've started working my way through the Man Booker long list, not in a particularly organized fashion, just randomly with diversions, and my reading has served to fuel my generally wandering mind and occasionally clarify my thoughts. But of course reading always does that, and novels in particular, if they are good, teach us much about ourselves, and about compassion, that we cannot necessarily learn unless we can escape from our own brittle shells. But what I learn today may not be what I learn from the same book tomorrow, as reading, in some ways like life itself, is a relationship, constantly evolving (changing)(damn! there it is again).
But before I started this year's books, I read last year's winner, Paul Beatty's novel The Sellout. The truth is that I struggled with this novel initially. It is written from a point of view, from a knowledge of an aspect of culture with which I am both completely unfamiliar and fairly uncomfortable, and I found it quite difficult. This doesn't mean that the novel isn't brilliant, it is, and it is brilliantly satiric, which of course explains a lot. If satire doesn't make us squirm in our seats, almost make our skins crawl, it is not doing its job. The Sellout does all this, and at the same time it makes the reader dig deeply into his or her own assumptions about race and culture and society, about what is the good fight, and what is not. I came out of this novel rethinking much of what I had previously held to be true. I read the novel before I read Quantum, but I realized in retrospect that the same question was being raised. What if our entire frame of reference is wrong? Where do we go from here? And how do we take as many people with us as possible?
I just finished reading Fiona Mozley's Elmet, a beautifully written and haunting book. Mosley's prose is so finely wrought, so poetic, and the conceit of Elmet, of the world of the copse where our characters live, almost outside of time and space, with the haunting overlays of timelessness and the intrusions of time, is beautifully rendered. In fact it is so beautifully drawn that the purely unadulterated visceral shock of the violence feels unanticipated, even though it has, in fact, been clear from the very opening lines that it is coming. Thus the author captures the seductions of life, of the stories we tell ourselves, of the innocence of children, and there are children here, children who are both wise, in the uncanny ways children on the cusp of adulthood can be, and yet also innocent in a way that we can barely imagine as adults. The story itself is beautiful, and thoughtful, highlighting wisdom and innocence and blindness, the way we are often all blind, the way we often make judgements and assumptions without really knowing either ourselves or the world which we are judging, and in the same way we are also innocent in that we rarely know the truth, and that which we are judged for often has nothing, or very little, to do with the way we see ourselves.
Between The Sellout and Elmet, I read Emily Fridlund's History of Wolves. Both Mozley's and Fridlund's books are, on one level, coming of age novels, although in radically different places and with radically different outcomes, and yet there are common threads. Both narrators are looking back on an episode that changed their young lives, Both narrators exist on the fringes of their respective cultures, and although they are aware they are outsiders they are not yet mature enough to understand why they are outsiders. The insiders are often blind to their own motivations and guilt as well, as we all are, defining those who are different as "other" and then somehow being shocked when the other doesn't understand the rules and expectations that have been placed on them, even though no one has bothered to teach them those rules.
As for me, I don't really know what I think about these books yet, just as I don't know what I think about the general unrest that has plagued me. I think, in these novels, that people expect too much, and I think we do as well. I see expectations that are somehow disconnected from the realities portrayed. In both of these books, and in life as I have perceived it this summer, I see a world in which the discomfort is there, but is not addressed, because we would rather not address it. Actually it is more than that, more like a denial of reality, of difference, of expecting that everyone will know what we expect because we assume that the world is like us, and, because we assume our knowledge is common knowledge, we can absolve ourselves of responsibility and blame the other. But life isn't really like this. And responsibility is always shared.
In Fridlund's book a fifteen year girl who obviously lives a mostly solitary life, already on the fringes of her society, is expected to suddenly have the wisdom of a fully educated and integrated adult. She is expected to have seen and understood what the adults themselves did not see or understand, or perhaps did not want to see or understand. In Elmet, well in Elmet, there are multiple layers of misunderstanding, topmultiple levels of denial, Mozley manages to create a world that seems completely unlike our own while at the same time capturing a level of dysfunction and denial that is probably closer to our own lives than we would comfortably like to admit. In all four of these novels, the implications of both action and inaction ripple out in overlapping circles, becoming something beyond control, something far greater than was intended or imagined.
Do you see the link? Why compassion weighs so heavily on my mind? We need compassion. We need compassion for ourselves and for others. Because it seems to me that without compassion, the things we haven't done would damn us far more than the things we have done. And in that, at least, we are each and every one of us, alike.
top photo: War Mother by Charles Umlauf. Photo taken at the McNay Museum of Art, San Antonio, Texas.
