#wordthings

In September 2019, along with some folks with endometriosis or who walk with canes or who live with other chronic shapes of tilt and pain, sometimes as a result of trauma, I kayaked for a week. Not straight, but well. And I thought about how between each vertebra there is a story pinched and breathing. And I felt how far I really have to grow. And though I don't have the luxury of centuries, I do have reach. I do have all the ways you stretch me. I do have violence to outlive and ice to break and songs to sing. I do have so much fat to earn and love to offer. Wisdom even.

I'd say I was raised, by both my mother and my father, to make my own sense of the world. And I was raised to make meaning by telling stories and listening to stories. I was taught that meaning is complex and shifting and difficult to state, and the more stories one adds to one's thinking the harder it gets to make meaning, and that is good, and a good thing to keep in mind when one sees something new—that one won't be able to make any sense of a thing until one hears not one but many stories about it. And I was raised to know that one good thing about stories is that one person might make one meaning of a story and out another person might take a different meaning from it. And I was raised to believe this ability to make our own meaning out of the world is what freedom is, and what joy is, and meaning making is a right we all have. I was raised that we all are obliged to work to make sure everyone has the right and the opportunity to tell their own story and hear everyone else's—the easy story to hear and the difficult, the happy and the sad, the comic and the tragic. And we are all obliged to work to make sure each of us has the right to hear and tell all the stories and each make our own meaning out of them and the world, and if we don't work toward that end, we are cheating our neighbor, and we are cheating ourselves of the joy of living, and should be ashamed of ourselves and should be forced to take long car rides in cars with no radio for all of eternity with people who grew up in places where they didn't learn how to tell stories.

Awakening in the night, when I first moved to my new Kentucky home, I was startled by a familiar sound, the sound of a train, a sound evocative of my childhood. When we moved from country to city we lived only a few houses away from the train tracks. Every night I would lie in the stillness of the dark and listen to trains coming and going, imagining my own life journey, the places I would go, the people I would meet. The sound of the train comforts me now as it did then, for I know I have come home. I have returned to the world of my childhood, the world in which I first sowed the seeds of my being and becoming, a seeker on the path, the contemplative intellectual choosing solitude, ideas, choosing critical thinking. Here in my native place I embrace the circularity of the sacred, that where I begin is also where I will end. I belong here.

"To truly create a social ethical context wherein masses of American citizens can empathize with the life experiences of Appalachians, we must consistently challenge dehumanizing public representations of poverty and the poor. Restoring to our nation the understanding that people can be materially poor yet have abundant lives rich in engagement with nature, with local culture, with spiritual values, is essential to any progressive struggle to halt mountaintop removal. Seeing and understanding that abundance means not only that we must collectively as a nation change our thinking about poverty, it means we must see a value in life that is above and beyond profit motives."

I propose a resistance made of refusals. Refuse a resistance excised of courage. Refuse the conventional arena and take the fight elsewhere. Refuse to eat with the enemy, refuse to feed the enemy. Refuse to participate in the logic of the crisis, refuse to be reactive to its provocations. Refuse to forget last year's offenses and last month's and last week's. Refuse the news cycle, refuse commentary. Refuse to place newsworthiness above human solidarity. Refuse to be intimidated by pragmatism. Refuse to be judged by cynics. Refuse to be too easily consoled. Refuse to admire mere political survival. Refuse to accept the calculation of the lesser evil. Refuse nostalgia. Refuse to laugh along. Refuse the binary of the terrible past and the atrocious present. Refuse to ignore the plight of the imprisoned, the tortured and the deported. Refuse to be mesmerized by shows of power. Refuse the mob. Refuse to play, refuse decorum, refuse accusation, refuse distraction, which is a tolerance of death-dealing by another name. And when told you can't refuse, refuse that, too.

How can literature help us here? The claim is often made that people who read literature are wiser or kinder, that literature inspires empathy. But is that true? I find that literature doesn't really do those things. After observing the foreign policies of the so-called developed countries, I cannot trust any complacent claims about the power of literature to inspire empathy. Some- times, even, it seems that the more libraries we have over here, the more likely we are to bomb people over there. What we can go to literature for is both larger and smaller than any cliché about how it makes us more empathetic. Litera- ture does not stop the persecution of humans or the prosecution of humanitarians. It does not stop bombs. It does not, no matter how finely wrought, change the minds of the fascists who once more threaten to overrun the world. So what is it good for-all this effort, this labor, this sweating over the right word, the correct translation? I offer this: literature can save a life. Just one life at a time. Perhaps at 4 a.m. when you get out of bed and pull a book of poetry from the shelf. Perhaps over a week in summer when you're absorbed in reading a great novel. Something deeply personal happens there, something both tonic and sustaining. When I describe literature's effect in these terms, I speak stubbornly in the singular. But I also know I am not alone in the world, and that none of us is...

Nothing irrevocable had yet been spoken, but there was only the barest margin of safety left them; each of them moving delicately along the outskirts of an open question, and, once spoken, such a question—as “Do you love me?"—could never be answered or forgotten. They walked slowly, meditating, wondering, and the path sloped down from their feet and they followed, walking side by side in the most extreme intimacy of expectation; their feinting and hesitation done with, they could only await passively for resolution. Each knew, almost within a breath, what the other was thinking and wanting to say; each of them almost wept for the other. They perceived at the same moment the change in the path and each knew then the other's knowledge of it; Theodora took Eleanor's arm and, afraid to stop, they moved on slowly, close together, and ahead of them the path widened and blackened and curved. Eleanor caught her breath, and Theodora's hand tightened, warning her to be quiet. On either side of them the trees, silent, relinquished the dark color they had held, paled, grew transparent and stood white and ghastly against the black sky. The grass was colorless, the path wide and black; there was nothing else. Eleanor's teeth were chattering, and the nausea of fear almost doubled her; her arm shivered under Theodora's holding hand, now almost a clutch, and she felt every slow step as a willed act, a precise mad insistence upon the putting of one foot down after the other as the only sane choice. Her eyes hurt with tears against the screaming blackness of the path and the shuddering whiteness of the trees, and she thought, with a clear intelligent picture of the words in her mind, burning, Now I am really afraid.