Rose Heat

“as the brick of the afternoon stores the rose heat of the journey” is the opening line of Gareth Evan’s poem that opens John Berger’s vital book Hold Everything Dear.

My head changed the words to rose heat for the journey, a small change, really, just one letter more and a bit of reshuffling, and there we are. I think of this when I see leaves soaking in sunlight, when I see logging trucks on my New England highways, when I put wood into fires, when I absorb and absorb and absorb the particular golden light of sunset, when I try to hold onto fierce peace of wild things, when I reach down within the best of myself to do good work in the world, to stretch my hands out like tree branches and become awake and aware and alive in the world.

The certain knowledge that people who live in the same neighborhoods as me, who shop at the same grocery stores, walk the same streets and pause to look up at the same shrieking seagulls and sunlight on the water…that these nearby strangers are having their doors knocked on by the government, that the phrase “show me your papers” isn’t reserved for Nazis in movies anymore, all of this is calling up on all the wells of rose heat I’ve ever stored for any journey. It’s stored up and spilling over—and some days starting to leach away—because I do not know the right outlet for all the love and concern I feel for all this beautiful world.

A student told me the other day that he had been seeing a lot of bald eagles around the college. Maybe, he said, it’s just the same one over and over again, but it’s still pretty amazing to see. I agreed, took heart at the wide-eyed wonder of someone even just a decade younger than me, and thought about how close bald eagles and other birds came to extinction before DDT was banned, before the EPA was formed, and how much love of the world is in real danger. When I lived in Montana and was hiking with a friend, a bald eagle swooped low over our heads and my friend said, sweetly, “Thanks, Rachel Carson!”—almost the way another set of believers would thank something more divine than human for the same gift of wonder.

As an environmentalist, as a human, as a Feminist, as a woman, as an American, as all of the ists and ans that I am, I feel as if I am trying at once to stand my ground, but that ground is being eroded on all sides. I know how the system is supposed to work—and I call my Members of Congress regularly, I attend neighborhood resistance meetings, I work at a college with a refreshingly honest dedication to sustainability—but I still feel beset on all sides and cannot help but see that the system is either broken or atrophied.

At my job, we’ve been discussing the opportunities for increasing the solar capacity of the college, in pursuit of our goal of carbon neutrality. The trouble—aside from the particulars of finding appropriate roof space or expanding a ground array—is that power storage technology is not yet advanced enough to meet what can be produced. On top of the storage, there is an inherent transmission loss of about 5% between production and use.

These all the same problems of storing and carrying rose heat for the journey.

I am at a loss for how to transmit my love and fear into power and change. The infrastructure of democracy seems in disrepair or decay or simply unable to handle the loads we require of it. We must reawaken it even as we seek to rebuild it, put new and different flesh on its bones. As much as I want to stand and speak and write and vote and donate and do all that I feel called to in the service of what I love and long to protect, I feel sometimes like I’m standing on the seashore and the tide is dragging the sand out from under my feet.

The truth with that, though, is if you stand long enough the sand holds your feet and ankles fast. And the tide always returns.

This is when it starts to get hard. The first month of euphoric disbelief and galvanized activism for a just America, that was a special time. Now, nearly two months into the buffeting winds of Muslim bans and abhorrent Cabinet picks and healthcare evaporating for our elders and empty promises of jobs and undeniable ties to a notably violent regime and the re-normalizing and re-institutionalizing of racism that had almost started to poke out into the sunlight and be rectified…now is when the journey really begins. And we must carry our rose heat forward in whatever forms and vessels we each can. It may be pussy hats, it may be daily calls to Members of Congress, it may be entering local politics, it may be opening up our spare rooms as safe havens, it may be increased mindfulness and a falling in love anew with the world so that we recall the value of what we protect, it may be and must be whatever each person has time for, now that the blush and fury of the first romance with activism has worn off with time, and the recognition of how much work this truly entails.

We are all vessels of power.

Kittens, Rex Tillerson, and Pipelines

(I took this picture years ago. Now I know what I was saving it for.)

    

For arguments sake, let’s say that a white man named Tex Rillerson had spent his career climbing up the corporate ladder of a company that makes stuffed kitten dolls. He was very good at his job and during his tenure at Kitty Dolls, the country became deeply reliant on his company’s product—to the point that most Americans, regardless of political leaning, would find it difficult to function on a daily basis without their Kitty Doll.

All of which points to Tillerson’s talents as a business person, which does require a certain amount of political ruthlessness to make money by abetting a culture’s crippling dependency on a particular product.

However, a talent with toy kittens—no matter how popular and necessary they are to the functioning of the country’s economy—does not necessarily translate into a solid grounding in the sort of international diplomacy and big-picture cooperation that I would expect of a Secretary of State.

Particularly if, say, there were large international supply chains that could get the raw materials for even more kitty dolls to the private companies that could then make up the alluringly necessary-for-life-in-the-United-States product, and make a healthy profit from the sale of these kittens. To set up the new supply line, there is a bit of international agreement that has to occur—and this would involve the Secretary of State, who in this scenario, has a lifetime of loyalty to the stuffed kitten industry.

It is hard for me to imagine that our friend Tex Rillerson would be able to exercise the sort of dispassionate diplomacy that could properly and thoroughly examine all the ins and outs of this new supply line of raw material for his former industry. In the long and short run, it would be very hard to be critically impartial and unbiased, and those ties to the stuffed kitten toy industry—or to any industry that the Secretary of State would expect to encounter regularly in our globalized world—makes me extremely leery of career businessmen and women in positions of high authority and power in our democracy.

Pretend with me that Rillerson’s stuffed kittens—indeed the entire stuffed kitten doll industry— turns out to be hugely polluting, that the dolls emit a miasma that alters the chemistry of the atmosphere, that the supply lines for their raw materials are extremely fragile, those raw materials are a hazard to drinking water when they leak out, and that, the CEO of Kitty Dolls knew for years that his toys were this destructive to both his customers and the planet and Rillerson helped to shush up the truth about his Kitty Dolls because he was more interested in making money than in anything resembling care for people other than himself and his company.

And then, let’s just go ahead and stop pretending and recognize that Rex Tillerson was the CEO of Exxon Mobil, and that his company has known about the correlation between their industry and product and climate change for years, and he is now slated to be at the helm of a department that will have a strong hand in the building of oil pipelines, including both the Keystone XL pipeline that felt like a battle won, and the Dakota Access Pipeline that feels like the most nightmarish conglomeration of all that is most shameful in America’s past and present.

The American people are—myself included—too reliant on fossil fuels. We are addicted, our culture has structured itself to feed and foster this addiction, and we are not so slowly irreparably damaging out planet and ourselves through this reliance. We need leaders—on every level—who will help us recover from this affliction, rather than leaders who will further enable our disease. We need Secretaries of State, of Energy, of Education and all the rest who look beyond the bottom line. A country is not a business, a country is full of people who are trying to do the best they can, a country needs leaders who will help lift everyone up, not just their friends and business associates.

The Dakota Access Pipeline represents all that is worst about the United States past and present. A multinational fossil fuel company is trampling on the sovereign rites of a Native American tribal nation. The Federal government is now backing a private business’s right to a profit above the rights of a people who have been on this continent longer than any white people’s ancestors and have been treated horribly since some illegal immigrants showed up from Europe in the 1400s.

With Keystone—a battle I foolishly thought was won, not realizing that nothing is safe or sacred—it is the same belief that a company’s profit is the ultimate goodness in this world. Certainly, companies provide jobs, and people need jobs, but not, I believe, at the expense of all other concerns. There are other jobs, there are other ways of being, and there are other leaders to be had than those who put their own private business interests and networks before all other things in this world.

Call your Senators and Congresspeople, frequently. Get your news from sources your grandparents would recognize. And do whatever you can to keep weaning yourself off fossil fuels—our reliance gives those in power too much power, and they are not worthy of us. If Rex Tillerson had really sold stuffed kitten dolls—even if he was a steely-eyed industrial genius—he would not be in the running for Secretary of State. Because he sold fossil fuels, he is powerful. If we reduce our reliance on his industry, we reduce his industry’s destructive power and influence. 

Thou Hast Done Champion

(Drawing by Trevor Stubley in T.H. White's The Book of Merlyn)

“Thou has done champion,” says the Hedgehog to King Arthur, towards the end of T.H. White’s The Book of Merlyn.

King Arthur has been whisked away on the eve of his last battle to spend his final hours in the company of his childhood tutors, Merlyn the magician and a host of animals. White, more than any other teller of Arthurian tales I know of, focuses on Arthur as a person, rather than a Legend. In White’s version, Merlyn trained Arthur to be a king and a leader of men by magicking him into lots of different animals as a child. Arthur spent time with these different species to see how they behave, how they commune, how they organize and how they are in the world. White was anti-war, and a far better than amateur naturalist, so these animal interludes are both more biologically accurate and politically astute than mere Disney cartoon magic. The point is amply made.

But, here at the end of his life when the beauty and justice and idealism of Camelot has crashed down around him in the angst and fury of Mordred’s Fascist rabble, Arthur is miserable. He worries that his fight for justice, his lifelong attempt for equality, all of his struggles and sacrifices, all of this has been for nothing because humans, it seems, are innately violent and ignorantly evil. Because he sees his fight as ending, and he himself losing, he believes it all a failure.

And then, in the midst of the animals fussing and complaining about warlike humans—all of which makes Arthur feel increasingly awful and personally responsible for all the evils of mankind—the little flea-bitten Hedgehog takes Arthur’s hand and pulls him back outside, into the moonlight and the landscape, and helps him to see how the world is beautiful, even though intrinsically flawed. The Hedgehog puts Arthur where he can see what he fought for, rather than parsing how he fought. And he congratulates and affirms Arthur, with those four words, which is the most graceful permission to exit I can fathom.

Since recently re-reading The Book of Merlyn, every time I see or hear or read anything about the evening of Obama’s presidency, the speculation about his legacy, the looming unknown specter of Trump’s dawning era, I want to yell and pray “thou hast done champion.”

Because, folks, it has been a wonderful eight years. Not a perfect time, by a wide margin, but a Good time in the metric I use for success. What the legacy of it all will be, I do not know. I hope that it will be an active legacy, that those who felt the spark of hope and change will remain rooted and engaged, that we will perpetuate our beliefs with our actions and words, rather than sit down and mourn the loss.

Along with the Hedgehog and King Arthur, I’ve been taking comfort in Jack Gilbert’s poem about Icarus, “Failing and Flying.” The end of the Obama era is not a failure—it is merely “the end of his triumph.” And, there was flight, there was progress. Hillary Clinton put her million more cracks in the glass ceiling, Barack Obama made the White House a little less white and a whole lot more dignified, and Martin Luther King jr.’s arc of the moral universe bent ever closer towards justice.

How long that arc is, how young this country is, how slowly evolution happens…all of this has given me pause and ballast in recent weeks. Change is grindingly slow, and our personal lives are brilliantly brief, so this makes change seem even slower. In The Book of Merlyn, as the old man Arthur questions his life’s work, Merlyn explodes over the disconnect between human history and evolution: “When will they learn that it takes a million years for a bird to modify a single one of its primary feathers?...Quite regardless of the fact that evolution happens in million-year cycles, he thinks he has evolved since the Middle Ages. Perhaps the combustion engine has evolved, but not he.”

Racial and gender equality, economic justice and environmental salvation—these are challenges that present-day Americans and the world need to address on a faster than a million-years-a-feather speed. And yet, if we can remember that we are, after all, only human and only one more species on this beautiful world, trying to govern ourselves, it lends some perspective to see how glacial evolution is. This is not a free pass; we must continue the work of hastening our evolution, of bending the arc towards justice, but we must have perspective in the scope of how we measure our progress. 

This is not to say that I believe that everything and everyone will be fine throughout Trump’s presidency. This will be a hard and ugly time. For the sake of those who threw the Hail Mary pass, held their noses at the brassy violence of Trump’s character, and voted for him purely on personal economic needs—I hope jobs are saved and created. However, I do worry intensely how the founding ideals of our country will go—I hear that the White House Press Corps is possibly being invited to move out of the Trump White House, and that more alternative bloggers and other media hosts are being invited in. The White Supremacist who advises the future President Trump announced this media change.

I do not doubt that there will be a violent lack of dignity within this administration, and that many shadowy corrupt dealings will take place in the background while the spotlight is on the histrionics of a Commander in Chief who doesn’t seem to understand he is playing with nuclear fire. People are going to get hurt—whether by armed conflict or loss of health insurance or recalibrated racism or climate change fueled floods and famines or all of this, I cannot speculate, but believe all are on the table. I ache with recognition that what I do, where I live, the color of my skin, I am unlikely to be one of the injured. And I know these protections are thinner than the dime all things can change on.

I imagine the Arc of Moral History to be something like a huge, timeless barrel hoop. Our jobs are to catch it, hold it, and hone it towards justice. We had it in our hands, but something slipped, and these next few years are the ricochet. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. This is how things move forward, this is how we evolve our primary feathers, how we fly. And in that, we will fail, sometimes. But the important thing is that we tried, that we bent the arc, that we flew, that we did.

As Merlyn lists off all the poets and writers and storytellers who will carry Arthur’s legend forward, all the places where his story emerges, all the ways in which he is not forgotten, I thought of all the acts of kindness and resistance that I know are happening as we go from Arthur to Mordred, Obama to Trump. King Arthur and Camelot—these are not remembered and retold because Mordred’s petulant rage broke the Round Table. The bitter end does not erase the sweetness of the being. The attempt is the triumph.

Hold Everything Dear

     

I watched George W. Bush’s final State of the Union address in the winter of 2008 with a sort of blistering rage and worry about the state of the world. I don’t remember, now, what the seed of the trouble was—maybe Iraq, maybe climate change, maybe the sort of dread about nothing in particular and everything all at once that overwhelms me when the world seems to be floundering and slipping away from the all things bright and beautiful and fair. I felt, deeply, a sense of wrongness in the world that I was powerless to combat. When I think of then, of myself at that particular time of life—twenty-five, and maybe too old too be so adolescently dramatic and naïve—I imagine my fingers to be more like dry wooden twigs than flesh and blood, grasping at a world in winter.

Regardless, watching someone I believed then to be criminally idiotic speak about my country, I was crying and sputtering with rage. The friend I was watching the speech with got up, walked across the room to the bookshelf, and tossed a small white book at me. “There,” he said. “Read that and you’ll be fine.”

It was John Berger’s Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance. I read it, and the world as I knew it, changed. I liked the quiet crackling of Berger’s rage, that he wrote of how the cramped crook of a boy’s body shooting marbles in a Palestinian settlement spoke of an undefeated despair and familiarity with unkindly small spaces. I liked the image of an old couple, crossing a check-point, holding hands no matter the age—a conspiracy of two against the world. I loved Gareth Evan’s poem at the start—where “the brick of the afternoon stores the rose heat for the journey.”

I fell for the way of seeing the world that came through Berger’s words—here was love and fury and a seething peace within it all. The dead were among the living, and living smelled of the gasoline of motorbikes as much as the freshness of hay. The despair had grace and teeth, the ghosts had blood and bones. My own writing, when I’m reading Berger, is more bodily—I leave muscle and heart and bones and teeth and hands and skin and hair and blood on the page to a degree I’ve never come to from anyone else. His writing makes me aware that I am alive, mortal and physical, while tattooing an eternal, earth-bound mysticism and immediate humanitarian outrage into my being. The blinders are off, the gloves are off, and any shred of artifice joins them—butchered and beautiful—on the floor.

After Hold Everything Dear, I devoured everything that I could borrow from my friend, find in libraries, or otherwise get my hands on. I love, particularly, the Into Their Labours trilogy and To the Wedding. Into Their Labours are loosely connected stories about three generations in a small village in France, but the story, I think, is the same as small-town anywhere. The binding love, the sense of place, the dirt and reality rather than a sanitized Euro Disney history—this is the world I believe to be real. Each one of those stories opened something within my heart and worldview a little more, made me believe in the stubborn strength of humanity to lurch forward. When I didn’t like the ending of the trilogy, when I cried at how the heirs of a pastoral village end in the slums of a nameless city—this colors how I see the present world’s migrations and crowdings and inequities. Berger’s writing, gently and ferociously, reminds me who we are, and who we may be.

The same in To the Wedding, where the wedding reads like some frothy fantasy of a quaint village—except for the politics that almost keep a father out of the country and the disease that stalks the bride. To have harsh reality and fairy tale idealism holding hands on the page…this burnt something about tradition and mystery into my being that no church service or religion could ever have done.

I’ve sobbed in public while reading several of his books—And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos while sitting on the bench outside an underwear outlet, Here is Where We Meet while sitting in a shack at my job as a ski patroller, most memorably. Arguably, I’m hysterical and dramatic and like to draw attention to my literary loves. It’s partly true. I’m operatic in my reactions to what I love. I cry, sometimes a lot. Because I’ve found that Berger’s writing touches something like my bones, the reaction seems authentic. I’ve checked myself, many times, to make sure that I’m not in love with the idea of someone moved to tears by words on a page. I don’t think I am. The emotional reaction slows me back down to the pace where I can absorb the weight of the words, of the world as Berger points it out. Beautiful words that renew my faith in the world also change the beat of my heart and the timbre of my breath. It makes me wonder just how razor thin that faith must be if each renewal tingles my spine.

With Berger, I know I’m not alone in this breathless wonder. When I worked at a school library, the drama teacher and I found that we both love To the Wedding and stood in the hallway beaming and almost teary-eyed, each putting a palm over our own hearts and gesturing at the air with the other hand while jointly saying, again and again, “It’s just…”

Out of the last nine years that I’ve known about John Berger, I have feathered my bookshelves with copies of most everything of he’s written. Often, I check the “B” section of a bookstore first—not that I’m necessarily looking to buy more of his books, but I like to see them there. It’s my iteration of a rosary or a station of the cross, I suppose. My Berger collection is separated from most of my books, surrounded by the poetry and the other books that mean the world to me.

Yet, I thought today, about how long it has been since I’ve read any of the books. Certainly I still carry them around like totems—I spent this last summer with an abbreviated book collection and am sure at least Hold Everything Dear was saved out from storage. But I haven’t read them, any of them, for at least a few years. The poem I wrote in response to Hold Everything Dear fell out of my copy, dated January 30, 2008, along with a letter from my original Berger librarian, sent to my first Montana address that September. I know I’ve read the book since then, but can’t think when.

All the same, I was shaken to hear that Berger passed away yesterday. He was ninety, I never met him, he did not write back when I tried to write him a letter once, and he is not mine, personally, to mourn. Grief, I believe, is for those who knew him as the man, rather than those who knew him as the Writer. Nevertheless, I’ve been stumbling on something between gratitude and grief about his passing. I met Berger, as it were, when the world seemed dark with a government I did not like or trust. My worries and sadness about the world going forward now, rather than nearly nine years ago, have suddenly deepened. Between refugees and ISIS and Russian hacking and climate change and a President-Elect with climate deniers and white supremacists as confidants and advisors, I keep coming to the sense that the dark side is winning.

Lazily, selfishly, I wanted Berger and more like him to see me through this patch of history. I wanted his older world gravitas and someone who stole art supplies and made love to a woman he called Oslo (because it rhymed with First Snow) in the London Blitz to light the way for me through this modern mess.

But then I return to why I haven’t read Berger in a few years: I haven’t needed to. I used to need to, like needing a bandage over a wound, like an invalid heals in stages. I needed both the healing and then the proud badge of the scar. There are no scientific realities—other than death, digestion, decomposition, and the trading forms of released molecules—where fur and feathers become flesh, where flesh becomes bone. But that was the image that struck me today, still musing about why the death of a man I did not know causes such a hiccup in my heart—Berger’s books gave me something I needed, something I could hold, until the words slipped under my skin and into my solid, mortal bones. His writing helped me become who I am, and now that I am this creature with those particular tattoos on my bones, the only way forward is to be the incarnation of all that blood and passion and light and critical love and championing of this world.