When a recent bout of illness sent me sulking with indignant disappointment at the ruin of long laid plans, I had to remind myself that we were never promised any of this; that it is hubris and self-importance and almost touching delusion to expect an indifferent cosmos to bend to our will, our wishes, and our plans; that meeting the universe on its own terms is the end of suffering.

Through the haze of what Virginia Woolf called the “wastes and deserts of the soul” exposed by being ill, I remembered a lovely calibration of perspective by the poet and peace activist William Stafford (January 17, 1914–August 28, 1993), found in the posthumous collection The Way It Is: New and Selected Poems (public library).

YES
by William Stafford

It could happen any time, tornado,
earthquake, Armageddon. It could happen.
Or sunshine, love, salvation.

It could, you know. That’s why we wake
and look out — no guarantees
in this life.

But some bonuses, like morning,
like right now, like noon,
like evening.

Stafford had a late start as a poet — his first major collection was published when he was 48. And then the poems that had been writing themselves in him all his life came pouring out, spare and stunning. Within eight years, he was elected Poet Laureate of the United Staes.

The morning before he died in the final year of his seventies, he drafted a poem containing these lines:

You can’t tell when strange things with meaning
will happen. I’m [still] here writing it down
just the way it was. “You don’t have to
prove anything,” my mother said. “Just be ready
for what God sends.” I listened and put my hand
out in the sun again. It was all easy.

Complement with Viktor Frankl, writing shortly after his release from the concentration camps, on saying “yes” to life in spite of everything and Henry James on how to stop waiting and start living, then revisit Barbara Ras’s kindred poem “You Can’t Have It All” and Hannah Emerson’s cosmic howl of yes yes yes.

It is strange how, in a universe governed by relentless change, human beings hunger for constancy — our bodies wired for homeostasis, our minds hooked on habit, our hearts yearning for everlasting love. We live as patterns unaware of perpetuating themselves, our aching resistance to change reflected in the routines and rituals and relationship formulae out of which we build the superstructure of belief that houses all of our actions, reactions, and choices.

It is not easy, reconfiguring this superstructure to fit something new — a new practice, a new person, a new way of being. The more transformative the new element, the more challenging it is to figure it into the pattern of life as we know it — a pattern shaped by what we believe about love, that deepest sinew of the self.

This delicate, difficult, wildly rewarding reconfiguration is what Terry Tempest Williams explores in When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice (public library) — a soaring meditation on life, love, and the stories we tell ourselves about who we are, sparked by an unexpected revelation: When, in her mid-fifties, at the exact age her mother was when she died, Williams finally opened the journals her mother had bequeathed her, she was staggered to find them all blank — a kind of “second death” that catalyzed a profound reckoning with the meaning of voice, of words, of how we write the story of who we are and how we revise it, lensed through the love of birds she shared with her mother.

Art by Sophie Blackall from If You Come to Earth

Williams writes:

Love is to life what life is to death. And so we risk everything trying to touch the ineffable by touching each other. Over and over. Again and again… Patterned behavior alternates like shadow and light… We can change, evolve, and transform our own conditioning. We can choose to move like water rather than be molded like clay. Life spirals in and then spirals out on any given day. It does not have to be one way, one truth, one voice. Nor does love have to be all or nothing.

Because we suffer a congenital blindness to what lies on the other side of transformation — a blindness brilliantly illustrated by the Vampire Problem thought experiment — it is often chance, not choice, that brings about the profoundest change. Life sweeps us off course — a terrible diagnosis arrives, an unimagined opportunity emerges, an unexpected person enters the heart — and suddenly we must begin again, rebuilding the superstructure of being on this new terrain. (“It could happen any time…”)

Williams finds improbable consolation for the challenge of change in her encounter with a bird out of place. The painted bunting — the most exuberantly colored bird north of Mexico, which so confused Linnaeus with its exotic plumage that he falsely classified it as native to India; a species now thought to orient by the pole star during migration — “had flown in on the tail of a blizzard, been blown off course, and stayed,” making a new life in Maine, a new pattern of being: Each day just before dawn, the painted bunting alighted to a neighbor’s bird feeder like clockwork.

Painted bunting by Mark Catesby, 1729-1731. (Available as an art print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)

Watching the bird one snowy morning, Williams writes:

At 6:43 a.m. the painted bunting arrived, like a dream between the crease of shadow and light. His silhouette grew toward color for the seven short minutes he stayed. And when dawn struck his tiny feathered back, he ignited like a flame: red, blue, and green.

[…]

The bunting got caught in a storm and stayed. I have been seized in a storm of my own making. Whirlwind. World-wind. Distracted and displaced. In the wounding of becoming lost, I can correct myself.

Echoing Emerson’s indictment that “people wish to be settled [but] only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them,” Williams adds:

We can take flight from our lives in a form other than denial and return to our authentic selves… Accidental sightings, whether witnessed in a brain or on a winter dawn, remind us there is no such thing as certainty.

A century after Virginia Woolf contemplated finding beauty in the uncertainty of being in the interlude between two world wars, Williams adds:

I want to feel both the beauty and the pain of the age we are living in. I want to survive my life without becoming numb. I want to speak and comprehend words of wounding without having these words become the landscape where I dwell. I want to possess a light touch that can elevate darkness to the realm of stars.

This vascular malformation could bleed and burst. Or I can simply go on living, appreciating my condition as a vulnerable human being in a vulnerable world, guided by the songs of birds. What is time, sacred time, but the acceleration of consciousness? There are so many ways to change the sentences we have been given.

Complement these fragments of the entirely wonderful When Women Were Birds with Milan Kundera on life’s central ambivalence of knowing what we really want, Rebecca Solnit on how we find ourselves by getting lost, and George Saunders on the courage of uncertainty, then revisit Williams on our responsibility to awe.

“All the goodness and the heroisms will rise up again, then be cut down again and rise up,” John Steinbeck wrote to his best friend at the peak of WWII. “It isn’t that the evil thing wins — it never will — but that it doesn’t die.”

This is a story many believe to be true — a story about human nature, written into the scripture of original sin, ensuring that we will go on perpetrating evil for as long as we keep telling and believing that story.

We — as individuals, as a culture, as a species — rise and fall to the expectations placed upon us, most of all to the expectations we place upon ourselves. After all, our very minds are model-fulfillment machines. Bruce Lee understood this: “You will never get any more out of life than you expect,” he wrote to himself. All expectation is a story — a story about what is true and what is possible — and a story is a model of reality. But the history of our species is the history of mistaking our models for reality, only to find them unmasoned by the sudden revelation of another region of reality, another possibility — our mathematical models of how the universe works (Einstein’s relativity upends Newton’s clockwork cosmos, and suddenly space and time are new, are one), our political models of how the world works (the French Revolution upends the feudal system, and suddenly a constellation of people’s republics lights up the possibility of liberal democracy), our personal models of how the self works (you fall in love with the most improbable person, and suddenly your entire story of who you are and what you want is rewritten).

All models of reality are drawn by an imagination filtered through our fears and our hopes in a proportion mediated by our conditioning, which is always the function of story. It is the stories we believe that shape what we become, shape what the world is. In an age when commercial media have become the great conditioning engine of society, selling models of reality because they are profitable and not because they are true, it matters all the more what stories we believe, and what we resist.

That is what George Saunders explores throughout his prophetic 2007 essay collection The Braindead Megaphone (public library), composed in the wake of the American invasion of Iraq and in the infancy of social media. He writes:

In the beginning, there’s a blank mind. Then that mind gets an idea in it, and the trouble begins, because the mind mistakes the idea for the world. Mistaking the idea for the world, the mind formulates a theory and, having formulated a theory, feels inclined to act.

Because the idea is always only an approximation of the world, whether that action will be catastrophic or beneficial depends on the distance between the idea and the world.

Mass media’s job is to provide this simulacra of the world, upon which we build our ideas. There’s another name for this simulacra-building: storytelling.

He considers the antidote to the sensationalist, manipulative, and altogether reality-warping stories comprising the basic business model of modern media — a model built on marketable antagonism and othering:

The best stories proceed from a mysterious truth-seeking impulse that narrative has when revised extensively; they are complex and baffling and ambiguous; they tend to make us slower to act, rather than quicker. They make us more humble, cause us to empathize with people we don’t know, because they help us imagine these people, and when we imagine them — if the storytelling is good enough — we imagine them as being, essentially, like us. If the story is poor, or has an agenda, if it comes out of a paucity of imagination or is rushed, we imagine those other people as essentially unlike us: unknowable, inscrutable, inconvertible.

Art from The Three Astronauts — Umberto Eco’s vintage semiotic children’s book about world peace

The challenge of telling better stories about the possibilities between us and within us is all the more urgent under the realities of war, when the aperture of compassion and understanding so dangerously narrows. All war, Saunders observes, requires “awareness of the law of unintended consequences” and “familiarity with the world’s tendency to throw aggressive energy back at the aggressor in ways he did not expect” — nuanced complexities absent from the sensationalist headlines of mass media and the fanged soundbites of social media.

With an eye to the murderous models of reality that incite the energies of war, he envisions an alternative for our culture’s story of itself:

A culture capable of imagining complexly is a humble culture. It acts, when it has to act, as late in the game as possible, and as cautiously, because it knows its own girth and the tight confines of the china shop it’s blundering into. And it knows that no matter how well-prepared it is — no matter how ruthlessly it has held its projections up to intelligent scrutiny — the place it is headed for is going to be very different from the place it imagined. The shortfall between the imagined and the real, multiplied by the violence of one’s intent, equals the evil one will do.

Art by Olivier Tallec from What If…

In another essay, Saunders finds himself rereading Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five — a book written decades earlier in the middle of another war — and contemplating the power of storytelling, with all its capacity for nuance and complexity absent from the media model, as our best mechanism for bridging reality and possibility. An epoch after Steinbeck lamented that the evil of war will never go away, Saunders celebrates Vonnegut’s enduring gift to the world:

It is a comfort [to] be reminded that just because something keeps happening, doesn’t mean we get to stop regretting it… It’s good for us to hear someone speak the irrational truth. It’s good for us when, in spite of all of the sober, pragmatic, and even correct arguments that war is sometimes necessary, someone says: war is large-scale murder, us at our worst, the stupidest guy doing the cruelest thing to the weakest being.

[…]

The book didn’t stop the current war, and won’t stop the next one, or the one after that. But something in me rose to the truth in it, and I was put in proper relation to the war going on now. I was, if you will, forbidden to misunderstand it. It is what it is: massacre and screaming and confusion and blood and death. It is the mammoth projection outward of the confused inner life of a handful of men. When someone says war is inevitable, or unavoidable, or unfortunate but necessary, they may be right. Vonnegut’s war was necessary. And yet it was massacre and screaming and confusion and blood and death. It was the mammoth projection outward of the confused inner life of men. In war, the sad tidy constructs we make to help us believe life is orderly and controllable are roughly thrown aside like the delusions they are. In war, love is outed as an insane, insupportable emotion, a kind of luxury emotion, because everywhere you look, someone beloved to someone is being slaughtered, by someone whose own beloved has been slaughtered, or will be, or could be. There’s something sacred about reading a book like Slaughterhouse Five, even if nothing changes but what’s going on inside our minds. We leave such a book restored, if only briefly, to a proper relation with the truth, reminded of what is what, temporarily undeluded, our better nature set back on its feet.

Although a novel and a news story may deal with the same subject matter drawn from the same facts of life, there is a universe of difference between the stories of reality and possibility each seeds into the world. It is within our power, Saunders reminds us, to resist the media manipulation machine — the “braindead megaphone” telling us that the world is broken, war inevitable, and human beings doomed by their own nature. Urging us to “insist that what’s said through it be as precise, intelligent, and humane as possible,” he writes:

Every well-thought-out rebuttal to dogma, every scrap of intelligent logic, every absurdist reduction of some bullying stance is the antidote. Every request for the clarification of the vague, every poke at smug banality, every pen stroke in a document under revision is the antidote… We still have the ability to rise up… keep reminding ourselves that representations of the world are never the world itself.

Couple with Saunders on how to love the world more, then revisit Richard Powers on rewriting the history of our future, May Sarton on how to live openheartedly in a harsh world, and Maya Angelou’s cosmos-bound poem about rising to our human potential.

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