Words Are My Matter Read online

  Besides, readers aren’t viewers; they recognize their pleasure as different from that of being entertained. Once you’ve pressed the on button, the TV goes on, and on, and on, and all you have to do is sit and stare. But reading is active, an act of attention, of absorbed alertness—not all that different from hunting, in fact, or from gathering. In its silence, a book is a challenge: it can’t lull you with surging music or deafen you with screeching laugh tracks or fire gunshots in your living room; you have to listen to it in your head. A book won’t move your eyes for you the way images on a screen do. It won’t move your mind unless you give it your mind, or your heart unless you put your heart in it. It won’t do the work for you. To read a story well is to follow it, to act it, to feel it, to become it—everything short of writing it, in fact. Reading is not “interactive” with a set of rules or options, as games are: reading is actual collaboration with the writer’s mind. No wonder not everybody is up to it.

  The book itself is a curious artifact, not showy in its technology but complex and extremely efficient: a really neat little device, compact, often very pleasant to look at and handle, that can last decades, even centuries. It doesn’t have to be plugged in, activated, or performed by a machine; all it needs is light, a human eye, and a human mind. It is not one of a kind, and it is not ephemeral. It lasts. It is reliable. If a book told you something when you were fifteen, it will tell it to you again when you’re fifty, though you may understand it so differently that it seems you’re reading a whole new book.

  This is crucial, the fact that a book is a thing, physically there, durable, indefinitely reusable, an object of value.

  I am far from dismissing the vast usefulness of electronic publication, but my guess is that print-on-demand will become and remain essential. Electrons are as evanescent as thoughts. History begins with the written word. Much of civilization now relies on the durability of the bound book—its capacity for keeping memory in solid, physical form. The continuous existence of books is a great part of our continuity as an intelligent species. We know it: we see their willed destruction as an ultimate barbarism. The burning of the Library of Alexandria has been mourned for two thousand years, as people may well remember and mourn the desecration and destruction of the great library in Baghdad.

  To me, then, one of the most despicable things about corporate publishers and chain booksellers is their assumption that books are inherently worthless. If a title that was supposed to sell well doesn’t “perform” within a few weeks, it gets its covers torn off—it is trashed. The corporate mentality recognizes no success that is not immediate. This week’s blockbuster must eclipse last week’s, as if there weren’t room for more than one book at a time. Hence the crass stupidity of most publishers (and, again, chain booksellers) in handling backlists.

  Over the years, books kept in print may earn hundreds of thousands of dollars for their publisher and author. A few steady earners, even though the annual earnings are in what is now dismissively called “the midlist,” can keep publishers in business for years, and even allow them to take a risk or two on new authors. If I were a publisher, I’d rather own J. R. R. Tolkien than J. K. Rowling.

  But capitalists count weeks, not years. To get big quick money, the publisher must risk a multimillion-dollar advance to a hot author who’s supposed to provide this week’s bestseller. These millions—often a dead loss—come out of funds that used to go to pay normal advances to reliable midlist authors and the royalties on older books that kept selling. Many midlist authors have been dropped, many reliably selling books remaindered, in order to feed Moloch. Is that any way to run a business?

  I keep hoping the corporations will wake up and realize that publishing is not, in fact, a normal business with a nice healthy relationship to capitalism. Elements of publishing are, or can be forced to be, successfully capitalistic: the textbook industry is all too clear a proof of that. How-to books and the like have some market predictability. But inevitably some of what publishers publish is, or is partly, literature—art. And the relationship of art to capitalism is, to put it mildly, vexed. It has not been a happy marriage. Amused contempt is about the pleasantest emotion either partner feels for the other. Their definitions of what profiteth a man are too different.

  So why don’t the corporations drop the literary publishing houses, or at least the literary departments of the publishers they bought, with amused contempt, as unprofitable? Why don’t they let them go back to muddling along making just enough, in a good year, to pay binders and editors and modest advances and crummy royalties, while plowing most profits back into taking chances on new writers? Since kids coming up through the schools are seldom taught to read for pleasure and anyhow are distracted by electrons, the relative number of book readers is unlikely to see any kind of useful increase and may well shrink further. What’s in this dismal scene for you, Mr. Corporate Executive? Why don’t you just get out of it, dump the ungrateful little pikers, and get on with the real business of business, ruling the world?

  Is it because you think if you own publishing you can control what’s printed, what’s written, what’s read? Well, lotsa luck, sir. It’s a common delusion of tyrants. Writers and readers, even as they suffer from it, regard it with amused contempt.

  Great Nature’s Second Course

  Written about 2009, not previously published.

  When my brother was about twelve and I about nine, he told me he liked to dream as much as he could every night. I asked why, and he said, “Because I’m doing something instead of just lying there.” I was impressed by this energetic attitude. I hadn’t thought of dreams as activity. We talk about “having” dreams, not “doing” them. In fact, I still can’t convince myself that I do my dreams. They seem to use me for their own purposes. Another brother, the psychologist, told me that in fact I’m responsible for them: I do dream my dream, nobody else does, and everybody in it is me. He’s right, but I hate to admit it. I don’t want to take on that responsibility, I want to escape it.

  Dreams may not offer escape, but sleep does. Indeed it escapes us. It eludes description, it evades. It’s what you don’t know you’re doing while you do it. Sleep is hard to talk about.

  Scientists have been trying hard to talk about it for decades now. Wikipedia starts off bravely: “Sleep is the natural state of bodily rest observed throughout the animal kingdom. . . . In humans, other mammals, and a substantial majority of other animals . . . regular sleep is necessary for survival. . . . Its purposes are only partly clear and are the subject of intense research.” That research is fascinating (as you can see in such books as William C. Dement’s Some Must Watch While Some Must Sleep), but so far teasingly inconclusive. Here is something every human being, dog, cat, and mouse does for a third or more of their lifetime, an activity we humans assiduously practice, with a time set aside for it (night) and a special place to do it in (bed) and even special clothes to wear for it (sheep pajamas). The scientists can describe it, yet can’t claim to understand it. We know sleep in our body, we recognise it as deeply familiar—but the mind cannot lay hold of it.

  Sleep gets some really good PR from poets, who are used to talking clearly about things we don’t understand.

  Care-charmer Sleep, son of the sable night,

  Brother to Death, in silent darkness born;

  Relieve my languish, and restore the light,

  With dark forgetting of my care return,

  And let the day be time enough to mourn . . .

  Samuel Daniel

  Come, Sleep! O Sleep, the certain knot of peace,

  The baiting-place of wit, the balm of woe,

  The poor man’s wealth, the prisoner’s release,

  Th’ indifferent judge between the high and low . . .

  Philip Sidney

  O magic sleep! O comfortable bird

  That broodest o’er the troubled sea of the mind

  Till it is hushed and smooth . . .

  John Keats

  Oh sle
ep! it is a gentle thing,

  Beloved from pole to pole,

  To Mary Queen the praise be given!

  She sent the gentle sleep from heaven

  That slid into my soul . . .

  Samuel Coleridge

  The silence that is in the starry sky,

  The sleep that is among the lonely hills . . .

  William Wordsworth

  Methought I heard a voice cry, ‘Sleep no more!

  Macbeth does murder sleep,’ the innocent sleep,

  Sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleave of care,

  The death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath,

  Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course,

  Chief nourisher in life’s feast . . .

  William Shakespeare

  I picked those almost at random from about 180 index items for “sleep” in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. Poets appreciate sleep. In fiction, it seldom plays much of a role, except by not being there when a character wants it. He tosses, she turns, they thump the hot pillow, and so goes the insomniac routine we’re all familiar with. When a character actually goes to sleep, the novelist tiptoes quietly out of the bedroom—unless, of course, the character has a dream, the only drama sleep provides. Once the author has said that somebody’s breathing grew quiet and regular, that’s it. We don’t really want a record of each breath in and each breath out. So sleep eludes fiction, leaving only the footprints of dream.

  Patrick O’Brian, that marvelous teller of sea stories, almost caught sleep in the net of prose. His character Stephen Maturin, an insomniac, sometimes dabbles a little too deep in his sedatives and sometimes is miserably wakeful, but there are times when, very tired, he falls asleep naturally, slipping with pleasure into an abyss deeper and darker than the sea his ship is sailing. In those passages the author catches by suggestion the actual experience of going to sleep, and it is magical. O’Brian, a supremely good action writer, makes you realise that to go to sleep is, in fact, an action—an act that changes everything.

  An act; a change; a journey. “Go to sleep,” we say to the baby in our arms. Go to that place, that other place, where everything is different, where you won’t have to cry . . .

  For young babies, of course sleep is the natural state. They return to it with angelic constancy, and when they’re kept from it by hunger or discomfort they let us know their misery and rage. The infant’s moments of awareness form a little archipelago of islets in a vast, soft sea. It’s only unfortunate that the islets tend to cluster, clamorously, endlessly, right where the parent’s need for sleep is deepest.

  Growing up means being awake more and more often. The baby’s islands of awakeness increase and join into the continent of daylight on which we adults move purposefully about, doing business, certain that we’re aware, because we’re awake.

  As those who practice meditation testify, the two things aren’t the same. You can be wide awake all day without a single moment of awareness. Multitasking is the newest and by far the most successful form of awareness avoidance. People who drive a car while drinking coffee and talking to their broker on a cellphone have mastered a form of narrowly localised consciousness completely impenetrable to awareness. Yet however well provided we are with instruments of electronic distraction, still the sea of sleep surrounds us, whether we’re aware or merely awake, and calls us nightly for the journey back into mystery.

  We can will ourselves to go to sleep, and have our will frustrated for what seems forever, but is in fact rarely as much as a whole night. Insomnia is an indescribable misery, but continued sleeplessness is so ruinous to mind and body that only the torment of pain can prolong it more than fifty hours or so.

  We can will ourselves not to go to sleep—and eventually, inevitably, be defeated. No matter how we try to cling to consciousness, when the time has come for it to melt away, there’s no holding on to it. It’s just gone, quietly taking the universe with it.

  Because our consciousness seems to be our self, our humanity, even our life, we may fear the loss of it. There are people who dread sleep because they dread any loss of control, or because their dreams are all nightmares. “Macbeth has murdered sleep,” says sleepwalking Lady Macbeth, unconscious, yet hideously conscious of the one terrible thing. There are people who, like my brother at twelve, resent sleep as a waste of time and brain, envying those famous few who need only two or three hours of it. Think how much we could do, they say, if we didn’t have to lie around snoring all night! I read a science-fiction novel about people who are genetically altered so as not to need sleep. They all become geniuses, immensely superior to the rest of us. I was sceptical. Having twenty-four hours a day to think and work and make mistakes instead of sixteen or eighteen would make a difference in the quantity of human thought, work, and judgment, but would it raise the quality? How? Why? It’s just six or eight hours more to do the same stuff in, including the mistakes. And at what cost?

  In college, we used to boast about our sleepless nights—how many beers we’d drunk or, before finals, how much studying we’d got done. But the next day, the Sandman I’d fended off so successfully all night was right beside me, reminding me uncomfortably about the beer, making it hard for my gritty eyes to focus on the exam I’d studied for. He is gentle, but he is ineluctable and unpersuadable, that Sandman. He is one of those awful people who knows—who really knows—what’s good for us.

  Researchers have exhibited by experiment that if we’re systematically deprived of sleep, we go crazy, and if it were possible to totally keep us from sleeping, we’d die. Torturers are well aware of this.

  One of the strangest things about the strange traditional training of doctors in the United States was the custom of making medical students do their practical internship in extended shifts with few and brief recuperative breaks until they were incompetent with fatigue and lack of sleep. I know no rational justification for this torment, which obviously put patients in danger. But then, hospitals are generally hostile to sleep. No real darkness; no real silence; a rigid schedule that leaves rest out of account. Even though the healing qualities of natural sleep are thoroughly researched and acknowledged, still the nurse comes bustling in to wake you up to take your sleeping pill. And the intensive care unit, entirely lacking silence, darkness, privacy, peace, and rest, is as hostile, as toxic an environment for recovery as could be imagined.

  Sleep gives us something we need, and we know it; but what it gives us is something we can’t know, though we may feel it slip from us as we wake. Refreshment, is it? Solace, simplification, innocence?

  People asleep look stupid. Knowing that, we hate to be seen asleep. We deny it fiercely. “I wasn’t asleep, I was just thinking!” with my mouth hanging open, drooling slightly. . . . But people asleep often also look childish. They look innocent. They are innocent. The word innocent means “doing no harm.” The coldest-hearted murderer, the cruelest dictator, the most dangerous maniac, is harmless so long as he sleeps.

  There has been throughout human history a pretty strong feeling against killing a sleeping person or even animal. It was seen not only as unsporting, but as wicked. While asleep your enemy is not only helpless, but actually innocent. He has to be awake to be your enemy. Any such moral discrimination was lost when we started slaughtering at a safe distance and wholesale. In the target area being bombed there is only the Enemy, an abstract entity which is not considered human and therefore does not sleep and cannot be innocent. It cannot even provide statistics. How can bomber pilots keep a body count? What do drones care?

  I wish war could cease with darkness, as it used to until less than two centuries ago, so the people under the bombing planes and the people who fly them could be allowed some hours of innocence out of every murderous day.

  But now the drones are to do it all for us, so none of us can ever be innocent again.

  I wish we had more respect for the great gift we are given, the silent hours, the interval of unknowing. Every night offers us
a deep draft of the water of forgetfulness, the river Lethe, which we drink in remembrance of where we came from and in practice for our return. From it we rise renewed. Sleep is the strangest of initiations, the kindest of mysteries, a ceremony whose observance is blessing. I wish we held it in the honor and gratitude it deserves.

  What Women Know

  Revised from two talks given at the Winter Fishtrap Gathering in Joseph, Oregon,

  in February, 2010. Each talk preceded open group discussion of the topic.

  The First Evening

  Our topic for tonight is: What do we learn from women?

  Many of us find ourselves surprisingly defensive on the subject of how men’s and women’s roles differ, how gender is constructed and enacted. Since generalisations about human behavior are easy to derail by bringing up exceptions, I suggest that to keep our discussion profitable, we footnote the exceptions. We’re entering the Forest of Gender, where it’s awfully easy to get lost. If we keep foregrounding a tree here and a tree there, we’ll lose sight of the very big, dark woods we’re trying to find a way through.

  So, in answer to the question What do we learn from women? my first huge generalisation is that we learn how to be human.

  Over the millennia, in all societies, right up to now in Oregon, women have supplied most of the basic instructions on how to walk, talk, eat, sing, pray, play with other children, and which adults we should respect, and what to fear, what to love—the basic skills, the basic rules. The whole amazing, complicated business of staying alive and being a member of a society.