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Premature Going On

September 24, 2005

My copy of Octavia Butler's Parable of the Talents arrived the other day from Seven Stories Press. Seven Stories also publishes the Open Media Pamphlet Series, which offers a variety of essays and other short works in monograph format. I'd been tempted on previous visits to their website (URL below) but couldn't limit myself to four or five (at $5 a pop) and so didn't order any. When I ordered Talents, the "pamphlet" (actually a perfect-bound booklet trimmed to mass-market size) that called most urgently was Sent by Earth: A Message from the Grandmother Spirit, which Alice Walker wrote in the wake of 9/11. It began as a speech given to the Midwives Alliance of North America in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on September 22, 2001. I read it last night and reread it today.

Some of the words struck me at once; others I'll be sitting with in coming days. One of the former, which hit home and is still going boinnggg in my head, was Walker's recollection of what went through her mind when she watched one plane crash into the World Trade Tower. It includes this: "What is the story whose fiery ending I am witnessing, I wondered. This was an act by a man who did not believe, definitely did not believe, in the possibility of love, or even common sense, to transform the world."

Two short pages later come the lines that grabbed me most insistently and made me read, read, and read again. I was already on their wavelength: it's another aspect of what I blogged about yesterday, "premature humanism." Walker remembers:

. . . during the Vietnam war, in which America bombed a country many of us up to then had never heard of, fifty thousand Americans died. But since the end of the war over sixty thousand who were in the war have died from suicide and drug overdoses and other ailments of the spirit and soul. George Bush, père, counseled us to "put the war [that war] behind us." But as Michael Meade, magical storyteller and warrior, so emphatically reminds us, when speaking of that war, in which he refused to fight: "What is behind us is a long, long row of coffins, and we'd better turn around and genuinely grieve and give our dead, both Vietnamese and American, a proper burial. Then we might be able to talk about going on." . . .

In the late 1970s for a couple of years I was part of the Washington Area Women's Center collective. On a shoestring budget and in a basement space in an unused school building that was one step above a squat, the center provided rap groups, a hotline, a feminist library, a newsletter, a coffeehouse, and a place for women to learn new skills, organize events, and just hang out. It also provided me a crash course in group dynamics run amok. One of the major life-lessons I learned and still carry with me is how much damage can be done by a single individual's fear if other individuals don't have the courage to recognize, name, and decline to be cowed by it. It was in the midst of one of these grueling intracollective battle/non-battles that one of my sister collective members said, "The trouble is that we can't stand to be uncomfortable for more than five seconds." (It might have been five minutes, or two minutes, or two seconds, or some other very short period of time. I've quoted her so often over the years that the memory that plays in my mind's eye and ear is shifty. The exasperated tone of her voice doesn't change.)

Premature humanism. Premature going on. When we can't stand to be uncomfortable, someone else has to shut up.

Seven Stories Press can be found on the Web at www.sevenstories.com.

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