29 April 2010

Thinkering Institute: Beyond Newtonian laws

Here a glimpse of what's cooking here at my one-woman think tank.

Isn't that word Geronimo! about that jumping-off, what you say when you let go of the rope or run and leap past the edge, when there's no going back and you're in free-fall for what seems like an flash and a roaring eternity? That is how I'm feeling about the book I'm working on right now. I printed out all 61,000 words of it and read it in one sitting yesterday. It made me happy -- the story and the fact that it occupies a place in the world now. Sure, I see problems all over it, but they're all solvable; there's a whole and a reason for being and a bunch of interesting scenes and people to weave together, and a main character I am rooting for and hope you will too. It's all very exciting and there's still a lot to do. I figure I need about 10-20 more writing days to get to the end of the plot (and I may need an epilogue as well). I was just reading an interesting piece about how Joseph Campbell arrived at the idea of "bliss" (it's not quite what I'd thought: it's more like that Geronimo! moment). My friend Gever may have started me thinking about this when he recently posted about leaping off cliffs on his Tinkering School blog.

The jumping-off part of this project is my attempt to answer violence with nonviolence. My protagonist is still vibrating from the effects of living with the constant, continuous threat of violence, and it takes her a while to be able to conceive of any other way. But once she does, she never wants to go back to the other mode: it feels wrong and bad and soul-destroying. So she has to find a path, to learn to be more creative than everyone around her who just wants to get to the end of the story, to end the bad guy's story, an eye for an eye, tit-for-tat. I still am not sure how I will solve this riddle. There's a Newtonian action-reaction balance I am looking hard at. Is that equilibrium truly necessary or even desirable in this universe?

This led to thoughts of how we collectively value things, which of course made me think of Lawrence Weschler's book Boggs: A Comedy of Values, which is one of those books I think should be required reading for anyone who lives in a society and is capable of reading it. Because it's about living in society, I might not choose this as desert-island reading (I like Chesterson's response when asked what book he would take if stranded on a desert island: The Art of Shipbuilding). But I am living in a society that is having to think hard about individual and group values at this moment of economic recalibration, and violence is one of the things groups collectively condone or resist. Not only do we see a lot of violence in our media but many of us are also exposed to acts of violence in our private lives, whether being bullied at school or work, or suffering physical or emotional abuse at home. There's a certain amount of tolerance for violence and bullying, a sense that it can't be stopped. This is backwards I think, and also goes to the heart of our financial crisis. We've come to value some things that intrinsically have no value. We've colluded in endowing them with their power, and now we must dismantle this big facade and rebuild something more sustainable, supportive, and enduring.

Capitalists like to say we saw the collapse of communism a few years ago, starting with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the defeat of the Soviets in Afghanistan. I'm sure there are Marxists out there right now crowing about the crumbling edifices of capitalism, too. What I see is the end of an era of valuing money and might in the abstract and the specific. To survive the next era we are going to need to adapt and value other things even more highly: creativity, connection, love, innovation. More money and growth for their own sakes simply aren't sustainable values, in and of themselves. For example, I find it interesting that this country has corporate laws enforcing a growth-at-all-costs belief system that prohibit targets of corporate takeovers from resisting a merger, even if the merger would clearly weaken or destroy the target company's production or business.

I am doing a lot of reading at the same time as all this cogitating and writing the ending of my novel. One topic I am reading about is nonviolence. I have found some interesting things already, having just scratched the surface. I never knew this, but Gandhi said that he learned the path to nonviolence from his wife, whom early in their marriage he had first tried to bully into submission. It wasn't working, he said, and she showed him the path to nonviolence by teaching him that no differences between them made her deserving of how he was treating her. Then I read about how if one person is a tyrant but everyone agrees that person is a tyrant, there is no need to subdue that person because all of society can turn away from the tyrant. I see parallels in the degrees to which we as a society are willing to accept money and might as ideals and to look the other way as despotic rulers looting and pillaging the very things that gave them their strengths. Can't we all just turn away from those outmoded definitions of power and influence and turn instead to the power each of us has within us to do good in the world, to be of service to others and our own truths. What if we weren't all competing to be first to use up the last of the resources and instead were each of us supporting and encouraging the other in engaging with our communities and our very own selves?

No comments: