December 12, 2023
EXPLORING THE UNKNOWN IN MIND AND HEART
Dear friends, seekers, imaginers,
I’ve spent today attempting to write a poem about friendship. I don’t usually choose such a huge abstract topic, but a friend commissioned me to write something for her memoir and I’ve taken up the challenge. The faces of childhood friends flood my mind, some names have disappeared into the mists of time, but the feelings of intimacy, mystery, and adoration are easily resurrected. These were “friends of my youth,” as the writer Alice Munro would say, companions and accomplices in mischief who taught me loyalty, cunning, devotion.
The topics of loneliness, friendship, and connection are in the air perhaps as a counterbalance to the feverishly discussed topic of enemies. Enemies loom large in the news, in our lives and in our imaginations. So much so that I felt called to explore our human instinct to wreak revenge on our enemies, those who have wronged us, in “,” the latest entry in Transcending the Past, my column for Psychology Today.
While enemies loom large in our lives, we seem to be less clear and less fervent about our friends.
If communication is on my mind, so is miscommunication and its deviant cousins, disinformation and misinformation. The other day I heard a Buddhist teacher say he was learning how to “practice with futility.” I admit I am feeling a similar need.
The novel I am working on is set, in part, during the Vietnam War era. One of my characters has become radicalized (the novel is from the point of view of her daughter). She feels energized and not futile about the possibility of societal change. It’s been interesting to reenter that historical moment when big transformations were in the air and compare it to our current zeitgeist.
Hope is different than wishful thinking. Hope along with courage, determination, and organizational leadership fueled the 1960s movements to fight inequalities of class, gender, and race and to dismantle an unjust war.
The roots of hope are sunk deep in the soil of idealism and require a necessary quality of innocence that rejects cynicism with its bad faith in the future. Hope fuels the imagination and creates spaciousness for the possible.
Propaganda has always been a potent force in shaping cultural ideas and biases, but in the sixties, we weren’t barraged by influencers or taken over by devices that restructure our brains and how we think. A single horrific photo of a napalmed South Vietnamese girl running naked down a country road helped turn public opinion against an increasingly unpopular war.
Think how many images of atrocities we view daily, and yet what has changed? Could it be that the channels through which hope should flow are now blocked by the constant bombardment of media gunk? Hope is contagious but so is despair. What feeds the former is connection—friendship, presence. Love. What feeds despair is loneliness, aloneness, isolation. More than ever, I say: Let’s hang out. Let’s listen to each other, and not just to the words, but to the feelings beneath the words, to the invisible self that wants to be regarded and heard. Let’s also listen to our inner voices, in silence and stillness and with respect.
Please don’t forget that books can serve as trusted companions and guides and offer sanctuary for restless weary minds. Proust said reading is the place where we (the reader) go beyond the wisdom of the author to our own wisdom. Our wisdom, he wrote, begins where the author’s ends. A book that has significantly affected me in recent months is Regarding the Pain of Others by the philosopher and social critic Susan Sontag. Her essays explore the moral considerations and effects of viewing atrocities from a distance, in photographs, on TV, or in other media. “One can feel obliged to look at photographs that record great cruelties and crimes. One should feel obliged to think about what it means to look at them, about the capacity actually to assimilate what they show.”—Susan Sontag
The issue of bearing witness is at the core of my work, poetry and fiction.
Even in these times, I DO have some good news to share with you, I’m grateful to say:
I recently received exciting news about a poem from my collection M: “What Couldn’t Be Said” was awarded special mention by the Pushcart Prize Committee for 2024 and is in their just-published anthology, . I’m honored to be among the finest American poets chosen.
A writer never knows where or with whom her writing will land. Lucky for me, my poems about Mary Magdalene landed in the hands of the TNW Ensemble Theater Company. Some of the poems along with other works by a group of talented women will be part of a performance called Step Right Up, Ma’am: Resilience Theater and Art Show. The production is part of the Great Performances Series at the Overture Theater in Madison. The performance dates are scheduled for Friday, June 21 through Sunday matinee June 23, 2024.
I’ll add updated information about the theater production on the Events page of my website, as well as any news about the 12-part documentary series on dreams and dreaming in which I participated.
Perhaps I should have issued a warning at the beginning of this letter that said: Serious tone ahead. But I have to agree with the ever-wise James Baldwin who wrote that the job of the novelist (and I might add, poet) “involves attempting to tell as much of the truth as one can bear, and then a little more.”
And in the words of my friend, the author Mark Nepo: If moved, please share this offering and spread the word. Anyone can subscribe at this link.
Always, with gratitude and care,
Dale
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