The World Has Changed (19 page)

 

I.A.: But therapists have a way of getting in your life.... The other day I was asked how my sex life was. And I said I’m not willing to talk about that with anybody except my husband.... “Isabel, you’re paying for
this.” And I say, “Yeah, but this I’m not going to talk about.” And then I thought, “Well, I’m wasting my money here. If I’m not willing to talk about this.”

 

A.W.: Well maybe you should change your therapist. Because that is a rather direct question, without sort of leading.

 

I.A.: Well it was formulated in a different way, not so blunt.

Are you in therapy?

 

A.W.: See, no, this is how you do it. You see someone infrequently when you feel a need. You may do it for a long time, but you don’t think of it as something that you’re just hooked on forever. Because that’s not the way I think it has to be. So yes, I have been, and when I feel that I really need an hour or two to talk with someone who really cares and who can really hear me, then I will ask for an hour or two. And feel that . . . I get what I need. If I need three hours that’s fine. But it’s not such a big . . . I don’t feel it in any way as a threatening thing. I feel it as something, another wonderful thing, in the world that will help me understand myself better and feel happier. So, Jean, I think a great deal of your profession.

 

J.S.B.: Well I think it’s an enormous privilege to hear the truth of people’s lives and be a witness to it and help people through a particular time in their life where there’s a sense of needing both a witness and somebody who’s with you on a journey.... I use a metaphor about how each of us is a protagonist in our own life story. And whether you write . . . there’s a point of, at what point should you be writing a story and which point should you be telling it, and not giving it form, just letting it come? It’s sort of like those many drafts; that’s unself-conscious. But when I was a resident . . . I remember ’cause I have a very strong liberal arts background, I started to realize that when people tell their stories about what has really happened to them and they have a vocabulary, it’s prose. If it’s because it’s so true and the words fit whatever it was that really happened, and the details are there, and that really is prose. And people need to know that.

 

A.W.: And poetry is the more inarticulate emotion. Is that it?

 

J.S.B.: Well, it’s more to the music.

 

I.A.: An angel passed. We say that in Chile when there is a silence. Do you say that here? An angel passed when there is silence in the room.

Two angels passed.

 

J.S.B.: Maybe there is a question.

 

I.A.: Maybe there are many questions.

 

Q.: My question is to all three of you, but it comes from a line in Alice Walker, in your book
The Color Purple
. One of the most important paragraphs, pages, in that book to me was what began with the words “Tell me what your God looks like.” And I know that was written a while ago, and I guess what I’d love to hear is, tell me what your God looks like now.

 

A.W.: Oh, I’d be happy to. My God is the earth and looks like the earth. That’s it.

 

I.A.: I don’t know what my God looks like because I don’t know what kind of God I believe. I don’t believe in the God I was taught when I was a child, and I don’t believe God has a shape or a form or a face or a name. I think that it is something that is like oneness or wholeness, or one spirit, and we are all like part of this spirit. And if I can really accept that in my heart I can see myself in every human being, in every animal, in every soul. And it’s very hard because sometimes it’s very easy to recognize oneself in the people one likes and very hard to recognize oneself in the torturer, the rapist, the criminal. But when one thinks in terms of one universal unique spirit, you are just representations of that. It’s difficult for me to talk about this because I’m like beginning to explore that, and . . . I don’t have any answers, I just have the questions.

 

A.W.: I would just like to add that actually I can now put my belief on a bumper sticker. “The earth is my God, and nature is its spirit.” So there.

 

J.S.B.: Well, mine’s a more complex answer. The book that I am currently writing, which is part of the becoming a more personal person in my writing, is about my own, it’s about a certain segment of my life, but it clearly is saying what I guess I have been asked to talk about, which is that the experiences that have made a difference in my life, that put me on the course of what it is I do and what it is I believe, have all been mystical experiences. That underneath this professional kid, there has been a very strong direct experience of divinity that, when I was sixteen, made me convinced that—it wasn’t a conviction, it was one of those ineffable experiences in which one feels graced suddenly. And in that moment of grace, so humbled, and out of that humility, having a sense of deep service. And for me at sixteen with all my liberal arts and debater, verbal kinds of abilities, the conviction was that I was so fortunate and that I could never repay; it was within a God context at that point in my life, so I could never repay God for the gifts that I had except by doing for others. And I had the conviction at sixteen that I should be a medical doctor with no talent in sciences or math. And it really was not a very easy task for me to surrender to that and do badly in college and those classes that I didn’t do very well in, which were the pre-med classes. And that’s when I made a sort of deal with God that said, “Well, maybe I mistook the message, but I’ll keep on course and apply to medical school. And if I get accepted, I guess it was right, and if they turn me down, I guess I misunderstood what I was supposed to do.” Well, that got me on this course that has led to knowing God and that—and I didn’t know until I went into psychiatry that it was true—that I really had a gift for it, and that this was my lifework. So there is something about following that. And then I call myself an “episcapagan” because somewhere along the line in my second half of life, I really had the experience of a different kind of divinity that could only happen within a context of people. And I was in a time of considerable anguish. And a woman asked me how I was, and I started to cry. And she came over, and she held me. And I had this sense of us both being embraced by something that was Goddess, different. [It] wasn’t transcendent God, which had been my experience before, it was something else. And that has led me to know something that I didn’t know before that is the impetus for what was then the next phase of my life, which ends up getting somewhere close to where the divinity of the earth, and the sacredness of the body, and a knowledge that comes to women is part of it all.

 

Q.: I’d like to ask you, it’s kind of like a two-part question: you both talked about the pain of creativity, you said that you were facedown on the earth, you talked about a book inside of you that’s too painful to write. I’d like to hear more about that pain of creativity. And then another question, is there a time when you can write from a different place, not from the pain, but more of a centeredness, even from joy, and probably from the satisfaction that you were talking about, the satisfaction of a later time in a woman’s life?

 

A.W.: Well, for me, just because what is painful is often understanding that what I’m writing about someone is actually living, millions of people. So that’s really very painful. But to know that I can myself create a story which will show that pain and make people feel it, intuit it, there’s nothing more joyful. So they’re not really separate things. There are also times when you’re not writing about something that is really crushing to the spirit and there’s a great deal of joy just in being able to share one’s sense of the unfolding of nature and the connection of people with the earth. I wrote an essay once about how when I was finishing
The Temple of My Familiar
, and all during the writing of that book, because I was so aware of our connection to animals, animals came from everywhere to be around me, to be with me. And I was just amazed; it was just so clearly a period when somehow what I was writing about, and mainly my deep feeling about animals that started to surface, brought into my life creatures of every kind. I mean some that had never, I think, been on this land. Well, maybe not in a hundred years.

 

I.A.: I have books and stories that I have written out of joy.
Eva Luna
is a book that I wrote when I realized how joyful and wonderful it was to be a woman. I always wanted to be a man. In the society I was born in it’s much easier to be a man in every sense. It was much better to be one of my brothers. And then when I was around fortysomething I realized that I have done all the things that men do, but I had this wonderful privilege of being a mother, of being allowed to be emotional, of having this connection with other women that men usually don’t have because they’re competing. And so I realize all this, and that book came out of joy. But there is also a lot of anger in that book, and that’s the anger of the injustice that women are done permanently. So it’s a mixture of
things, but the process of writing is always joyful. Even when you write about torture it’s joyful. I think you had a question now.

 

Q.: You talked about a sense of entitlement when you have earned your creative right by having suffered and experienced alienation as a child, and this is something I do understand. I’m still finding that when I write about certain aspects that obviously are preempted by my life experience, I still have blocks where enormous guilt comes up that I am betraying and being disloyal to people who still don’t understand what I have come through, and that my writing exposes what I perceive as the lie of their life. And I just wonder if you have any responses about how you deal with that kind of dilemma that comes up. I’m thinking specifically of, like, I’m writing a play which has a mother/daughter relationship and I have enormous guilt that I am really being disloyal to my mother. And even though I’m not writing about her, per se.

 

I.A.: Well, I can answer part of the question. There’s always fear and guilt. I write a lot about relationships, and my mom is the only person who reads my books before they’re published. And I sometimes feel the guilt, but writing is something that you have to do. You don’t have a choice. And if you are offending people, and you are revealing secrets, it’s too bad. You are helpless. You have to do it. And just go ahead and do it. I’ve betrayed my friends, my lovers, my husband, my children, everybody. And writing is about life and about betraying.

 

A.W.: I think of it in a slightly different way, which is that we really, especially as women, we must learn to be loyal to ourselves.

 

I.A.: But often to be loyal to yourself you have to betray others. In your writing you have to do it.

 

A.W.: But that’s what I’m saying. Yeah, but if you think of it as being loyal to yourself rather than disloyal to your mother, I think this will relieve a lot of your guilt.

 

J.S.B.: Well, you know, it is really not about writing, it’s about leading an authentic life that differs from what your mother expected you to do and say. And you don’t have to do it through your writing, you have to
do it through your life however you express it. And there is guilt. There is guilt at being different, at not meeting expectations; you feel guilty for being visible about something that our parents’ generation would never be visible about, all kinds of things. And so I don’t think that’s about writing, I think that’s about life, and that’s about being willing to tell your story, what you perceive, and then wait for either lightning to strike or for the earth to sort of dissolve under you. And then you find it does not.

 

Q.: Hi. Each of you has spoken about the spiritual center from which you write, and I guess my question for each of you is what caused you to say yes to it rather than saying no? And just a small question for Alice because my daughter sent me here with a mission: she loves your children’s book [
Finding
]
the Green Stone
, and I’d like to be able to go back and tell her something about the writing of that.

 

J.S.B.: I didn’t know you wrote a book called
Finding the Green Stone
.

 

A.W.: I did. I think that the answer to the first question is that really it’s a matter of necessity, and that you write to save your life is really true. And so far it’s been a very sturdy kind of ladder, you know, out of the pit. About writing
Finding the Green Stone
, it has a kind of complicated, and I don’t even know if I remember everything, but about thirteen years ago my mother had a stroke, and it debilitated her, and this is the woman who’d always been just this enormously energetic earth goddess, and so it’s a great weight to even think about her incapacitated. But I started I think mourning for her, and somehow I at the same time was reading about a ceremony in some really ancient culture where when people die they have a green stone placed in their mouths to remind them on the journey that rebirth is always the next step. So the green stone as a symbol grew out of that. And I more or less dreamed the story of
Finding the Green Stone
, because I realized that you do, you come into life with your own green stone, your own vibrant life, your own heart, your own clear pure spirit. But this is sometimes damaged and destroyed if you’re not very careful. And sometimes you do it yourself. And I wanted to write a story for children in which there is a character who does this to himself, who really mutilates his own spirit because of his really awful behavior. But I wanted also to show that we are healed
in spirit in community, and so that is what happens. And that for us in this time, unlike any other time ever, we are able to be healed in a community that is incredibly diverse. So that everybody is our community.