The World Has Changed (27 page)

 

M.T.: And others, Jerry Mander pointed out that in northern Canada their whole culture has been decimated by the influx of television coming in and basically, it has brought with it the material world and the outside world in a way that the young people are wanting to leave....

 

A.W.: They probably think they’re poor, because they don’t have the houses . . . the cars, the refrigerators, and the motorcycles and all of that.

 

M.T.: Yes, and these are people who lived in longhouses in the communal way and shared things. Their whole culture is being changed radically.

 

A.W.: Yes, I’ve seen that happen in Bali. I’ve gone there over the years. It’s been so upsetting; now so many people have TV. The first time I went, you would see a television set every once in a while. It would be under a tree, and they would be watching a puppet show on it, the same little puppet show you could watch off of it. It just leads to a kind of hardness in the faces of the people, because they take a much more cynical attitude about life. It doesn’t—well, I can’t say it doesn’t ever, but it rarely, in sort of mainstream television, it’s rare for it to promote values in keeping with community and struggle and solidarity and spiritual development.

 

M.T.: Since Bali has come up, Bali is of interest to us. What is your feeling about Bali and why have you gone there and what have you gotten from going to Bali?

 

A.W.: I went there many years ago just because I heard of it. I heard how beautiful it is and the people. I wanted to be in a place where the art is still inseparable from life. Where everything . . . Also where art and spirit are together. And people don’t even think for it to be otherwise. That appealed to me, because in our culture things are fragmented in such a way that it is very difficult to go about your business as an artist, as a spiritual person, as a political activist, as a mother, as one thing, one being. And all these things are just part of what you do. They’re not even part, they’re just mixed so that you can’t separate these things. So I went for my third visit about a month ago, about a month and a half ago. It’s changed a lot. You really have to dodge the cars in the streets of Ubud. I was happy, though, to go out into the countryside and find the old Bali, still. But I often, wherever I go, I watch the faces of the people and this was the first time I felt and saw that cynicism, that look of smartness that I never associated with Bali, with the people of Bali. I also saw more unhappy children. The first time I went, I really never saw a child who seemed to be unhappy. Now, there may well have been unhappy children, but they certainly seemed pretty okay. This time I saw children who were hawking wares and obviously working because they were being made to do that. I noticed that the dancers in these
dance programs have the saddest eyes, and I cannot believe that they dance because they feel like dancing. This is so hurtful to the spirit that I couldn’t really go to any of these things. I gave up trying to watch any performances. I just had a much better time going out into the rice paddies and watching the people deal with the rice, because they seemed to be doing what they had always done.

 

M.T.: So you didn’t think they were doing it out of a calling to ritualize the sacred. I mean, there wasn’t that sense of performance.

 

A.W.: By now it is a performance. I didn’t feel anything particularly sacred. The people looked too sad.

 

M.T.: Ah, interesting. Well, this is really kind of endemic in many cultures around the planet, where other cultures like the West, Western materialism, that kind of thing coming into heretofore what we would call primal cultures, native cultures, ancient cultures.

 

J.T.: One of the themes I pick up in some of your books has to do with children, and I know, in one of your current books, you say there could be (it’s a quote from one of your characters; I think this is from
Temple of My Familiar
) there can be no happy community in which there is one unhappy child. That really struck me, and that’s a theme that I pick up here and there in all of your writings. So maybe you could talk to us about the children and your feelings about children.

 

A.W.: I think a society that ignores a crying child is a doomed society. You don’t need more than one child crying. I think that’s why some ancient cultures have rules about how a child is always carried. I think, in Bali, until the child is two years old, or what seems like a very long time to us, but it’s a period. I remember the first time I went to Bali. We lived in a house that was looked after by a family, this Balinese family. It was true; I watched them holding the baby. There was the mother, the father, and the grandfather. And that grandfather held this little boy. He was out chopping weeds and doing all the chores around the house, but he never let that child set foot on the ground. It was the most remarkable thing. So that the Balinese child traditionally is a very well-adjusted child because there is that feeling of being part of whatever’s going on
and loved and valued. They would also, all of them, sit with the child and be with the child, even though the child wasn’t talking at that point. I just saw this little boy this last trip. He is big and he was carrying—he and his mother were going to the temple, and they had these offering trays on their heads. He just seemed really in sync, in whole. So I do, I feel that it’s not enough to just think that your child is okay, the world is fine. I feel very badly about the way, in a racist culture, that white people can think, “Well, my child is okay and my child is well fed, well clothed, well housed, and is going to a good school and right across the track there are children who are starving, miserable, sad. There is no way to think that these children can be separate forever. Because the children who have nothing will always be trying to get what your child has. And then your child will be called upon to try to protect what is his or hers. A better way of doing it would be to try to make sure that all children are happy. And well cared for.

 

J.T.: It just seems to me this is a wonderful political platform if everything was run by that, what you just said: is it good for the children? Anything that we decide, poetically, if we say “Is it good for the children, all the children?” It certainly helps to separate what should be done and what should be—

 

A.W.: Okay, if you and I started a political program, I tell you what we could do, just for instance in Anderson Valley. We could go around to every household and we could interview the children. We could ask them, “How do you feel? Are you happy? What makes you upset? What makes you ill?” It doesn’t always have to be that children are mistreated physically, although they often are. They have many many things to tell us about how they are treated and they really are the measure of our success. If we lose the children, we’ve lost. And we’ve just about lost the children.

 

J.T.: It’s true.

 

M.T.: I’m reminded of an essay you wrote (and you may think differently now, I don’t know) about having only one child.

 

A.W.: I think the same.

 

M.T.: You think the same. Tell us about that.

 

A.W.: I think that the planet being finite and resources being limited and things like that, from an ecological point of view, there is no reason why people should have more than one child. Two, if you really stretch yourself. That way you would at least have a replica of each other. But my feeling is that one way of relieving the planet of this burden that the population is, is to limit the number of children people have, because when you have a lot of children . . . especially in the West. I think the Western notion is often that it’s just people in the third world who should limit their children. The truth is that this country, and countries like Australia and New Zealand and all these colonized places, really exist because of overpopulation by white people. Deliberately trying to have more people than the native population. But what that has meant, given the high standard of living of Westerners, that is why the resources are just gobbled up. They’re gobbled up by people who have ten and twelve children or even six, because every child has to have a house, a car, a refrigerator, a whatever. I think that just in terms of survival of human beings, people really must voluntarily decide to limit their families. China, of course, has tried to do this by edict. I think maybe other countries will have to do something. But there are too many people on the planet. That is a much more serious problem than many people are willing to recognize because they feel a need to have children to prove something about themselves. My theory is that if you love yourself, the more you love yourself the fewer children you will have. Because really there’s no need; also if you really care about children you don’t have to have your own. There are millions of children you can look after.

 

M.T.: In that essay you referred to the impact of a child on your work. Could you talk a little bit about that?

 

A.W.: I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to function as a writer and the kind of writer I intended to be and I was: very committed and needing long hours of intense work, to write novels especially. But I discovered that with one child, I really was okay. I had some rough times—that whole first year, for instance. I found it very hard to be that suddenly split person. I had been twenty-one or twenty-two years (or however
old I was, maybe twenty-three or twenty-four). Anyway, I had been completely single-minded in terms of my work in college; completely single-minded political activism, right on whatever I was doing. Then, I suddenly had this little baby and she was just as primary as any thought I’d ever had, totally. Not to mention seductive and a miracle. So I was just really very much aware that I had suddenly become two people and this was really—it was going to be a juggling act. But after that, I did what mothers often do; I found a good day care right down the street. [My daughter] was always very bright and liked people, so she was happy, so we managed. Now I think she’s the best thing that ever happened to me, just because she really taught me to love.

 

M.T.: Children can do that.

 

J.T.: I am reminded of the child within. I think also that you have spoken again of Muriel, the mentor in college, how she always brought the child to the classroom. How important is that?

 

A.W.: Oh, it’s very important. When you go to most college campuses and if you listen in to most of the courses, you would never know children exist. You would never know there were people even sitting in that classroom who are looking at their watches, trying to figure out how quickly they can leave the class and go pick up a two-year-old or three-year-old. This is real. I mean, this is real life. I think the reason the children have been excluded is because if they are included, everything has to change. And it should. It should be a child-centered society. Obviously, they are the future. They are us. On and on and on. If they’re neglected, we won’t make it.

 

J.T.: Going back to the women’s issues and talking about your being in Bali and telling stories together. I’m reminded of something you’ve written. This was after reading some writings that women from India had written. You said each woman was trying to be free, trying to be independent. She was trying to relate to the people she loved in ways that were not self-destructive. I think you’ve said a mouthful right in that one phrase.

 

A.W.: I was talking about a writer whose work appeals to me. That is the work of women now. Usually we have to relate to people in such
self-destructive ways. We are able to assist them or support them or be with them only because we have given up on being for us. It is crucial that women don’t do that anymore.

 

J.T.: What are some of the ways you are doing that in your life that are working for you?

 

A.W.: What specifically?

 

J.T.: In ways that you’re relating then, without being self-destructive ways, that you are relating in being yourself.

 

A.W.: By not being married. Because for me marriage is so alien to my sense of how I would have done it. It is such a patriarchal construct and the vestiges of slavery are still so clear on it but . . . I did it, I was married. But I did it partly because it was illegal to marry the person I married. So that was a great challenge to me. But I have in my life . . . I relate to people without being bound to them by anything other than my love. I’ve found my love for people is the strongest thing I have and it doesn’t need any other support.

 

J.T.: This reminds me and takes me into something I read about animals. Again, going back to your book
The Temple of My Familiar.
Talking about when women lived with animals and when they were living separate, men and women were living separate, and they would come together in a new sort of way. This really stimulated my imagination. Can you speak on that?

 

A.W.: As a friend said to me once, “Alice, imagine what it would be like if people came together only out of desire.” It would be a very different world. Because you wouldn’t have to follow somebody else’s notion of how you should live. Everybody really is different. We all do require different things. We don’t all require in the same form. We are different contents so we need a different form. What I like to think about is that people should devise: if marriage is great for you, that’s fine, but I don’t think that you should just accept it as the way it’s done. Every June you see all these fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds in their little bridal gowns and they’re getting married (well, maybe they’re a little older). I just know that not one of those young women has had anyone to sit her
down and say, “Now, look. It’s true that people have been marrying for thousands of years. The wife usually goes and whatever, the husband does this. But, you know you don’t have to, you don’t really have to do this. There’s no reason why you have to.” Just talk to the young about different possibilities.