I concede that my life on the farm with Maria is something of an artificial and even delusional cocoon. Generally, we are all nice and loving to one another here, we speak gently, we support one another, the animals are soft and comfortable and trusting with us. Our small community is nurturing and supportive.
Our dogs and even our barn cats are loving and patient, and our animals are citizens of a Peaceable Kingdom, they are never cruel to one another or to us. In small towns, people tend to speak gently to one another, we see each other often.
Several things connect me to the outside world. One is technology, which brings an avalanche of violence, anger, cruelty and hostility into my head every day, as well as love and support. This is in the form of “news,” e-mail and text and social media messaging system, and the many opinions about me that other people have. I am one of those people who sometimes annoy people because I think in the open.
Another is my occasional book tours, which pull me out of my life and into the world.
Between these two things, I am aware of life outside of my cocoon. Like an animal, I can use my instincts to sense the world beyond.
I call it Nasty World sometimes, especially in recent months.
As my life grows gentler and more grounded, I have this uneasy sense that the world beyond is growing angrier and less sane. This week has left me feeling uncomfortable even edgy. Usually when my books are published, I am exhilarated. What is different now?
Publishing, for one thing. What used to be a celebratory and affirming experience – traveling around the country, giving thoughtful and leisurely interviews, meeting fans and readers, conferring constantly with editors and publishers, staying in five-star hotels, being driven around by media escorts, seeing new and different places, visiting big and crowded bookstores – is all gone. All of it.
I rarely speak to my editor, have never spoken to my publicist or publisher, and the primary interaction I have with readers are through e-mails or messages. Face-to-face encounters with human beings are vanishing, I hardly know anybody I communicate with or depend upon.
That may be necessary and inevitable, but it is lonelier. And I believe it makes it simpler for people to be hostile, even cruel, and harder to be thoughtful and compassionate. How does one learn empathy if you never see the person you are supposed to understand? The outside world I do see seems tense and disappointed and depressed. People also just seem nastier to me, especially over the past year.
And this week may have set a new record for the intensity and depth of people’s anger and cruelty. Because I go out on a book tour every year or so, it’s a way for me to take this social temperature. More than ever, I feel this year that I am venturing out into Nasty World.
This is a jarring and unsettling contrast to the way Maria and I live our lives. I won’t catalogue the enraged and sometimes vicious comments I heard at different times this week – every week – when you are a person who exposes him or herself to the wider world now.
I am still hearing daily from Esther-The-Wonder-Pig lovers horrified by my poking some fun at the once tiny but now huge animal whose story I have displaced on the Number One Amazon Pet Care Category Slot with my new book “Talking To Animals.” Some people are jeering at me for having launched a Kickstarter Project to buy a new camera when I needed one.
The pig stuff is quite strange. When you have to explain to people what humor is, you have either failed as a writer or the world beyond is not healthy. Really, I wonder, are our lives so empty that we must spend this much time on a much loved 650 pound pig?
Both things – may shortcomings as a writer and an unhealthy world – may be true. I am reading a deeply thought-provoking book called “The Sane Society” by Eric Fromm, the philosopher and psychoanalyst, and re-thinking my ideas about what sanity and what is insanity.
I’m thinking we sometimes have it backwards.
I have long suffered from mental illness, so the idea of being crazy is not new to me. But like most people, I tend the think the outer world is sane, at least saner than me. If a lot of people thinking something I don’t think, I just assume I must be wrong. After all, I am crazy, people have been telling me this my whole life.
This year, I am re-thinking this idea.
“Just as man transforms the world around him,” writes Fromm, “so he transforms himself in the process of history. He is his own creation, as it were. But just as he can only transform and modify the natural materials around him according to their nature, so he can only transform and modify himself according to his own nature.”
Fromm writes that the insecurity and stresses of a modern, technologically driven capitalist culture creates insecurity and unhealthy, even mentally ill, or insane societies in which the healthy are often considered insane and the unhealthy sane. It is naively assumed that the fact that the majority of people share certain ideas or feelings – take the “left” or the “right,” for example – proves the validity of those feelings.
We assume that our lives are much better and easier than our forebears, but it is really true that we are happier or more fulfilled?
But nothing is further from the truth, he says. Conventional wisdom or consensual validation has no bearing on reason or mental health, something Washington seems to prove every day.
What a person may have lost in richness and in a genuine feeling of happiness, is made up by the security of fitting in with the rest of mankind – as he knows them. His very defect may have been raised to a virtue by his culture.
What I feel outside of the cocoon this book tour is rage, unhappiness and, increasingly, cruelty and a kind of visceral nastiness.
One person wrote me a long letter this morning saying my making light of Esther The Wonder Pig for pursuing her on Amazon showed me to be ruthless, selfish and undeserving, I should be ashamed of myself, she would no longer read what I wrote. It isn’t criticism that bothers me, get a lot of it, and I listen to it, but the growing inability of people to express themselves in a rational or civil way.
Shrinks often say that the ability to show humor is the hallmark of a healthy society, the death of humor, or the rise of the humorless, is a sign of sickness.
It’s almost as if this author no longer knew how to simply disagree, and leave it there. I had to be a monster, and that happens often, it did not used to happen at all.
More and more, I feel the responsibility to be civil and gentle in my words and writing, it is almost a moral duty to avoid being cruel as cruelty becomes the common shared language, especially on computer screens, where there are no social inhibitions or restraints. My life is not and will never be an argument.
How does one stay grounded in Nasty World? How does one absorb cruelty without becoming cruel? How does one encounter rage and hatred without becoming enraged and hateful?
I believe I am embracing a new code for me, a moral and rational path in a time of discord and irrationality. I think it works for me. It is simple. I call it Doing Good.
For me it is a new mode of living in which I seek to find fulfillment, and in which all problems are solved in relation to the whole person. Often, in our greedy ,working, insecure world, men and women suffer from four kinds of misery: moral misery, physical misery, intellectual misery, or material misery.
I seek to live in a Sane Society, if I can’t find one outside, I will find one inside of myself. I was inspired by a book called The Communities Of Work (author unknown) and I thank the writers.
The aim is to fully develop myself.
I seek LIBERTY: a human being is free when he has economic, intellectual and moral freedom.
I seek ECONOMIC freedom, the right to work, and the right to the fruit of my labor.
I seek INTELLECTUAL freedom, a person is only free if he or she can choose. I can choose only if he knows enough to compare.
I seek MORAL freedom. People cannot really be free if they are enslaved by their passions. I can be free only if I have an idea and attitude which makes it possible to have a coherent life.
I seek to do GOOD not to argue what good is. That is my idea for a coherent life.
There is no path to salvation in hating a political leader or worshiping him or her. We have to feel good about ourselves, and the best way I know to do that is to do good. Every day. And to speak gently to others.
I seek SOLIDARITY and FRATERNITY. We can only truly blossom in community and society. Selfishness is a short-sighted way of helping ourselves. I cannot separate my true interests from those of the people around me. I can only help myself by doing good and helping society. Solidarity is not a task or chore, it is a profound satisfaction and the best guarantee of what we all want, community and security.
So that is my way of staying grounded in the Nasty World. I had a difficult week, as is apparent, I think, and every time that happens, a better angel appears and calls me to rise up, and that happened this morning with an e-mail from Patricia W. (I don’t have permission to use her full name).
Patricia wrote me for several reasons. She saw a particularly enraged review of my new book, “Talking To Animals,” on Amazon, in the Nasty World this is no longer unusual, but almost automatic. My book tours used to begin with spirited reviews of my work, pro and con. Now they usually begin with reviews like this one, from someone who calls herself Opinionated and is hateful anonymously, as is also common and accepted promise by corporations who love to promote controversy while, in fact, promoting hatred.
It was both cruel and false, a symbol of what we now call Fake News.
Patricia wrote this to me, in response to a Kickstarter update I published thanking people for their support in buying me a new camera a few years ago. It reminded me that people are good, and of what is important in the world. It reminded me what it means to be a human being, and to love what you do.
“Thanks for your update. I honestly forgot that I contributed to the camera to support your art and talent. My feelings about contributing are unaffected by how it turned out with a new publisher, except that it would have been great to include your wonderful photos. But as we all know, shit happens—or more politely, things change and evolve. Everything. The unkind reviewer on Amazon about this issue bothered me greatly. Not just for itself and its unkindness to you, but for its bigger implications, as an example of what seems to be rampant in so many aspects of our country now: baseless accusations, self-righteous indignation, thinking the worst of others instead of the best, black and white judgments, us versus them, demonizing people with whom there is simply disagreement. It seems to be such a temptation, maybe for everyone at different times, to kick our better angels to the curb.
That is where the Army of Good came in for me. In reality and in attitude. Thank you so much for that. In what have unexpectedly been the most challenging difficulties of my life during the past couple of years, I have been able not to speak ill of my life (most of the time!), to send cards and contributions to the lovelies at the Mansion, to Christie, to Ali and to the Syrian refugees and to children, and to support your blog and Maria’s art. I could keep compassion and perspective alive, it gave me connection to others. I could honor the their souls and understand the great value of the hearts of our elders, and to welcome our newcomers. This has kept my heart from turning to stone at a time where it was emotionally hard for me to volunteer in person, but it was so meaningful to be able to contribute to work of The Army of Good. So I see that the good extends in all directions.
Today I am packing my belongings into my car and tomorrow I am moving to a rental cottage in the NC mountains. I will drive away from a very good man I’ve loved since 1988. We all face such difficulties of one kind or another at times in our lives. It has helped me understand viscerally the pain of others that I may have previously only understood intellectually. I will turn to my creative side in ways I haven’t been able to in many years. I will look for real community, I will try to do good in person. It is both terrible and wonderful, happy and sad, unthinkable and necessary; because life is not just one thing.
Thanks again for everything you and Maria have done. (Show Your Soul has affected me deeply.) Thank you for your thoughtful writing about people and society and history and social justice and the simple value of doing the good that is before us. I have enjoyed your recent writing on these subject so much and have been sustained by it.”.
- Patricia, thanks, I am grateful to be me, and to be alive. You are one of the better angels, and godspeed.