What happens is you’re planning the end of the week imagining you’re still part of the working classes who have earned their leisure time. You’re imagining this because the alternative is too grim to contemplate. You are aware that this very fear, or more properly its avoidance is a luxury. Its Friday and you’re chewing your nails.
Fear is on everyone’s minds. Jobs are vanishing at the fastest rate since 1930 and the GOP has its heads in the dunes and the Dems are throwing money into the blast furnace and the jobs are vanishing and the jobs are vanishing and the jobs are gone.
To cheer myself (and because I don’t know any better) I read anything that isn’t the news.
But the problem is I am a nonfiction writer so I invariably find myself reading the kinds of true to life stories that fail to uplift the spirit.
Last night while the Iowa wind howled at the eaves I read In the Heart of the Sea the National Book Award winning history of the whale ship Essex by Nathaniel Philbrick.
The ship was rammed by a sperm whale and it sank far from land and the sailors navigated thousands of miles in their flimsy whaling boats only to starve. The survivors ate their dead companions.
Around 3 in the morning it occurred to me that this wasn’t the right book to be reading as the economy collapses and the social safety net is imperiled.
I tried to think what I could be reading. I tried to remember what people read during the great depression. I remembered a Zen admonition: “If you have time to read, dance.” I thought of dancing. I thought of my wife who believes (with some justification) I am the world’s worst dancer. I will not dance.
I will read. I’m a professor of creative writing.
I thought of my friend, essayist and poet Peggy Shumaker whose memoir Just Breathe Normally tells the story of her near fatal cycling crash and her slow recovery–tells “it” through the gravitas of the inner life “where the meanings are” and lets the ordinariness of plot take a backseat to affairs of the spirit. I thought of how a writer like Peggy can remind us when we are tired or bowed down by the affairs of the world that its the care and nurture of the spirit that calls us to writing and to reading. This is what I was thinking at 3 in the morning.
Its too late to make a new year’s resolution but I made a promise to myself deep in the night that I would read Peggy Shumaker’s wonderful words again.
Creative nonfiction is a rich and variable genre. One can find plenty of cannibalism and there’s a place for the history of survivalist flesh eating. But not just now. Not for me.
People in Iowa City are palpably afraid. The University of Iowa is facing a massive budget cut as are most of our nation’s colleges and universities.Shop keepers and the folks who sell cars or pet supplies–all are frightened that they too may wind up unemployed and unable to pay their mortgages.
Writers like Peggy Shumaker are not Pollyannas offering easy compensatory uplift. The writers of blurbs often tell us that memoirs offer visions of recovery. True memoirists tell us in no uncertain terms that people don’t really recover. We become strong where we are broken. This is a different thing from recovery.
Now is the time to read books that narrate how the spirit can be fed even when the times are dark. Today’s vote: Shumaker.
S.K.
Planet of the Blind 
Actually, my recommendation of Cannery Row as a good read for the neo-depression blues has a disabilities-related caveat, and it’s a significant one from the perspective of any “ableism”-aware person of the 21st century. Cannery Row was published in 1945. Steinbeck is a phenomenally accurate chronicler of his times. In the story there is a youth named Frankie who has a cognitive impairment. He is befriended by “Doc” the protagonist of the novel. When the locals on Cannery Row decide to throw Doc a party, Frankie wants to get Doc an extra special gift. He sees a beautiful onyx clock in a jewelry store. With no hope of purchasing it, he steals it. He is caught and thrown in jail. Doc offers to bail him out, but the powers that be will not hear of it. They intone that it is better if Frankie is “put away” now… before he reaches adolescence. Hearing this, Doc essentially heaves a big sigh, and heads off to the tidepools to collect more specimens for his business. At that point, Frankie disappears from the narrative, never to be heard from again. End of sub-plot. It’s all quite chilling, because Doc is presumably the most enlightened of the bunch. Still, it is this warts-and-all realism of how people function in hard times, showing both their weaknesses and ignorance as well as their resiliency and humanity in the face of heartbreaking circumstances that makes this book worth the read.
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Peggy’s wise words have cheered me on in recent months, especially where it comes to caring for and nurturing the spirit. It’s the best cure for writer’s block I know. That, and to keep writing, even if it sounds like something from Richard Speck’s diaries…Georgia
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Hey, Twain’s boat wasn’t the Essex, it was the Hornet, in 1866. I guess this sort of inappropriate snacking happened a lot before the GPS was developed. Here’s the link in case the Essex story wasn’t enough to keep people on dry land: http://www.twainquotes.com/18660719u.html
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Uh oh, the Just Breathe Normally link yielded a voyage with the crew of the Essex. Now I’m hyperventilating, instead. The story sounded eerily familiar, though, and I then realized that I’d coincidentally just read about it in Mark Twain’s Letters from Hawaii.
I actually find great comfort, as many people do, in “worst case scenario” stories. For some it’s the resulting my-life-is-not-that-bad feeling that makes them feel all warm and cozy. For others, it’s the feeling that we’re all in the same horrifying boat (in this case the Essex) that provides a sense of belonging and community. I’m probably philosophically more in the latter group most of the time.
One also can learn valuable lessons in worst case scenario stories. Vacationing at Asilomar between Xmas & New Year, I read a portion of one of only five books that were in the communal living room of Scripps Lodge. Three were in German, one was a sappy romance, and the fifth was about two RAF pilots who were shot down in Iraq during Desert Storm (the OTHER Iraq war). What I learned from that was: when these two and their fellow prisoners were tortured unmercifully, they were all quite surprised that each one divulged great quantities of very accurate and sensitive information, betraying their colleagues, country, etc., etc. This surprised me, too, because previously when I thought upon torture issues, I was inclined to believe that torture doesn’t yield accurate intelligence. Does that mean, I’m crossing over to the Dick Cheney camp? No, no, no. I’m still hanging in there with Barack who says we will win this war, and we will win it on our own terms. However, this notion of winning, out of anyone’s mouth is a bit difficult for me. I’d at least like to think that whatever happens, we will just make up our minds that we’re not gonna torture the c-r-a-p out of anyone. Is that too much too ask? Anyway, there I was in front of a lovely roaring fire in one of the most delightful seaside towns on the California coast, and I had managed to totally freak myself out. Here is a testament to the true power of the written word.
Yes, this economy thing is troubling. But it’s great that we have a president who is intelligent and who listens. It’s just so refreshing. Does he have a handle on this economy crisis? No, nobody does. Does that mean that we’ll sink into oblivion? I really don’t think anyone has a clue. Here is a good book to read for these uncertain times: Cannery Row. Steinbeck: he was a peach!
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