My maternal grandmother – Nana – became partially deaf
around the age of twenty-six. It was
caused, we were told, by the act of giving birth. The fact that no doctor, then or ever on the
face of this earth, could find any linkage between the inner ear and the
successful exercise of reproductive organs meant nothing. She was deaf.
Her whole life, Nana was shouted at by her husband and
her two children (one natural; responsible for the deafness – and one adopted)
and everyone else.
Then along came her grandchildren.
Amazingly, she heard us just fine. The slightest mew in the night and she was up
like a shot! And she never once lost the
thread in our simple little stories.
This double standard drove my mother absolutely bats,
because she had to continue to bellow at the woman just to get a cup of
tea. Clearly, Nana had shrewdly checked
out of the Reality Hotel and found a means by which she could hear what she
wanted to hear and not hear what displeased her.
In a similar vein, one of my kids refuses to watch “Behind
the Scenes” or “Making Of” videos. Even
from the earliest age he disliked these DVD add-ons. His favorite movie as a child was,
inexplicably (yet showing terrific taste), “The Adventures of Robin Hood,”
starring Errol Flynn. When I suggested there existed rare footage of the making of “Robin Hood,” he was
aghast. “But I don’t want to know it’s
not real!” Later, even the idea that
David Suchet is an actor playing a part, as opposed to Hercules Poirot waddling
around 1930’s England solving Agatha Christie mysteries, struck him as
extremely unpleasant information. As
Nana herself might have said, “What’s the good in knowing that?”
Why indeed.
In Yuval Noah Harari’s excellent tome “Sapiens,” an
anthropological history of our species, he makes the point that we began to truly
evolve as a social species when we got into the fiction business. Crudely put (by
me, not Harari), the moment we sold each other on the notion that there’s a man
in the sky (or men and women, because in the good old days we were equal
opportunity pantheists; only later did we exclude women from the God business) we
were on our way. That was the means by
which we figured out how to work together and farm, or rather, put up with the
drudgery of farming for a greater good.
Certainly the day we convinced ourselves that
these truths are self-evident and all men are created equal, we were on to
something. The fact that it wasn’t true
is beside the point; it fired our ambitions and imaginations and unleashed the
better angels of our natures. Today
women vote. Today blacks are nominally free. We’re getting there. Hey, it took us tens of thousands of years just to get corn right.
Just how important it is to fire up our collective
imaginations came home to me last night whilst watching the seedy and greasy story
of Trump and the women unfold, as well as Hillary and her turncoat speech to
the Goldman Sachs crowd. I made the decision to just stop watching and go
upstairs.
There are books piled everywhere in my world. It’s a problem. Last night I picked up, for absolutely no
reason, Volume I of Carl Sandburg’s chronicles of Lincoln, which I have read in
pieces throughout my life but had not looked at in years -- this despite buying
a beautiful hardcover set of them (published circa 1939) from a neighbor here
in California who told me his dad “liked these old books” but that he had no
use for them. He asked for a dollar.
Let’s be clear. Gore
Vidal tells us not to read Sandburg. His
argument is that it offers up a Central Casting Lincoln, a cardboard cut-out as
later truncated and given out (or used to be given out) in volumes such as Lincoln
for Young Readers, which I loved. Vidal
is right, of course. I know that I
should not accept this folky, rail-splitting Lincoln any more than I should
accept John Drinkwater’s invention, or Robert Sherwood’s “Abe Lincoln in
Illinois.” (Sherwood, by the way, is one
of American’s great and forgotten playwrights and, amazingly, an FDR
speechwriter).
Despite these warnings, I read Sandburg and
felt no guilt at all. How wonderful it
was! This is comfy-slipper Lincoln,
macaroni-and-cheese Lincoln, complete with the lovely smell of musty pages in
well-made and cared for books.
I know the real man suspended habeus corpus and was a
master political manipulator (“if I could free none of the slaves and preserve
the union”...), but not that night. I
confess there are times when I read about Jackson as well, ignoring Andrew
Jackson the genocidal Indian killer, and opt for Jackson the adventuring
frontiersman.
It is crucial to know the truth, but more and more I
believe it is just as important that we agree on our fictions, because when we
agree upon our fictions we have a tendency to achieve, because it is, literally, a form of
communication and communion.
How are we doing otherwise? In the age of extreme public cynicism (everything
post Watergate, let’s say) America has become more polarized than ever. The
wiser and more cynical we get, the more polarized we become. We are pretty dysfunctional now. So to avoid finally just punching each other out in the parking lot over who we're going to vote for, maybe we need to turn to fundamental untruths and remind
ourselves of that which binds us. Honest
Abe and the rail splitter, perhaps, is more important in the long run than Abe
the political prevaricator.
There are things that wed us to one another immediately, whether they're rational or not: how about the Statue of Liberty or the boy with the straw hat on the raft going down the Mississippi? How about Boo and Scout and Jem? How about the decency of the guitar-playing
boy from Tupelo? Certainly we all harken
to the tall man in the saddle or the marines storming up the beaches of France,
MLK at the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, the family of Okies in the overloaded truck about to tip over, and certainly,
always, Fern, who saves the runt pig and names him Wilbur.
We flew to the moon on such fictions, built a railroad,
and created a Civil Rights Act.
We need to communicate, bridge divides and fix wounds -- and as a binding agent truth and cynicism don’t cut it. Only fiction, it turns out, will do.
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