Go back, catch hold again

I’ve lost the thread. I don’t know where I am. I hardly know what I am. Let me go back, try to catch hold again. I'll end up repeating things I've already said, and probably in a more confused and feverish tone than before-- but there's no way around it.

Almost everyone now feels what some of us have felt for a long time: that the world has taken a bad turn, that everything is falling apart, but they have many conflicting ideas about what exactly is wrong. It breaks down along political lines: this camp is fixated on this set of issues, that one on that set. And since the other camps are all “enemies,” whatever they’re worried about must be only hysteria, or else a smoke-screen for nasty ideas.

 

And everyone feels helpless: no one can think how to begin to fix things, so everyone continues to participate in a way of life that they know is terrible and getting worse.

 

A woman says to me, “White people would have to sacrifice a lot to give up their privilege.” I say, “But how do you give it up? If you were prepared to make any sacrifice, what would you do?” She says she was talking on a large scale not about individual action. “But even if you had ten thousand white people who wanted to give up their privilege, what could they do? What step could they take?” She smiles. She says she doesn't know.

 

Everyone is full of criticism. No one knows anything about solutions. We do not know where on earth they are found, or if they exist at all. They are mythical beasts. 

 

When I try to write fiction, I begin with the ordinary world, everyday reality: this is the soil of all dreams—and then an impulse always takes hold of me, like a kind of demon, to put in some magical element. Only later do I realize that the magic has ruined the story. Magic was never what I wanted to write about, I wanted to write about reality. And then, with the next story, it happens again. Why? What is this magic I’m drawn to, like a moth to a flame? It is hope. It is possibility. It is the idea that the world could contain what I do not know, what does not seem possible. 

 

Our so-called knowledge paralyzes us. We would be better off if we knew much less—or, better still, nothing at all. 

 

I do not know if it is through pride or morbid fantasy that we imagine that we know so much so definitely: whether we are comforting ourselves or torturing ourselves. In fact, we know only a little corner of reality, and the more we refine it, the littler it is. 

 

This is why the conservatives are right when they say not to trust the experts—wrong, perhaps, in every particular case, but right in general. For example, maybe the experts know best how to preserve lives, but they have forgotten what a life is or why or when or at what cost it should be preserved.

 

We must forget in order to remember. We must free ourselves from knowledge so we can begin to think.