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October 29, 2010
I remember my father reading to me in bed, books about the Civil War, about the history of invention and exploration. He read novels to me as well, often about families struggling to keep together in colonial times, pioneer times, adults and children having to learn from one another to survive. I remember my father’s heart, the simultaneous softness and itchiness of his sweater. Often he was still in his work clothes, a white shirt, a tie, a pullover v-neck vest, slacks and thin black socks. I remember what I think every child lucky enough to have had this experience remembers, the heartbeat and anticipation I felt radiating from my father, what we might call the joy of the reader. His fingers could not wait to turn the page, and almost always pulled the top right corner between his thumb and index finger well before finishing the last paragraph. He took pleasure in experiencing the story as much as I, even the simplest most childish of stories. It had something to do with the sharing. I was reminded of this phenomenon while listening to a lecture given by a fiction writer, Kevin McIlvoy, about the role of immanence in writing. It is the immanence in a story, not merely the anticipation of what happens next that thrills us. By immanence I mean the mystical, unknowable now that contains the inevitable soon-to-be. This is why there is often a malaise that overcomes us when we work a job in which we can no longer perceive a shred of immanence. When this occurs we to varying degrees spend our working hours dreaming and free time dreading our return to work. Of course boredom is a trifling sacrifice when compared to the fact that bills need to be paid, but it is a nagging condition in a society where “exciting” lives full of immanence are dangled in front of us at every turn. This condition is also worth tracking in terms of what it informs us about its terrible unmentionable cousin, hopelessness. As Mr. McIlvoy explains, this is what we call writer’s block. We cannot go forward with our creation because we have lost a sense of immanence. I am holding onto you the reader this very moment only so far as you sense something more revealing might be coming from the unpredictable and almost unimaginable land of Afghanistan. I am sorry, but I have no story to tell except the ongoing reminder that what we are doing here is instilling a sense if immanence into the souls of children in a land so desperately in need of hope a good portion of the people will accept even the dreaded Taliban back if only it can promise something different. My grandmother used to tell a story about one of her great grandchildren which I heard many times. My niece was three or four years old and it was an early summer morning. My grandmother had it in her mind to show her the magic of life by planting some tiny seeds in a row. A week or two later, after the seeds had sprouted, she watched from a window with a combination of dismay and wonderment as my niece wandered into her garden and went from sprig to sprig of green and pulled each from its fragile footing in the soil, expectant there would be attached to one of them an orange root known to all as a carrot. The thing that compelled that little girl to see what magic might be attached to those seedlings is immanence. I think the world is losing its sense of immanence in Afghanistan and is readying to walk away. The news every week feeds this fading interest. So what if Karzai received bags of money from Iran? He gets bags of money from everyone, China, India, Pakistan, and of course the U.S.. This is about as rote a story as spacing items on an assembly line. And herein lies the creative block, the deterioration of immanence. I wager if I were in a bar, a Park Diner or a Starbucks in any part of America today and took a survey, with little variation this would be the prevailing sentiment: nothing will change in Afghanistan; the people are barbarians anyway. They don’t comprehend democracy and they certainly don’t need someone to teach them drama or photography. The women still walk around in blue sheets and grow old fast, the men wear stupid looking things, pajamas and such, wrap sheets around their heads, eat meat with their hands and cut off the noses of their women. The people are tribal (euphemism for barbaric), ruled by warlords (euphemism for medieval), bend and pray five times a day and mutter strange sounds like savages praying to King Kong. They don’t have a sense of humor; they don’t know how to have fun. They don’t even drink. I have the feeling the only westerners with an acute sense of immanence about Afghanistan are soldiers, Marines and their families. Still, this has more to do with getting a job done (ill defined as that may be), and coming home in one piece. No matter how humanitarian the military brass wishes to portray its mission, establishing democracy, reducing civilian casualties and winning hearts and minds are peacetime pursuits. A war is still being conducted here. Airstrikes are spiking again, and roadside bombs are ever increasing. Civilians are still being killed and by all sides, and the only hearts and minds truly being won are the relative few who profit from wartime contracts. If I spoke to a hundred people in the United States I predict for every one the first and for many the only question would be whether or not we should get out. Here is my non-answer answer: In my years working as a counselor it bothered me to hear it asked by a parent or a staff member or a doctor or a teacher at what point do you kick a troubled adolescent out of the house, the school, the group home, even the wilderness camp. It bothered me even more that this was considered to be a solution to the problem. I don’t claim to be right or wrong, I only claim this is how it made me feel. At issue is hypocrisy; while asking the child to take responsibility for his or her actions we take little responsibility for our own. As individuals let alone as countries, only if outright caught with a hand half emerging from the cookie jar, only if found standing with a smoking hot gun are we impelled to take responsibility for just about anything we do. Otherwise we are all victims of something or someone else. The real tragedy, in America as much as in Afghanistan, is when true victims are made to feel responsible for their own victimization, and their persecutors are rewarded. To go to war with someone is in a perverted way choosing to fall in love with someone, to marry and have children with that someone. I do not accept that the attacks of 2001 left us little choice. We have inadvertently gotten ourselves into one hell of a shotgun wedding here, and this union has produced a whole lot of children. Whether we want a divorce or not seems, at least from my perspective, to have little bearing on the fact that the needs of the children, with or without loving parents, come first. This week I showed the girls in leadership class photos of Kabul in 1965. I expected them to stare in amazement. I expected them to leap from their chairs. Nothing of the sort happened. They looked on with expectant smiles. No, not in their lives have they seen such things, not in their families, not in the streets, not even on television, but nevertheless they recognized them. Why? It is because these images are tucked safely within the immanence of their lives. This is the gift you have given them, and really, this is the only gift any mission should offer, be it militarily or humanitarian or otherwise. We give them immanence, and they will turn the pages. We must be like writers, remembering that to create something lasting in this world means to once again become not the father but the child sitting in the father’s lap. The father is what McIlvoy calls the “adult adult”. He is bored. He is not real. He is an entity, like God or the calendar. The moment we become the father is the moment we suck the immanence out of our endeavor. After all, what father hasn’t relished from time to time, or every single time becoming a child again when reading the words to the little boy or girl in his lap, Once upon a time…
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