This summer I picked up and was hooked by a zombie book (World War Z, by Max Brooks).
It posits a worldwide epidemic that transforms infected humans into zombies: animated forms whose only purpose is to eat. It imagines how all levels of human organization are threatened – from the cellular to the historical. Behaviors, identity, relationships, social structure, ethical values – all assumptions of “normal” are disrupted. And I wondered why such science fiction could be so fascinating.
I am no literary critic, but … it seems there might be a collective, unconscious fear being addressed, of human forms that are animate but devoid of humane sensibility and connection. Such fiction creates an extreme, disruptive experience that leads me to questions about what it means to be “human.” Questions can start processes to find individual and collective answers.
One of my favorite pieces of literature is William Faulkner’s Nobel banquet speech in 1950 (see below). It is a secular hymn to the importance of spirit, “one of the props, the pillars to help [humankind] endure and prevail.” Although he was speaking of the writer’s requirement to speak of “love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice,” he insists that these are universal qualities that can bind and lift individuals and communities through dire and fearful times. We see this binding and lifting after football games, natural disasters and 9/11; we feel it when holding our children and grandchildren. It is a wonder and a gift to have such experiences.
Sometimes we imagine ourselves bearing up alone in a harsh and accidental world; sometimes we can imagine ourselves wounded but connected. How can we encourage the latter outlook, and limit our struggles with the former?
Among the hopes of this blog is to maintain a conversation about sources of meaning and support. Spirit can bind and lift us. What sources of Spirit do you know? We won’t start with religious answers, especially ones that exclude other belief systems (“What is an idol? Any god who is mine but not yours, any god concerned with me but not with you, is an idol.”). But we might try to find questions to provoke spiritual answers – questions about the nature of our time together and sources of meaning, purpose and comfort.
I admit spiritual biases: I believe all humans have dignity and deserve respect; I believe there is free will that must accommodate others. I believe that our lives are necessarily limited, that we began with un-woundedness and have to overcome the traumas of living in order to create lives as individual works of art. I hold Christian sensibilities, and marvel at the insights that other religions provide. I hope that the examples that others live are their attempts at creating lives as works of art, too.
We do not live in isolation, and we live as more than the sums of our appetites and impulses. As Faulkner and spiritual traditions and zombie stories suggest, we have hearts and souls and spirits, and are thus much more than marvelous biologic machines.
William Faulkner – Banquet Speech (1950)
I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work – a life’s work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before. So this award is only mine in trust. It will not be difficult to find a dedication for the money part of it commensurate with the purpose and significance of its origin. But I would like to do the same with the acclaim too, by using this moment as a pinnacle from which I might be listened to by the young men and women already dedicated to the same anguish and travail, among whom is already that one who will some day stand here where I am standing.
Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.
He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed – love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.
Until he relearns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.