Spring 2002

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CARVED RUNES IN A CLEARING The place of the book in our lives

by Julius Lester

Winter Light, 2001, by Julius Lester ONE OF MY INTERESTS IS etymology, the origins of words. I read to my wife every night once she is tucked in bed and one of the books from which I read to her from time to time is The Oxford English Dictionary. Not only do we discover wonderful words no longer in use, we also learn the origins of familiar words. In so doing, we uncover the human experience lying behind the word. So I want to begin by looking at the word “book.” It comes from a Germanic root and means “beech tree.” This is a reference to one of two things – more likely both. One is the literal tree, because it was on trees and tree bark that some of the first writing was done. Another is the beech staff on which ancient Germans carved runes. The latter is a haunting image of origins: a beech staff standing in a forest clearing, runes inscribed on it. It does not matter what the runes represented. The significance lies in the fact that one person was attempting to reach out to others whom he or she may not have known. I do not remember any books from my childhood. The fact that I don’t remember specific books is important, because it was not so much the content of books that was important to me as the feeling that someone I didn’t know and who didn’t know me was reaching out to me across the vastness. Given when and where I grew up this was crucial. I grew up in the ’40s and ’50s in Kansas City, Kansas, and Nashville, Tennessee, and spent parts of summers at my maternal grandmother’s in Arkansas. Those decades were not pleasant ones for black people, and I am uncomfortable around whites who get nostalgic for the ’50s. I am not nostalgic for segregation, for the “No Colored Allowed” signs that covered the landscape like litter on the smooth green grass of a park. I am not nostalgic for a time when my life was in danger if I raised my eyes and they accidentally met those of a white girl or woman. Black men and boys were lynched for this during my growing-up years. It is a world I recall with the pain of inner screaming, and I survived that world partly because I discovered the beech staff standing in the forest clearing, covered with runes. Part of what those now forgotten books gave me was an emotional knowledge that the world in which I was forced to live bounded by the white heat of hatred was not the only reality. Somewhere my eyes could not then penetrate were dreams and possibilities. The mystery and miracle of a book is found in the fact that it is a solitary voice penetrating time and space to go beyond time and space, and to alight for a moment in that place within each of us which is also beyond time and space. Let me explain. I am an indiscriminate reader. I read erotic novels as readily as I do acknowledged masterpieces – well, probably more readily, and with more pleasure. In the present moral climate of our nation, some think I should be ashamed of this. I have learned not to be, because I trust that undefinable and mysterious “something-in-me” that knows what I need to be a whole person, and directs me to it even when my more conscious self is bewildered by what I’m doing. Though I do not recall the books I read as a child, ah, the comic books! I remember them. I remember my father bringing home comic books in a cardboard box, a hundred at a time. I remember the comic-book shop he would take me to where you could swap comics two-for-one. In comics my imaginative mind was nurtured. Every child yearns for the power of a super-hero or the wizardry of a sorcerer, and that yearning was especially poignant for at least one black child in the ’40s and ’50s. My other memory of childhood reading is rather macabre. I read countless issues of such magazines as Police Gazette and True Police Stories. They were pulp magazines that recounted in graphic detail the true stories of lurid murders. The stories were accompanied by crime scene photographs of the murder victims. Besides comics, this is what I read at age eight years old, and read with avidity. Why I did so will become clearer in a few moments. In the early ’50s my family moved from Kansas to Tennessee, and there I discovered that blacks were permitted in only one library – the “colored branch,” as it was referred to then. It was on the other side of town from where I lived, an hour or more each way by public transportation. So my primary access to books was the bookmobile, which came to my neighborhood every Friday evening. Its stock of books was not only limited in number, but consisted primarily of westerns and mystery novels discarded from the white libraries. So through much of my adolescence I read almost nothing but westerns and Perry Mason mysteries, and would read two to six every weekend. I marvel at the wisdom of my parents. They never questioned or derided what I read. I am astounded that they bought magazines and comic books for me. But maybe my parents understood on some primal level, though I did not, what I was doing. I grew up in a violent world. Segregation was a psychological and spiritual violence, and not only in its many restrictions on where we could live, eat, attend school, and go at night. Segregation violated the very premise of my existence by decreeing that I was inferior to the white majority by the mere fact that I had been born black. There was the continual threat of physical retribution, even death, if you looked at a white man in what he considered the wrong way, or he didn’t like your attitude. There was the actual physical violence in my neighborhood. I will not recite the deaths from stabbings or shootings or speak of classmates imprisoned for rapes they did not commit. I will not recite the deaths of classmates from accidental fires or car accidents. Suffice it to say that I grew up in conditions where fear and death were neighbors and if you weren’t careful, they could sneak through your back door and be sitting at the dinner table, knife and fork in their hands and a paper napkin tucked in their shirt. What does a child do who is exposed daily to such violence, who confronts the force of death even before he can spell the word? I was an adult before I understood that my reading of comic books and murder magazines, westerns and mysteries were attempts to neutralize and withstand the violence intrinsic to my dailiness. In reading about violence I found a way to isolate and objectify it, to see it as separate from me. Reading about violence also reassured me that it was not unique to my neighborhood, and that it not only existed in other places, it existed at other times. And yes, it was also reassuring to read that white people died, too. Reading about violence was like a vaccination by which I immunized myself against that which sought to harm me. I am so thankful that my parents trusted me to educate my soul as I saw fit, and left me alone to read what I wanted to. THIS BRINGS ME TO THE second word whose origins I want to look at. That is the word “read,” which comes from an Old Teutonic root meaning “to fit together, to consider, to deliberate, to take thought, to attend to, to take care or charge of a thing.” So, what is being attended to? What is being fit together? On the most basic level it is the reader. Who am I to judge what anyone reading a book – any book – is attending to and fitting together for themselves, what they are taking care of, what they are taking charge of? Two of the most popular series of books for children in recent years are the Goosebumps and Harry Potter novels. The former is considered to be devoid of literary merit while the latter, some claim, encourages satanism. I have not read either series and honestly don’t care about their merit or lack thereof. However, I do wonder if we don’t need to respect our children as my parents respected me. (Quite frankly, I would not be as worried about a child reading Goosebumps as I would about an eight-year-old reading True Police Stories and studying photographs of crime scenes. My parents had to have wondered if I was a serial killer-in-training.) But just as I read such magazines to mitigate the violence assaulting my child self, perhaps we need to ask ourselves: If children are so avidly reading books that scare them, as in the Goosebumps series, is there something they’re afraid of? If they are drawn so powerfully to the sorcery of Harry Potter, do they feel powerless in their lives? My oldest son is now 35, but I remember one day some 20 or so years ago when we were watching television and he suddenly burst into tears. Twelve-year old boys do not cry if they can help it, so I decided I should pay attention. I asked what was wrong? After some time he said, “I’m afraid that when I grow up there won’t be enough oil left in the world.” My heart broke for him. It broke both because no 12-year-old should have to worry about the supply of oil in the world, and because I was his father and I could not reassure him and tell him that everything was going to be all right. My heart broke because one of my responsibilities as a parent was to keep my children safe, and let’s face it: The degree to which any of us can do that anymore is decidedly limited. Our children are growing up in a society in which they associate sex with death rather than love and pleasure. They are growing up in a society in which they will probably not be able to maintain for themselves the standard of living of their parents. They are growing up in a society in which racial, ethnic, religious, and gender differences have been so exaggerated that they are afraid to say hello to someone not of their particular group. Our children live in a fear, the nature and extent of which I don’t know that most of us can imagine. Our children are growing up afraid of the world without, and feeling impotent within to do anything about it. The astounding power of reading is that the very act can help children fit themselves together, even if what is being read is of no literary merit. The almost miraculous power of reading is that it can help children to attend their souls even if what is being read is mundane. The primary value of reading is that through it, children encounter language. Not only is the child who reads Goosebumps far more likely to read the classics eventually than the child who sits passively before the television set; even Goosebumps brings a child into the presence of language, and language is the primary means by which we humans attempt to communicate with each other. When a child reads, he or she is being introduced to the most powerful force in their possession – the power of words, the power to express thoughts and feelings, the power to touch another, the power to express love, the power to take care of. The power of reading does not reside in information conveyed. All too often we think of children as little beings who must constantly be taught. How many times have I been asked, “What do you want children to learn from your books?” My response is: nothing, and whatever they need to know. For 30 years now I have taught history, literature, and religion at UMass, and published about each in 33 books for children, adolescents, and adults. Though my teaching and writing do not eschew reason, I place the emphasis on another faculty, one our educational systems seem to have little place for. I refer to the faculty of imagination – a faculty as vital to our lives as reason, and I would suggest perhaps more so. Is learning to reason as important as our civilization has led us to believe? To what extent does reason enhance the quality of our living? To what extent does reason bring the quality of mercy to our living? I am going to make a broad and sweeping generalization but I believe it to be true: The failure of modern living is the failure of the imagination. THE ROOT MEANING OF THE word “imagine” is “to picture to oneself.” In other words, when we imagine, we create an inner picture of something not visible to our physical eye. One kind of picture we are all accustomed to is images of things we have done or witnessed. This is the visual aspect of memory. It is not imagination. Imagination requires something more of us. It requires that we see what we have not seen, what we may never see, what may not even exist. I remember reading Stephen King’s novel Christine, which is about a car that goes out at night by itself and kills anyone who may have offended its owner. Say what you will about Stephen King, all I know is that there are still mornings when I look at my car suspiciously. There are other mornings when I silently wish it had been out the previous night and permanently resolved a problem for me. The power of language is such that it can make you believe even things you know aren’t true. The child reading the Goosebumps series is experiencing the power of language to make him or her afraid. There are no gory images on a screen; there is no creepy music playing in the background; there is no audible sound of creaking doors. There are only words on a page, and through words alone, the child experiences fear. Obviously, books are the royal road that enable us to enter the realm of the imaginative. Books enable us to experience what it is like to be someone else. Through books we experience other modes of being. Through books we recognize who we are and who we might become. It is summer, 1956. I am 17 years old and that fall I will be entering college. I don’t know what makes me remember the English class I took that year, and the unit on Romantic poetry, but I do. I remember reading about the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and something about him caught my imagination. Even now I don’t know what it was about Shelley. Perhaps it was that he was an atheist. To the son of a fundamentalist Methodist minister, the thought that there had been someone in the world who had not believed in God was revolutionary. Shelley’s atheism presented me with the possibility that there were other ways to be than the way I had been raised. So I went to the library and checked out a biography of Shelley. I can still see the 17-year-old me sitting beneath the large tree in our front yard, making my first attempts to write poetry. And by the end of that summer I had reached a startling decision: I wanted to be a writer. Because of Percy Bysshe Shelley, I reimagined what was possible for my life and responded to something in my soul which had theretofore not been recognized. I knew I was not destined to be a minister like my grandfather and father; I knew I would not be the pianist my mother wanted me to be. I would be a writer even though reason derided and mocked me. Books invite us into realms of the soul by asking us to imagine that we are someone other than who we are. Books require that we temporarily put our egos in a box by the door and take on the spirit of others. Books are the place where the possibility of blacks and whites and men and women experiencing each other is created. I am convinced that if I can bring you into my being through words, I create the possibility that you and I will see that we are more alike than we may have thought. When we can imagine the hurt and anger of another person, we have an understanding in the heart. When we understand in the heart, each of us is less alone. In 1978 the late novelist John Gardner published a small book called On Moral Fiction. It was daring of him to use the word “moral,” because he risked guilt-by-association with those who seek to ban books, legislate personal behavior, and have us all recreated in the image of a god who is a perfect reflection of them. But morality is not a prescription list of do’s and don’ts. Morality is about the spirit we bring to our living, and, by implication, to literature. If, in the presence of a person or a book, we feel ourselves mysteriously but unmistakably confirmed as human beings, if we sense that life itself is being celebrated in this book or person, then we are in the presence of the moral. Gardner put it this way: “We recognize true art by its careful, thoughtful, honest search for and analysis of values. It is not didactic because, instead of teaching by authority and force, it explores, open-mindedly, to learn what it should teach.” Perhaps the key phrases are “ search” and “explores.” We are not accustomed to conceiving of the moral either as searching or as exploring “open-mindedly” – or imaginatively. We do not often encounter human beings who search with care and thoroughness for values, who explore with open minds to learn what they should teach. THE LAST WORD I WANT to look at is “knowledge,” which comes from a Middle English root meaning “to confess, to recognize.” This is what a book, any book, offers us the opportunity to do: confess and recognize ourselves. To confess and recognize our fantasies, our joys and griefs, our aspirations and failures, our hopes and our fears. Deep within the solitary wonder in which we sit alone with a book, we confess and recognize what we would be too ashamed to tell another – and sometimes we are as ashamed of joy and delight and success as we are of embarrassment and failure. Both as a reader and as a writer, I come to books for this experience of confession and recognition. For me writing is not self-expression; instead it is my way of reaching out to people I do not know and will never know, and seeking to be known. Writing brings me into intimate relationship with others – a mysterious relationship since I do not see them and they do not see me. Writing is at once a solitary act and a social one, in which rune-carver and reader come together and know themselves and each other. You and I wander along the densely bordered trails of our lives, trails closed in by meals to be cooked, children whose hurts and joys need our tending when we feel scarcely able to tend our own hurts and joys, marriages that periodically seem to start unraveling before our very eyes and sometimes cannot be knit anew; and there is always the car that needs fixing and the letter from American Express telling us to please leave home without it. And lo, in the midst of the detritus and flotsam of our lives, the trail leads into a clearing, and there a beech staff stands, plunged into the earth like a sliver of moonbeam. We stop and read the runes so painfully and painstakingly inscribed thereon, and if the beech staff has been inscribed lovingly, if we can see specks of the writer’s blood in the cracks of a rune or two, we find our heads nodding slowly in amazed recognition that someone else knows and put it into words. We are confirmed and recognized and say a quiet but audible, “Yes, yes. That is how it is.” That is what reading is, whether you are an adult or a child. It is the shock of recognition. It is the means through which we are led to say “Yes” to ourselves and that densely bordered trail of our lives. Through reading we are given words, and through words we gain the power to subdue chaos and tame storms. Reading gives us back to ourselves in a way nothing else and no one else can. Ultimately it enables us to say “Yes, yes” – and then continue on with the mystery of this journey we call our lives.

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CARVED RUNES IN A CLEARING

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