Falling Through Space (13 page)

I‘ve been visiting my son Garth, the one that went off to Alaska when he was eighteen. Now he's twenty-eight and he lives on a farm with his wife, Jeannie, and two dogs and three cats and twenty-six cows and five gray horses and two brand-new colts and one lonely guinea hen. There were six guinea hens but foxes killed them so Jeannie and Garth are down to one.

I drove all day yesterday to watch Garth with his animals and hide out from a lot of sad confused statements being made about me by Arkansas politicians.

I drove to Mississippi to watch Garth with his animals. All his life he has had a way with animals. He can hold out his hand and anything will come to him.

I needed Garth, to touch him and sleep under his roof. He lives in a trailer underneath six enormous oak trees. From his yard all you can see in four directions are fields and trees and skies. Last night the skies were so wonderful — no man-made lights for miles to dim the stars.

The seventeen-year cicadas hatched here last month. Jeannie says it was so loud no one could sleep at night. The guinea hen and the dogs went wild running around gobbling up cicadas like popcorn.

Back in Arkansas the newspapers are full of simplistic versions of a speech I made to the Arkansas governor's school for the gifted and talented. The professional breast-beaters are coming out of the trees like locusts. All I did was tell four hundred fifty students that you had to be able to think for yourself to do creative work. I told them that to achieve that they might have to ignore authorities like their parents and teachers. I was in an especially generous mood that morning and I was trying to show them the full force of my creative self, the part of me that writes the books.

The next thing I knew I was headline news. Thank God for a free press. The stories are calming down and the reporters are printing my side, or as much as I can bring myself to say to defend myself against this tempest in a teapot.

For now, as I stop to write this, I am driving along the Natchez Trace saving turtles in honor of my son Garth's childhood ambition to be the man who builds fences along country roads to save animals from getting run over. I've saved five turtles so far. I stopped one time to save a clump of dirt. A good-looking young man in a red sports car stopped to help me save the fifth turtle. If this was a movie I was making and the heroine was twenty years younger, I could have made something out of that.

I
WAS TEN YEARS OLD
the night the Japanese surrendered. It was night in Seymour, Indiana, although it was morning on board the ship where the emissaries of the emperor were signing the papers.

General MacArthur was there, wearing, I was sure, his soft cap and smoking his pipe. And General Skinny Wainwright, who surrendered on Corregidor and spent the war as a Japanese prisoner. If he was skinny before, now he was emaciated. Admiral Halsey was there, and Percival, the Briton who surrendered Singapore. Also, Englishmen, Australians, New Zealanders, Canadians, Russians, Chinese, and row upon row of American sailors in whites. The talks began. The speeches and translations. It meant my uncle would be coming home. He had flown bombers over Germany. Later, he flew with General Claire Chennault and the Flying Tigers. How strange that the youngest and gentlest of my father's brothers should have been the one to drop the bombs.

We had worried about him night and day. Now the worrying was over. I was in bed with my mother and my father and the magic eye of the radio was glowing in the dark and we were listening to the Japanese surrender.

There was no dancing in the streets at 504 Calvin Boulevard in Seymour, Indiana. My parents were very quiet and serious. When I said, “Goody, goody, goody, we beat them,” my father said, “Be quiet, war is bad, beginning, middle, and end.”

I remember snuggling down into the covers, keeping my elation to myself. Goody, goody, goody, I was thinking. Now they can't come over here and stick bamboo splinters up my fingernails and make me tell everything I know. I had worried myself sick during the war about whether I could stand up under torture. I was afraid they would give me truth serum or the pain would become too great and I would break.

The speeches and translations went on. It was dark in the room but there were stars outside the windows. No more air-raid practices with drawn blinds. Seymour, Indiana, was safe and I could cash in my war bonds. There would never be another war. We had the biggest bomb ever made and no one in the world would ever dare make war on us again. We would divide up the world with Russia and they would run half of it and we would run the other half. Truman and Stalin and Winston Churchill and Ike and General MacArthur would run things and everybody would be happy and have a good time.

The ceremonies ended. “These proceedings are over,” General MacArthur said. My father heaved a sigh. We turned off the radio and the magic eye dimmed and went out.

It was some weeks later that Jody Myerson's father came home from the Japanese prisoner-of-war camp. He weighed about a hundred pounds. He looked so terrible I could hardly stand to walk by the house where he was recuperating. “He'll be better,” my mother said. “In time he'll be a whole man again.” But I had no faith in it. His eyes stared at me through the walls of the house.

I am marked by that war. To this day when I see a group of Japanese businessmen getting on an elevator in New York City I think of Jody's father. I wonder what they think of when they see me stare. It is in spite of such knowledge that I dream of peace.

A
LOT OF PEOPLE
have gotten the idea that what I do for a living is sit around on a mountain writing a journal. I will answer that, although it is not my nature to explain myself or justify my actions. I do what I think is right and let people think what they please about it. I am not in the business of trying to make people understand my complicated and individual life-style.

What I do is write prose fiction, I write it six or seven hours a day, seven days a week, except for the times when I force myself to stop writing in order not to completely lose touch with the real world. It is easy for me to isolate myself and write books — the hard thing is to live in a real world with other people's needs and desires and dreams. I'm a good receiver — I hear it all.

Anyway, I write for a living. It is an exciting and jealous obsession. One of the ways I fight the obsessive part is by making these journals — they are immediate — out of my immediate experience. Another thing I sometimes reluctantly do is give readings and lectures and very occasionally teach a few days at a college.

But none of this answers the real question. The real question is, How do I have time to write books when other people who wish to be writers don't have time?

I tell students when I talk to them that the first thing a writer has to do is find another source of income. Then, after you have begged, borrowed, stolen, or saved up the money to give you time to write and you spend all of it staying alive while you write, and you write your heart out, after all of that, maybe no one will publish it, and, if they publish it, maybe no one will read it. That is the hard truth. This is what it means to be a writer. I wanted to earn the name of writer for myself and I went to work and did it. I am often awestruck at that fortunate occurrence.

W
HEN LAST
I wrote about fat, my friends and I were in the philosopher's kitchen trying to decide whether it was wise and/or sane to be so irritated at the body's natural desire to grow larger and to carry stores of food around on top of its muscles and bones. Stores that might come in handy if we lived in a less fortunate country, or if we were survivors of an airplane crash in the Andes or in case the weather should change and no longer favor the great farmlands of the United States of America.

My friends and I have spent many hours this past summer talking very seriously about losing weight. If it is intelligent to give in to the prevailing winds of fashion about how large our bodies should be or become.

How much of our so-called body image is fashion? we asked ourselves. Is it healthy to divest ourselves of pounds? If so, how many? How will we know when to stop?

I am the ringleader of the faction that says, Yes, we must diet. We must to go bed hungry and fit back into our clothes and never give in to inertia and complacence.

So I dieted all summer and in three months I had gained three pounds. Needless to say I do not think this is funny. I think it is very very cruel and unfair.

I was cheered up last night by being taken to hear a young sports nutritionist. She talked to us about food and how we use it and told us about the new studies in nutrition. Telling us a lot of very sensible things about how to become healthy and beautiful without starving ourselves. She kept stressing the importance of complex carbohydrates and exercise and laying off of sugar. The thing she said that cheered me up was that nutritionists are very leery nowadays of people weighing themselves all the time.

We are diverse and wonderful creatures made of starlight and comet dust. What shape and size our individual bodies take cannot be measured by steel scales and weight charts. We are breathing oxygen created by plants on a planet hurtling through space. We are not a flat image in a mirror or the reflection of a starving model in a fashion magazine. Life is soft and round and generous.

Some of us may be underexercised and over-guilt-ridden but we are not fat. We are wonderful and mysterious and can swim in water.

I
WAS TALKING
to a reporter the other day and she asked me if I thought my studies in philosophy had affected my writing, shaped the forms I chose to write in. I told her that I didn't separate knowledge into genres or categories because it seemed to me that all of us were probing the same mystery, coming at it from different angles, calling it different things, but all asking the same questions endlessly. Who am I? Why am I here? What are we doing? Is there free will and, if so, how much, and who has it? The scientist and philosopher René Dubos explores these questions with great intelligence and humor. On free will he quotes Samuel Johnson, who said, “All scientific knowledge is against free will, all common sense for it.”