The World Has Changed (28 page)

 

J.T.: In my experience, too, there are more and more people who are much older that are not married. As they get older they are really enjoying their lives in relationship, not necessarily in marriage.

 

A.W.: I guess I still remember in my genetic memory having been owned as somebody’s slave. I just resent any form of ownership, any one of claim on me. Because I feel myself to be a free person and a free spirit. That is completely compatible with me.

 

J.T.: How about dreams informing your writing? I know you’ve said that you’ve used dreams, that they’re very important to you. How have you used them in your writing?

 

A.W.: Sometimes if the dream is a part of what I’m working on, it’s right in my writing. I just put it in because that’s where it belongs. If you spend the kind of time I spent writing
The Temple of My Familiar
, time itself becomes dreamlike and you can hardly tell, in a way. I was really tapping my ancestral and sort of ancient memory because it represents my visions of the world and of time. So I would often dream parts of the story and I would often have visions of parts of the story, even when I didn’t know what they meant. One of the first ones was the scene between the old man in the nursing home and the younger man who comes to talk to him. I was putting out the garbage one day and that just flashed. I could see it clearly. But I had no idea what it meant or where it went in the novel. It was much later that (actually at the very end of the novel) I finally saw, oh, yeah, this is where this goes. And the same has been true of dreams. Dreams are very . . . as you know, they like to give you . . . they’re not entirely coherent, they’re not logical. But they’re true. The truth is in you. The truth is what you find in the dream. So it takes a lot of working with images over and over. Sometimes you never really know. But when you’re working with a book like
The Temple of My Familiar
, where it’s about vision, I did know enough to recognize
that all of these things belong to this vision, even though I wasn’t always entirely clear what it was exactly.

 

J.T.: How do you sort that out for yourself then, to find the truth of the dream? Do you have some techniques that you use or some, I don’t know, scales you’ve developed in working with your dreams?

 

A.W.: No, I think life is the one. Life is what tells you what your dream is.

 

J.T.: Do you write them down? Well, of course you do write them down.

 

A.W.: Sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I just mull a dream over.

 

M.T.: Well, one of the things you’ve done and obviously been pretty disciplined—I would say ruthless or relentless—about is minimizing your input from other sources. That’s something that would help your inner life, I would think.

 

A.W.: What do you mean exactly, Michael?

 

M.T.: Well, what I mean is that I think you said that minimizing your input helps self-knowledge. It’s almost like putting, shutting out. We’re barraged in this culture so much, just the media images that are coming to most people all the time is enough to send you over the wall. So one almost has to take responsibility for minimizing that. Just as you said you limit yourself to two hours a week of television. Most people don’t do that.

 

A.W.: And two hours, I find, is often too much. But I do give myself that, because I feel it really is a fabulous medium. Often there are incredible things. But, yeah, I do, I had to learn that, because I know that I am here in this form once, I believe, as far as I know. And I want to really be here. I want to be here completely as myself, as much as that’s possible. I don’t want to be here as somebody else. I don’t want to be here as a composite of stuff that comes over the media. To do that would be to miss it, to miss being here.

 

M.T.: Miss who you are.

 

A.W.: Yes, but also to miss being here as who I am.

 

M.T.: Sure. Right.

 

A.W.: And that would just make me grieve.

 

M.T.: Yes, good point.

 

J.T.: This is reminding me of another quote I want to bring in. It’s a quote that we’ve used on New Dimensions. It was, again, from
The Temple of My Familiar
, Ola saying you must live in the world today as you wish everyone to live in the world to come. That can be your contribution. Otherwise the world you want will never be formed. Why? Because you are waiting for others to do what you are not doing.

 

A.W.: That’s true.

 

J.T.: It really moved me because sometimes you feel overwhelmed with all the input; but then if you just take it just one step at a time, saying, “I can do this, this is close to me. This I can do with my neighbor. This I can do in my own household,” it’s somehow hopeful.

 

A.W.: Right.

 

M.T.: I don’t want to be presumptuous to try and compartmentalize the body of your work, but it seems to me the thread running through a lot of your work is a thread that does provide, does kind of provide, a grounding of hopefulness, of optimism. I’m wondering if someone coming from your background, from the Deep South, poor Georgia sharecropper farmer, how you were able to overcome not only that background but the cynicism that pervades our society. So many people, as you and I both know, feel disempowered, feel helpless, hopeless, “There’s nothing I can do to change things.” Somehow you were able to crack that code or jump over that wall. I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit about that.

 

A.W.: Well, among other things, I had a great mother who, around those shacks, planted the most incredible gardens ever. So that, in poverty,
I was surrounded by beauty, from birth. That beauty has sustained me through many many crises. I was also part of the Civil Rights Movements and changed my own part of the country, my own part of the world. So that has made me understand that change is possible and that people can do it. Also, that people can change themselves. I’ve never lost faith in people. I sometimes feel very sad because the people who have had the power to do so have been incredibly destructive to all of us and to the planet. But I’ve never lost faith in the people who didn’t have that kind of power, who didn’t do that kind of destruction. I also get—I mean the reason I’m here in this, here on this hill, and the reason I worked very hard to get out of the city, is because I get energy from the earth itself. I get optimism from the earth itself. I feel that as long as the earth can make a spring every year, I can. As long as the earth can flower and produce nurturing fruit, I can, because I’m the earth. I won’t give up until the earth gives up. Of course, that’s why where we are now is so sad, because you just start feeling the earth has pretty much had it with this species. And for good reason. We have to exert all of our love and all of our energy to try to convince the earth that we haven’t forgotten that she is, it is, home. I know that there are some people who think they come from heaven and are going to heaven, but I don’t believe that. I’m from earth; I go back to earth. I’ll always be here.

 

M.T.: There is a saying attributed to Jesus. He was asked, I think it was in the Gospel of Thomas, by one of his disciples, where is heaven. “Lord, tell us where is heaven.” He said, “Heaven is spread before you. You just don’t see it.”

 

A.W.: I know, and you think, “Why can’t people see that they’re in heaven already? And why must they believe they must turn it into hell?” To fulfill the prophecy of another part of the Bible.

 

M.T.: That’s an interesting question. I don’t know why.

 

J.T.: Going back to your idea of bringing beauty. We often don’t put a priority on that. We put a priority on things that are utilitarian, but beauty is kind of the last thing. And yet, you’re saying, what you just said is that sustained you. You are doing what you’re doing today because your mother took the time to bring beauty to your surroundings,
physical beauty. I’m very moved by that. I feel it is truly the truth and somehow—do you have any idea how we will be able to bring that more to the fore and bring that more into our lives?

 

A.W.: Fewer shopping centers, for sure. And fewer buildings. Just fewer. I’m always amazed that somebody thinks the measure of health of the economy is building more buildings. I can never understand why they think like that. It is a pure colonizing idea. Spread and conquer. That will really have to change. If it doesn’t change—if, in fact, the developers and all these other people keep covering, paving over the earth—we don’t have much of a chance.

 

J.T.: What you’re saying—I’m just getting this new flash—we all disapprove of colonization. We look back in history and we see the mistakes of colonization, and you’re talking about something that’s going on right now under our noses, so to speak. That is still that same energy.

 

A.W.: That’s how you colonize the earth. You just take it over with shopping malls and buildings.

 

M.T.: One reason is that the science of economics is very limited. It doesn’t include human values and quality of life as part of its equation. The same is true of how we measure progress; it’s called the gross national product. It doesn’t include human-scale process.

 

J.T.: Or to say if we could measure the health of the children we would know the health of the nation. We don’t bring that in.

 

A.W.: That’s right. If you had healthy children you would have a healthy nation. And if you had beauty everywhere, you would have a people who have mellow spirits. I have been in ghettos. Thank goodness I never lived in one, because even though I had to live in shacks, they were just in the middle of the most incredible splendor, so I never confused myself with the poverty. I always identified myself with the grandeur, the beauty. But in ghettos, nobody should be surprised that people take drugs. If I had to live in the ghetto, I would take it by the ton. Anything I could get. Because I couldn’t stand the ugliness.

 

J.T.: And that lack of community. There’s nothing that brings people together, in a loving way.

 

A.W.: People have traditionally had the church. But it’s problematical, because people are beginning to see that that is an institution, like marriage, that they also have nothing really to do with. It’s a concept that is given to them. They had worship; everybody’s had worship because it’s innate. You would worship if you never saw a church because when you go out this door you see a California poppy and you see the orange of it; you worship that. You worship the spirit of the creation that goes into that. You look at a tree; the same thing. Everybody has that. But the church, and especially its patriarchal construction, makes it difficult for people to feel accepted in their church, accepted for who they are, as diverse as people can be. So I don’t think people hear the sermons with quite the same ear that they used to. That’s a structure that’s more or less—not lost entirely, but fading.

 

J.T.: Some of Alice Walker’s many writings include poetry. We’d like to share with you Alice reading from her book
Her Blue Body Everything We Know: Earthling Poems, 1965–1990
.

 

A.W.: This is a poem that I wrote some time ago, called “If There Was Any Justice.”