Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart_ A Novel - Alice Walker [28]
First of All, Abandon
First of all, abandon any notion that anything you humans do will ultimately destroy me. That is because I am your mother. It is impossible to kill one’s mother. You may shoot her a hundred times, but alas, she has already given birth to you. She is yours forever. What you are destroying is your own happiness. Your comfort, which I put so much playful effort into creating. Your peace of mind. Your joy.
There is no potion, no poison you can create, that will do anything but rearrange the pattern I have made. And, let me add, you were created in such a way that you can do this. So destruction too is part of the overall design.
The biggest problem is thinking the fate of the world rests on you. It does, and it doesn’t. The “saving” of the planet, as you humans think of it, can be done really easily. All that is required is that everyone becomes as one mind. The mind, actually, of clay, she said, and laughed. Television creates this global one mind to some extent, but the programming is so bad. Then there are the languages people have which have become a completely unnecessary division. There is no need to talk, really. It is something humans started a long time ago—I don’t even remember why—and they’ve clung to it. Clinging to speech they’ve lost the ability to read one another, to feel one another, to know one another at a glance. Or with a sniff. It is entirely within human capability to do this.
When you witness the various peace talks that occur on a daily basis somewhere on earth and you see how far everyone is from peace, and how they get no nearer the longer they talk, well, this gives an indication of the problem.
If you see a human being, really see them, Kate thought, how could you kill them? Even more so if you smelled them. She thought about the peace talks she’d seen on television, the snippets of peace talks one saw on the news. Everybody arriving in limos, trying to look serious and important. But nobody wanted to smell or see anybody else. And by now the human smells of fear and suffering made humans angry. They thought they could wipe out fear and suffering if they destroyed their scent. Fear and suffering, that is always the smell of the enemy.
Don’t you dare show me any fear, they seemed to say to one another. Act like nothing’s happening that I should be frightened of! Act like you don’t know I’ve bombed your house and you were terrified watching your grandmother bleed. Don’t let me smell your grief. Smile! There’s the camera. We’re all men here, we’ve got to show we’re on top of this thing.
This is what civilization really meant. What it came to, in the end. Abandonment of the animal fear of annihilation, the scent of suffering. Not wanting to see it in others, not wanting to face it in yourself. When these men left the peace talks they returned to the military bastion from which they directed their tanks. Blow up the memory of the fear in the eyes of the enemy, was the command. Blow it up before I feel it too deeply in myself. There was no way of not knowing, on some level, that the bombing left a hole in the bomber, made it necessary to evacuate himself.
There’s your dad, come home from the war, run give him a kiss!
The child runs up, kisses the face of the man. Is puzzled. If she is young enough she smells and sees precisely. Where has he gone to, her dad?
How could it be otherwise?
Like Elizabeth Taylor
Like Elizabeth Taylor, Kate had been married many times. Some of these marriages had been very short. Three had lasted about a year. The others, one in which she’d borne children, were longer. When she met Yolo she was sworn off marriage; that was one of the first things she said to him when they discussed living together.
I can do the living-together thing very well, but being married is of no interest to me.
Cool, he’d said, kissing her.
It wasn’t that she loved him less than any of those she’d married; in fact, she felt she probably loved him more. It was just that she couldn’t bear to be wrong again. To wake up beside one more person in the morning