Le Guin said it in her commencement speech to Bryn Mawr in 1986:
in this barbaric society, when women speak truly they speak subversively - they can't help it: if you're underneath, if you're kept down, you break out, you subvert. We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.
That's what I want - to hear you erupting.
Every morning I check: push a button with my thumb, scroll up, scroll down, click. I hold my phone with both hands. I lift my eyes now and then to the window where I see maples stripped of their tawny leaves. The trees are dark and the sky is pale. On the phone, I am watching the protests in Iran. Outside my window, first snow. Every Iranian I’ve ever known has either called themselves Kurdish or Persian, not Iranian. Until recently.
I watch videos of young girls. Girls singing, girls dancing, girls holding hands, girls shouting in protest. My pulse rises and goes broad with aliveness as I watch. My blood thicks with joy, rapture. Gawd but these women - these girls - are gorgeous.
Le Guin said that a girl is a volcano: this thing that I’m watching is the power of eruption.
Notice this: eruption. A girl’s action is simultaneously beautiful - in the sense of inspiring awe - and hot with trouble. It must be. Girl + action cannot be anything other than subversive. I’ve been saying this, particularly in regards to spirituality and religion: a feminist spirituality must be incendiary because religion is by definition oppressive to women.
I do not exactly believe this is true; many women find solace and identity in religion without questioning what it does to them, just as many women participate in social behaviors that are in effect self-hating; to be femme does not make one a feminist.
I keep saying it any way.
These kids are also dying. 8 year olds are shot in the street as they walk home from school. 14 year olds are beaten in the back of vans. Children are being raped in prison hallways before they are murdered: some stories say they are first forced to marry prison guards so that they can go to heaven, others say they are raped to assure they go to hell. Either way, their soul is violated.
So some part of what is happening in my pulse is fear. Some of it is confusion. And another part is rage.
I can’t help but wonder if the girl I am watching is still alive.
What a strange world we live in, where we can bond with strangers across the world. We are moved by the flickering of their human spirit or wracked by their struggle, and yet when we look up we look out our own window.
Look up. Look.
The protests have been going on for nearly three months. They began when a 22 year old Kurdish girl named Mahsa Amini died in custody of the morality police. So called: western news outlets always say the ‘so called’ morality police. Why? to deflect? or to clarify?
The Islamic Republic says Mahsa died of a heart attack before her arrest. Women arrested with her say she was beaten until - and after - she lost consciousness. Medical records say she died, after being in a coma for two days, of cerebral hemorrhage.
Recent updates: protesting girls - children, really - are being taken from their homes and their classrooms and sent to psychiatric hospitals. Security forces set a prison on fire. The Ayatollah’s government insists protest is futile; they will not back down. The Ayatollah’s government is supplying Russia’s military ‘kamikaze drones’, causing policy wonks to discuss the increasing possibility of nuclear bombs coming into play in Ukraine, and/or someone supplying Ukraine with weapons capable of attacking Russia on Russian soil, and/or U.S. military intervention in Iran and just how poorly intervention has gone in the past. Pandits are skeptical that 'revolution’ is anywhere near happening. Yet exiles - artists, dancers, writers, academics, and journalists - express a hope unlike anything they have felt before. This is it, this could be it, they say: these are the girls who will change our world.
It is impossible to know, exactly, how many people have died. The government lies. The internet is censored. Human rights groups have verified more than 240 dead. On Sunday, the state news station announced Parliament of the Islamic Republic has approved the death penalty for everyone who has been arrested. That would currently mean 15,000 people. The Islamic Republic sits on the UN council of human rights, by the way.
It’s almost unthinkable.
I come back to this question of knowing. What good does knowing do? Outside the window: snow. And of course, the U.S. midterm elections. I am not interested in talking about that. Truth is, I am not interested in mere politics.
I have been re-arranging my books. This is what I do when there is a question different than the ordinary blip of awareness. Some questions linger. They float in the air, sucked into the space behind me as I walk into a room. They coil in some eddy below the ceiling. I go digging around in my books.
Why?
Here’s the question: we live in an age of unprecedented information. In some of the great schemas of human history, there is an Industrial Age, an Age of Empire, etc. Ours is the Information Age. There is so much information - and misinformation - that it’s possible to wonder what good all this information is doing. There are conversations about the loss of real life and real relationships as we spend more and more time with our face in a screen. There are concerns about the dangers to our bodies, our wellbeing, and the social fabric. We get emotive taps - adrenaline surges, bonding hormones, dopamine satisfactions - from little dings or pulses emitted by blue light. It is quite possible to become addicted. It’s easy to go through whole tragedies and traumas, breakups and breakdowns, emotive peaks and crisis, just by looking at videos of puppies, Japanese cooking trends, or some grandma in Ohio. There are questions of normalizing sexual violence, guns and hate speak. We might be numbing something fine and important in our soul.
I was raised to value both education and knowledge. I think this is both inborn - my family are readers, history buffs, inclined toward political engagement - and cultivated. I was explicitly taught the values of a liberal education. I heard things often said of education: a well rounded education allows you to become more fully yourself; education makes us more compassionate, more resilient, more fulfilled. Education should ideally teach us how - rather than what - to think. I was taught that these capacities are perhaps the most important things we’ve got going for us as human beings.
I was also taught the dangers of a miseducation: prejudice, group think, inflexibility and a tendency toward fear.
I believe this. All of it. Knowledge is power.
But what good does my watching the revolution in Iran actually do? Is it knowledge?
Is it actually helping even a single one of those girls? Does it render me more humane? Does it cause me to crumple or to enlarge?
In the end, I think this is the question.
It is common in wellness circles, with their armchair neuroscience, to point out that our nervous systems aren’t designed to handle this much stress. Take care of yourself, the teachers and the twits and the posts say: meditate, kick your feet up the wall, relax.
I do not necessarily think any of this is true.
Sure: our nervous systems evolved in a world before the internet. But our nervous systems are also tremendously adaptive. What’s more, to argue that our lives are more stressful than, say, those of a feudal or even an industrial society doesn’t strike me as plausible. It doesn’t take into account the increased comfort, longevity, health indexes or improved child mortality rates we take for granted. It doesn’t take literacy, social mobility, or democracy into account. The very concept of human rights is a modern one. Our ancestors may not have had to deal with the flooding of social media but they lived with oppression, hunger, the routine death of children and the constant threat of killing poverty.
I am not suggesting we live in a perfect world. Social media is stressful because it proves how lucky we are. Lucky and imperfect. It feeds us a sense of passive guilt at times and an alternative activity - an illusory activism - at others. We flit back and forth between thinking we are pieces of shit and believing we are Good People. We believe ourselves wholly other than the Other side, but we do much the same things that they do. A cascade of neurotransmitters leaves us tired. Global communication gives us the stories of the costs associated with Western ascendency; we know some of the ways our luck and comfort are related to slavery, genocide, and expropriation, but these forces seem impersonal and overwhelming. We’re left with cynicism and an inability to evaluate or value how lucky we are. I think of the word appreciate, as in what wealth or quality does over time. We have no idea how to appreciate our relative okayness so that others might benefit; instead we buy into the idea that maybe we’re not really okay.
I am suggesting that there is a slant difference between information and knowledge. We have a supra-abundance of information. A glut. It’s a positive value in our culture. People obscure their faces with it, glom it on like a mask, put it at the head of their social media profiles. We threaten, manipulate, and shame each other with information. We’re stunned and bloated with TMI and teetering with the fear we do not have enough.
We have a paucity of knowledge. I am afraid knowledge is in actual danger, more and more so as we confuse it with information. Information is ballast. It’s cheap and frenetic. It gives the illusion of safety, competency, having a handle on things. But when it comes down to it, when we are faced with an actual responsibility or problem or child, we find that none of our information seems to apply. Information isn’t enough. It’s just (twittering fingers and a puff of breath). In a fast way that is easy to miss, information makes us numb to our fears while at the same time stoking our fears.
Knowledge is a different thing entirely.
Much of the information that flits and hisses across my screens is social justice oriented. Political.
In the last several years political jargon has gone mainstream. It wasn’t quite there yet with Obama’s presidency, but there were hints. There were complicated - mind bending - reactions to a Black president in the United States of America. It moiled with the absurdity of the Trump campaign and the bewilderment of the world as he not only won but then absurdly governed; in the wake of George Floyd’s murder and the Covid pandemic it’s hit critical mass. It’s trendy. And now, well, Trump has announced he’s running for president again. Unless he ends up going to jail. He might avoid jail by becoming president, which underscores the absurd nature of our world.
So outrage is hot.
It has also become rigid and polemical.
First thing: exactly none of the issues are new. Second: I am not troubled by the masses becoming aware of crisis; we do actually live in a kairotic moment of history. These things are important and outcomes uncertain, dependent on us. My point is simply that most of what is passed around isn’t intelligently thought through or reasonably helpful, even to those who are wielding it.
It’s propaganda.
Deep in a stack, untouched for years, a little dusty, Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism made eye contact with me and lifted her eyebrows in a well? way. I rolled my eyes. Like hell did I have any interest, just now, in revisiting and revisioning the very concepts of polity and polemics. No. I gazed at Hafez. Fingered Graham Green. I laid on the floor belly down with the book from the Botticelli show currently at the MIA.
Arendt didn’t care; her gaze followed me around the room until finally I said alright! and squatted to her level. I had to stabilize the column of books above it with one hand and jimmy it out wiggle by wiggle. She was under anthropology, mostly: imagined communities, language and religion, weapons and statehood, gender and culture. A plane ticket stub: Lima. A beer label carefully peeled off a bottle with a penciled drawing of a volcano: Xela, Guatemala. A torn piece of paper that references a forgotten Tuesday at 10:30. I sat on the floor crosslegged and flipped The Origins open. My handwriting and an old habit of underlining hit me from decades ago: the red ink I sometimes used in the aughts. I smelled old paper and imagined I smelled Gauloises cigarettes. I heard several voices I haven’t heard in a long time lilt and then fall. After clearing her throat because I wasn’t paying attention, Arendt said:
“In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. ... Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”
And:
“Never has our future been more unpredictable, never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interest—forces that look like sheer insanity, if judged by the standards of other centuries. It is as though mankind had divided itself between those who believe in human omnipotence (who think that everything is possible if one knows how to organize masses for it) and those for whom powerlessness has become the major experience of their lives.”
In a shifting, incomprehensible world, we flail about and we grasp at things. Our own behavior - our mind - gets a little confusing. It is as though we are both the subject and object of Stevie Smith’s poem: are we waving? Or are we drowning?
dear Reader, I don’t know.
I don’t know about you. Maybe you are drowning.
Do you know?
Most of what we understand as “knowledge” is essentially a categorization of distinct understandings. That is, wisdom is a capacity to discern, knowledge is the ability to reason. But I don’t think it ends there. I believe that out of the inky dawn of discernment, in the motion of things falling apart, what we discern suddenly leaves the mere and ephemeral and superficial and petty or the accidental, theoretical and hypothetical, combusts the merely political in such a painful flurry that it scorches the privacy of the heart and becomes terribly personal. Knowing is as intimate as a scar. It pangs. There are infinite and very important emotive symptoms and burps: sorrow sorrow, regret and grief. Hope. And cracked joy. Even serenity, ruby red. But the emotions - the feeling - of wisdom isn’t the point. Rich grace though they are, they are by-product rather than essence.
The essence of knowledge is the intimacy, the right hereness, of change. Thus what we know may very well be dark, but it is illuminating.
Several weeks ago, I read Shahrnush Parsipur’s memoir Kissing the Sword. Parsipur is an Iranian novelist who was imprisoned first under the Shah and later the Islamic republic. Her memoir is of her four different prison terms - three without ever being charged with a crime. It is a dark, hard, terrifying, incomprehensible read. I read it in one go, moving from my office chair to the couch several times as the early winter dark approached and gained. At the end, I sighed and let the book fall in my lap. G, on the other end of the couch, looked up. Human beings are so terrible, I said, hot tears popping out of my eyes. I cried and I cried.
My having read the book does not, in any substantive way, change what has or is happening in Iran. Parsipur herself speaks of the dead she cannot resurrect, the names she’s forgotten, all of the many things her writing and her survival cannot change.
Her book is important. It’s important because in reading it I understand - I understand again; I understand differently - what is at stake when human rights are curtailed. I understand the violence of theocracy and the danger of banning books. I can feel the terror of unenlightened power, the governance of fools. I know how it will inevitably disown us of what is most essential: choice, music, debate, love stories, literature, scientific wonder, innocence, bodies. I do not mean in Iran. I am not talking about Islam. I am tired of the way we politely talk of spiritual bypassing; I want to get back to the bones. I want to talk of religious and philosophical hypocrisy.
I spoke of armchair neuroscience. The vast majority of the stuff out there is information and fluff, but there is a vein in it that burns deep and hot. The goal, I’d say, isn’t soothing and calm; the goal is eruption. We have to discern the blowsy bits of external pressure from the pulse of hot pressure arising inside of us. The trick, the point, is finding just enough steadiness that we might melt stones to liquid.