It Was On Fire When I Lay Down On It Read online

  There is a sacred simplicity in not doing something—and not doing it well. All the great religious leaders have done it. The Buddha sat still under a tree. Jesus sat still in a garden. Muhammad sat still in a cave. And Gandhi and King and thousands of others have brought sitting still to perfection as a powerful tool of social change. Passive resistance, meditation, prayer—one and the same.

  It works even with little kids. Instead of telling them to sit still, you yourself can sit very still and quiet. Before long they will pay a great deal of attention to you. Students in class are also thrown by silent stillness on the part of a teacher. It is sometimes taken for great wisdom.

  And sitting still works with grown-ups. On the very same bus route Rosa Parks used to travel, anybody can sit anywhere on the buses now, and some of the drivers are black—both men and women. The street where she was pulled off the bus has been renamed: Rosa Parks Avenue.

  A new religion could be founded on this one sacrament. To belong would be simple. You wouldn’t have to congregate on a special day in a special place. No hymns, no dues, no creeds, no preachers, and no potluck suppers. All you have to do is sit still. Once a day, for fifteen minutes, sit down, shut up, and be still. Like your mother told you. Amazing things might happen if enough people did this on a regular basis. Every chair, park bench, and sofa would become a church.

  Rosa Parks is in her seventies now, doing most of her sitting in a rocking chair, living in quiet retirement with her family in Detroit. The memorials to her sitting still are countless, but the best ones are the living tributes in the form of millions of people of every color getting on thousands of buses every evening, sitting down, and riding home in peace.

  If there is indeed a heaven, then I’ve no doubt that Rosa Parks will go there. I imagine the moment when she signs in with the angel at the pearly gates.

  “Ah, Rosa Parks, we’ve been expecting you. Make yourself at home—take any seat in the house.”

  WHAT I’M ABOUT TO SAY ABOUT BLOOD begins with bagels. A bagel will not fit gracefully into an electric toaster. Or if it goes in, it will not come out—unless you employ a screwdriver. This postulate has been completely tested. Recently. So you have to cut the bagel in half, sliced horizontally—the hard way. This also cannot be accomplished gracefully. A very sharp butcher knife and a pair of pliers helps. But not very much. If you want to slice off a piece of your finger, this is an ideal setup.

  The normal tendency when you slice your finger is to want to call Medic One. Blood equals emergency. But if you can somehow wire around your panic, an existential moment may come if you stand still and bleed a little into the sink. You will not die of this cut—you’ve cut your finger before. (And there are no Band-Aids in the Band-Aid box in the linen closet, anyway. The children used them to wrap Christmas presents when the Scotch tape ran out.) Calm down. Go ahead and breathe. And bleed.

  See, you won’t bleed long. Your own interior Medic One takes care of the problem in an amazing way. In the meanwhile, there’s the most beautiful color in the sink. A scarlet red you can’t buy in a tube at the art-supply store. And it’s homemade. The closest thing to it outside your body is seawater. When we came up out of the sea we internalized it. There’s about five quarts of this stuff inside us, and if you take a pint out and give it away, you make a replacement pint in no time at all—without even thinking about it. You just cook up some more blood.

  Like a lot of other things about us, the more we study blood, the more fantastic and mysterious and wondrous it becomes. It’s 55 percent liquid and 45 percent solids—red cells and white cells and platelets. There are twenty-five trillion red cells alone; fastened end to end they would form a string that would wrap around the earth three times. This blood moves through sixty thousand miles of vessels in your body, regulates your temperature, and moves energy and minerals and hormones and chemicals to the right place with an efficiency envied by all public utilities, including the garbage-collection company.

  You’ve stopped bleeding now. A sixteen-step protein cascade effect has built a dam and shut off the flow. At the point of injury, white cells have gathered to fight infection, other blood elements have already brought repair materials, and healing has begun. Endorphins have been supplied to curtail pain—it doesn’t really hurt.

  If you’ll just stand there patiently for five minutes these things will happen.

  Without your thinking or planning or organizing or trying.

  It’s very beautiful, this blood of yours.

  It’s very powerful and efficient.

  It’s worthy of respect.

  It is life.

  Confirmed.

  (I should point out that if, in the midst of this epiphany, some member of your family should walk in and see the bloody bagel and the knife and the general mess and shambles of the kitchen, and the toaster plugged with smoking bread dough, and you staring glassy-eyed into the sink, you may have some explaining to do. So, explain. When the student appears, the teacher is prepared.)

  “ASPIRIN. WE DON’T KNOW EVERYTHING ABOUT how it works. We know what it does, but we don’t know how.” So said a medical researcher to me during the making-small-talk part of a dinner party. Wait a minute. This guy is a Ph.D. and an M.D. and has government grant money running out his pockets, and he doesn’t know about aspirin? This is not small talk. But it’s true. He doesn’t know—nobody else knows—not even the guy in the TV ad dressed up to look like a doctor. Big mystery, which has been around for a long time. Chinese doctors prescribed it a thousand years ago. “Chew up some willow bark and call me in the morning,” is what they said back then. Willow bark has acetylsalicylic acid in it. That’s aspirin, which is easier to pronounce and easier to get down your gullet than willow bark.

  There’s some comfort in knowing that the Ph.D. and M.D. types are thrown by something so common and simple as aspirin. Mystery remains as close at hand as my medicine cabinet.

  In my working journal there is an old list under the heading: “Ordinary Things We Don’t Know About.” The list got started when I read a statement in some science magazine to the effect that “we don’t know how water moves from the ground up through the trunk and out to the leaves of a tree.” Amazing! I thought we had trees figured out.

  So I started the list. Every time I read of an expert saying we don’t know about this very simple ordinary thing or another, it went on my list.

  Homing pigeons came next. Then the common cold. Followed by hair loss. But when I read about Heisenberg’s Principle of Uncertainty in a physics course, I realized my list was a fool’s task. Electrons are everywhere, and we not only don’t know if they are a wave or a particle, we can’t know. If electrons are a problem, well, everything is.

  So I began a new list. “Signs of the Cosmic Glitch” is the heading. The information about electrons pointed at a basic untidiness. Example: The earth wobbles seventy-two feet off center. Like a top spinning on its axis somewhat cockeyed. Right this very minute we are all wobbling just a little. If you ever feel kind of queasy for no particular reason, it may be the wobble.

  Now. We learned that the earth is slowing down, so we have to mess with the clocks and throw in a leap-year from time to time—and we know why this is. But the wobble? Lots of theories, but nobody can explain it. Cosmic Glitch.

  Science has tended to dismiss such matters as being in the range of permissible error. In almost all research in almost every field, there has always been some persistent little inconsistency. The Glitch. And it has always been easier to build it into an equation and discount it rather than try to explain it.

  It’s like knowing that no matter how carefully and long you may stir your hot breakfast cereal, there will always be at least one small lump of dried, uncooked cereal hiding somewhere in the mix. After a few years you learn to expect and accept the lump and assume it just goes with the territory. But the WHY is the interesting part, as it turns out.

  For suddenly science has become very interested in the behavior o
f your breakfast cereal. This pattern that always seems to include the unmixed lump has become the business of something called “Chaos Science,” the most important shift in scientific thinking since Einstein’s little formula.

  Chaos Science is the study of the Cosmic Glitch. And the Glitch is in every field of science and every realm of experience. Chaos Science suggests that the problem has not been one of small errors, but one of larger information. The pattern of existence turns out to be far more complex and complicated than we thought—on every level.

  Chaos Science has led researchers back to the most fundamental everyday matters—the formation of clouds, the mixing of paint, the flow of traffic, the spread of disease, and the freezing of water in pipes. The cycles of earthquakes and the eruption of volcanos fits into Chaos Science, too, which is pretty important these days if you live in California or in the Cascade Mountains. The problem of the larger pattern pervades every activity we know of.

  The language being used to label the new fields of study is itself appropriately glitchy. When I attended the 155th national meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, in San Francisco, I heard discussions in the field of Chaos Science about such topics as “fractal fingering,” “strange attractors,” “dangling bond defects,” “folded-towel diffeomorphisms,” “Eden growth,” “smooth noodle maps,” and “lattice animals.” There’s more poetry and metaphor in Chaos Science, and I think it’s because we’re talking about something so far out on the edge that even though we sense a mighty truth, we don’t have language symbols to accurately nail down what we sense.

  So we call it Chaos Science. By “Chaos” we mean simply what we can’t understand.

  It’s as if we were the most numerous and oldest and most established ant colony in Chicago. And every once in a while, some of the most brilliant ants wander out together and take a look at Chicago—or what they can see of it. The farther away from the ant heap they get, the more mysterious things seem to be. Recently they happened to be standing alongside a formerly quiet area in their universe when there was a mighty tremor, a huge darkness, and a mighty blast of wind. They had not predicted such activity. They sensed something unimaginable was going on. And reported a new condition of the universe when they returned to the anthill—something that would force a revision of their understanding. Some wanted to call this Chaos. Some wanted to call it the Mysterium Tremendum. Others, the Backfire of the Big Bang. The Wrath of God was also suggested. A new science—a new chapter in the Great Book of the Way It Is. Little did they know that they had happened onto a seldom-used railroad siding when a freight train passed by.

  The bad news is that the ants will never ever comprehend Chicago. The good news is that they sense they are right in the middle of something infinitely wonderful and the more they try to understand it, the more amazing it seems to be. Seems to be in the nature of the ants to keep going out and pushing the limits of the known until they come to a new edge. Naming what’s beyond seems to help accommodate that which cannot be understood. It is the ants’ way.

  Chaos Science is the study of process—that which won’t hold still. The study of that which is still becoming, rather than of what is.

  Chaos Science is my kind of science. I like knowing that no matter what, there is this cosmic untidiness—an unexplainable hiccup in the order we think we perceive, an unpredictability, a mutational inclination, a glitch in the works that anchors mystery and wonder to the center of being. And that the aspirin I hold in my hand and the clouds overhead remain as mysterious to the experts as to me.

  Chaos. I can relate to that. My life is chaos most of the time. I am in tune with the universe. It feels like home.

  “THE GREAT HUGGING PLAGUE” is how it’s remembered now. Broke out in our church in the seventies—back in the days when loving everybody was the way to straighten the world out once and for all. The Sunday Morning Greeters Group started it. They decided to hug every single person who walked in the front door. Wanted to make everyone feel loved and welcome right away. They were just going to try it for a couple of Sundays and see how it went. But things got a little out of hand.

  Sometimes as many as six people were standing around the vestibule of the church on a Sunday morning waiting to hug anything that was moving. The Greeters Group even started wearing signs around their neck that said things like: DESIGNATED HUGGER, HUGGER AT LARGE, HUG ME, I’M HUMAN, and GOD LOVES A CHEERFUL HUGGER. They thought a little touch of levity would grease the wheels of social interchange and make hugging really happen.

  As I say, it got out of hand. It was said that when business was slow, the huggers hugged each other for practice. Some hugged a chair or two, and even the janitor got hugged as he tried to clean up some spilled coffee. A stray dog strolled in and got hugged, as did several people who were looking for the Methodist church nearby and wandered in by accident. I heard that someone even hugged the coffee urn—it was warm and made comforting sounds, so he hugged it. There was a rumor that some parishioners just came to be hugged, and went home without going to church. Hugging junkies. It became an epidemic. The great hugging plague.

  Not everybody wanted to be hugged. A somewhat quiet and reserved member of the congregation wrote a letter to me and the board of trustees. Said he had developed a hugging aversion. Said he didn’t want to keep other people from doing it, but he was nervous about getting assaulted by joy when he came to church. He had tried sneaking in through the kitchen door, but one of the cooks had got caught up in the mania and not only hugged him but spilled chicken bouillon on his suit in the process. Said his glasses got knocked off and his toes stepped on in the morning melee, and he felt social pressure—if he capitulated to one hugger, he’d have to hug everyone else, too. Said he was anxious about going to the rest room when huggers were in there.

  But he didn’t just complain. He had some constructive suggestions. Perhaps a second entrance for people who just wanted to say “hi” or shake hands when they came to church. Maybe a medic-alert tag to wear—one with a silhouette of people hugging and a red line across it.

  Furthermore, he suggested organizing a group to be called HA!—Huggers Anonymous—for those who wanted to kick the habit. Perhaps, he suggested, we could offer T-shirts that said: DON’T HUG ON ME or UNTOUCHABLE or UNCLEAN or something.

  He said the only way he had been able to put off the huggers was to walk through the door with his thumb in his mouth. The huggers didn’t quite know how to handle that. He had thought of carrying an open umbrella or a small child with a runny nose.

  It was while the board and I were working out a response to this concern that the first wave of free-wheeling kissing hit. Seems that somebody had been down to visit the Episcopal church and there was this exercise called the Kiss of Peace, where you held hands, sang the benediction, and then turned and kissed people on the cheek. Great idea! So our huggers were all for expanding the action and doing some handholding and peacekissing at the end of the service. Sure enough, they tried it one Sunday morning without any warning. Well, it was a Sunday to remember, let me tell you. Guess we weren’t quite ready for unprovoked kissing, for the sake of peace or anything else.

  The board of trustees talked about hugging and kissing a great deal more than they ever intended. It made trying to deal with a leaky chancel roof seem simple in comparison. And I felt the need to address the whole issue of public affection in one of those wishy-washy on-the-one-hand-and-then-on-the-other-hand sermons that left me as confused as the congregation. Aagghh.

  The seventies have come and gone. Aggressive affection is out of fashion. People in that church still hug each other, but they are more careful about it now. The shift is important to recognize. The purpose of hugging has changed. Where once it was a statement about the liberation of the hugger, it is now a statement of caring about the huggee. A shift from getting to giving. A shift from Look at Me to I Am Seeing You. A shift from knowing What I Want to noticing What Someone Else Needs. You might not lear
n this just from watching two people hug each other. You’d have to put your arms around somebody to understand.

  “THEY LIED TO ME ABOUT THANKSGIVING!” a former student of mine complains by phone from college, where she is getting the latest revisionist view of American history. Up until high school she had been deeply committed to the Thanksgiving story as reenacted by her fifth-grade class.

  She played Pocahontas, the ravishingly beautiful Indian princess, in a floor-length velour nightgown, and got to marry the tall handsome blond kid playing Miles Standish. He looked magnificent in the big black cardboard hat, sneakers spray-painted silver, and a curly black mustache left over from the melodrama the class produced in October. Furthermore, he was armed with a plastic submachine gun, which gave the pageant a measure of tension, seeing as it was really a watergun loaded with cranberry juice.

  In this fifth-grade version of the story of our fore-mothers and forefathers, the Pilgrims sat down at a long row of card tables across from the Indians. You could tell the Indians by the turkey feathers in their hair and the lipstick smeared on their faces and arms. Everybody bowed their heads for the Great Prayer of Thanksgiving and then ate cold turkey sandwiches washed down with root beer. They sang “Home on the Range,” that old hymn of thanksgiving, followed by ice-cream bars and licorice whips. Then they all went out for recess and the Pilgrims beat the hell out of the Indians in a game of Red Rover.

  That was the beginning of Thanksgiving as we know it today. The fifth-grade class could believe in this and be pretty appropriately thankful about the whole deal.

  Ah, but in high school my young friend was told that, no, it wasn’t like that at all. Pilgrims were pretty uptight, right-wing prudes—fascistic bigots who were not only harsh on the Indians but harsh on each other as well. Pilgrims were against fun and spent most of their spare time in church, where they didn’t even sing. Sometimes they burned people for being witches. They were against science, education, dancing, chocolate, tobacco, and fooling around between girls and boys. No radio, no TV, no rock ‘n’ roll, no drive-ins. Just church and hard work. My young friend loathed these Pilgrims and had refused to eat Thanksgiving dinner one year in protest against her parents’ celebration of evil incarnate.