Stories are porous (so are we)

Walking composition

"I will not forget where 
I come from. I 
will craft my own drum. Gather my beloved 
near and our chanting 
will be dancing. I 
will not be played. I 
will not lend my name 
nor my rhythm to your 
beat."
—from "What I Will," Suheir Hammad

There’s a story my father’s told me that I’ve referred to many times, in essays, in my book, in tweets when I had a Twitter account, in conversation, in my mind. It wasn’t even a story, really. More of a line. A moment or an image, of him and his parents and his two older siblings sitting around their dining table in Leningrad in the 1960s, reading loose-leaf pages of Solzhenitsyn and passing each page on as they finished it.

Almost exactly twenty years ago, my older sister and I interviewed our father while we were visiting him in Moscow, and he told that story again. Or told the moment. The line. I’ve been trying to listen to some of those old tapes for parts to share here (my tape recorder is giving out, so the sound’s been wonky), and when that section was playing a few days ago, there was an undertone I had only vaguely remembered: how important literature was to ordinary Soviet citizens during those times. Essays, novels, short stories, poetry—the way my father describes it, whether it was his parents or him and his teenage friends, people couldn’t get enough.

This 10-minute recording is taken from hours of interviews done over several days in 2003. The excerpts I quoted here are from this recording. The shrill sound about 30 seconds in is the phone ringing. Apologies for that.

“Starting in early 60s, we started reading all underground literature that wasn’t published at all. It was just typed on typewriter and given from one to another. At that time started reading Solzhenitsyn’s novel, and we would get into loose leaves, like this folder, and we would go in our family around the table—we had a big dining room table, so we were sitting around this table and we would have this book, like Cancer Ward, for one night, and we would sit around the table and give each other leaf. After one read, we would give to next person, and we would go around the circle and read the whole novel in an evening. And that happens to a lot of underground literature. I loved a lot of Soviet literature, too. But I read, I read everything, so much stuff.”

Do you think literature was a big part of Soviet society? I asked him. I remember sitting there on the couch in his old apartment in the Frunzenskaya district, my sister trying not to fall sleep, the horrendous, shrill drill of his apartment phone interrupting us.

“Oh, during Soviet times specifically, but I think overall, I cannot vouch for whole population because I worked as a metal worker when I was going to the unique school, and workers in my—”

How old were you?

“Fifteen. I was fifteen, I went to work as a metal worker. There was a pretty substantial class of people, a layer of people, that were very much into literature. You know, if you’d go by tram or bus, like 80 percent of people were reading book. And some of them were reading detective stories, simple things, but most of them were reading literature. So to a degree it’s a pretty vast difference from what I saw in the United States. . . .

We had to stay the whole night in line to get subscription to like 18 volumes of Dostoevsky. Some books—when finally Pasternak volume was printed, you would have to go through hell to get the book, because it’s a very limited edition, and you would have to go through friends of friends, etc., pay tremendous amount of money, and etc. to get a book of Pasternak’s poetry. Same with Marina Tsvetaeva, small, small volume finally came out. . . . Chekhov, you would get a volume of Chekhov, and you would have to put a special effort to get the subscription for like 15 volumes of Chekhov’s. Same with just about any classic writer.”

Do you think—was it more important to people because it was Soviet times?

“It had something to do with it. It was, you know, outlet for ability to do creative thinking or enjoy something. But I don’t know. It’s a big, big discussion.”

---

The original epigraph I chose for my book on walking was a poem in the Coleman Barks version of Rumi, the one that goes:

“Today, like every other day, we wake up empty
and frightened. Don’t open the door to the study
and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument.

Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are a hundred ways to kneel and kiss the ground.”

I thought it was a lovely way to say what I meant by “walking,” a way of being as fully present in the world as is possible for each individual person.

Somewhere near the end of the writing process, I ran into a version of that poem that was slightly different. It would have been fine to stick with the version I had, but I always make an effort to double-check facts and quotes when it’s possible. So I emailed Coleman Barks, along with a couple of random Persian poetry professors for good measure. Barks wrote back a very nice, brief message saying that either version worked and I was welcome to use them for my book.

The professors were another story. One of them wrote me back and asked which translation I was looking at. I wrote back that it was the Barks version of Rumi and he answered something along the lines of, “Oh, if you’re using Barks then it doesn’t matter. His poetry has nothing to do with Rumi.” I thanked him for the correction and asked him if he knew of better translations, but he didn’t respond again.

So I did some research and found a version of the same poem, translated by a Persian speaker (which Barks is not), that had very little resemblance to the one I liked. And then some more browsing around online to wander into the rich world of conversation about how much Islam is in Rumi’s poetry and how completely it’s been erased for Western audiences (if you’re curious, this New Yorker article is comprehensive).

I looked around for something else to use as an epigraph and ended up with a stanza from “Walking,” by 17th-century English clergyman Thomas Traherne, a poem I like that was more suited to the book anyway:

“To walk is by a thought to go;
To move in spirit to and fro;
To mind the good we see;
To taste the sweet;
Observing all the things we meet
How choice and rich they be.”

After that, I considered letting go of the copy of Rumi that’s on my shelves, which is, like most people’s in the English-speaking world, the version by Coleman Barks.

I left it because those poems are lovely and inspiring; it just seems that they should be sold as “poems by Coleman Barks inspired by Rumi” rather than Rumi himself. They mean something to people. They’ll continue to mean something. I’d like to become more acquainted with Rumi’s actual poetry, or as close to it as I can get without being fluent in his language and knowing his culture better, but I don’t want to take away what people have gotten from Barks’s work.

People use Barks to get through loss, through divorce, through angst, through pleasure, through the day. What does Rumi offer that can get through those things but also oppression and belonging and faith or lack thereof and the sheer, lonely pain and joy of being alive?

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When my father was growing up in the Soviet Union, literature was of tremendous importance, as were music and art. These are the things that can hold people together when trust frays and authority is a threat. Stories have always had that power.

“People to some degree in many respects they couldn’t express themselves freely. They didn’t realize it,” my father said.

“I had a great time when I was young. I had great friends. I enjoyed life, I listened to music, I would go to see movies, I would go to museums, I read books, I walked the streets, I talked to friends about philosophy, literature, politics, everything. So I can’t say that I felt suppressed. But there was always boundaries. We knew that what you talk with friends about, you don’t talk to everybody. The official life was completely separate, and officially you would be somewhat a different person. And that’s what I call kind of schizophrenic society.

But we lived in it, and we were very angry in many respects at the Communist Party, at the actions, etc. But we didn’t quite realize how artificial the situation is, how completely wrong the situation where you have—where you live kind of free life at certain level, at another level you had to be a different person.”

Story, in all its forms, moves who we are. It constantly changes us. The way we perceive ourselves, the way we shape and tell and narrate and live and rearrange our own stories. The way we cope with situations we have no power to change.

People like those Barks poems, I think, because they—we, since I enjoy them, too—like who they see themselves as being through them. Like Barks-as-Rumi is a river of self-story moving through everyone who reads it, eroding banks, depositing sediment, changing the way we meander through life and the world. As all stories do.

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Some stuff to read, listen to, or watch:

• Without a Whisper, a not-quite-30-minute documentary on the influence of Haudenosaunee women on well-known American suffragists. Women’s rights in North America began long before the Seneca Falls convention in 1848: “My Grandma would say, ‘We’re not feminists. We’re the law.’” (Really worth watching this one.)

• The second photo in this post was just me messing around in the caragana hedge in my yard after being inspired by Bryan Pfeiffer’s post in Chasing Nature about the naked buds of winter and the meaning we wrap them in.

• In her newsletter Feast for the Curious, botanist Erin Zimmerman gives a brief history of women’s role in developing botany as a science, and how they were eventually nudged out of the field: “Botany crossed socioeconomic lines, with working-class botany groups forming as well. In the mid-19th century, there was a push by a group of more academic botanists based in London to change botany’s image. They wanted it to be a more respected science, on par with the physical sciences.”

• In Psyche, Sarah Boon explores the potentials of journaling—finding material in old journals for her book-in-progress about her time as an Arctic field researcher, and the question of how people use journals to explore and define themselves: “And as another American writer, Susan Sontag, said in ‘On Keeping a Journal’ (1957): ‘In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could do to any person; I create myself. The journal is a vehicle for my sense of selfhood. It represents me as emotionally and spiritually independent.’ Didion and Sontag saw journals as a respite from the everyday world, a place to revel in and reveal oneself – on the page, instead of in public.” (I like that “vehicle for my sense of selfhood.” That’s probably how I use mine, which, unlike the notebooks I draft essays in, are utterly private and destined for the fire pit when they’re done.)

• On a recent copy editing project, I got hung up on a definition given to fifth-graders for the word civilization, which the textbook defined as “human society.” Wait a minute, I thought, and ended up dragging a handful of colleagues into the question with me. We pulled together some articles on the colonial intertwining of the word civilization itself to share with my client, and one colleague sent me this funny but also informative historian’s riposte to a 2018 reboot of the BBC’s show Civilizations: “The truth is, despite some good-willed attempts to make ‘civilization’ something universal, it was never stripped of its original, Eurocentric essence.”

• I was listening to this episode of the Smarty Pants podcast while taking a long walk home from a meeting at school, and was so riveted that I walked straight into the bookstore and ordered the novel being discussed, by Uyghur novelist and poet Perhat Tursun. Tursun is currently serving a 16-year prison sentence in a Uyghur detention center. The interview is with one of his translators, Darren Byler.

• Another gem from my copy editing job: A Marrakech Tale, a half-hour documentary on a Marrakech master storyteller’s work with younger people—particularly with novice storyteller Sara Mouhyeddine, who wants to perform in a square and art normally the realm of men—to revive the 1000-year-old tradition of storytelling in Morocco.