Dear Friends, Family, Neighbors, and Those of You I Don’t Yet Know —
This has been one of those weeks when I’ve been getting messages from Beyond. Before you write me off as a mystical kook, let me explain, at least a little, as well as I can, which might not be *very* well. I sometimes feel I’m being nudged to write an issue of Odd Company about one thing or another. Of course, people offer topic suggestions to me regularly. And I say, “Thank you!” and file them away for that rainy day I know will come eventually, on which I’ll have no idea what to write about when the Monday night in question comes around — if you can make any sense out of that sentence at all. But getting a message from a reader is different from getting a message from Beyond
A few weeks ago, a friend recommended a book to me. This is a friend who writes occasional reviews for a small publication. She knows her books. “You’ll find it timely and fascinating,” she said. “And it’s a good story.” Her recommendation was a novel by someone whose name rang only a faint bell. David Beniof, City of Thieves. It’s sort of a coming-of-age story about two young Russian men whose paths cross by sheerest chance in Leningrad in 1942, on a shared mission to find a dozen eggs for a wedding cake. In 1942, Leningrad (formerly, and now again, known as St. Petersburg) was in the midst of an 872-day siege conducted by the German Wehrmacht as part of WWII. 872 days with just the barest trickle of food and other supplies, all while being shelled daily. Imagine; nearly 2-1/2 years of this! Many historians consider it a genocide, because its object was the systematic and intentional starvation of the civilian population of the city. There’s seems to be no agreement about how many people lost their lives during the siege. At least 600,000. Perhaps as many as 2.2 million. People were eating sawdust, and probably things that were much worse. Eggs? What eggs? Kind of puts the COVID lockdowns and shortages into perspective, doesn’t it?
The book is framed as a story told to the author by his grandfather, who was one of those two young egg-seekers. The fact that the grandfather’s name is Lev Beniov adds to the possibility that this story is based on something other than pure fiction. David Beniof, it turns out, wrote the screenplays for Game of Thrones. Which is why his name rang a bell in my muddled mind. I highly recommend this book. It will tell you a little something about Russia and Russians at a time when an understanding of Russia and Russians is particularly needed. I would not, mind you, trust a novel as a great source of factual information. But good novels can be a useful window into cultures and default ways of thinking. And I’m willing to believe that David Beniof’s grandfather might indeed have lived through the siege of Leningrad and had some tales to tell about it.
So this book was the first whisper of the Nudge from Beyond. Why do people do such obviously terrible things to one another? Why are the Russians now doing to Mariupol more or less what was done to them at Leningrad?
And now we zoom off in what will appear to be a completely different and random direction. Dear readers, I pray you are used to this by now, and will trust me when I say it’s all related. Last Friday we had eight young California redwoods removed from our yard. When I say “removed,” I mean cut down, and the stumps ground out. How we came to such a wrenching action is a long story. Let me just say the redwoods were a gift from someone who was himself a force of nature, impossible to turn down, though I tried and tried to do just that. They were beautiful trees, but eight was far too many for the space. Really, one would have been too many. And they were growing fast, as redwoods do. Through no fault of their own, they were in the wrong place.
I spent the weekend feeling like a criminal. Killing a tree is always a horrible experience, even when the tree is sick or dying, and these surely were not. Consider, also, that a tree is actually a community of beings — birds, insects, squirrels, fungi, all gone. I felt as if I had done something not just bad, but immoral. What was it in me, I wondered, that made me so certain I had done a terrible thing? (For those who are wondering, we will plant some Laurus nobilis ‘Saratoga’, bay laurels, where the redwoods stood. Less glorious trees, but still beautiful, hardy, and better for the space.)
Meanwhile, all this time, I was reading the section on moral development in human beings in Robert Sapolsky’s tome, Behave. Will I ever finish reading this book? I’m beginning to wonder. I’ve been at it for months, and am now about a fifth of the way through. (Part of the issue, of course, is that I’m always reading more than one book at a time, but that’s a different discussion.) The thing is, it’s just one fascinating discovery after another. How do we figure out the difference between right and wrong? How do we make those decisions? Sapolsky being Sapolsky, his answer is a complicated mixture of DNA and experience. The prefrontal cortex, our primary decision-making machine, is the last area of the brain to develop, and is the least constrained by genetics. It’s very much about environment and experience, overlaid on emotion and intuition. This is getting a little bit out-there, I realize. So before I completely go into orbit, let me bring things back to earth somewhat by saying that, after pondering all this information, I’ve pretty much concluded that everything we think of as moral behavior is really about making human relationships, at all scales, work better. And in some cases, it’s also about improving the general health of the gene pool.
There are good reasons for feeling indignant at people who are blatantly self-serving, who kill with abandon, who lie, who cheat, who are great at taking and terrible at giving, who believe laws and taboos do not apply to them. If we all behaved like this all the time, we would never have a moment’s peace. It’s possible that without moral guides, the human species would go extinct. We would all be so perpetually ticked off at each other that we would die from lack of co-operation. Ah, you may laugh. But even hermits need to go down the mountain for basic necessities now and then. And where do they get those? From other people. It pays to live in a functioning society, and to know a few people who can help you out when you need it, which you will.
Meanwhile again, I got yet another Nudge from yet another book, Booth, by a friend and colleague, Karen Joy Fowler. It’s another great, fact-packed novel, this time about John Wilkes Booth, the actor who assassinated Abraham Lincoln. By extension, it’s about the American civil war and the politics surrounding it, which were not so very different from the politics we find ourselves in today — that is to say, terribly polarized, and no one willing to compromise. How is it that someone like John Booth, who came from a large and loving (if complicated) family of vegetarians, ended up shooting one of our best-loved presidents? What was it that convinced him this was the right thing to do? Because he surely was convinced of that.
I was now pretty sure the subject of this Odd Company should be how do we know the difference between right and wrong?
Then along came Mother’s Day, and I couldn’t help but wonder, how much do our mothers have to do with our moral compass? There have been times when mothers have been blamed for just about every bad thing that has ever happened, from individual transgressions to wars. Genghis Kahn credited his mother with making him a great man, whatever he thought that meant. That’s the weirdest instance I’ve heard of so far. Inadequate mothers have been blamed for anxiety, depression, inability to form lasting relationships, criminal behavior, sadism, and difficulty ending abusive relationships, among other human failings.
So what exactly makes a woman a “good mother”? If all mothers were “good,” would we live in a perfect world? As a mother myself, and partly out of self-defense, I have to say that what makes a mother good is the same thing that makes anyone good. Loving kindness. To paraphrase Sapolsky, a good mother makes it clear to her children that she’s happy they exist. She does that by giving them her joyful attention. But it isn’t just mothers who matter. Good people make it clear that they’re happy others exist. In these times of terrible strife and moral turmoil, it’s nice to remember that the solution is simpler than we might think. Note that I didn’t say “easy.” Just simple. Love and be kind whenever you possibly can.
In honor of Mother’s Day, even though I’m a day late, here’s Brandi Carlile with “The Mother,” a wonderful example of loving kindness. Till next time…be good till I get back.