Smallness

I thought Felicity's comment on my last post about gorillas in the Congo deserved a whole post. Felicity said, "I was also strangely encouraged by that story when I saw it this morning! I felt small (in a good way)." Feeling small--now there's something we don't usually celebrate!

I know I've posted about this before, but I think one of the tragedies of modern life is that we've insulated ourselves enough from the "wildness" of the world that we've forgotten how small we are. And, yes, I'm just as bad as anyone in this area, maybe worse (just ask my wife). I think I may have linked to the post on Living Small about bear season on a previous blog, but this story (and Felicity's comment) made me think of it again. Here's a quote from the author about her response to an encounter with a grizzly near her home in Montana:

Although I won’t be heading up Suce Creek alone for another month or so, until the bears’ food supplies have started to kick in in the high country, knowing that the bears are here is one of the reasons I choose to live in this part of the world. I like living among people who know we’re not the top of the food chain, and who are working so hard to keep it that way. My encounter with the bear last year, while terrifying, was deeply thrilling. That’s the paradox — it’s those things that scare the wee out of us that keep us sane, that keep us in touch with what’s real. The world is real — its not actually in our heads — and sometimes it takes a big old bear standing uphill and woofing at us to remind us of that.

Perhaps a combination of fear and the basic hubris of humanity, the outsized view of our own importance, lies behind a lot of our difficulty with seeing how small we are. Maybe this author is right: we need big grizzly bears and great white sharks and man-eating tigers to remind us that we are not quite so mighty as we like to think. These predators (along with tiny viruses and massive natural disasters) certainly make me feel tiny!

I think another reason western culture in particular is uncomfortable with human smallness may come directly from the way a largely christian society has understood god's blessing to humankind in Genesis 1:28. Here's the New American Standard version of this verse:

God blessed them; and God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth."

Notice the language used: subdue, rule. It's the kind of language that produced the crusades, colonialism, and slavery. More recently, we have carried on that tradition by wiping out animal and plant habitats and generally shooting ourselves in the foot environmentally speaking. Ever been on a cruise? Did you know many if not most of those ships still dump all of their waste at sea? Who cares? The ocean's big, right? We're the rulers; it's all here for us, right?

I don't pretend to understand the original languages, but I like Eugene Peterson's more nuanced version of this in the Message:

God spoke: "Let us make human beings in our image, make them
reflecting our nature
So they can be responsible for the fish in the sea,
the birds in the air, the cattle,
And, yes, Earth itself,
and every animal that moves on the face of Earth."
God created human beings;
he created them godlike,
Reflecting God's nature.
He created them male and female.
God blessed them:
"Prosper! Reproduce! Fill Earth! Take charge!
Be responsible for fish in the sea and birds in the air,
for every living thing that moves on the face of Earth."

Wow. "Be responsible for..." That's so different! Or is it? Doesn't a good leader truly see themselves as the servant of those they lead? Why do we get this so wrong when we consider the world we are a part of? How did we go from "be responsible for" to "use up"?

Barbara Kingsolver, one of my favorite authors, wrote a bestselling novel called The Poisonwood Bible about an American family's misguided missionary adventure in the Congo during the 1950's. Her fictional family definitely went there to subdue and rule. One of the daughters of this family grows up to study parasitology (which she experienced firsthand in the Congo!) and tells how she comes to terms with what she learns:

As a teenager reading African parasitology books in the medical library, I was boggled by the array of creatures equipped to take root upon a human body. I'm boggled still, but with a finer appreciation for the partnership. Back then I was still a bit appalled that God would set down his barefoot boy and girl dollies into an Eden where, presumably, He had just turned loose elephantiasis and microbes that eat the human cornea. Now I understand, God is not just rooting for the dollies. We and our vermin all blossomed together out of the same humid soil in the Great Rift Valley, and so far no one is really winning. Five million years is a long partnership. If you could for a moment rise up out of your own beloved skin and appraise ant, human, and virus as equally resourceful beings, you might admire the accord they have all struck in Africa.

Regardless of what you think about creation, evolution, or original sin, there is just a lot about this world that does not seem to be here for our benefit. I suspect this is what the writer of Genesis was getting at when he wrote down the story of the garden of Eden. This god sees not only human suffering, but knows when a sparrow falls. It makes me feel small, but it also makes me feel part of something big.

Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes...

A man who has at length found something to do will not need to get a new suit to do it in; for him the old will do, that has lain dusty in the garret for an indeterminate period.... I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes. If there is not a new man, how can the new clothes be made to fit? If you have any enterprise before you, try it in your old clothes. All men want, not something to do with, but something to do, or rather something to be. Perhaps we should never procure a new suit, however ragged or dirty the old, until we have so conducted, so enterprised or sailed in some way, that we feel like new men in the old, and that to retain it would be like keeping new wine in old bottles.

--Henry David Thoreau, Walden; Or, Life in the Woods

I am very much in agreement with Mr. Thoreau about avoiding enterprises that require new clothes, but I must confess that I am quite glad that he did not choose to direct his disdain towards those enterprises which require new notebooks and writing utensils (ie--all of them). Simplicity and common sense are all well and good, but one mustn't, after all, succumb to fanaticism. Prudence and careful consideration are important qualities to cultivate if only for their usefulness in diverting criticism from one's own faults to those that can be safely identified only in others.

But what is it's message?

This weekend I finished reading a book and realized with horror that I had nothing to read!* In a mild panic, I scoured my bookshelf for something I hadn't read enough times to be able to outline the plot from memory. My eye fell on Ursula K. Le Guin's book, A Wizard of Earthsea. That might work. Poking around the author's website, I ran across a wonderful little article that might be of interest to anyone who is engaged in writing or reading fiction. The article is called A Message About Messages, and it describes exactly how I look at meaning and message in fiction. Here's a little teaser:

Readers—kids and adults—ask me about the message of one story or another. I want to say to them, "Your question isn't in the right language."

As a fiction writer, I don't speak message. I speak story. Sure, my story means something, but if you want to know what it means, you have to ask the question in terms appropriate to storytelling. Terms such as message are appropriate to expository writing, didactic writing, and sermons—different languages from fiction.

* "Nothing to read" in this case means "no unread work of fiction that suited my current mood."