The World Has Changed (29 page)

M.T.: There are many children, particularly young adults and even adults in many cases—there’s this kind of phenomenon we have of this increasing violence in urban areas and things like drive-by shootings, totally meaningless kinds of violence. Part of it is this disconnection with one’s fellow creatures, one’s disconnection with one’s brothers and sisters and
other living things. And also the disconnection with any kind of roots or family. A lot of your writing, in some sense, honors your ancestors. Maybe you can talk a little bit about the importance of your ancestors and your own connection to roots, because it seems to me that’s one of the things at the core of some of the problems we have.

 

A.W.: I’ve always honored my mother and father . . . I could be critical at the same time, but I honored them and do honor them for all they were able to do to bring up eight children, under incredibly harsh conditions, to instill in us a sense of the importance of education, for instance, the love of beauty, the respect for hard work, and the freedom to be whoever you are. But beyond my parents, my grandparents, and my great-grandparents—and by now I have gone very far back to May Poole, who lived to be 125 years old and who was my four-“greats” grandmother—but beyond May Poole, I have gone back in
The Temple of My Familiar
to reconnect with the very first ancestors, as far back as I could push it. I think that one of the fallacies of modern thought, or postmodern thought (wherever we are), is that somehow the ancient people—the ones who lived and died, and thank goodness, because now we can put up a shopping center—that those people were somehow less than now. In my view they’re really the same.

 

M.T.: Might even have been better.

 

A.W.: No, I’m deliberately not going to say that, but they probably were. But the point is that, if you can really understand that your most remote ancestors were probably just fine, you can feel a whole lot better about yourself now. So, if you go back five hundred thousand years and look at the people then, what were they doing then? They were raising their children, and hunting and fishing, and telling stories around the fire; and darn, pretty soon you can see that their life was not that much different from yours, in the basics. There’s no point in thinking that just because people didn’t make the catapult—or they didn’t make some technological thing or other that people now will think of as an advance over the slingshot—it’s no reason to think that they were less human. I have, in my work, delighted in dreaming my way back and remembering my way back to these ancient, ancient days in which I feel quite at home and have no quarrel with. So I’m at peace with my ancestors—all of them. It means that when I go about in the world, they’re really with
me. When I went to New Zealand, I spent time with the Maori. That’s what they all said when I went to the Marae, their gathering site. They have this wonderful ceremony where they speak for you and they introduce you to the group and everything. They consistently said about me they always saw all of my people around me. And I said, “Right,” because they’re all around me. They said, “Yes, you came to the door with many many people with you.” They could just see them. They had a seer, a woman who saw my Cherokee history (I can’t talk about it because she gave me a message to give to the Cherokee nation, which I have to do and then I can talk about it), but she started to weep; she just started to weep; from what she could see. It’s lovely to be in a society where people are still in touch, so in touch, with the kind of vibrational life of the person in front of them.

 

M.T.: The invisible world.

 

A.W.: The invisible world. It was such a relief. I felt seen and affirmed in a way that I had never felt.

 

M.T.: Our society doesn’t honor the invisible world. It stresses the visible. It’s part of our scientific revolution, as it were. It, in some ways, suppresses the sacred.

 

J.T.: There’s a whole movement to work with native cultures and their science, which is just what you speak of: being able to see what we call the invisible world. But to them, it is not invisible at all, but to see that which is not apparent. And so they’re meeting with physicists of our culture and shamans of other cultures and finding that there’s a commonality there that they’re coming together. Although language makes it difficult, because sometimes it’s difficult to speak all of this.

 

A.W.: I don’t know. I don’t think they get it. Mainly because of the kind of arrogance involved in how they can’t really believe it unless they can prove it using their tools. It’s very prevalent. Some of this really has to do with just having faith and just being open to what you experience yourself and having faith in your own experience.

 

J.T.: This is where our culture comes in with experts. We have been so “expertized”—we can’t trust it unless an expert says it. Recently,
I was listening to the news. There were some earthquakes in Northern California up in Eureka. There was some seismic expert saying, “Oh, there’s no connection at all between that and what’s gone on in Palm Springs in this other part of California.” I don’t trust that anymore. There’s something in me—maybe I’ve done New Dimensions long enough to realize it—I don’t trust that anymore.

 

A.W.: It’s because they don’t believe it’s connected. If that’s not the fatal flaw of the Western world, I don’t know what is. It’s this feeling. I think it’s all connected. If you do something in Eureka, if something happens in Eureka, of course you feel it in Fresno.

 

J.T.: Or you do a test, a nuclear test in Nevada; it’s going to have its effect someplace else.

 

M.T.: They were having that series of underground tests in Nevada and there was that whole series—slew—of earthquakes that occurred on the eastern region of the Sierra a couple of years ago. I remember calling the geological survey and asking them, “Seems to me there’s a relationship here.” But “scientifically” they would say that there’s no relationship, there’s no connection of the plates.

 

A.W.: The thing is how basically—I won’t say uneducated, because often people have had a little bit of education—un-college-educated people often are so far ahead of the scientists. The case in point, I think, is that, for years, the people in Georgia have been talking about how the sun had changed, because they could feel it on their skins. These were people who had worked outdoors almost all of their lives. They were just talking about it: “I’m burned. I can’t go from here to there and suddenly it hurts. It stings.” This was long before anybody said anything about the ozone. They also kept saying that they noticed a real change every time they sent up a missile.

 

J.T.: You mean, like a space shot?

 

A.W.: Right. They said, “Every time this happens, the weather changes and the sun is different.” Well, even now, you don’t hear anybody saying that the fuel, the fire from the fuel, as they go up through the ozone, has burned it. People don’t talk about that, except maybe Helen Caldicott.

I don’t know if she even does it. I just feel that, eventually, somebody will mention it. And they will mention it at the point where the Pentagon has even run out of money, when we’ve stopped feeding this fantasy of going off somewhere. Or it’ll just peter out somehow. Then they will say, “We don’t want that because actually it was burning up the ozone, every time these things went up.” But people have been realizing this and they are really, in my opinion, the experts. Because it’s about their lives. If people who go out in the sun all the time—it’s their experience—tell you that suddenly the sun is burning me, it gets worse every time you send up a space shot, this matters more to me than some scientist sitting, protected from the sun by several stories of stuff built all around him, opinionating about, “Well, no, it’s all fine, it’s just a tiny amount of it and you’ll never notice it.” He would never notice it, because he’s not in the sun.

 

J.T.: That just brings us back to the earth, doesn’t it? In our culture here in the U.S. we continue to think of expansionist—oh, we’ll move out into space. What you’re saying brings in a new thought of, “Oh, maybe there is no other place but Earth, really. Maybe this is really it.”

 

A.W.: There are a lot of ways of thinking about that, too. There is no other place for me, and for many Earth people. But perhaps the people who want to go, or people who have a memory of having been somewhere else, and it would be lovely if they—and they alone—could go there.

 

M.T.: We’ll support their going there.

 

A.W.: I’ll give a couple of dollars. I’m sure you will join in. You have to wonder why some people do colonize naturally. That is their nature. You do have to think about that. You go from country to country colonizing and eventually you try to go from planet to planet colonizing. Why do you do that? Not everybody does that.

 

J.T.: So that’s really allowing them to be who they are, but not at the expense of the other people who choose to live it differently here.

 

A.W.: The problem is that they’re spending our money. They’re using Earth resources to go to some other planet. Now, I’m willing for them
to go as far away as they’d like and I would be really happy. But two dollars is all I’m willing to contribute. I’m not willing to give them all my taxes to go to these far-flung places, which are of no interest to me. Rocks from the moon I don’t need. I have rocks right here. They always talk about exploiting these places that they go to because that, too, is a pattern. They have exploited every place they’ve been.

 

M.T.: So much of the space program has been co-opted by the military. You don’t hear about that a lot. You just hear about the pioneering, the exploration; you don’t really understand the reasoning behind it, what’s going on underneath that.

 

A.W.: “Pioneering” is the operative word. We have to look again at what “pioneering” means. What “settler” means. All of these words tell us a lot. They have been completely distorted from what they actually meant to the people who lived here before these people got here.

 

M.T.: I think the land we’re on right now was populated by the Pomos. Each of these little valleys had their own little Pomo tribe. The story is that many—most—of these tribes had all different languages and they weren’t able to communicate with one another. There’d only be a couple, a few tribespeople, who would take the trails over to the coast, or other valleys, to trade. Things would trade back and forth. But there was very little interaction because these people had everything they needed in their own valley. Why go to the next valley?

 

A.W.: Many people feel like that about this valley. Again, there are other ways of existing. I noticed among the aboriginal people in Australia that they, too, have many different—they have hundreds of languages. Hundreds of groups of people. I never knew that. It makes a lot of sense, if you really have your way and you want to live your way. You have everything your way, even your language. Not everybody needs to have a United States. You need to have a United States if you’re colonizing a large territory and you need to have posts of control. Like the fort at every place.

 

M.T.: I wanted to ask you about your process of writing. Could you describe it to us?

 

A.W.: A spiral notebook. I used to use a yellow pad when I was married to a lawyer, because he would always have the long legal pads. But I like spiral notebooks, because they’re portable, they have nice covers, and they’re very inexpensive. I write in that. I often write in bed. I use the computer only when I’m transcribing from the longhand, a manuscript. That’s about it.

 

M.T.: What about where you write and how you allocate time to writing. Do you separate yourself from other activities?

 

A.W.: I do more of that, yes, because sometimes, as with this book, I wrote it over a period of a year—
Possessing the Secret of Joy
. I was able to do that because I took a sabbatical from the work of political activism. I just said, “I cannot both write this and appear there and march there and do this and that.” Once you drop a lot of other stuff, it’s just wonderfully freeing, so you can really put all of your energy into the creative work.

 

M.T.: You mentioned also, you wrote about meditating, using meditation, when you’re writing.

 

A.W.: I meditate when I’m writing every morning. Sometimes, when I’m not writing, if I haven’t decided to write a book that will take months and months, I don’t do the discipline of meditation because I really do feel I do it in other ways. But when I’m writing, it just is so helpful to—I think I do it mostly because I want to be pure, I want my thought to be pure. By pure I mean really just the best thought, that everybody in the book will have really my best and finest thought. Even if I am writing about a demon. That demon should have my best and purest thought about his or her “demonness.” I think that writing is a great responsibility because you can mistreat a maligned character, just as you can people. That’s a great responsibility. If you do it badly, if you do something or cause the character to be out of character, I would feel it almost the same if I had done something bad to a person.

 

M.T.: I know you’ve responded to this critique before, but I’d like to ask you about it. That is, in
The Color Purple
, there was some criticism that
came out about your portrayal of black men. Could you talk about that and respond to that now?

 

A.W.: Many of my critics really preferred the old model of the black man, which they were busily trying to construct during the sixties and some of the seventies, which is of someone who is fairly cold, in charge, up against the whatever (usually with a gun in one hand and a woman who is of no importance in the crook of the other arm, not connected to anybody else and rarely connected to himself): the need to be a man in the dominator model was very much a part of what that criticism came out of. I wrote a book in which someone starts out kind of like that, with the old model of what a man should be, but who changes completely, who ends up sitting on the porch with his former wife, sewing. I think that there are men who will never forgive me for that, because to them it means that I have turned this man into a sissy—or into a woman, even though I go to great lengths to show that not every man who sews is a “woman,” and I try to remind them that it’s a very old African tradition that men sew. Also, that men in Africa don’t traditionally wear pants. They wear robes. But this was lost on the critics, partly because of our history, in which, for so many years, black men were seen as kind of weak and always subservient to white people. There was a need for a superman kind of quality, which I never bought, don’t like, and would never try to pass off as what I consider a real person.