Our recent paper and our videos on India’s chicken industry [now with over 50,000 views on Youtube!] and dairy and beef industries delve into this further. In this blog series, I hope to highlight writings on India and where they intersect with sustainability, equity, and rights, particularly in the context of food security and climate change.

Read Part 1 of this series: Red Sorghum and ‘F&B’  which discusses Siddartha Deb’s recent book, The Beautiful and the Damned: A Portrait of the New India.

Check out Part II of this series, which discusses AkashKapur’s article in the October 10, 2011 issue of the New Yorker, “The Shandy: The Cost of Being a Cow Broker in Rural India.”  The article is an excerpt of his forthincoming book.  India Becoming: A Portrait of Life in Modern India.

Green is the New Red is a thought-provoking and riveting read that examines several legal cases against activists. He gives particular attention to Operation Backfire, a series of arsons that took place in the late 1990s, as well as the activists arrested for their campaign to Stop Huntington Animal Cruelty (SHAC7). The book opens with the story of Daniel McGowan, who is also the main subject of recent film If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front.

Green is the New Red embodies one of my favorite forms of writing. It is part memoir, part history, part investigative journalism. Belonging to the school of “new journalism,” where an author acknowledges his role in the story, this book  is a thrilling read for both its exhaustive research and the intimate nature of the telling. Potter is reporter, activist and friend. While I find the resulting combined perspective to be one of the book’s greatest strengths, balancing these selves while writing had its challenges:

“No matter how many times I might think I’ve escaped these compartmentalized roles of being either a friend or a journalist, of either being part of the story or telling it, I find that I’m still trying to walk the line between them.”

Potter has tracked several of these activists from their trial through prison, and for some, even after. He examines the set of forces that led to their arrest and sentencing and how the word “terrorism” has been applied to property destruction (even where there was no loss of life) and free speech activities.

Two of the activists he writes about, Andy Stepanian and Daniel McGowan, were sent to “Communication Management Units.” Alia Malek wrote an  important piece about CMUs for The Nation earlier this year.

In such places, communication is severely restricted compared with the general prison population. CMU prisoners only get one 15 minutes phone call a week, and can’t have any physical contact with friends and family who come to visit.

Potter shares the difficulty prisoners face when trying to maintain their relationships. He describes Daniel and his wife Jenny Synan:

“He only has fifteen minutes with her, and if those minutes do not flow smoothly and end flawlessly he has to wait a week to remedy them. McGowan knows the burden this has placed on loved ones. He often asks friends to purchase small presents for Synan, sneak into their apartment, and then hide them between couch cushions or on the bookshelf, so that when he talks to her on the telephone, he can tell her where to find them and listen to her surprise.”

He writes about Andy Stepanian after he has been released:

“He has told me that since being released from the CMU, there will be moments where he’s standing in a post office or on a subway platform and smells this scent; he fades out of the moment and returns to prison, to moments in prison he would like to forget—someone stabbed, someone beaten, screams he had to ignore—and he will stay in that place until a noise or a stranger’s hand brings him back home.”

Potter candidly expresses his own concerns about writing this book:

“The most dangerous consequence of this terrorism rhetoric is fear, so does raising public awareness just make people more afraid?… As a journalist, I have felt a responsibility to raise awareness about legal and legislative issues that have largely gone unnoticed. As someone who cares deeply about these issues, I’ve wondered if I’m just doing the job of the government and corporations for them by spreading fear.”

But he later notes,“The best way to cut through the fog of fear is to shine a light directly on the source,” which is exactly what Green is the New Red does.

Released in the year of several global political uprisings and the Occupy Wall Street Movement, Green is the New Red is particularly relevant and insightful reading for all concerned citizens questioning corporate power. See more about this on Will Potter’s blog.

I remember the outrage in 1998, when the U.S. Air Force placed 111 of their former research subjects in Coulston’s care instead of retiring them to sanctuaries.  The Coulston foundation was notorious for animal welfare violations, and eventually the NIH, FDA, and USDA pulled their funding.    On the verge of bankrupcty, Coulston sold his facility to Dr. Carole Noon, director of the Save the Chimps.

Carole Noon, was my very first interview subject for Satya Magazine.  The work that she and Save the Chimps were doing was amazing.  At the time, they were running two sanctuaries.   One was a dream chimp paradise in Florida-this was the ultimate destination for all the chimps.  As they were building and expanding, they were slowly transferring chimps from Coulston’s former facility in New Mexico.  In the mean time, for the Almogordo chimps, their digs received a complete makeover, and Carole and her team worked on renovations, socialization, enrichment for these chimps who were caged in solitary.

Monday night, the last of the chimps housed in New Mexico, started on their journey— “The Great Chimp Migration“— to Florida.

I wish Carole Noon, who passed away in May 2009, was here to witness it.   As she told me, the role of the human being is often just “opening the door.”   She’s definitely opened plenty of doors for hundreds of chimpanzees.

“Recognizing that sustainable development, democracy and peace are indivisible is an idea whose time has come.”  On the verge of tears, I cheered at that moment.

Over the next few years, I grew to learn more about her work.  My collegues at Satya Magazine had interviewed  and written about Prof. Maathai, and we featured her prominently in our pages.  Later, I had the opportunity to provide research assistance on her book The Challenge for Africa (Pantheon 2009).  I was saddened to hear of her death this past September.  A summary of her ” life of firsts” can be found here.

In New York, this week, there will be a memorial service, honoring and celebrating this remarkable woman.

The Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine will hold a memorial ceremony for Prof. Wangari Maathai on the 14th of November from 4:30 p.m. to 6:30 p.m.
1047 Amsterdam Avenue (at 112th Street)
New York, NY
November 14th, 2011

The ceremony will begin promptly and all are invited to attend.Donations will be collected for the Green Belt Movement. Please do not bring any flowers or presents.

In Nick Flynn’s memoir, The Ticking is the Bomb, he introduces  the Buddhist concept of “monkey mind,” the restless, bewildered, unsettled mind.  It is also the structure he adapts for the book.  Like a monkey swings from one branch to the next, Flynn’s memoir  swings from one story fragment to another.  It is a book about torture and impending parenthood; about reading and relationships. These seemingly disparate pieces echo and resonate with one another when juxtaposed (with great care and craft). The pages reveal a mind responding to all that he is reading, witnessing and feeling. ( Flynn quotes Fanny Howe:  “Bewilderement is a way of entering the day ”)

What I am drawn to in narratives is the intersection of the personal and the political.  How does violence  on a global level, or an intimate level, affect our lives, and how do we reconcile and respond to these injustices?

Flynn received an award from PEN for his first memoir, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, the same night Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith won a sister award from PEN.   Flynn did not know then that Harris’ book advocates  torture, and what bewilders him even more was that Harris was given an award by a human rights organization for it.

Later, Flynn has the opportunity to go to Istanbul and meet with an Abu Ghraib ex-detainee, “Amir.”  “Now if asked, I’ll sometimes say, I went to Istanbul to bear witness, though at the time I was somewhat bewildered as to my role,” Flynn writes.

One of the parts of the book I found most interesting  is Flynn’s anyalysis of Standard Operating Procedures, the film and book project by Errol Morris and Philip Gourevitch. There is further corresponence between Flynn and Gourevitch on his website here. Flynn’s main criticisms are that Morris and Gourevitch take the story of the torturers at their word, and refer to the victims by the often times derogotary nicknames the military police gave them and not by their real names or dignified aliases.  And in one particular controversial passage, it seems Gourevitch suggests that the pictures look worse than things really were.  Flynn writes to Gourevitch:

I met with several of the Iraqis depicted in the photographs last year, including the one the MPs nicknamed “Gus,” the man on the end of Lynndie England’s leash, who I will refer to here as “Amir.” In the MPs version of that night, as reported in SOP, Graner is concerned with the well-being of Amir, of how to move him without injuring him, which led to using the “tie-down strap.” As I read this I assumed that Mr. Gourevitch was merely allowing the MPs enough rope to hang themselves, as it were, but Gourevitch concludes with this: “Once we learn Shitboy’s story, however, the pictures of him with Graner and Frederick become relatively anodyne. With Gus and the tie-downstrap, the opposite is true: even when we find out the story, the pictures of him with England remain shocking—only now the shock lies in the fact that the pictures look worse, more deliberately deviant and abusive, than the reality they depict.” (p148)

I had finished Flynn’s book the same day I read an article about the circus in Mother Jones, by Deborah Nelson.   My  restless literary animal mind couldn’t help but recognize the shadows of this discussion of torture in other contexts. Where there are incidences of violence and abuse, often times narratives of defense and denial emerge.

In the “Cruelest Show on Earth“, Nelson examines the abuse of elephants in Ringling Bros, and the difficulty in getting justice.  Here too, there are “standard operating procedures:”

“There’s no way to control an elephant without an ankus,” and the Animal Welfare Act doesn’t prohibit it, he [USDA legal counsel] explained. Maybe a time will come when bullhooks, chains, and “elephants getting paraded around doing unnatural things” is prohibited, he said, but until then, litigating abuse is difficult.

And there is denial:

But all five trainers and handlers named by Ewell and Stechcon denied abusing elephants or ever seeing anyone else do so. “I have a very good relationship with the elephants, especially the babies Benjamin and Shirley,” Harned told the investigator. “There is no abuse of any of the elephants. I treat these elephants as my children.”"

Ted Friend, a professor of animal sciences at Texas A&M University, took the stand for the defense. He testified that the elephants likely enjoyed the train rides, because the long hauls satisfied their “nomadic” urge to roam—a theory Friend said he based on aUSDA-funded study that he had conducted for the Journal of the Elephant Manager’s Association. Under cross-examination, he conceded that the study had not been peer-reviewed, and that Feld Entertainment was paying him $500 an hour to testify—$100 more than his usual hourly fee and 10 times Ensley’s rate.

We see denial elsewhere too. In responding to cases of animal abuse at factory farms or in laboratories, sometimes the incidences are also referred to as anomalies, (“a few bad apples”), and not the norm.  Victims of abuse are not viewed as individual beings with dignity.  Sometimes industries complain that photos and videos may be taken out of context.  They don’t reveal what’s outside of the frame.

“Amir,” the victim of torture, also recognized the limitation of photographs: “This is what happened that night, he said, there were other incidents, other nights.”

As shown in the Mother Jones article, extreme denial can look absurd.  Perhaps that is what is most bewildering and unsettling to the mind:  when there is no moral outrage;  when a new narrative can emerge that renders another one invisible.

Meditating on the clinical language often times used to describe violent acts, I was reminded  by  a passage I read in Armies of the Night by Normal Mailer.  Mailer is discussing a Pentagon spokesperson who justified the use of violence against protestors:

“The spokesman was speaking in totalitarianese, which is to say , technologese, which is to say any language which succeeds in stripping itself of any moral content.”

Mailer further adds:

“There are negative rites of passage as well.  Men learn in a negative rite to give up the best  things they were born with, and forever.  However much must a spokesman suffer in a negative rite to be able to learn to speak in such a way?”

What does the  global denial of violence do to our collective psyches. While, there is defense and denial on one end of the spectrum, there is despair on the other.  If we accept these violent realities, it is a great burden—perhaps too large—for an individual to bear.  Despair is  denial of a different sort.  We deny ourselves the opportunity to feel and respond to what we know to be true.   The Ticking is the Heart.

To find a sense of peace, perhaps we shouldn’t be quieting the thoughts of our Monkey Minds, but acknowledging them.

One of the highlights of my day was watching Junot Diaz and Min Jin Lee “hang out.” The program description was exactly that. I wasn’t sure what this would entail,  but I was so happy I stuck around to find out. Though neither one of them really uses twitter, the conversation was split up into hash tags. #origins, #doubt, #why people want to become writers. I am going to break this post into # origins, #doubt, #the reader and #we don’t sell anyway

#origins

Both Min Jin Lee and Junot Diaz took over ten years to publish their first books and they discussed this long process. Junot said that most discussions of “how one becomes a writer” often feel “less like options and more like the paths you failed to take.” There’s no one path and schedule that fits all. (He closed the panel with the very reassuring “ You didn’t do anything wrong”)

Min Jin did not study writing in college. She pursued economics and then switchted to history and went on to Law School. She wanted to examine what it was that led her and Junot to become writers. Neither of them came from families of writers or had the luxuries of trust funds to pursue their work. But this idea emerged, this “inner belief” that they were writers.  Reading inspired this too. “We get so much courage from writers we don’t know,” Min Jin said.

#doubt

“You feel like a loser for so long,” Min Jin said about her long road to publication lined with rejection letters.  Junot talked about that constant battle of “you versus whether or not you think words mean anything.”

“What you need to finish a work,” Junot said, “is  an extra dose of compassion.” Compassion for yourself. Once, he quit working on his novel for a whole year. It wasn’t until he was able to forgive himself, (“I forgive you for really sucking”) that he was able to begin the work again.

“Naipaul really helped me,” Min Jin said. “I don’t think he wanted to help me,” she laughed. But there was something in A House for Mr. Biswas that spoke to her, that told her she could do what she wanted to do.

While we have doubt, we must also have trust. Later there was a moment when Junot was talking about the difference between working on short stories and novels. You can hold a short story in your head. It can be perfect, he said. Novels draw strength from their imperfections, Junot observed.  You can’t hold it all in your head, and you have to trust that that all the pieces will come together.

#reader

Junot had some concerns about the writing workshop lifestyle and writing to a group of writers. Often times, “the reader” is forgotten in these discussions. One writes to readers. You have to understand “how readers function… how reading actually works,” he said.   Min Jin had some great workshop experiences at the Asian American Writers Workshop, and finding a group of writers/readers/mentors.

There are two gems I took away from their chat on these topics.

1-    Junot pointed out, “The average reader is capable of deciphering a great deal of unintelligible stuff.”  It is normative in the process of reading. “ (Perhaps even the pleasurable part. Wan explained this to me recently in education terms as “desired difficulty.”) We have readers who are going to get our work. (If they get 60 percent of what we are saying, that’s a win, Junot added)

2-      Min Jin shared a little story about how when she was younger she never talked. Her parents thought there was something wrong with her. She got accepted into Bronx Science, and in high school, she realized she needed to learn to speak or else people would think she was stupid. “My parents thought I was stupid.” One great lesson she learned in public speaking training was something that can be applied to writing too. “Your audience wants to like you,” she said.  They don’t want you to fail. “Your readers want you to succeed.”  Many times when I’m writing, I have a critic in mind, whether internal or external, and not the generous reader who is invested in my story. This shift in perspective can make all the difference.

# We don’t sell anyway

In the publishing world, those of us writing about things new and different that aren’t part of the standard model, are “statistical anomalies,” Min Jin pointed out. She talked about wanting to populate an English novel with Korean words, like Russian novels of a certain time were populated with French, and how this idea wasn’t warmly received or understood.

Junot told us how he almost messed up his first novel by listening to his first editor who told him to take out all of the footnotes. He did. Then, the editor quit, and Junot put them back in, and the second editor didn’t say anything about the footnotes.

The problem, Junot said, is that  they  [publishers, editors, agents] are “making economic arguments about aesthetic issues.” Essentially saying, “ You are not going to sell.” “Well guess what?” Junot said. “We don’t sell anyway”

So we might as well write the stories we want to write and be true to them and not let the economic stuff get in our way.  They closed with warm encouragement:

You matter.  Your stories matter.  You didn’t do anything wrong.

As I mentioned in my previous post, Rizzuto  weaves transcripts of her interviews of the atomic bomb survivors, the hibakusha, and her own narrative of piecing together this story, infusing the personal and political elements that shape memory and history.

It is UN Disarmament Week, and two hibakusha have come to New York to serve as ” Special Communicators for a World without Nuclear Weapons.”

Wan and I had a chance to hear them speak  at Teachers College in an event organized by the Peace Education program.

“Call me Grandma,” Kazue Sueishi told the intimate classroom that had filled to hear her story.  Born in America, Sueishi returned to Hiroshima as a child with her parents.   She recalled her parents talking fondly of America.  In her nursery school, she remembered being asked to draw something.  She drew something beautiful with lots of crayon colors, and when asked what it was,  she said, “America”

When the war started, she said.  She didn’t feel angry.  She saw a silver  American B-29 plane everyday.  She would refer to it as an angel.  ”Good Morning Angel,” she would say.

On August 6, 1945, her family had finished breakfast (an American style breakfast she added).  She was 18 years old at the time and worked in a military factory.  She had a slight fever and stayed home sick that day.  She was out on the street with her friend when it happened.  Blue sky.  Powerful flash.  She covered her eyes with 4 fingers and ears with her thumbs, then slid to a safe spot  like a baseball player sliding into home base.  B-29 had left Hiroshima.  She talked about the burns on her father, how the school building collapsed on her brother.   She saw school children 5-6 years old escaping with their teacher, crying out for their mommies.   She had given them a drink of water and umeboshi pickles which soothed them temporarily.  Later she went to check on them, and all of them were dead.   That is the reality of the bomb.

Later Sueishi—because she was “made in America”—had the opportunity to return to America.  She did not speak any English and on the boat ride over she only knew the words apple, cracker and water.  A man on the ship taught her two English phrases.  ”Don’t touch me” and “Shut up”  She didn’t know what they meant but practiced saying them to herself and greeted her fellow Americans with “Don’t touch me. Shut up” when she arrived.  Grandma had a great sense of humor.

Nobody talked about the bombings, she said.  It had been 5 years, 1950, when a caucasian man came up to her and said  ”You killed us in Pearl Harbor”

All of a sudden her memory started to come back.  She didn’t have anger or hate toward this man.  She felt sorry for him.  Maybe he had immediate family in Pearl Harbor, she wondered.  With her limited English she responded:

“You America/ Me Hiroshima/Bomb Hurt/You Brother/Me Sister/I love you.”

From that night on the memories came back, she was having a bit of a mental breakdown, and pimples and bruises all over her arms.

“In here,” she pointed to her heart, “there is a scar that never disappears until you die.”

“We are the last ones to be called Hibakusha.  There should be no more.”

She asked  us to repeat the following.   In similar fashion to the people’s microphone at the OWS protests, we echo:

Rest in Peace

We will not repeat the same error again

No more Hiroshima

No more Nagasaki

No mor war

May Peace Prevail on Earth

Setsuko Thurlow shared her story as well.  Born and raised in Hiroshima, Ms. Thurlow was 13 years old in 1945.  She was in 8th grade, but at that time, she wasn’t doing academic work.  The girls were mobilized to work for the army, decoding messages.  On August 6, the major gave his daily pep talk about patriotism and service to the emperor.  She remembered a white flash and then “floating in air.”  In actuality, the building was falling and her body went with it.   She landed in the rubble, and heard other voices shouting out for help.  There was a voice of encouragement too, one that guided her toward the  sun. When she got out, the rest of the building caught on fire. Only two other girls survived.  The others were burned alive.

There were the images.  Streams of people like ghosts.  Swollen bodies.  People holding their eyeballs in their hands.  Stomachs burst open with intestines.

Nobody had the strength to shout.  People simply “shuffled” escaping to the hillside.

She came across those asking for water.  There were no containers or buckets.  She went to the stream and washed the blood off of her, removed her blouse and soaked it in water.  The other victims drank what moisture they could from the soaked clothing.

This “primitive support” was all they could offer.

“I watched all night , my beloved city burn.”  People slept on contaminated soil.  ”What did we know?”

“For 12 years, the Japanese government abandoned us.”  Gradually people came back to the city.  ”If you go there now, you wonder if the bombing really took place.”

Ms. Thurlow had a lot to say about U.S. occupation.  While General MacArthur wanted to modernize Japan, bring labor and agricultural reform, he also brought censorship.  The period after the bomb was one in which the press was muted and many records (diaries, photos, films, medical charts) were confiscated.  She talked about the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission that was set up to gather data on the effects of radiation, but offered no help or treatment to the victims.

Rizzuto’s great-aunt, a Japanese American who experienced internment in the U.S.,  signed up to return to Hiroshima to be part of this commission.  ”I thought we were helping,” she told Rizzuto.

“When she found out—and how did that happen?—that she was the enemy, that the US government was classifying all that information so no one could fully understand what the bomb did, that they were offering no help and no medical care—and here begins the outrage—that’s when she became a peace activist.”

Rizzuto learned that the ABCC has changed names to the Radiation Effects Research Foundation (RERF) in 1975.   She states that “The RERF contradicts the ABCC wholesale, without ever admitting that it is a contradiction.  The mistakes, the manipulation, the evil if there was an evil, are simply gone.”

Ms. Thurlow continued her story  and how she came to  the U.S. on a scholarship to study in Virginia. It was 1954 and the U.S. had just tested the most powerful hydrogen bomb on Bikini Atoll in the Pacific, impacting a Japanese fishing boat.  As a student, she was asked how the Japanese felt about this.  She spoke her mind and then was confronted with hate mail in the days that followed.

In the question and answer period of this talk, a young man asked how they respond to those who justified Hiroshima as the “necessary ” end to  WWII. Ms. Thurlow brought the conversation back to the students who challenged her in Virginia.  Back then, she felt sorry for them.  They, like Japanese soldiers, blindly accepted the narrative given to them by their leaders.  It was then that she decided that she needed to study history.  Now there is some historical consensus that the war was already over before Hiroshima.    And there was no justification for Nagasaki.  ”Grandma” reminded us that Little Boy and Fat man were two different bombs.   They wanted to test them.  ”We were guinea pigs,” Ms. Thurlow said.

A few days before this talk, I read Evan Osnos’ “Letter from Fukushima- The Fallout,” in the October 17, 2011 issue of the New Yorker.  In addition to discussing the events at the nuclear plant in Fukushima after the earthquake and tsunami earlier this year, Osnos provides a brief history of how Japan “became the most devoted, and improbable, advocate of nuclear technology, ” and the U.S.’s role in encouraging that development.

I wondered if the victims in Fukushima were also hibakusha. A young man in the audience of the talk recently came back from a Fukushima conference and heard the survivors refer to themselves as hibakusha.  He had asked a question about where the discussion on nuclear energy was in the context of disarmament.   Ms. Thurlow essentially linked the two.  She believes nuclear energy generation contributes to the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

At the end, Grandma posed a simple unanswered question for us all.  ”Why do people make bombs and then use them?”  ”I need an answer”

I am still absorbing all of their stories. I was struck by something I read in Hiroshima in the Morning.  Rizzuto interviewed a priest who tells her this:

Ichi go, ichi e (one time, one meeting)

Each time we encounter another person in our lives, he tells me, it may be the last time, and it may be very important, something may happen in that moment to change both of our lives… This is our time: just once, you and me.

I think about how wonderful this is to apply to the present. To be our better selves in each moment.  How not only physical encounters, but also encounters with words, books, stories, have the same potential—to change you.  To stay with you. Forever.

Ichi go, ichi e.

Wan and I prep veggies to go into tonight’s vegan chili.  He then drinks chia seed water and programs his playlist for his Sunday long run.  My husband is training for the upcoming New York City Marathon.  Today he plans to run 23 miles.  While Mookie sun bathes in the light pouring in our living room window, I ponder what I should do this afternoon.

Perhaps go for a run myself, or a bike ride?   I really should write.  Keep working on the manuscript; make edits to pieces to send out for submissions; tweak the ending of this; write the beginning of that.  I often feel that in my limited spare time I have to choose between exercise and writing; reading and sleeping.  There isn’t enough time for all, and I’m never satisfied in my progress in any.

I choose to read this afternoon.  Not one of the four books I’m currently immersed in for pleasure or research, but something new.

Rahna Reiko Rizzuto‘s, Hiroshima in the Morning, was just nominated for the Asian American Writers Workshop literary award in nonfiction.   I received a copy, a generous gift, at my first Associates Board meeting at the AAWW this Friday.

I was intrigued by the blurb on the back cover :

“….The parallel narratives of Hiroshima in the survivors’ own words, and of Rizzuto’s personal awakening show memory not as history, but as a story we tell ourselves to explain who we are.”

As I write my own stories that blend memory and history, I cherish examining other narratives and the choices made in their creation.   The very first page, the very first words, draw me in:

“I can tell you the story, but it won’t be true.  It won’t be the facts as they happened exactly, each day, each footstep, each breath.  Time elides, events shift; sometimes we shift them on purpose and forget that we did.  Memory is just how we choose to remember.

We choose.”

I curl up on the couch with a blanket wrapped around me, and Mookie snuggles under the covers and warms my feet.  My mother jokes that she, too, must have gotten her MFA while I did. And as Wan now works on his doctorate, Mookie too is accruing her stack of honorary graduate degrees.(Like Stephen Colbert, DFA).

Mookie and I  pour through the first 85 pages together and then take a break.  Facebook. Twitter. These are other time sinks I fail to account for in my scheduling. I look at a tweet, a retweet of another, and all of a sudden I’m reading this interview with Haruki Murakami.

He has written about the metaphorical importance of his running; that to complete an action every day sets a kind of karmic example for his writing. “Yes,” he says. “Mmmmm.” He makes a long contemplative sound. “I need strength because I have to open the door.” He mimes heaving open a door. “Every day I go to my study and sit at my desk and put the computer on. At that moment, I have to open the door. It’s a big, heavy door. You have to go into the Other Room. Metaphorically, of course. And you have to come back to this side of the room. And you have to shut the door. So it’s literally physical strength to open and shut the door. So if I lose that strength, I cannot write a novel any more. I can write some short stories, but not a novel.”

I do not have this physical door to open when I write.  I do not have this Other Room.  I have The Couch and The Bed. Most days, the only time I have to write is on the subway. Who needs a writing retreat, when you have the G train?  I like to reassure myself.  It is a writing space born out of necessity, but has wonderful attributes.  I can’t get on the internet, so I am focused on writing.  While I may be surrounded by people, there is a deep solitude I feel on the subways in New York.  I wrote about this as something I missed, when I moved to the Bay Area for graduate school in geotechnical engineering:

“’What are those graphs? Is that the stock market?’ an elderly woman sitting next to me on the AC40 bus asked me one day on my commute from Oakland to Berkeley for my earthquake engineering exam in graduate school.

I laughed, shook my head and said no. They were acceleration time histories of earthquakes in California.

On another bus ride study session, a man sitting next to me inquired about diagrams of clay consolidation in my text. I wasn’t used to talking to people on public transit. In the crowded subways of New York, I found mental solitude. Despite being brushed up against, being breathed on, or having someone “eavesread” my paper, I could avoid conversation. When physical space was so limited, I appreciated that privacy.”

When  I type on the subway, I am not self conscious. I think to myself, and perhaps even gesture and mumble, but nobody bats an eye.  Sometimes when I am working on difficult material,  I start to cry.  Nobody feels the need to ask me if I am ok.  I wipe my tears and continue to type.   I am grateful for their indifference, what I perceive as respect for my writing space.

While I don’t have to physically open a door to get to this space, metaphorically I do.  I do have to open my laptop. (“Notebook,” my husband reminds me is the correct name.  This computer will burn my lap if I don’t place some sort of barrier between my writing and my thighs.).  While I commute every day, twice a day,  I don’t always open my computer. Somedays I read, or hand write in my journal.  I’ll justify this as necessary, a precursor to writing.  Somedays I’ll shut my eyes.  This too, I’ll justify. How can I write, when I’m so tired?   It does take great strength to lift open the screen on my machine.   Once I do, the writing gets easier.  All of a sudden it’s my stop, and I’m wishing for more time.  While I may initially dread entering this space, I also dread leaving it.  I recall the quote I wrote down once from Art and Fear:

“Artists don’t get down to work until the pain of working is exceeded by the pain of not working.”—Stephen DeStaebler

I think about Murakami’s day and his discipline:

“Murakami rises at 4am on most mornings, writes until noon, spends the afternoon training for marathons and browsing through old record stores and turns in, with his wife, at 9pm.”

All of a sudden, I’m feeling the urge to discipline my body. (When I first started my current job, I used to listen to that Flaming Lips song “Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots” on my walk from my subway to work, just to hear that line “Working for the City/She has to discipline her body).

I turn to the one person who has brought routine and discipline (joyously) into my life.  I grab Mookie’s leash and we explore the park I’m lucky to call my front yard.  This time we go for miles.  It is on this journey, this blog post composes itself in my head.

When we return, Wan’s back from his run and we enjoy vegan chili and tamales.  Perhaps between the three of us, we have a Murakami day.

Murakami notes how he enjoys spending his time:

“I like to read books. I like to listen to music. I collect records. And cats. I don’t have any cats right now. But if I’m taking a walk and I see a cat, I’m happy.”

I am writing this while I play an indoor game of mother dogter catch.  A beautiful Sunday.  I am happy.