I've been doing this blog for less than a year (seems lots longer, doesn't it?), and already I'm repeating and referencing myself. If any of us needed evidence (I know I didn't) that I'm a man of few ideas, there it is. On February 12 I wrote a post about Love. I'm here to talk about it again, with not much new to say.
Like the rest of you, I'm sure, I was sickened by what happened in Connecticut yesterday. I cried my way home from work, called my son Sam who was 2 cars (or trucks, to be honest: we're carpenters, after all) ahead of me 'cause I needed to tell him I love him. The shooting was a horrible, heinous, unthinkable-until-it-happened event. And I'm sure that we're, as a sick society and species, going to endure many more that are just as unthinkable. Until they happen.
The governor of Connecticut, Daniel Malloy, said Friday that "Evil came to this town today." With all due respect, that's just a good sound bite. It's far too simplistic and shortsighted to address the fundamental human need that led to this shooting, though I assume he meant well. If it was evil that led to Friday's tragedy, then evil is all around us, in every town, every day. And here's where it gets hard to say, and all fuzzy-headed Liberal: Evil, or something like it, entered Adam Lanza's life long ago. He was as much victim as killer.
Although I can understand it, I was, somewhat surprisingly even to me, saddened to hear that at gatherings and memorials last night there were 27 candles lit, to commemorate those who were killed. The fact is, of course, that there were 28 people who died in that massacre; the one not remembered, not mentioned, the one we'll all think of for all time as a monster, was the perpetrator of the horror, who was himself once a little boy looking for love and affirmation, looking to know that he was okay. That assurance was apparently not forthcoming.
Yes, what he did was sickening, was horrifying, unthinkable, unexplainable. Or was it? No one comes here thinking "Someday I'm going to slaughter tens or hundreds or millions of innocent people." We all come here with certain immutable physical needs: food, shelter, and clothing, and one enormous psychological need that may in fact outweigh the physical. We Need Love. We need to know that we are needed, wanted, respected for Who We Are, for what we brought to this strange and foreign place. We can't go back whence we came, much as we might long to, so we have to know that where we're going, we're going to be okay. And some of us who don't get that reassurance, who don't get enough love, or the kind of love we need, become sick and twisted and erupt in horrifying ways. Something happened to Adam Lanza along his journey; could he, at 7 or 8 or 10, when he himself was trying to find his way, have even contemplated being in the torment he had to have been in when he committed his inhuman deed? I can't imagine it.
Until we all learn how to give each other the kind of love we all need--which is to say "never"--we will go through horrors such as occurred in Newtown, or worse, again, and again, and again.
As I was writing this post Saturday evening, an extraordinary thing happened. I received a phone call from a man in North Carolina who met Alice B. Fogel last spring when she was in residence at the Carl Sandburg house, heard her do a reading, and bought her books. He called, filled with emotion, to tell her that he had sent her poem "Grief" to his daughters, who have school-age children, and to many friends, as a way for them all to cope with the Newtown tragedy. He wanted her to know how important her words had been to so many people, and how her poem was helping them to carry on. It was an incredibly kind and thoughtful act for him to call, and further evidence, I think, of our innate need for connection.
I have secured the author's permission (by virtue of walking from my office to the living room--some of us are just lucky, I guess) and herewith reprint the poem, which appeared originally in I Love This Dark World (whose title came from our son Jake, then aged 3; his Facebook page from yesterday is surely worth a read) and subsequently in Strange Terrain:
Grief
I am ashamed as I try to sleep,
counting the wounded and the dead
in this old day's news
the grieving ones they leave behind. Counting stones and bullets, averted needs,
the pretty breaths of my family beside me,
counting on a world that I don't trust
to keep my children safe.
What was I thinking? Did I forget those others,
the rubble of their troubled worlds
and mine? Does it fill their days--
their remembering? Or do they remember too
to choose their favorite breakfast bowls,
that red dress, the time to step out of doors?
When I lean my body over the fragile forms
of my husband and children, I am afraid
I am not strong enough to bear
the grief of so much loving, the burden
of our survival from day to day,
or of what we can't live without, but will.
How each of us fends off despair--
that is what we are made of
when all else is dust or luck.
Each stranger's grief is not my grief
but it lies under everything, like ice.
Sometimes I fall through it.
Sometimes I walk achingly.
I am not saying their voices rise
above the hum of comfort here and now.
I'm saying I believe that even sweet blue skies
will break away, leaving nothing
between my eyes and the face of a god
who says, Look down into that dark place,
meet your own shadow there.
Go on, take it, take it on. Grieve:
Go down into the dirt.
I want to have already known its taste.
I want to have swallowed it alive.
If I fall asleep tonight,
If I do not die before I wake,
what will have lifted me back to perfect
that other thing that we call hope
is more love: the leaven of all sorrow.
That was written in the early '90s. It'll be true forever.
It may not be true, as The Fabs had it, that "All You Need Is Love," but it's surely most of it.
We need to love each other, and love each other right. Now.
