Secrets of the Universe: Scenes from the Journey Home

I sought out this book after reading a reference to an essay in it, "Local Matters", in another one of my mother texts, belonging: a culture of place by bell hooks:

I searched far and wide online for the essay and couldn't find a PDF anywhere. I found out it was in a book so I bought it. But not just any version. I wanted the first one, the hardcover, because I noticed the paperback was framed a little differently. It was called Secrets of the Universe: Essays on Family, Community, Spirit, and Place, which is arguably more telling and up my alley, but I was intrigued by the original subtitle, "scenes from a journey home." And I think that's because homecoming is quite nebulous, an often inexplicable spiritual pull and complex never-ending process of reconciliation, renegotiating, and reorientation, as opposed to a set of extractable categories or neatly contained reasons to be somewhere as the latter subtitle implies.

The forever homebound journeywoman in me was more intrigued by the cover of this, with its shadowy figure in the upstairs bedroom window looking up at what stars would blanket her that night as opposed to this:

The essay I procured the book for did not disappoint. Here are my two favorite snippets from "Local Matters."

In ancient Japan, you realized you had wandered from your neighborhood when you could no longer hear the sacred drum. I know I've left my neighborhood when I can no longer hear the infernal dogs...

Distant dogs I can ignore, just as I ignore the faults of strangers and the leaks in other people's roofs. But these are my local dogs, whose voices therefore penetrate through windows and walls to skewer my brain.

My American upbringing offers three alternatives: kill the brutes, sue the owners, or move house...instead I shove in earplugs and grit my teeth...I put up with the ruckus because the dogs and their owners, along with ancient sewers and modern chuckholes, belong to my neighborhood, just as I do. I am convinced that you marry a place, if you truly want to live there, as you marry a spouse, for better or for worse. Having to listen to the bellow of dogs is a small tax to pay for the privilege of living in a community.

And this is the portion of the essay that made it into bell hooks' consciousness, and mine via her...

It is rare for any of us, by deliberate choice, to sit still and weave ourselves into a place, so that we know the wildflowers and rocks and politicians, so that we recognize faces wherever we turn, so that we feel a bond with everything in sight. The challenge, these days, is to be somewhere as opposed to nowhere, actually to belong to some particular place, invest oneself in it, draw strength and courage from it, to dwell not simply in a career or bank account, but in a community.

...which makes me wonder: what consumable aspects of community have we mistaken it for? Networks, amenities, power. How do we know when we have really let a place in?

With Belonging Comes Responsibility

Sanders goes further, gracefully elucidating the deep sense of responsibility that accompanies a sense of belonging when "place" isn't simply and selfishly thought of as yet another thing to consume.

Once you commit yourself to a place, you begin to share responsibility for what happens there. When PCBs leak into the water or dioxides into the air, it is your water and your air that is polluted. The parks, the schools, the hospitals, the government, all are yours to fret over. When kids knock at your door, requesting donations for the band or the debate team or the purchase of a limestone rhinoceros, you have to reach for your wallet. Entangle yourself in a place, and you become attached to your neighbors as kinfolk. When some of them pull up stakes and leave...you grieve. If a local woman is raped, a child goes hungry, a man is denied a job because of the shade of his skin, you are implicated. You must answer to the needs of a community, and if you neglect those needs, as I too often do, slipping back into the hammock of private life, you eat the sour bread of guilt.

No wonder our songs tell us we gotta keep travelin' on. Who needs to shoulder the weight of a community when our own skins weigh so heavily? The impulse to hit the road is not only a hunger for a new territory; it is often a flight from trouble. Daniel Boone is famous for having moved on whenever he could see the smoke from a neighbor's fire. Many of us move on to avoid cleaning up the ashes from the fires we ourselves have set.

A Call to Action on Place

It's a constant frustration of mine and an argument I get into with friends whenever I feel like they're "shopping a place" by declaring their preferences as opposed to seeing their relationship with place as a two-way commitment. It's like making a checklist on the ideal lover all the while resisting falling in love. Worse, it's colonization: arriving, plucking what suits you using the ladder of privilege, and leaving the rest.

I get that it takes some folks some time to find home, that not everybody is born into circumstances or communities that easily inspire such a feeling or commitment. I get that some people have to run up and away for a while before they have a sense of something to return to.

What I refuse to accept from people though is the permanent state of searching and flux. The refusal to put down roots. Fear of responsibility dressed sympathetically as loneliness. The complaining about a country or place and its current conditions, but not entering the arena.

It is not the job of a place to give you a sense of belonging and purpose, to wrap you up in its arms, and bestow amenities. What if our ancestors thought like that? The safety and comfort of place is something you have to contribute to building, for yourself and posterity, continuously. Maybe the bricks are gifted to you by the earth you stand on, but it's your duty to apply the glue.

I take this very seriously, and I find that I gravitate most toward people who do too, who at the very least are looking for a place to make a difference.

Other Essays

The essays in this book are categorized in three sections: People, Places, and Purposes & Powers. The first essay in the book, "Under the Influence" is perhaps the strongest. It caught me off guard. It's about the author's childhood in a loving family with an alcoholic father.

My father drank when I was little, and I spent much of childhood wondering why, dreading evenings when he would be stressed and melancholy, completely not himself, and blaming myself for it all, or so I later realized. I can relate to Sanders' writing here because it lingers in the very specific memories and feelings of a young child growing up with someone inebriated they're completely in love with.

A lot of narratives about this experience contend with these two realities separately rather than holding contradictions, as if the love and terror didn't completely coexist in that moment and always. But Sanders speaks to how they did, how they still do, even though his father is now gone. There are several turns of phrase and passages I found very powerful.

On shame...

The secret bores under the sin, gets in the blood, into the bone, and stays there. Long after you have supposedly been cured of malaria, the fever can flare up, the tremors can shake you. So it is with the fevers of shame. You swallow the bitter quinine of knowledge, and you learn to feel pity and compassion toward the drinker. Yet the shame lingers in your marrow, and, because of the shame, anger.

I like how Sanders conveys the levity of childhood rage, which I struggled with for most of my life until my dad kicked the habit for good. Here he is talking about the shop-owners who sold his father the wine...

Because the Mom and Pop who ran the dump were neighbors of ours, living just down the tar-blistered road, I hated them all the more for poisoning my father. I wanted to sneak in their store and smash the bottles and set fire to the place. I also hated the Gallo brothers, Ernest and Julio, whose jovial faces shone from the labels of their wine, labels I would find, torn and curled, when I burned the trash. I noted the Gallo brothers' address, in California, and I studied the road atlas to see how far that was from Ohio, because I meant to go out there and tell Ernest and Julio what they were doing to my father, and then, if they showed no mercy, I would kill them.

I'm not at all surprised by the clear memory here because I have similar stamps in my brain. I remember struggling to date men who drank in college because I just couldn't trust their feelings for me. I was convinced they'd transform into someone – something – different than everything I liked about them. I wanted no touch of that in my life if I had a choice. Sanders touches on the fear of transformation...

...we had no way of understanding Father's drinking except as an act of will, a deliberate folly or cruelty, a moral weakness, a sin. He drank because he chose to, pure and simple. Why our father, so playful and kind and competent and sober, would choose to ruin himself and punish his family, we could not fathom.

What stands out to me is the cycling through reasons, not understanding why, wanting to fix it all. Sanders goes on to talk about his self-perceived role in it all.

If my father was indeed possessed, who would exorcise him? If he was a sinner, who would save him? If he was ill, who would cure him? If he suffered, who would ease his pain? Not ministers or doctors, for we could not bring ourselves to confide in them; not the neighbors, for we pretended they had never seen him drunk; not Mother, who fussed and pleaded but could not budge him; not my brother and sister, who were only kids. It did not matter that I, too, was only a child, and a bewildered one at that. I could not excuse myself.

What strikes me again and again is the honesty. I don't think I've ever read such a truthful, self-aware account of what it's like to have an afflicted parent. To know something is wrong that isn't their fault, to be angry and heartbroken all at once.

I failed of perfection; he succeeded in dying.

Sanders closes with a familiar insight.

I still notice every twitch of emotion in the faces around me, having learned as a child to read the weather in faces, and I blame myself for their least pang of unhappiness or anger. In certain moods I blame myself for everything. Guilt burns like acid in my veins.

My memories of my father drinking are buried deep inside of me. While his drinking wasn't as serious as Sanders' father's, the childhood terror is the same. Reading this did surface some latent anger, which thankfully I've been in a position to talk to my father about. Anger about the fact that no child should have to contend with this, ever. I still don't know exactly why my father drank. I'm not sure he knows. We suspect if was the stress of the business, the pressures that come from raising a young family, feeling lonely at the loss of motherland, nuclearn family, and community. Survivor's guilt – I think it weighed on my father that his brothers never truly flourished, despite all being brilliant artists and craftsmen. These are my guesses.

I'm grateful we all had a chance to reconcile, that the years we have all spent with my father as a non-drinker and non-smoker outnumber those early ones. Sanders never had that opportunity, the gifts of life, time, and recovery. His father succumbed before his eyes. His words will haunt me: "I failed of perfection; he succeeded in dying."

Reconciliation feels so important. For things to happen in life, go awfully wrong, but for there to be an upshot, a closing, a coming home to each that you never thought possible...that's what faith is made of. My family has endured so much together. We've worked together as a team to build something incredible in this country, and in this lifetime together. The reconciliation, having that opportunity, is what enriches the story and makes it one of triumph. This essay livened up my gratitude. As I finished, I said these words aloud – Thank God, we made it.