Literature as vaccine

For my first column of the year, I asked my son Roel, an educator and writer, to reflect on what persisted to be meaningful to him in 2020. This is what he wrote:

A year that reduced face mask/shield apparel, a consequential mute button and the debate over what one contributes to society into matters as customary as deranged late night talk shows, is also the year I decisively shunned the toxic and superfluous, clinging tighter to those deemed essential and invisible to the naked eye.

I learned that I still anticipated my lovely wife’s company, despite both our work-from-home schemes, reinforcing each other’s shoulders as safe spaces upon which we both can simultaneously stand. I relearned how the body fuels the mind, rediscovering meditation and a relatively rigorous daily physical regimen. I saw my principles acid-tested, lending my voice to the parliament of the streets, continuing a tradition of resistance wildly coursing through our family line. I finally acknowledged fatherhood as equal parts Herculean and David Lynchian in nature. I discovered a breed of unshakeable faith in a higher power that only resurfaces more incandescent each time it wavers. I recognized more precisely that at the heart of my career, spending more than 30 hours a week teaching, therein lies a passion dictating I can only keep what I have by giving it away.

I also reacquainted myself with beloved comrades-in-arms residing in the hallowed bookshelves scattered throughout our home.

Growing up surrounded by bookshelves lined with a multitude of titles and genres rivaling any bookstore where I divided my time scavenging for a random read and wreaking havoc along the streets of my youth, I discovered Albert Camus’ “The Stranger,” a lifelong influence. A highlighted copy from my mother’s days as a Literature major, I fortunately moved past the overbearing despair of the absurd into recognizing how existentialism is, as Richard Linklater’s “Waking Life” describes, “an exuberance of life.” Similar to a fateful first meeting with a good friend, I vividly remember acquiring his body of work, starting with personal favorite, “A Happy Death,” in a perpetually-chaotic mall right before accompanying my sister to watch “Space Jam” for her 13th birthday, and clutching it while gliding like Neo through the previously stifling crowd. Nearly identical with another talisman, British gurus Radiohead, as I move from one page to the next, I still never precisely know if he is trying to make me sad or happy, or inexorably, both. But whether enlightening one on how a plague redefines heroic call to action into simply what one must logically, humanely do, or how we must imagine TikTokers happy as they struggle towards their peculiarly-defined heights, what lies at the core is the tangible responsibility which necessarily accompanies how we define what is meaningful.

With music likewise an indispensable vaccine, Beck’s soul twins “Sea Change and Morning Phase” are always within ear’s reach whenever I want to adorn time and space – to interact with the self and all that is elevated in this world, free from all cumbersome laws, fleeting and irreversible. This is the closest I can get to defining poetry, certain to raise more than a few canonical eyebrows. But Horace Green-tenured Professor Finn urges me on. This is also the reason I keep the bodies of work of both Conchitina Cruz and US Poet Laureate Joy Harjo always within sight. Both fortuitously discovered, like an imaginary friend, a constant. The very first lines of introduction for each, one accusing the city of its wretched irreverence, as a culprit who forgets “Rain is the subject of prayer, the kind gesture of saints” and the other urging me to always remember “each of the star’s stories [and] the dance language is, that life is” were incantations immediately inked into my flesh.

Whenever I yearn to interpret all the untranslatable movements of the soul, littered with graffiti that tell the story of a day or a turbulent year, in order to re-inhabit the self, I kneel before the matriarchy and know where to reach.

It wouldn’t do any justice to simply use stories as an escape. As a vaccine, stories bring me ever closer to understanding the world and the purposeful role I can, and should, play in it. Stories are an urgent, vigorous antidote to the inanity, ignorance and lack of critical thinking on which powers that be capitalize to perennially victimize those already marginalized.

JD Salinger’s “Catcher in the Rye” proving yet again that in a town ruled by Stradlaters, one must persist to be a Phoebe. Close confidante Jorge Luis Borges’ “Collected Fictions” reinstructing on how time, as a labyrinth, is less an occasion for aimless wandering and more a springboard for infinite possibilities. Beat priest Salman Rushdie intoxicating through language and combining myth and history to reveal portals; Nick Joaquin’s “Manila, My Manila” replacing cobwebs installed by run-of-the-mill history teachers with a distillery that never runs dry, Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman’s Dragonlance Chronicles imploring how a pivotal quest is not at all best done alone, with Raistlin Majere scoffing at anything quidditch to boot. Master chemist Norman Wilwayco’s compulsory, all too visceral grasp on what your eyes indolently avoid right outside your window; comic book-anarchist Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles packing a mental grenade to make enough space to contain the weight of oceans and the turning stars.

These vaccines and countless others can rest readily, safely, assuredly, on a nearby bookshelf. Curing what ails. Nourishing, heartening and, most critically, turning the eye more sharply to the world around, declaring for one to see, now, that our sentence is up: Urging one to reside and act in a world that can be transformed into the best version we can conjure.

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