Last week I turned thirty-eight. To make meaning around the new year I bought a point-and-shoot camera off eBay (thanks to Kelly McCarthy, for the inspiration) and made a bunch of small simple plans with some of my favorite people. The camera stopped working after the third photo—a portrait of Ret, the horse on hay delivery night at the barn—and most of my small simple plans were washed out by the rain.
I did manage to see my friend Andrea Ngan for a walk, who recommended I read Ursula K. Le Guin’s “Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction.” Le Guin suggests that before tools that force "energy outward” like a spear or a stick or a sword, humans had containers. Having felt de-humanized by stories of weapon-wielding heroes with whom she could not relate, Le Guin wonders if it is also an ancient human thing “to put something you want, because it’s useful, edible, or beautiful, in a bag, or a basket, or a bit of rolled bark or leaf, or a net woven of your own hair.”
Her “carrier bag” theory of fiction is that a novel might be more like a cup than a sword. While we tend to think about stories in certain ways—that a proper narrative is linear, the central concern should be conflict, and without a hero a tale is no good—Le Guin thinks a novel is more of “a medicine bundle, holding things in particular, powerful relation to one another and to us…full of beginnings without ends, of initiations, of losses, of transformations and translations, and far more tricks than conflicts, far fewer triumphs than snares and delusions; full of space ships that get stuck, missions that fail, and people who don’t understand.” After all words themselves “hold things,” she writes, and are in a sense cups that bear meaning.
After reading her essay, I remembered a teacher who’d expressed concern that my use of the word “container” in a written reflection on group work might steer my imagination away from process and relationship and toward a certain sort of walled-off thinking about inside and outside or self and other. Having now read Le Guin, whose essay is thirty-eight this year too, I don’t disagree with that teacher and I’m imagining more can be true.
What I loved most about Le Guin’s essay is that it feels like a sort of manifesto for the everyday non-hero. Making our selves among the endless recountings of heroes who suggest that what it is to be human is to exert one’s will in the world or make a “good life” against odds, it can feel like the less heroic day-to-day things—which are often gendered, raced, and classed—somehow make us less human.
But it is these perhaps unheroic tasks that allow Le Guin to believe that perhaps “I am a human being after all. Fully, freely gladly…Not, let it be said at once, an unaggressive or uncombative human being…[but] an aging, angry woman laying mightily about me with my handbag, fighting...” And importantly she does not see herself heroic, for doing so. “It’s just one of those damned things you have to do in order to be able to go on gathering wild oats and telling stories.”
In my thirty-seventh year I’d say I was the antonym of hero. I was Joseph with the dream coat stolen, bruised and bloody at the bottom of a well. I was the cast-off twin in the wintery woods looking angrily into the home where the favored twin was tucked in and read stories each night. For that reason I think it was proper that my thirty-eighth birthday was so without pomp. Yes I was glad to have made it through, but it wasn’t exactly a celebration of conquest.
I did not throw a party, did not host a dinner, did not buy a new outfit and and did not even eat cake. I wrote in my journal, practiced the same set of yoga poses in the same order I’ve been doing them for the last thirteen years, laid on the couch, ordered Thai food, went to a meeting, and even drove a friend to the airport. Halfway through the day I realized it was all kind of perfect. And just as I’d settled into my vows of un-heroic-ness for the rest of my days, and because life is nothing if not complicated the second you start to relax, I came across a truly heroic story.
There is an international civilian group called the Freedom Flotilla Coalition, who are working to end Israel’s illegal blockade of Gaza. They are setting sail this month with “multiple vessels” carrying 5500 tons of aid in containers to the Palestinian people, who are in an unimaginably dire situation as a result of “a deliberate policy by the Israeli government to starve” them. In my years working as a publicist I never read and re-read a press release as many times as I did the one about the Flotilla’s planned mission.
There is a quote from Ismail Moola of South Africa’s Palestine Solidarity Alliance, who notes that the International Court of Justice’s order against Israel after the recent genocide trial “requires the whole world to play their part to stop the genocide unfolding in Gaza, including unobstructed access to vital aid. While our governments fail to lead in these urgently required humanitarian responses, people of conscience and our grassroots organizations must act to take leadership. When governments fail, we sail!”
So now I’m bewildered. I’m not sure how to reconcile my fresh vows to be unheroic with how moved I am by the courage and conviction I’m seeing. I feel ambivalent in an old sense, which is to say I feel strong on both sides. I remember the story that poet and psychoanalyst Nuar Alsadir tells in Animal Joy about how her teacher bestowed her and her peers with clown names at the end of their two-week clowning workshop. Her name was “Next!” Which she connected with a pervasive ambivalence.
Alsadir writes, “The name incorporates the inflection of a director calling the next actor onto the stage for their audition, being dismissed, sent away, an irrelevant number. If you’re not going to bring it, really give it your all, let yourself be most self beautiful, seen, then get off the stage. You had your chance. Next!”
She also says, two paragraphs later, that “If we choose to act courageously, we become courageous. But the moment we make a different choice—say, to act cowardly—we become that next thing. We are always becoming the self our most recent choice calls into being, painting our portrait anew.”