GY That connects to another idea you wrote about, which is that love often looks like grief. Can you talk more about how you see death and tragedy as a doorway to love?
ALI happen to have had an unusual amount of loss and death in my life, beginning with my father’s death when I was in my early twenties. It was really the end of the world, as you can imagine. It was like a nuclear bomb fell on our family. I was still drinking; I kept drinking for eight more years. I got sober, had a baby at thirty-five, and then my best friend since high school died—my most intimate girlfriend who just lived down the street. Those two deaths shattered a lot of illusion that things were going to be the way I needed them to be. That’s where love blooms. I found something inside of me that was always me, and was able to breathe and to push back my sleeves and enter into death and loss in a way that something bloomed. My dad, and Pammy, and my other friends who have died were so exquisite, and wonderful, and real, and charming. It was love that arose in the face of suffering, and that is a profound and sacred love. The disillusionment is where life begins; it’s good to have our illusions stripped away. When I was younger, a lot of love was because we found somebody that had the same sense of humor and read the same books. Then as I got older the magic, the collagen that my friends and I discovered was that we had shared certain losses. We shared a certain hurt.
Did you ever read Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein? It was our bible in our teens and twenties. It’s science fiction, and the word Heinlein uses for me intuitively, deeply getting you is grok. I grok you: I’ve known you most of your life. I grok you as a choice, like I believe you grok me partly as a decision to trust me or to love me. If we got together, it would be as if we’d spent a tremendous number of hours together, instead of the meager hours we’ve spent. That arises through death and loss. It’s a different bloom than the beautiful flowers. It’s a deeper, more modest bloom, but for me, it’s where the action is.
GYYes, totally. We need that word.
ALSo much of my identity, my “beingness,” has to do with the books I read starting at age four. So much of our grokking has to do with having read the same books and having been changed by them. This is a kind of shorthand to love. It means we’ve loved the same thing. We’ve loved the same words; we’ve found the same portals. That’s what Neil and I had. My friend Duncan Trussell, the comedian, says that when you first meet me, you’re meeting my bodyguard. Somehow, because of this mysterious thing—you might call it grace, or you might call it magic—you go past the bodyguard, past the scrim, and it’s like you’re running around, singing: Did you read this? Have you ever read—? Did you read Poisonwood Bible? That’s love. That’s recognizing something, deep calling to deep. Briefly, we’re like one person. Riffing, sharing, jamming, going, Oh my God! It’s so exciting. It brings peace, it brings relief, it brings joy. In the Christian tradition, in the Black Christian tradition especially, there’s a saying that goes, “peace is joy at rest, and joy is peace on its feet.” Sometimes, you’re with your best person, and you’re feeling that peace that passes all understanding because you’re with your safe, trusted, sweet person who just gets you. Then other times you’re with them, and you’re doing that radical silliness, and you are in joy. That’s the peace on its feet.
GYThat feels connected with the idea you talked about through your book, that love is the only way we can endure this extreme and mind-breaking vastness of life.
ALWe have this ground of our being, which is that we’re loved beyond all sense of proportion and reason by these people that are just magic to us. You won’t be knocked down because you have it. If you are knocked down . . . I was knocked down when Dad died and when Pammy died. They were there. They didn’t try to fix me, or save me, or try to make it be un-fucked. They just were there, and they were listening. They were quiet. They were holding me. They were leaving me alone. They were in the other room when I couldn’t breathe.
GYWhy write a book focused on love at this point in your career?
ALI wrote a book on hope, and everywhere I went to promote it, I discovered that people felt hopeless. I wrote a book on mercy before that, and everywhere I went, people were scared that they didn’t have it in them. Their parents or their culture had told them to put it in the drawer when they were little because you couldn’t be graded for your merciful heart, or because on the blacktop, mercy didn’t get you anywhere—maybe it got you beat up. I could say, You have it; it’s in the drawer. You were encouraged to put it away and work on your handwriting instead. My son is thirty-four, and my grandson’s fourteen-and-a-half, and I don’t know how long I’m going to live—I could live another few months; I could live till I’m ninety. Certain things have always worked, and they all somehow or other have to do with love, so I wanted to get it all down and leave it for my son and grandson as a manual for when I’m gone. Everything that has ever worked will work again because it wasn’t grounded in circumstance, or measurable quantities, or things you could poll.
There was this priest in the ’30s who helped Bill Wilson get AA off the ground. He said to Wilson, “Sometimes, I think that heaven is just a new pair of glasses.” You could be in the cranky and judgmental glasses, then you put on the better pair of glasses, and you look around. I can look at the cat licking her mouse that I helped her get on her bed; I can look in your face, and you can look at mine. Ordinary beauty: old family friend, seven-month-old kitten with her favorite mouse, and outside there’s this atmospheric river that’s going to fill our reservoirs and our streams. Scientists have proven that trees are talking to trees through tree roots: when your tree roots are sick, Gracie, my tree roots reach out unseen beneath the ground to give you the nourishment that will heal you. I wanted this book, a love book, because what will always work is love.
GYThat reminds me of when I read The Hidden Life of Trees. I felt like I’d put on another pair of glasses. I went out for a long hike afterwards, and I immediately felt so much more connected.
ALWhen you have that experience, you feel like you’re standing next to a Buddhist gong. The experience of your eyes being opened is vibrational. It’s like that beautiful E. E. Cummings poem, “I Thank You God for Most This Amazing.” The very end of it is, “Now the eyes of my eyes are open and now the ears of my ears can hear.” Everything is bigger; everything is suddenly connected. Deep is calling to deep and unseen is calling to seen. The most extraordinary, wild, hallucinogenic nature walk is also you being where your feet are. That’s the first thing God says to Moses in the Old Testament: Take off your sandals. Be here, where your feet are, and feel the holy earth beneath your feet. But it is scary to agree to experience that big, uncomfortable mystery.
GYI’m wondering if you have any advice for how we can move one step closer towards a life centered around love.
AL You can’t get anyone to do anything until they have created enough pain for themselves. If people keep pouring their energy into striving and ego, they will end up empty, and frazzled, and exasperated. God willing, they experience some dark night of the soul where they confront how narcissistically they are living, and this gives them the willingness to try a more spiritual way of life, which means a commitment to loving themselves as is; loving the world as is. The truth is that if you want to have loving feelings, you have to do loving things. You have to decide to change your priorities from striving and ambition to a kinder, sweeter way of being in the world. And that is love.