Connection
Thinking about George Saunders and the listlessness of being human
I walked to the grocery store one night this week and listened to an interview with the writer George Saunders. At one point, he mentioned something about the basic error he believed was located in the phrase “I want,” and it threw both me and his interviewer for a loop.
Saunders, a student of Buddhism, explained himself. Basically, he said that at some point early in a human’s life, an ego emerges, a sense of self. A self that almost immediately has wants and needs—and a self that soon knows itself as a thing with wants and needs. I want, I want. I need, I need. Then, via such establishment, the self, the ego, also begins to feel itself to be a thing that’s independent of other things. Influenced by external factors, sure, but still whole, still apart. Such that, years later, it’ll wind up going around town believing itself to be a human who wants uniquely and doesn’t want uniquely, who says at dinner parties that she or he is (or is not) this thing or that thing, thereby making itself somewhat alien to everybody else (and possibly itself).
And Saunders is saying: yeah, no.
I turned off the interview, did my shopping, and thought about it. I thought about it more on the walk home.
I also thought about in light of an article I read this week about people in Minnesota setting up networks to help and protect their neighbors. Patchwork mutual aid to get food and supplies to families who can’t leave their homes, who can’t let their children go to school, for fear of being abducted by the government. (Not that our government cares anymore about entering people’s homes without warrants.)
Anyway, this line stopped me:
“Volunteers are trained in what to do should ICE agents follow them on home deliveries or pull them over, including eating the slips of paper that contain the addresses of aid recipients.”
Here in Los Angeles, there are rolling protests. There are volunteers carrying whistles in Home Depots. There are posters on many street corners telling people what to do if they spot ICE. There is a young man who attaches a respirator to a set of bagpipes so he can play through tear gas clouds.
I was thinking over all of this on my walk, passing one of those posters on a street corner, because I think I agree with Saunders. That my “I” may exist, but it’s not very much, and it’s not really mine. For me, one of the things that makes humans beautiful is the degree to which we’re interconnected, whether we know it or not—ridiculous, animal, malleable in ways the mind can’t detect. At the same time, one of the things that’s most ugly about humanity, again for me, is the error Saunders detected, when people deny their interconnection, the interrelatedness—thinking themselves and their cohort into a separateness through keywords and jargon, memories and identification, a vocabulary to say they’re unique.
I have a friend here who makes a zine called on we. It’s a play on words—the zine’s influenced by French cinematic malaise—but I think it’s a good slogan for right now, or a thing to focus on. On we. Because yes, there’s an “I” to me, the me that is the fingers and mind typing this meditation, observing myself and the world, but I’m not sure that “I” is very interesting, or at least nowhere near as interesting (to me) as my getting to play a part in something bigger.
At the end of the interview, Saunders says—
From a novelistic standpoint, everything is sacred. Everything is interesting, in other words. Ideally, you’re just, like in the ’60s parlance, digging it. Like: Oh, wow, look at that. A hustler, a con man, a criminal, a saint. It all occurs, and therefore it’s worthy of your attention. The best book would be one that I have not written yet, which lets all of that in with very minimal judgment — and even a feeling of, if we define it correctly, celebration — like: Look at this universe. It’s amazing.
It’s a good pose. It’s also a hard pose, the single eye taking it all in. And at what cost?
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What the what
“Meditations in an Emergency” is a weekly essay from author Rosecrans Baldwin about something beautiful. Paying subscribers receive a Sunday supplement with three-plus things to love, plus a monthly travel-lust ballyhoo.
Rosecrans is a correspondent for GQ, a contributor at Travel + Leisure, and the bestselling author of Everything Now, winner of the California Book Award. Other books include The Last Kid Left and Paris, I Love You but You’re Bringing Me Down. His debut novel, You Lost Me There, was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice.
For magazine articles, bio, contact info: rosecransbaldwin.com.
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