This is from an acquaintance of mine:
To explain my email address.
The Golden Notebook is a phenomenal and highly sociological novel by Doris Lessing, published in 1962. In it, the protagonist has four different notebooks into which she sorts her writing: a yellow one for her fiction, a black one for her musings about writing, a red one for her political life as a leader of London’s Communist party, and a blue one for her personal journal. The book alternates between these various books, until the very end, when she is able to synthesize them all into a Golden Notebook – where her politics, her soul, her body, and her art all finally, for god’s sake, finally, for god’s sake, please, for god’s sake mesh into one, and become whole.
There are very few places I have ever seen this happen with any artistic integrity. The Grapes of Wrath. The Left Hand of Darkness. Anything by Alexandr Solzhenitsyn. St. Joan of Sacramento, in her later stuff. I want to write the socialist epic too – but with heart. But outside of the actual created thing, that sort of total synthesis seems impossible.
I had a fascinating argument with my little brother Derek over the holidays. He feels as strongly about politics as I do – on the same issues. But he argued that only spiritual redemption would change the human world, and that politics was too necessarily compromised to ever be truly transformational.
I tried to state as best I could that I believe politics, in its highest and purest form, is actually spiritually transforming. Hacking out some development deal with Johnny Doc leads people into a very limited and exchange-rate view of power, even though it may be celebrated and everyone loves to brag about it later. But then there’s the other type of power, the power of allowing people to see what is possible.
I have seen it happen over and over again, especially in P4C: some quiet woman who stands up in front of the crowd – maybe she has not voted in ten years, but she’s just realized that her neighbors will listen to her – are in fact waiting for her to stand up and fight – are listening to everything she says – because every act of courage and honesty multiplies into more of these acts, just as rock breaks into sand.
And then there’s this beautiful beach, smooth on your feet when you walk.I guess this is why my email address is golden.notebook@gmail.com. It’s a decision I’ve made, about literature and politics, or rather, the idea that they can be mixed successfully. Both of them only become transcendent if honest, mystically so. It would require some whirling dervish at the center, to bring them all into the centerfuge and start to turn – the words, the party, Howard Dean, the desire to write, the craven personal life, the endless staring out of windows – so they could splatter all over one’s body, like the hemoglobin they are.
