Crazy Little Thing Called Hate

The cannibals are hungry & they're coming for our words: converge and collide.

“I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.”—James Baldwin

Low heat is a good partner for marinade. Brooms and earthworms are not so different. Arrivals are to be expected; the past is finished, and everything else is unclear. I’ve been restless and whittling my intuitions recently. Been thinking about collisions and convergence. Doing so, two things have come to me. 1) Writing is the effort to narrow the distance between words and feelings. 2) I’m emerging from the comfort zone of hate (see above quote again). Hate is fool’s gold—think dopamine bursts—and the results are not comforting. I’ve learned the serum of hope never quite works either. John Prine sums it up nicely: “you drive around the town 'til you just get bored.”

I’d be the first to admit this: I make a lot of mistakes every day. I’m on edge quite a bit. Some days, almost everything upsets me. The world of humans can seem off-point in every direction. I hesitate to hate, but there’s an odd comfort that goes along with it. I try breathing deep and humming, which is supposed to soothe through the vagus nerve. I rarely stop humming.

Which brings me here—Hunger is a sharp claw, a relentless force, not limited to eating. Most of us are hungry, just not for food.

And worse.

We’ve become cannibals. We are eating words without calories. And there’s nothing we can do to stop any of this. We are being fed lies, and even though we know this, we feel less and less safe and more overwhelmed.

And even worse.

If you do tell the “truth,” you become the “bad guy.” You can’t make this sort of irony up. I hear people call someone a “truth-teller,” and my first thought isn’t about truth at all—it’s about how much courage they must lack to say this about another person.¹

Years ago, I initiated a 501(c)3 called the Standing By Words Center. Founded entirely to deal with the aforementioned koan: Standing By Words. I held annual harvest events around the state for about ten years, inspired by a single sentence from Matthew Fox: “The environmental crisis is a crisis of the soul.” I read this and felt I’d devoured just the right words and became less hungry. Help felt more possible. In his more sensible early days, Wendell Berry once wrote, “We are speaking where we stand, and we shall stand afterwards in the presence of what we have said.” What does this mean to me? Promises made of love and conviction narrow the gap between words and feelings. I stand by this, even knowing the results may not work out.

I’ve found the very things people claim hold our communities together are insincere slogans—shop local, small business Saturdays, keep your dollars at home, local this and small that, blah blah blah. My primary purpose for the last thirty-five years has been using the literary arts to understand how we can best live in the Midwest. No surprise, but people don’t really stand by their rah-rah slogans (words). Name the last ten businesses you’ve been to or noticed being built. I persist, of course, and keep standing by my words, but it can feel disheartening. Even the public library where I live doesn’t carry the books my small, local company publishes. As Jefferson Airplane sang: “when the truth is found to be lies / and the joy within you dies.”²

“All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know,” proclaimed Earnest Hemingway. I don’t doubt he believed this, but he, like others, didn’t last long for this world doing so. That’s one fate of the “truth,” sadly. People are hungry for speed and ease; few want to ingest deeply. Prefer, instead, to follow false leads, grifted by deception. What do I mean? The relentless queries of a market-based belief system—how much, how fast, how soon, what next. These are versions of being “right.” However, being right means next to nothing. Being effective is what matters. Right is holier than thou; effective is standing by words.

I’m not a political writer, so let's return to sentences, paragraphs, books, and points of view. Adjusting my “publisher’s” cap, let me suggest a fault these days is writers losing respect for the value of the written word. I’ll focus on Substack as my model. I consider each post a eulogy for feeling. Just reporting what happened and stating facts is like knowing the names of plants, the easiest thing there ever was, a slow-motion march toward being replaced by AI. I want to read and write succinct efforts at sincerity, agonizing interpretations narrowing the gap between words and feeling; insights expanding being alive. In layman’s terms, I’m like a Bon Iver lyric: I want to “see things behind things behind things.” I wish to kettle high circles with Pelicans in the sky.

Don’t tell me this is impossible. I have read thousands of words which have taken me to new heights. So many single sentences, let alone whole books, have inspired my life and altered how I live. Is this easy? What do you think? If everyone could do it, I wouldn’t even want to try.

I’ll land here. A Jim Harrison quote I like: “we have to posit that reality is an aggregate of the perceptions of all creatures.” This takes the truth-cannibals by surprise. There is no way to manipulate this. We want truth which feels recognizable in primordial fashion: merging large and small, majors and minors, the lettuce, the toad, the snowflakes: all the sorrows and the joys. As Flannery O’Connor’s story declares: “everything that rises must converge.” The world is full of hate and lies—my advice is to be honest, good, and truthful anyway.

When you decide to be a writer, embrace the full power of words.

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1. The so-called “truth tellers” hear this a lot too—“I have your back,” but you’d need a pair of binoculars to see how far back they are.

2. This is probably when they knew it was time to go from Plane to Starship.