How to go on Playing
with words by Richard Powers
It’s been a while since you last heard from me and I don’t want to keep watching while my writing drifts further and further away like some message in a bottle on the waves, so here is something timely from the archives, that is to say, last November.
First of all, November the 6th. My notes from that day:
US election results. trepidation, determination. A grating noise outside my window in the morning, when I finally give in and look it’s a man balanced precariously in a thin swaying tree, sawing off reaching branches.
And some hours later:
Afternoon aftermath. Book on a table outside on my street: ‘Onderhandelen met lastige mensen’ (‘Negotiating with annoying/difficult/troublesome people’). The window all dark, a single tea light flickers.
All of it grimly metaphorical.
Then, November 12th. Something small and remarkable happened: I met the novelist Richard Powers during a book tour event at SPUI25 and remembered that I am alive at the same time as many people I greatly admire.
Of course, Powers addressed the man sawing off branches and the flickering tea light:
We know what the first four years of his administration did. We know that he rolled back 50 years of hard-fought environmental legislation that was the result of very difficult, arduous compromises. We know that the speed bumps are gone, his party controls both houses, he's destroyed the judiciary. This is a tremendous setback, not just for the U.S., but for the entire world. Where do we look for hope? My honest answer is, I can't give you hope.
But I can give you meaning. And here's the difference. When people say, is there hope, they mean, can we avoid massive cataclysmic change? Can we preserve the status quo? Can we sidestep pain and suffering? And I don't believe that we can.
But also. I believe that this moment, as dark as it is, has increased the capacity to find meaning in engaging the future. What we want more than anything else is to belong to processes that are larger than us, and to feel that the time and effort and energy that we put into our activities contributes in a significant way to that larger structure. The need to move the needle of the future has never been greater, the urgency has never been higher, and the possibility for shaking ourselves out of the cultural formation that has led to this is stronger than it has been in a long time. And so the potential to do so through your individual actions is also more present than ever. We're not looking at a binary future, either doom or salvation. We're choosing between degrees of pain, degrees of suffering, degrees of possibility.
Powers’ new novel, Playground, is a book about the ocean, fraught friendship, chess, (neo)colonialism, AI, and democracy. I read it very quickly after the event, hungry for answers to everything. My thoughts on books and films don’t really come out as reviews, and they rarely come out critical, which is why I am not in the habit of sharing them on the internet. To make an exception, here are the thoughts I recorded on Playground:
The novel as symphony, this one even more assured, practiced virtuoso’s play, light-stepped cutting quilting swimming, he gives us democracy in an island-shaped nutshell, progress vs conservation vs man vs nature, past vs future and the human now, makes us love it, them. Makes us love the argument from every side. This the mirror, the weird cousin who doubles your field of vision blindfolding you then holding a strawberry up to your nose asking what is it? Friendly voice at eye level, and soon you conspire towards sleepovers.
The weird cousin comes from a quote on page 205, where one character takes the other two to an art museum. “[she] showed us how to dance in our minds with a painting that looked like food stains on an old work shirt. The thing would have incensed me as fraudulent had I come across it a month before meeting her. Now it became a mirror, a weird cousin to play with, a thing that offered up a meaning that wasn’t mine until I looked closer.”
Art and fiction, Powers said, and speculative fiction in particular, possess the power to temporarily open our eyes to the fact that our current systems are optional: “Change one small thing and you’re on another planet.”
If it feels like there is a swarm of exhibitions, events, publications and other cultural production at the moment all concerned with speculative futures, that’s because it’s pretty grim out there, and artists often work as tea lights, life boats.
“Playground feels like the closest thing to a pure gift that 40 years of writing have given me”, Powers said: “How to love and go on playing, even in the face of endless loss.” And quoting someone called Daniel Mason: “the only way to understand the world as something other than a tale of loss is to see it as a tale of change.” Though really, that particular idea ought to be credited to Octavia Butler.
In 2018, Powers’ The Overstory helped to launch trees into broader collective consciousness as the magnificent living beings that they are. Since then, the book has lifted more than two million people’s tree blindness, mine included. Change one small thing and you’re on another planet. Understand one other way of sensing the world and you’re on another planet, too, or you’re on the same planet but it has suddenly become so much more precious and wonderful. That’s why I asked what I asked:
“How do you approach the challenge of writing from nonhuman perspectives?”
In The Overstory, I knew that I didn't want to completely anthropomorphize individual trees, because then they're just people with wood on them. The whole point is to try to represent agents that are really profound, but to do so in a kind of simple one-for-one — give them a personality and a name and a backstory — seemed to defeat the purpose of really trying to see how far we can shift our consciousness to take other forms of life seriously. In that book, I tried to handle it in various ways. Sometimes they're great individual trees, like Mimas, the big coastal redwood. But then there are also trees that function communally and are only ever treated as communities in the book. And then there are trees that are given a kind of deep time treatment: there's a passage where one of the characters is in an airplane in Vietnam and is shot out of the sky. And as he's falling, I just sort of stop the story and I go back and tell the story of the banyan tree that takes several hundreds of years to grow up underneath this guy, so it happens to be in place when he falls down into it.
So it’s about exploring different axes of time, distance, focal points, all the tricks of narratology. There's just certain limits to the way that you can deploy standard ways of telling, of narrating a scene. I'm also still figuring out the answer by playing, exploring and tinkering.
I think the best thing I could say is: Don't necessarily look to the techniques of the modern novel when you're trying to do it, but look back at the way that most human stories were told in most places in the world for most of human history, and see what they do with the nonhuman. Because in a way, when I wrote these books, and particularly The Overstory, I kept thinking about what Robin Wall Kimmerer says: That we need to learn is how to become indigenous again. And I think what the novel has to learn to do is maintain all the power of its modern form while remembering where it came from, and learning to become indigenous again as a form of storytelling.
I would have liked to end by just letting this answer stand, but I think it requires some clarification. What Powers referred to in the last paragraph is a quote from author and botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass. Kimmerer is a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation and the book is about reconciling Western ‘scientific-method-science’ and Indigenous knowledge and storytelling, braiding them together, infusing one with the other. It’s also fundamentally about establishing relations of reciprocity with plants, animals, and the land. When Kimmerer writes about “becoming indigenous”, that’s what she means, rather than belonging to any specific group of people: “living as if your children’s future mattered, to take care of the land as if our lives, both material and spiritual, depended on it” (p. 21).
What Powers means, though, is slightly different: Remember, while working on your modern novel, the old stories which were told around the fire before writing was invented, and how in them, the tiger and the fox and the goose and the mouse are alive, clever and cunning, how they looked back at us. May our stories not exist in an impoverished human vacuum any longer. May they also host the storms and the starlings. Write as if your children’s future mattered, because they will have to face the storms and care for the starlings.
What kind of relationships, what kind of reciprocity, can we dream up for them? The current cultural formation is optional, and the work is to put the songs into practice and the practice into song, and to keep the tea light burning.
