Receiving somebody’s blog on the nature of direct action, I seem to hear the megaliths of destiny moving around to better positions. I’ve long said that ordinary courage requires witnessing and, for some, telling what was seen. As I contemplate the writing of Pale Criminal, the final book in The Falling Sky Trilogy, the mind keeps straying to drastic actions certain characters might take to deal once and for all with the psychopathy stalking their lives. Naturally. Suddenly I get it: the three stages of ordinary courage needed for the conquest of evil are witnessing, articulation and direct action.
The third level may be required of us if we are to stop idiocy like the Enbridge pipeline. Frightening idea. I realize anew how much I enjoy being alive. How much it takes to risk one’s only life for a cause.
White Birds: dreams for dancers traces the stages of courage symbolically. At first, the victim of abuse is barely even a witness: she becomes disembodied before the abusive act is fully perpetrated on her. In the second, third and fourth dreams, she moves from seeing her disembodiment to recounting her story; from telling the tale to daring to change her form. In the final dream, she moves from shape-shifting to taking the direct action that ends the evil. A warrior may not always be successful in eliminating evil, she learns, but the roles of victims and accommodator are surely insufficient.
In Broken Sleep, chronologically the first book in The Falling Sky Trilogy, Paul and Zack, reluctantly shaken out of the comfort zones of their professions, become witnesses to Jane’s story. Zack, the son of Holocaust survivors, can do no more than witness. Paul, son of a successful survivor of the Greek underground, takes action with compassion. Matt, to appearances the all-round American star of the American Dream, takes action as he sees fit — for your own good, of course. As for Jane, just as no one knows precisely what happened to her father as a POW, neither her friends nor we the readers find it easy to predict what she can or will do.
La Chiripa is all about articulation, the telling of lies that encourage the ongoing evil, and the courage it takes to tell the truth. In Guatemala, that courage is only beginning to break through what is called “El Silencio”, the silence that rules after 42 years of CIA-sponsored violence. The wonder of PIra is that somehow, in spite of — or perhaps because of — her mother’s victimization, the child is fearlessly articulate. That is why readers love her as she carries “La Violencia”, the bigger half of the book. That is also why readers love to hate Matt as he carries “El Silencio”, for in his fearless telling of his actions there is no love, no compassion, no right but his own. He’s his own private CIA, over and over again.
You see, the bad guys will always take action until their evils can stand futile. “All that is necessary for evil to take over the world is for enough good men to do nothing” — or something close to that. We must be alert to the moment when the ordinary courage of witnessing and truth-telling is no longer enough. To the hour of direct action.
Is it any wonder that the prospect of writing Pale Criminal scares the hell out of me?