poisonwood (from july 8, 2009).

Last night I finished The Poisonwood Bible and felt a quiet shifting in my world. I felt a deep harmonic resonance with what words and metaphor can do, how they can give shape to the human experience and even to things outside of humanity. And I feel a deep harmonic resonance with the characters of Adah and Leah, both- two sides of the same embryo- the twin who is handicapped by selflessness, who holds an entire internal world that she shares with no one; and the twin obsessed with justice and belonging, working always to fulfill a debt that she never incurred.

Who knows if this book changed my life- I expect that is a story I won't be able to tell until I've lived longer. But I know that words have changed my life. I can't stop devouring them now, especially words by and about women. Now I'm starting in on Joan Didion. It's been a long time since I've read behind the wheel while waiting for the light to turn green.

I'm thinking about Adah most of all, a twin born crippled because she fed herself to her sister in the womb, sacrificed the right side of her body and brain so that the other might grow stronger. That is what she gave. But humans and animals and nature will always work to compensate weakness with different kinds of strength. And so I'm thinking about handicaps, and whether there is actually such a thing at all. Maybe 'handicap' is just a word that the able-bodied use because they recognize only one kind of whole.

Fact: The bristlecone pines are the oldest living organisms on earth. I saw them last year in the high barren Inyo National Forest of the Eastern Sierras. In freezing wind and mountainous wasteland, they grow where nothing else does, clinging to dry soil strewn with broken rock, or seemingly growing out of the rock itself. They look like nothing so much as the skeletons of dead trees, gnarled and twisted where they shaped themselves taffylike to the currents of the wind- and yet many of them are alive. Have been alive for 5,000 years. If they could see and speak, they would tell stories of the human civilizations that have risen and fallen, the changed face of the world since they were first born. When insects, fire or wind threaten their survival, their innermost core stays alive and holds to their roots even as the rest of them dies, and so they keep on living and bending and surviving as they must- twisted, handicapped by circumstance, dignified by experience, and alive.