Growing Pains

A Story, by Li-Young Lee

Sad is the man who is asked for a story 
and can’t come up with one.

His five-year-old son waits in his lap.
Not the same story, Baba. A new one.
The man rubs his chin, scratches his ear.

In a room full of books in a world
of stories, he can recall
not one, and soon, he thinks, the boy 
will give up on his father.

Already the man lives far ahead, he sees
the day this boy will go. Don’t go!
Hear the alligator story! The angel story once more! 
You love the spider story. You laugh at the spider. 
Let me tell it!

But the boy is packing his shirts,
he is looking for his keys. Are you a god, 
the man screams, that I sit mute before you? 
Am I a god that I should never disappoint?

But the boy is here. Please, Baba, a story?
It is an emotional rather than logical equation,
an earthly rather than heavenly one, 
which posits that a boy’s supplications 
and a father’s love add up to silence. 

     Hmm. This is one of those poems that I can't quite work out. It is also one of the few that gives us (the teenage, pre-college population) an extremely different perspective from the adults who had the joy of raising us. Many questions circle around my naive head. Why can't he come up with a story? Why are they both silent? Why does the man live in the future? I honestly don't know. On the surface it sounds like the ultimate trade-off for having a child--having to let go of him when the time comes. But where does that pain come from? And how do 'stories' relate to it? 

     I breathe a secret sigh of relief that I wasn't an AP Lit student in 2011. This poem would have stumped me, and maybe rendered me heartbroken because it would have been even more relevant as I sat in the testing room, taking my last test as a high school senior living under my parents' roof. Then I'd realize how my parents loved me all along and wanted me to be with them forever, that I wasn't just a money sucker, and I would leave my tears along the edges of my Timed Writing paper when I finished. How are you supposed to to feel when that happens? Something along the lines of what the poem is trying to convey? 

     As the child asks for a story from a father who can't think of one, you can see that the child is still wholly dependent on the father figure; the term baba carries this meaning in itself, as it hints at the child's young age and inability to say "father" or "dad" (baba is a lot more fun, and easier, to say). This physical and mental weakness of being too small and immature to understand the world is the reason why he asks his father, the baba, to describe it for him in the form of stories. However, the father simply can't; the contrast in the third stanza between the father's lack of story time skills and the enriched environment around him emphasizes this point. But why? All these lessons to teach his young son, all the anecdotes in the world that the father can come up with from his past experiences, and not one single utterance from his mouth.

     His fault lies in his mind's place elsewhere in the world, the future. The first half of the poem can be viewed in such metaphorical terms, the stereotypical situation where the father is never living in the present day, taking care of his son, because he's too worried about the future. It's a sad truth that many children live in and many fathers regret when the first true look they give to their son is one of his back, leaving the door for college, or a job, or who-knows-where. Once the father feels stable and comfortable about the future, he looks back only to realize that the son has already grown up, has already given up on those promised stories left in the past. It turns out to be ironic, then, when the son doesn't answer the father's question in the fifth stanza. At this point, the father is desperately grasping at straws, finally focusing on the present time of telling stories to a son who is already thinking about the future, seen in his packing of clothes and searching for car keys; he's all set on moving forward. The places that life takes him is seen as more important than the dull, childish time with his father. They've switched places. 

     This leaves both father and son at a standstill; they're never quite in the same place, thought-wise. The father's cries of defiance and the son's silence is mirrored immediately in the final stanza, when the son pleads the father for a story. He wants this knowledge that the father has been abstaining in fear that his child will grow up to be the all-knowing man the father fears to be. But it's all so futile! No matter how many stories the father tells (or refuses to tell), the son will always leave. That's part of life, part of child-rearing, is it not? This leaves the father thinking in sad circles, thinking not "logically" but "emotionally," almost a selfish need to keep his son by his side when the son is more than ready to leave. 

     But the last two lines present us with the final stroke of irony: how the child's pleads, added with the father's undying but worrisome love, "add up to silence." This again mirrors the future, when the son's and father's roles are reversed, but the end result is the same--the silent treatment. Thinking about this gives me this aching, heavy feeling in my heart. It's something none of us can really escape from, but the pain comes from the love we have with one another. It' just sad to think that this overwhelming passion for one another creates nothing but silence, a deadening feeling that leaves you numb. How do you fix something like that? I know my parents enough to realize I wouldn't get an answer if I asked one of my parents. I'd just be met with silence. 

If you Believe in Yourself, You Believe in God

I read a lovely poem the other day.

I didn’t realize it at first, of course. But it was after I finished analyzing that last line, sat back and smiled, that I came upon this ‘enlightenment.’ Well, not enlightenment, more of a playback. Reading Blake's poem "The Divine Image" was like reading a third person's account of my own beliefs of God that, no, aren't necessarily religious, but are more spiritual.

In truth, my mother told me about her own theories of religion; I didn’t come up with a philosophy on my own. I’ve always been confused throughout my high school years when I hear people talking about/preaching about their religion, be it through Christianity, Buddhism, Judaism, etc. etc. They seem to know so much about their spiritual roots, and for a while I wondered why my mom didn’t do the same for me. She’s a devout Muslim–she prays 5 times a day, washes her face and arms 5 times a day, fasts 30 days every year for Ramadan…everything short of blowing something up (ha ha). Does she not think I’m able to handle a religion, or that there isn’t hope for me? (My dad doesn’t care about that sort of stuff. I’m a lot like my dad.)  A couple of years ago, when I finally had the nerve to ask her why I don’t really practice a religion, she simply told me, “You don’t have to.”

This didn’t help.

“But I know nothing about Muhammad! I learned about my religion through AP World! I don’t even know who Adam and Eve are!” (That’s a truth–I didn’t know about that whole creation story until it was mentioned in Frankenstein for the senior summer reading assignment. I am currently a senior.) And then she looked into my eyes and told me, “Religion isn’t about whether you are a Christian, Jew, or Buddhist. Or atheist. It’s only about God. Don’t all those religions have a God? Do they not mean the same thing?”

I frowned. “Atheists don’t believe in God.” She asked me what God was, and I went silent. I didn’t know. A man that sits on a chair in the sky. No, that’s not right, lots of men (and women-gasp!) do that already, that’s what airplanes are for. I didn’t know.

And that’s when my mom told me the most crucial and insightful advice that I still keep close to my heart (besides marrying a rich Arab oil monopolizer for the monies)– “God is made in man’s image. If we strive to be with God, we only strive to be kind, caring, loving, and patient. Any good Christian, Buddhist, or Atheist would want to be these things to be happy in life. You already had all these things from a young age; from that point, I had nothing else to teach you.”

I was still confused. Keep in mind, I was a sophomore at this time, things never made sense to me as a sophomore. My mom continued, “For as long as you keep being these things, you will believe in God because you believe in yourself and those around you. God is within you. For as long as you can believe that, nothing will stop you.” Then she left to yell at my dad for not washing the dishes.

It took a good long while for me to figure this out, but it profoundly changed me as a person. For one thing, my lack-of-religion doesn’t bother me as much (hooray). I’m a lot more grounded as a person–or maybe I was all along, but never realized it. And when we read the William Blake poem, it just brought back this particular memory of how I became a devout spiritual believer (but not in the obvious sense, of course).

So, really, the whole point of this post is that Blake put into poetic words what I never could when someone asks me "What do I believe in?" I'm seriously starting to keep a pocket-version of "The Divine Image" around so I can recite it whenever someone asks. The four critical characteristics of religious association--"Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love"--are not only the goals that a religious person follows; they should be the ideals that everyone follows. It's ridiculous to say that I'm not a peaceful person because I'm not a [insert faith here]. Rather, it's much better to be these things for the sake of being human, for isn't that what separates us from other organisms? This idea of being superior in intellect? Thus, to be human is to embody these four spiritual (not religious) elements. If Blake believes that this is his idea of God, and you embody these things, then congratulations. You believe in God.

Spoiler Alert: Beowulf Still Wins

     Today marks the end of another chapter of my life--the Grendel chapter, that is. All the headache, stress, and confusion that comes with growing up was condensed into this little novel, and we were lucky (?) enough to go through this intensive maturation phase in just under a month. Don't get me wrong, the novel was brilliant and wonderfully written--you could tell that the work came from the thoughts of a modern thinker, not an old hag that we couldn't possibly relate to. Grendel's struggle between two different forces--faulty religion and depressing existentialism--is part of the search for identity that all pre-adolescents face, even if it isn't as intense or even conscious. These questions of "Where do I belong? Why am I here? What's the point of my existence? What's the point of existence in the first place?" pass through our minds at some point, and some days we feel better than others about not knowing the answers to any of these questions.

     But what is John Gardner saying about this transitory period in the human life through Grendel? I mean, the fact that Grendel was actually more than an evil monster doesn't change the end result; Beowulf still destroys Grendel. Is Gardner saying that our angsty selves will be the cause of our destruction, that we never really get out of the role and identity phase until the day we die? Look at Grendel. So philosophical and insightful, knowing the pros and cons of both religious and existentialist intentions, yet he ends up a hallucinating creature who doesn't know right fromm wrong…basically he goes crazy juggling all these ideas in this head and not finding a solid use for them. I like to imagine him like a chicken running around with its head cut off. And what's Beowulf's role in all of this? Is he a force to be reckoned with? A savior from our own thoughts?

What is a savior? Is he one who enlightens you, or one that destroys you to ease the pain?

     Too many questions, too little words to answer them with. Reading this book was a whirlwind of these unnamed emotions that I frankly have a hard time describing (it's safe to say that this confession is a good indicator of how poorly I'll do on the timed writing). It is a physical tug of the heart, to decide between a comforting but lying religion, a truthful but futile existentialism. How do you choose between two extremes?

     I think this is where Beowulf becomes an integral part of the story, even though he only takes up two chapters and does nothing but stare vaguely out into space and rip Grendel's arm off. Beowulf is able to live because he never actually chooses. His few (but important) lines of dialogue showcase his thoughts of life, a mix between the dragon's and Shaper's rants. Although he accepts the futility of life as the dragon sees fit, he rejects the notion of the meaninglessness of it. A Shaper's hope transmitted in religion is then taken by Beowulf and interpreted as a hope of impact and identity within each human being. He has the ability to control his own destiny, illustrated when he claims that "time is the hand that makes." Not quite the aim that a Shaper was going for, since it doesn't mention any religious fate that each man and woman has in this world, but it gives each of us an opportunity to do what we please in this life and be proud of it. This completely changes the backbone of the dragon's futility theorem, where the infinite span of time makes the impact of man infinitesimal. In Beowulf's opinion, time is in our own hands, something we create that expounds on our goals and achievements. Time doesn't rule us; we rule it.

     The winner of this battle of the philosophies goes to Beowulf, for being able to accept the Shaper and dragon within without throwing himself off a cliff to dull the pain. Acquiring knowledge is only one part of being successful, as seen in Plato's Cave Allegory. If he had just let that prisoner free, out into the world, then of course he wouldn't have an impact on mankind. He'd just be…there. Standing, sitting, whatever it is freed prisoners like to do. But going back to your origin, your people, and trying to enforce this knowledge, accommodate it to your own beliefs to find your own truth in this crazy world, is what determines heroism and success. Beowulf does exactly that; he has a dragon's knowledge but a religious heart, like Grendel. Unlike Grendel, he morphs the two to be in agreement with his own beliefs. He spreads this knowledge to those willing to listen to it. I can't say the same for Grendel, who berates his own mind for acquiring knowledge, but does nothing about it, remains inactive. Beowulf represents the ideal freed prisoner that crawls back into the cave, to spread his knowledge. Grendel only toys around with it, lives through it.

Thus, John Gardner presents us with two possibilities--the Grendel complex or the Beowulf complex. You can technically survive through either one, and neither actually guarantees a certain level of happiness that every living being hopes for in this world. Your desire for initiative will define the type of hero you are. Do you want to live a life full of 'useless' knowledge, knowing that you won't spread your thoughts with others? Or do you want to do something about it? It isn't necessarily saying that we've answered any of the questions listed above, but we have a basic idea of how to go about answering it, without getting to the answer. And knowing how to get there will at least give you the incentive you need to find an answer, and this gives you that purpose that makes life so meaningful.