Oyster Knife :: November 2024
/Last night I dreamed an eagle flew into our house. We screamed and jumped up while it perched serenely on the back of our couch, huge and beautiful, and we ran around hiding cats and looking for gloves, trying to figure out what to do with it. It hopped to the floor and began exploring, clicking across the hardwoods, testing the rug, chasing off the dog. I ran to get my camera to record the event and when I came back, it had grown smaller, about crow-sized. I watched as it picked through the cat’s food with its beak, and by the time someone came back with the gloves, it had shrunk even more. Now it looked like a pigeon bobbing around in the living room. Over the next few minutes it changed again. Its feathers faded, its body hollowed out, a fire ignited in its chest and flamed briefly upward. The eagle put its beak on the ground and tipped over on its side, dead.
I woke sad and a little stunned that my subconscious had given me this story in the night. Yes, I thought, this is exactly what it feels like. Even if the country survives this intense fracturing, what I thought about America, the deepest part of me that trusted in our basic decency and goodness has tipped over, dead.
Since election night, I’ve been looking for torches, something to show me the way forward now. This shimmered out of the dark at me yesterday, from Zora Neale Hurston’s 1928 essay, “How It Feels to Be Colored Me.”
“I do not weep at the world, I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.”
Hurston was writing about the limits a segregated America tried to put on her and how she refused them. Despite the pervasive, soul-crushing racism she faced, she saw herself as belonging to the world, capable in it, entitled to that oyster prize like every other human. I love that so much. Maybe I just need to feel possible, to have a direction for all this dismay, but it’s the thought of getting down to work, of honing my blade, that is helping me live right now.
“This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silences, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal. I know the world is bruised and bleeding, and though it is important not to ignore its pain, it is also critical to refuse to succumb to its malevolence. Like failure, chaos contains information that can lead to knowledge - even wisdom. Like art.” ”
Sometimes what I have to offer the world feels so slight, just a thread of words tossed into the wind. But writing is what I do, and I’m going to work now. Here, there, everywhere.
How about you, my friends?
Sending love,
tonia
P.S. You might like Eve L. Ewing’s poem “what I mean when I say I’m sharpening my oyster knife”
