In his debut novel, “Dear American Airlines,” author Jonathan Miles established himself as a literary voice able to capture the acute pains and joys of human life. He joins Lunch Break to discuss his next book, “Want Not.” Photo: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
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Fifty Shades of Grey author E.L. James, has not only officially confirmed Jamie Dornan’s casting – she has firmly thrown her support behind him. The best-selling author tweeting a welcoming word to Dornan, the newly cast leading man for the upcoming film version of the steamy novel.
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One of these poor schmucks was Philip H. Farber, occult author of FutureRitual, Meta Magick: The Book of Atem, and Brain Magick: Exercises in Meta-Magick and Invocation. He has also written a novel, The Great Purple Hoo-Ha.
Philip is a hypnotist, Neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) practitioner, and magician. Beside his books, he also teaches courses and seminars dealing with ritual magic and NLP. DVDs of some of these can be found at Hawkridge Productions.
Friending Phil on Facebook was one of my smartest moves. Not only was he willing to answer all of my questions at length, he was also quick to give me excellent reading recommendations. And all for free. What a sucker.
In preparing for this interview, I reread some of his books, re-watched some DVDs, and reviewed some of our old correspondences. And there, staring coolly at me from behind computer screens and printed word, was the ugly beast of accusation.
This interview is an act of apology to Phil. If anyone out there has ever gotten me drunk enough to talk about my actual views on magic, you should now realize that all of those brilliant and thought-provoking ideas spewing out of my mouth were most likely lifted from this guy.
Sorry, Phil.
Isla: Can you explain NLP in terms a dummy like myself can understand?
Farber: Heh. I’ve struggled with simple explanations for the things I do for many years. But I’ll give it a whack. NLP is neuro-linguistic programming, from “neuro,” referring to our nervous system, “linguistic”, our ability to communicate, and “programming” the art of using language and neurology to create change. One way to look at it is that NLP provides a terminology that allows us to discuss and use language and behavior in ways that were not previously possible. The field originated from the keen observations of Richard Bandler and John Grinder, a mathematician and a linguist, influenced by Chomsky’s transformational grammar model, General Semantics, Ericksonian hypnosis, gestalt therapy, and cybernetics, among much else.
There are a ton of misconceptions about NLP, ranging from accusations of cult status to scary warnings about government and corporate mind control, most of which are easily dispelled by actually picking up a good NLP book or attending a seminar. In its most basic form, “the study of the structure of subjective experience,” NLP can generate a nice box of tools that most people can benefit from. It allows for intense states of rapport and empathy, quick healing of psychic trauma, healthy belief change, habit change and much more. It’s popular among all kinds of healing modalities, including bodyworkers, therapists, and hypnotists.
They are certainly related fields. If we take magick in the Crowleyan sense of “causing change in conformity with Will,” then NLP becomes another subset of magick. As with any other kind of human behavior, we can use NLP to model the processes that go into magick and tweak various aspects for better results. NLP techniques can be used to better access altered states in a ritual or magical context, to develop achievable outcomes for ritual efforts, to improve language used in ritual, to create new symbol sets, and a whole lot more.
Similarly, there are quite a few aspects of magick that can easily be adapted to NLP processes, including the idea of a ritual frame, various ways to work with thought forms and entities, and ways to apply metaphor and symbolism.
What is your model of interactions with nonphysical entities (i.e. gods and spirits)? Do you think they have an existence outside of our subjective experiences of them?
Can we prove the existence of anything outside our subjective experience? I’m not entirely sure. If you look at someone across the room, you aren’t really seeing him or her, you are perceiving an interpretation that your brain has constructed. In terms of physics, that person isn’t even really a solid thing, but clouds of probability and a lot of empty space. Our neurology has learned to interpret these experiences in various ways that allow us to navigate our subjective world.
We have big parts of our brains devoted to perceiving entities and making both motor and social predictions about others. Those same areas are likely active when we think about gods, goddesses, demons, angels, imaginary friends, etc. The internal models we make of other humans can be very detailed and complex – think about the last time you dreamed or daydreamed about a friend. The non-human entities that run on the same brain hardware can be just as detailed and complex – and some of them also have the ability to transfer from mind to mind. That’s not so mysterious – it is memetics.
We share entities when we tell stories, create art, build temples, and so on. Is Jehovah inside us or outside? The answer is both (whether you are a follower of that entity or not) – inside as our own concept of Jehovah and outside as memetics in the minds of others. Jehovah, like him or not, has influenced vast swaths of history, has caused the rise and decline of entire civilizations, has inspired war, peace, architecture and commerce, among much else. At what level do we decide that such an entity is “real” or “outside us”? I’m not sure it matters. I think that even if we continue to consider Jehovah as entirely imaginary, the old dude still influences a lot of people and causes change in the world, for good or ill.
The other fun thing to consider is that our individuality, our self-perception as “I” or “me” may be a trick of our brains. An area in the right frontoparietal lobe seems to provide this illusion for us and, when suppressed, subjects experience an inability to identify themselves in mirrors and a sense of cosmic unity with everything around them. Our own status as entities may be a neurological construct similar to that of Jehovah, a self-myth created in our brains. I like to think that “consciousness is a continuum and entities are its way of perceiving itself.”
Describe Atem.
Atem is an entity who is conducting an experiment in entity creation. When I wanted to write a book on evocation a few years ago, I wanted the book itself to be a demonstration of the principles that it described. So I evoked an entity named Atem, who is specifically concerned with teaching the art of evocation. Atem gave me a lot of feedback and helped to bring himself into the world, in the form of a book: Meta-Magick: The Book of Atem. In describing Atem at length, the book offers instruction in using NLP and memetics to perform evocation and to work with entities of various kinds. Atem invites readers to participate in the experiment of bringing him into the world, which provides some interesting magical benefits for the participants.
Atem also appears in a funnier, fictionalized form in my novel, The Great Purple Hoo-Ha.
I take a broad definition of language and include all the different ways that we are able to represent human experience. So I’m not limiting it to the wordy kind of language and I’m including any kind of visual, auditory, kinesthetic, olfactory or gustatory way of recording or transmitting information.
The processes of language are important in the human brain. We are constantly creating narrative, our personal stories, the mythology of own lives, and our ability to manipulate language helps to guide the narrative. Ultimately that personal narrative gives our life meaning and structure. We are able to relate it to the stories that we find around us, the mythology that helps us to make sense of our world, which further guides the process of self-definition and reality creation.
Both magick and NLP are ways of tapping into and altering that linguistic flow. Magick applies ritual, symbol, evocation and invocation to influence the direction and quality of the personal narrative. NLP uses shifts in perception and conscious use of language to similarly alter our narrative and self-concept. By changing the stories that we tell ourselves about our world, in effect we change the world.
What do mirror neurons have to do with magic?
In short, we all have motor neurons, brain cells that are activated when we move muscles in our bodies. In most of us, about 20% of all motor neurons are also mirror neurons. That is, they are also activated when we watch (listen to, feel, read about or imagine) someone else performing a behavior. Everyone has experienced the contagious nature of yawns – when you experience someone else yawning, your mirror neurons respond and you want to yawn, too. Or when you hear a fantastic guitar solo and have the urge to play air guitar – that’s certainly mirror neuron activity. More usefully, mirror neurons are how we share feelings with each other, how we empathize, develop rapport, and communicate on a nonverbal level. When you feel emotion from looking at a painting or listening to a song, those are your mirror neurons at work. When you feel exhilaration watching a winning athlete, or watching the hero of a movie prevail, those are mirror neuron responses.
Mirror neurons make predictions about behavior. For instance, when you shake hands, you likely do a pretty good job of getting your hand in just the right place to receive your friend’s hand. More subtle intuitions are also possible via the mirror neuron system. We often feel excited in the presence of exciting people, sad in the presence of sad people. When a sadsack comes into the room, it takes the energy of everyone there down a few notches via the mirror neurons. When a charismatic person enters, we feel the energy of the people around us rise.
Now, to activate mirror neurons, the brain has to make a decision. It has to decide if something is worth mirroring. Behaviors worth mirroring generally come from what we perceive to be a sentient being similar to ourselves. So the brain and mirror neurons have to distinguish “entity” from “brick”. They can be fooled. We often find ourselves responding with mirror neurons to drawings of humans (ever laugh at a cartoon?), to computer-generated music (which can still make you tap your toes), and to our imaginings of people (ever have your body respond to a fantasy of a favorite sex partner?).
Mirror neurons are also a triggering mechanism in additional brain systems that help us to make more complex social predictions, to develop rapport and create our mythic self concept.
Readers who are interested in the union of neuroscience and magick may enjoy my most recent non-fiction book, Brain Magick, which explores these ideas in depth.
I read in an interview that you had some interesting ideas for the application of magic in Second Life. What do you think of the renewed interest in virtual reality technology like the Oculus Rift, and how will this affect the future of magic?
I was fascinated with VR back when it was a brand new idea in the ’80s and ’90s and I got to play around with some of the early devices, back then. I’ve dabbled a bit with Second Life, but have never tried Oculus Rift. A couple years back, I was invited to give a little magick workshop in SL by an NLP trainer, Gina Pickersgill. Gina set up a ritual environment in SL that tested out some of the neuroscience ideas I was talking about. I found it surprisingly powerful to watch my avatar perform ritual actions. It turned out to be a neat way to activate mirror neurons and suggested some fun and exciting methods that might be explored. Some of that might still be on YouTube.
Personally, my tendency in magick is to use less props and tools and more body and imagination. However, I do think that VR can offer some very powerful experiences that might be a great way to help someone learn some of the basics of magick and how to direct active imagination. If you can develop locations and avatars in SL, you can learn to imagine ritual space, symbols and entities in your own mind.
What projects are you currently working on?
The main project right now is a book on the uses of cannabis in magick, both historically and in modern ritual. I’m also preparing for a series of seminars in the spring of 2014, including NLP Practitioner Training and a Meta-Magick weekend seminar. I’ll soon be posting more info about these at meta-magick.com.
NEW YORK (AP) — Best-selling author Tom Clancy, whose wildly successful technological thrillers made him one of the biggest publishing phenomena of his time, has died. He was 66.
Clancy arrived on best-seller lists in 1984 with “The Hunt for Red October.” He sold the manuscript to the first publisher he tried, the Naval Institute Press, which had never bought original fiction.
A string of other best-sellers soon followed, including “Red Storm Rising,” ”Patriot Games,” ”The Cardinal of the Kremlin,” ”Clear and Present Danger,” ”The Sum of All Fears,” and “Without Remorse.”
Clancy had said his dream had been simply to publish a book, hopefully a good one, so that he would be in the Library of Congress catalog. Four of his books, “The Hunt for Red October,” ”Patriot Games,” ”Clear and Present Danger,” and “the Sum of All Fears” were later made into movies, with a fifth based on his desk-jockey CIA hero, “Jack Ryan,” set for release later this year.
Born in Baltimore on April 12, 1947 to a mailman and his wife, Clancy entered Loyola College as a physics major, but switched to English as a sophomore, saying later that he wasn’t smart enough for the rigors of science.
Ironically, his novels carried stiff doses of scientific data and military detail.
After graduation in 1969, he married his wife Wanda and joined her family’s insurance business, all the while scribbling down ideas for a novel.
In 1979, Clancy began “Patriot Games,” in which he invented his hero, CIA agent Jack Ryan. In 1982, he put it aside and started “The Hunt For Red October,” basing it on a real incident in November 1979, in which a Soviet missile frigate called the Storozhevoy attempted to defect.
In real life, the ship didn’t make it, but in Clancy’s book, the defection is a success.
By a stroke of luck, President Reagan got “Red October” as a Christmas gift and quipped at a dinner that he was losing sleep because he couldn’t put the book down — a statement Clancy later said helped put him on the New York Times best-seller list.
It led to a string of hits, both on the page and in Hollywood blockbusters. He even ventured into video games with the best-selling “Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Future Soldier,” ”Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Conviction” and “Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Double Agent.”
The latest Jack Ryan movie, directed by Kenneth Branagh and starring Chris Pine, is set for release in the U.S. on Christmas Day. Keira Knightly plays Jack Ryan’s wife and Kevin Costner plays his mentor at the CIA.
Clancy resided in rural Calvert County, Md., and in 1993 he joined a group of investors led by Baltimore attorney Peter Angelos who bought the Baltimore Orioles from businessman Eli Jacobs.
Clancy also attempted to bring a NFL team to Baltimore in 1993, but he later dropped out of the effort.
Copyright 2013 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
MORGAN: So my argument is, where there are more guns, there’s actually more likelihood of a gun being used, and call me old fashion in that theory, but, there is this heartbreaking case. A couple of days ago, an 18-year-old, who for a prank, in a family home with a family friend who’ve been staying there, hid in the closet and jumped out to surprise him. He happened to be carrying a gun, and because he was startled, he killed her with the gun. Well, that simply wouldn’t happen in countries where you’re not just overrun with everybody assuming (ph) there’s to carry in a gun.
MILLER: But what about the machete. The guy in England who killed a guy with a machete. I mean, people are vulnerable. You know, accidental death is a different issue. Don’t get that too much in my book, it’s about 700 people a year. It’s not that frequent of a crime, and obviously catches people attention because you think a guy who will — I will never do that. But their picture is this, gun — there has never been proven whether it’s the government CDC study, Harvard study, that any gun — all these gun control laws that I hear you advocate all the time. They don’t prevent violence, they decline violence. And that’s what we all want to do is decrease violence, make our children safe or make ourselves safe, or make our cities safer.
MORGAN: But what they do do is they dramatically reduce gun crime.
MILLER: No, they do not.
MORGAN: Yes, they do.
MILLER: Gun crime hasn’t gone down 40 percent in the past 20 years while gone ownership had skyrocketed. There’s over 300 million guns. As gun ownership is going like this, gun crime has gone like this. Whereas in England, gun crime after the ban went like this and then started going down. There is no parallel between gun — there is no parallel during gun ownership and gun crime.
MORGAN: Well actually, gun crime in Britain. As he write this out after the Dublin (ph) massacre when they board a new gun control laws, it went out the next five years since as they all came into effect. And then made them twice as hard and so they’re going to start jailing people for five years for possession of a handgun. And every single year since then, since 2003, it has gone down significantly.
MILLER: As it has in the United States, while gun ownership is through the roof here.
MORGAN: What about Iowa? Iowa was to give permit, gun permits to legally blind people. And indeed has been doing that including a number of people who are not allowed to drive because they’re also blind.
MILLER: With the state issues. So there’s no federal ban on that. And I know a lot of these disability groups want to say, “You can’t take away their secondary (ph) rights because they’re blind.” So it’s a complicated issue. It’s really — I mean there’s no …
MORGAN: Emily they’re blind.
MILLER: I don’t want a …
MORGAN: These people are blind. I interviewed Stevie Wonder. He said to me, “Can you imagine, I’m allowed to go and buy guns. Can you imagine me with a gun?” I think it’s actually ridiculous, Emily.
MILLER: But, here’s the thing …
MORGAN: There is he with your lovely gun you want to get your gun. A farmer (ph) doesn’t want to take your gun away. You want to stop people killing each other, right?
MILLER: He doesn’t care about the blind people.
MOGRAN: Now, we’ve got people in Iowa who are blind applying for weapons, and they’re allowed to have them because it’s their right. Not it’s not.
MILLER: Can I talk?
MORGAN: Yes.
MILLER: Once we start having cases of blind people going around shooting people, we can come back and have that debate.
MORGAN: It’s something that’s going to happen?
MILLER: It hasn’t happened yet.
MORGAN: Do you think blind people are going to accidentally shoot people?
MILLER: It’s been fully legal in most states right now and they’re not doing it because gun owners are responsible, which they train responsibly, which they store responsibly.
MORGAN: So let me guess — the view is right. You actually think that we can have responsible blind gun owners?
MILLER: I’m going to tell you what.
MORGAN: Yes, Emily.
MILLER: I won’t — yes.
MORGAN: Unbelievable, Emily.
MILLER: Let me tell you why. You can rack a shotgun, never shoot it, scare the hell out of the criminal. Am I allowed to say hell? I don’t know.
MORGAN: It’s good. You just said hell (inaudible).
MILLER: Well, I may — they teach me back and so (ph). But anyway, I went with two blind people down to the DC police to see if what happens if they did because you have to be legally blind, you’ve take a vision test in DC because it took me four months to get a legal gun. You would love DC, 17 steps and four guns …
MORGAN: I do find — I actually do love DC I love America. My hat is off (ph) with America or Americans, or in fact, any of your magnificent states, my problem is with the gun law that you’re saying is perfectly OK for legally blind people to be marching around with guns. It is ridiculous?
MILLER: Well, the gun lobby (ph) is not — the gun always now doing that is the disability groups who actually the ones advocating for this. And you know, because they say, why should they not be allowed to have guns. That’s not mine, right?
“That was one of the hardest times in my life,” Skaggs, now 59, tells Newsmax in an exclusive interview. “I thought my world had just come to an end.”
“I just thought at first when his mother, my ex-wife, called to let me know about the accident, I thought it was like a family shooting or something like that — an accidental thing, like they were out hunting. But when I found out it was a road rage-kind of shooting, oh man, it just freaked me out.”
Story continues below video.
“I caught a plane, flew to Roanoke, Va., and spent hours and days there with him,” Skaggs says. “But just seeing my son in the hospital with a bullet hole right here at his face, that was one of the hardest things I’d ever gone through in my life. But thank God, he came through it.”
His son, Andrew Lee Skaggs, is now 35 and has two children. “I’m so proud of him,” his father says.
Ricky Skaggs, whose primary instrument is the mandolin, is the author of the widely anticipated memoir “Kentucky Traveler: My Life in Music,” with music journalist Eddie Dean. In it, he recalls the importance of bluegrass and the mandolin on his childhood, to a full career as a popular country musician, and the eventual journey back to the bluegrass of his youth. But he’s not slowing down.
A live CD with singer and keyboardist Bruce Hornsby is scheduled to be released next week, and the pair will be on tour later this year.
Born in Cordell, Ky., Skaggs started playing music at age 5 after his father, Hobert, gave him a mandolin. The next year, he played mandolin and sang on stage with country legend Bill Monroe — and at age 7, he appeared on television playing with Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs.
He wanted to audition for the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville but was told he was too young.
In his mid-teens, Skaggs met a fellow teen prodigy, guitarist Keith Whitley, and they started playing together with Whitley’s banjo-playing brother, Dwight, on radio shows. By 1970, they had earned a spot opening for Ralph Stanley, who invited Skaggs and Whitley to join his band, the Clinch Mountain Boys.
Skaggs later joined The Country Gentlemen in Washington and played with J.D. Crowe’s New South. He also played with Emmylou Harris’ Hot Band and wrote arrangements for her 1980 bluegrass-roots album, “Roses in the Snow.” He also sang harmony and played mandolin and fiddle in the Hot Band.
Skaggs has received 14 Grammy awards and seven Country Music Association awards. He also has been honored for his music by the International Bluegrass Music Association.
In 2008, Skaggs recorded a bluegrass version of “Old Enough” by the Raconteurs with Ashley Monroe and the Raconteurs. He played mandolin and shared vocals with Monroe, Jack White, and Brendan Benson.
He says in his book that his collaboration with White was one of those “staying open to God moments.”
“If we’re just open to God’s direction in our life, he’ll take us places that we never dreamed that we’d get a chance to go to, and I’ve always been real open about my faith. I’ve always been open about music. Music is just a great way to express my faith, and I love being able to do collaborations with people.”
Skaggs, who’s been married since 1981 to Sharon White of The Whites country music group — they have a daughter and a son — tells Newsmax that he is even more heartened to see the bluegrass tradition being carried on and expanded by such groups as Mumford & Sons and the Abbott Brothers.
“They are really taking the music to a completely different audience. It’s very rewarding,” he says. “When I see a banjo up there, even right along with their kick drum, there’s something cool about that.
“I started playing bluegrass when I was just a kid,” Skaggs adds. “Then I went into more commercial country music, but I always tried to bring my bluegrass sound even to country music, and that’s one of the things that made me successful in the early ’80s, was trying to bring and bridge those two music genres.
“Really, bluegrass music and traditional music are the oldest pure forms, and even today they are some of the most pure forms of country music.”
And even though modern country music is far different from the tunes he played growing up in Kentucky, Skaggs says “music has got to always develop and always keep pushing boundaries.
“I try to do the same thing with the bluegrass music — but these kids, they’re very respectful when I’m around.
“When I see Keith Urban at the Grand Ole Opry, he comes up and says, ‘Man, I love you. You’re a great inspiration to me, your early records.’ That good seed fell on good soil somewhere in my career, and it makes me feel good to see that these people are out playing good music, but that they’re also paying tribute and honoring the past and honoring people that inspired people.
“I’ve always been about that with Bill Monroe, Flatt and Scruggs, and the Stanley Brothers,” Skaggs adds. “I’ve always tried to pay tribute and pay honor to those guys.”
© 2013 Newsmax. All rights reserved.
Author Iain Banks has died aged 59, two months after announcing he had terminal cancer, his family has said.
Banks, who was born in Dunfermline, Fife, revealed in April he had gall bladder cancer and was unlikely to live for more than a year.
He was best known for his novels The Wasp Factory, The Crow Road and Complicity.
In a statement, his publisher said he was “an irreplaceable part of the literary world”.
A message posted on Banksophilia, a website set up to provide fans with updates on the author, quoted his wife Adele saying: “Iain died in the early hours this morning. His death was calm and without pain.”
Publisher Little, Brown Book Group said the author was “one of the country’s best-loved novelists” for both his mainstream and science fiction books.
“Iain Banks’ ability to combine the most fertile of imaginations with his own highly distinctive brand of gothic humour made him unique,” it said.
After announcing his illness in April, Banks asked his publishers to bring forward the release date of his latest novel, The Quarry, so he could see it on the shelves.
On Sunday, it was revealed the book – to be released on 20 June – would detail the physical and emotional strain of cancer.
It describes the final weeks of the life of a man in his 40s who has terminal cancer.
Speaking to the BBC’s Kirsty Wark, Banks said he was some 87,000 words into writing the book when he was diagnosed with his own illness.
“I had no inkling. So it wasn’t as though this is a response to the disease or anything, the book had been kind of ready to go,” he said.
“And then 10,000 words from the end, as it turned out, I suddenly discovered that I had cancer.”
‘Craft and skill’
Little, Brown said the author was presented with finished copies of his last novel three weeks ago.
Banks’ first novel, The Wasp Factory, was published in 1984 and was ranked as one of the best 100 books of the 20th Century in a 1997 poll conducted by book chain Waterstones and Channel 4.
In 2008 he was named one of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945 in a list compiled by The Times.
The writer also penned sci-fi titles under the name Iain M Banks. His most recent book, The Hydrogen Sonata, was released last year.
You never knew what you were going to get, every book was different”
End Quote
Iain Rankin
Fellow Scottish author Ken MacLeod paid tribute to Banks, saying he had “left a large gap in the Scottish literary scene as well as the wider speaking English world”.
“He brought a wonderful combination of the dark and the light side of life and he explored them both without flinching,” he said.
“He brought the same degree of craft and skill and commitment to his science fiction as he did to his mainstream fiction and he never drew any distinction in terms of his pride in what he was doing.”
Another contemporary, Iain Rankin, told the BBC that Banks was “fascinating, curious and full of life”.
“He didn’t take things too seriously, and in a way I’m happy that he refused to take death too seriously – he could still joke about it,” he said. “I think we all thought he would have a bit longer than he got.
“What made him a great writer was that he was childlike; he had a curiosity about the world. He was restless, he wanted to transmit that in his work, and he treated the cancer with a certain amount of levity, the same that made him a great writer.
“You never knew what you were going to get, every book was different.”
Other authors to pay tribute included Irvine Welsh, who tweeted: “RIP Iain Banks. One of the finest writers and greatest imaginations ever.”
Sci-fi writer John-Paul Cleary also said: “Tragic news about Iain Banks, my hero and inspiration, a writer of incredible creativity and wit.”
Scotland’s First Minister Alex Salmond said: “Iain was an incredibly talented writer whose work, across all genres, has brought pleasure to readers for over 30 years.
“His determination not just to complete his final novel but also to reflect his illness in the pages of his work, will make that work all the more poignant and all the more significant.”
After announcing his illness, Banks had described being “hugely moved” by the public support for him through his website.
“Still knocked out by the love and the depth of feeling coming from so many people; thank you, all of you,” he wrote on Banksophilia last month.
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AARON MATÉ: We spend the rest of the hour with the legendary author, poet, activist, Alice Walker. In her newest book, The Cushion in the Road: Meditation and Wandering as the Whole World Awakens to Being in Harm’s Way, Alice Walker discusses many of the dominant themes in her life and work, including racism, activism, Palestine, Africa and President Obama. The collection of essays explores her conflicting desire for deep engagement in the world and for a retreat into quiet contemplation. Alice Walker is the first African-American woman to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. She won it in 1983 for her renowned novel The Color Purple, which also won the National Book Award for Fiction and was later adapted into a film and musical by the same name.
Alice Walker is also the subject of a new film that plays this Friday at the Seattle Film Festival and premiered in London on International Women’s Day in March. The film is called Alice Walker: Beauty in Truth and is directed by Pratibha Parmar. This is a clip from the trailer.
EVELYN WHITE: Alice claimed her space because she needed to be a writer. It saved her life in many regards.
DANNY GLOVER: Intrinsic in her writing is that part of her as a citizen, a citizen of the world, a woman, a woman of the world, and an activist.
ALICE WALKER: Three dollars cash
For a pair of catalog shoes
Was what the midwife charged
My mother
For bringing me.
“We wasn’t so country then,” says Mom,
“You being the last one —
And we couldn’t, like
We done
When she brought your
Brother,
Send her out to the
Pen
And let her pick
Out
A pig.”
JEWELLE GOMEZ: Whatever perspective you have, when you read her work, you know she’s talking to you. And the you in her writing is really quite universal.
HOWARD ZINN: It’s interesting. In her creative writing, she puts herself on a firing line, in that she is herself. She is not going to conform to any idea of what a black writer should do.
BEVERLY GUY-SHEFTALL: I don’t know any other black writer who has experienced the venom that she experienced from her own community, the community that she cares the most about.
AMY GOODMAN: From the trailer of the new film, Alice Walker: Beauty in Truth. You heard Evelyn White, Danny Glover, Jewelle Gomez, Howard Zinn, Beverly Guy-Sheftall. In addition to Alice Walker’s new book, The Cushion in the Road, a new collection of her poetry has just come out, The World Will Follow Joy: Turning Madness into Flowers.
Alice Walker, it’s great to have you back on Democracy Now! Congratulations on these two books. Talk first about The Cushion in the Road. What do you mean by that?
ALICE WALKER: Good morning. I mean that my life is so full of so much activity, and yet my heart—my heart and my soul are longing for my cushion, which is a meditation cushion, where I can contemplate. I can drop into the deep source of our lives and draw a lot of richness from that. And what I discovered, though, was that I would sit on my cushion in meditation, and I prepared a beautiful place just for that, and the phone would ring, and the world would call. And so, in some ways, I was very torn and conflicted, until I realized, by dreaming it, that at that part of my life when I was, you know, called to the world, my solution was to take my cushion with me on the road. And so that is what I have tried to do.
AARON MATÉ: Alice Walker, you began your activism when you joined the civil rights movement in Mississippi over 40 years ago. I’m wondering if you could talk about that experience and how it has informed your activism that still continues today?
ALICE WALKER: Well, actually, my activism started when I got on the—when I was leaving my home in Georgia on the Greyhound bus, and my dad took me to the bus stop. It was such a small town, there was no station, so the bus just stopped by the side of the road. I got on the bus, and feeling the joy and the emotion of the movement starting up in Alabama and Mississippi and other places, I sat in the front of the bus, and I was immediately forced back to the back of the bus. And I had to make a decision whether I would risk my education—I was 17—or whether I would keep on the bus and go to my first year of college and join the movement at my school. And this is what I did, and that was really the beginning of my activism. And years later, I went back to—I went to Mississippi and worked in the movement.
AMY GOODMAN: Talk about—
ALICE WALKER: And how does it—
AMY GOODMAN: Go ahead, Alice.
ALICE WALKER: Now, how does it inform my activism? Well, I see myself in all the people in the world who are suffering and who are very badly treated and who are often made to feel that they have no place on this Earth. And this Earth actually belongs to all of us. The universe belongs to all of us. And we mustn’t forget it, you know. And I know firsthand how it feels when people tell you and make you think that, you know, they can have everything, they can have as much as they want, they can buy everything they desire, and you are supposed to have nothing. Well, this is not—it’s not right, and we must not accept it.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask you about Assata Shakur, who you’ve also written about recently. Earlier this month, the FBI added the former Black Panther to its Most Wanted Terrorists list, 40 years after the killing for which she was convicted. She became the first woman added to the list, and the reward for her capture was doubled to $ 2 million. This is a clip from the film Eyes of the Rainbow: The Assata Shakur Documentary, when she talks about her experience in prison.
ASSATA SHAKUR: Prisons are big business in the United States, and the building, running and supplying of prisons has become the fastest-growing industry in the country. Factories are moving into the prisons, and prisoners are forced to work for slave wages. This super-exploitation of human beings has meant the institutionalization of a new form of slavery. Those who cannot find work on the streets are forced to work in prison.
AMY GOODMAN: That was Assata Shakur, and that’s from Eyes of the Rainbow. Alice Walker, after the roadside shooting in which Assata Shakur was severely wounded, and she went to trial and was convicted, a crime she says she didn’t commit, she escaped from prison and got political asylum in Cuba, where she has lived for decades. Your thoughts on what has most recently happened, her being added to the terrorists list?
ALICE WALKER: Well, I see it as an attack, really, a sort of covert sneaky attack on Cuba. I think that the governments, all of them, in recent memory, have wanted to destroy the Cuban people, really, and their insistence on their freedom and their dignity. And I think this is a way of saying that, you know, you have a, quote, “terrorist” there, and we have a right to go in and get her. And so, this could cause a very big fight between these countries, which have never had peace in my lifetime.
AMY GOODMAN: You dedicated The Cushion in the Road: Meditation and Wandering as the Whole World Awakens to Being in Harm’s Way to Celia Sánchez Manduley and Fidel Castro Ruz. You say, “revolutionaries, teachers and spiritual guides who were, as well, one of the most inspiring power couples of the 20th century.” Why this dedication?
ALICE WALKER: Well, because they were. It’s just that we didn’t know anything about it. I think if you said to almost any North American, “Who was Celia Sánchez Manduley?” they wouldn’t have a clue. They wouldn’t know. And I didn’t know, actually, very much. But she and Fidel had this partnership and actually were co-revolutionaries together. And she was very prominent in the leadership of the Cuban revolution. And there’s a new book about her called One Day in December by Nancy Stout. It’s the life of Celia Sánchez. And this is a woman who can teach a lot of us about what it feels like and what it can be like to come face to face with the reality that your country is being not only stolen from you, but trashed, absolutely degraded—you know, your mountains despoiled, your rivers a mess, your children badly educated, if educated at all. So this book, I think, is crucial for people to have a guide, especially women, but also men, of course, a guide to see what it’s like to actually confront, you know, the forces that are literally destroying you, they’re destroying your children—horrible food, horrible laws, you know, rich people permitted to own much more than anyone should own of anything, and poor people being continually ground into the dust.
AARON MATÉ: Alice Walker, I want to ask about your travels. You’ve gone to Gaza. You’ve gone to Rwanda and eastern Congo. Can you talk about these experiences and what they left you with?
ALICE WALKER: Well, the Congo was the hardest, because there I saw that people will just do anything for gold and silver and coltan and whatever they can get, and that they care absolutely nothing about the suffering of the people. As you know, the Congo is called the worst place on the planet to be if you’re a woman. And I saw that in action. I saw the result of so much horrible atrocity in that place. But this is something that people should be very aware of in places where this kind of atrocity is not yet happening, because this is—you know, it’s crucial to see ourselves always as a part of whatever is going on, because we are. You know, this is one planet, and we are one people. And we learn from each other. We learn the awful things just as clearly as we learn the good things. And so, if you want to see what is a possibility for a really dreadful future, even here, go to the Congo and to places where, you know, people are fighting over minerals and resources that actually the people who live there will never benefit from.
AMY GOODMAN: You’ve also been to Burma, and you write about Aung San Suu Kyi.
ALICE WALKER: Well, I went to Burma before she was freed from house arrest. And we actually went and tried to get our cab driver to stop in front of her gate so we could just, you know, sort of bear witness, but he was so afraid, that he couldn’t stop, and he was—you know, sort of wanted us to get out of his cab because we put him in danger. But now she is out, of course. And, actually, once she was freed from her house arrest and she started talking to the world herself, I haven’t really kept up. You know, I feel that she’s such an amazing being, and she’s so smart, and she has a good heart, and she’s a practiced meditator, which I think is of value, because it means that her thinking is the kind of thinking that understands that the harm that you do to others is the harm that you do to yourself. And you cannot think, then, that you can cause wars in other parts of the world and destroy people and drone them, without this having a terrible impact on your own soul and your own consciousness.
AMY GOODMAN: Alice, your book of poetry, The World Will Follow Joy: Turning Madness into Flowers, could you read a poem from it?
ALICE WALKER: I would love to. This is a poem called “Coming to Worship the 1000 Year Old Cherry Tree.” And the preface to that is that I was in Japan at some point years ago for the Tokyo Book Fair, and I knew it was going to be a lot of work, and they did, too. And they, the people who invited me, insisted that not only could they take me to the countryside to have, you know, a wonderful bath and a beautiful place, you know, a massage, but they also wanted me to see this thousand-year-old cherry tree, which reminds us—this kind of old, beautiful tree reminds us of how long humans have been here and how much we have loved this planet. So, this poem is a result of going to see this wonder, this incredibly beautiful cherry tree in full blossom.
Life is good. Goodness is its character;
all else is defamation.
The Earth is good. Goodness is its nature.
Nature is good. Goodness is its essence.
People are also good. Goodness is our offering;
our predictable yet unfathomable flowering.
Thankful and encouraged
Infused with our peaceful inheritance,
Our peaceful inheritance,
May we not despair.
AMY GOODMAN: Alice Walker, reading from The World Will Follow Joy, her poem “”Coming to Worship the 1000 Year Old Cherry Tree.” Alice, tomorrow on Democracy Now! we will be interviewing Julian Assange from his, in a sense, cell. He has taken refuge in the Ecuadorean embassy in London. He is the WikiLeaks founder. And I was wondering if you have a message for him or a message for people in this country about Julian Assange. What do you think of WikiLeaks and his predicament right now?
ALICE WALKER: I think unless the people are given information about what is happening to them, they will die in ignorance. And I think that’s a big sin. I mean, if there is such a thing as a sin, that’s it, to destroy people and not have them have a clue about how this is happening. So I think that when people like Assange step up to this place of sharing knowledge about what is happening, I think it’s an honorable place. I know that there have been charges against him for, you know, other things, but personally, I would have to be convinced. And looking at just what he has given us in terms of sharing information that can help us, I think he’s very heroic.
AMY GOODMAN: Alice Walker—
ALICE WALKER: And I think that we should support him.
AMY GOODMAN: We have to leave it there, but we do part two post-show. Go to our website at democracynow.org. Alice Walker, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author.
