How to Live
This week we debut the work of a young writer named Alyssa Pringle (she/her), a writer so good that she prompted us to break our cardinal rule for brevity. We are running her essay, “How to Fry Dumplings,” at essentially full length. Not that we didn’t try to shorten it, but we kept finding that Ms. Pringle had written it so that no phrase was misplaced, virtually no gesture unneeded.
The striking example of this was a little phrase we originally thought was out of context and unconnected to the rest of the essay: “into a trampled plant clinging to life.”
While doing photo research to find an image, one of us sought out pictures of the main ingredient of Jamaican callaloo: the amaranth plant. (Callaloo can also be made with the leaves of the taro plant).
And guess what? The word amaranth has taken a long journey to this side of the world from its origins in Latin, meaning “everlasting, unwilting plant.” Working with Ms. Pringle to create a path for the phrase we almost cut has reminded one of our editors, Lisa, of the bittersweet advice she received from her husband Gil, the subject of her housekeeping essays here and here: “If someone tells you to take something out, sometimes you have to practice doing it until you are so good that it can’t be taken out.”
Dried amaranth. by Sara Maximoff for Unsplash
The year we have all been through was a good year for that good advice, a year when we were called upon to learn what was essential to us, what couldn’t be taken out, even as COVID-19 threw us all into the same sea and took so much from us, giving only some of us safe passage in boats. No sooner had we gone into lockdown in the US but the violent murder of George Floyd, the virulent hatred directed at Asian Americans, and the ongoing cruelty directed immigrants from the Global South, Asia, and the Middle East reminded us, when someone tells you to stop speaking up, stop protesting, stop coming to our borders or demanding your rights, persist. Fight for what cannot, shall not, be taken out of our human relations. The question was and always has been: what will the people in the nice boats do? Will they stand up and rock them, offer a hand to those in the sea, make new boats for all?
It’s been a year and change since everything all over the world changed, and nothing changed at all. We at DH went damnably silent for much of this year. What could a little blog paying tribute to dead loved ones do when the deaths or persistent illness and oppression of millions swept us out to that vast sea peppered by so few boats? What could we ourselves--one of us living with a cancer diagnosis, two of us having gotten COVID-19 this year, all of us having lost or watched a loved one suffer from it--what could we say, what creativity and positivity dredge up from the bottom of our spirits as we corralled kids to their compulsory screens, lost or overcompensated at our jobs, fought with loved ones at close quarters, visited with friends uneasily on our lawns or in our open carports, donned masks and made the grocery store our only outing, where the lucky find of some toilet paper or yeast this week and the incongruous tunes of the Talking Heads or Eurythmics were our only cold consolation?
How to Live When So Many Are Dying?
Don’t even get us started on the horrific bush fires that started off the year in Australia, the forest fires in the US, the hard freeze in Texas, the death by floods in Africa, by heat in Europe, the ongoing and slowly grinding neglect of Puerto Rico by its own federal government in the US, the growing authoritarianism resulting in silencings, disappearances, and state-sponsored murders in Russia, Hungary, the Philippines, Myanmar, Hong Kong. When so much takes away so much, what cannot be taken?
Like the family in the story by Alyssa Pringle, we gather and sit and cook and watch because only the daily belongs to us, and only so fleetingly. Wherever you are, whomever you are with now, whomever you lost, we know that you--like we--are gathering and cooking and watching like us, trying to hold all these conflicting events together in your mind, to do something, anything, if only it is to understand.
We believe that this first essay we have published in a very long time will bring you--as it did us--to a new, buoyant place from which to feel it all. Pringle’s light touch with even the most troubling realities, her steady gaze at the long suffering of the man caught up in the bosom of family love (presumably she is the one in the little pink dress with the little blue voice), her sharing of the delight in nourishing food even though the central character is fading away, her illumination of the hard trace of family violence and patriarchy in the image of the child “get[ting] the belt for their own beating”--Pringle presents these realities to us with clear eyes and an open hand, neither judging nor condoning. She is present, she permits us to be present, and she stays beside us so that we need not look away.
Perhaps, that is all we can count on to teach us how to live.