Dear Hollow: I Don't Know What It Means To Walk Each Other Home
Lit Salon sits on a stupid couch and fails to properly answer the simplest question about a better world, but offers certain thoughts about dog paws, divorce & absolute miracle of the human hand
Dear Jeannine,
You know how Ram Dass said that we’re all just walking each other home? I love that idea—and it’s such a pretty way to say it. But when I really stop and think about it, it feels so hollow.
Or maybe it’s just me. Maybe I’m hollow.
I don’t know. But I’m sitting here on my stupid couch wondering: What would this world even look like if it were true? If we really were, in fact, walking each other home?
Signed,
Hollow
Dear Hollow,
It’s been a devastating autumn. Many of us are feeling hollow. But also, even saying that—as I, too, sit on my stupid couch—feels a little hollow given the war, given the children.
You know that Pablo Neruda poem, “I Shall Explain A Few Things?” It’s about the Spanish Civil War from 1936 to 1939. Neruda was working in the Chilean Embassy in Spain when the civil war began. The fifth stanza goes like this:
And one morning all that was burning,
one morning the bonfires
leapt out of the earth
devouring human beings —
and from then on fire,
gunpowder from then on,
and from then on blood.
Bandits with planes and Moors,
bandits with finger-rings and duchesses,
bandits with black friars spattering blessings
came through the sky to kill children
and the blood of children ran through the streets
without fuss, like children's blood.
That couplet—and the blood of children ran through the streets/without fuss, like children’s blood—has remained with me since I first discovered Neruda’s poem in 2017. It’s a heartbreaking, unforgettable image, and it’s seared into my consciousness permanently.
But I still don’t know what it means to walk each other home.
I’m not a Charles Bukowski fan—only, really, because I haven’t ever read his work. I hear he was misogynist, but I don’t actually know anything about his work myself. That’s in part because I am woefully undereducated, having mostly not attended high school due to chaos created by my mom’s mental illness and my eventual placement in foster care. I still got into college somehow, because my alternative high school gave me a diploma despite my almost never attending, and I scored pretty well on the PSAT. I managed to complete almost two years of liberal arts coursework in college before I dropped out to get married and have my first baby, a stunning, perfect girl. But most of the university classes I took were Latin, Women’s Studies, and poetry. So, in that sense, I didn’t really make up much of the ground I’d missed in high school.
I’ve spent all the years since then trying to catch up, but one never really does catch up, I don’t think. All that by way of saying, I am no Bukowski expert, but I do think of this quote of his an awful lot:
We're all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn't. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.
I think you could say that Bukowski didn’t seem to—at least in the moments he was writing these words—see much truth in the statement about us all walking each other home, either.
And maybe there’s not much truth in it. Maybe it’s as hollow as you say.
But also, maybe not. Maybe there’s a little truth in it. And maybe a little is better than none.
.You asked, What would this world even look like if it were true? If we really were, in fact, walking each other home?
Which of course, isn’t really a question. We both know full well what it would look like—it would be so fucking beautiful we’d have to look away to keep from burning our eyes on its glory. My god, it would be beautiful.
It would be like that time I was teaching a class in the prison and one of the younger guys in the class started to get real edgy, in a way that felt, you know, a little off—like, he was escalating but not for any reason any of us understood or saw coming. And then, in that state of rising agitation, he asked a question that didn’t connect very well or, to be more honest, connect at all to what we were discussing right then, and that’s when the guy next to him chuckled a little.
Just a little.
But that chuckle was like, really the wrong thing in that moment for this kid (and I think it’s fair to use that word, he was younger than my own young adult kids, just a really young guy) who instantly grew agitated and turned hard toward the guy who had chuckled. He turned hard and said, “Hey, what do think you …” or something along those lines, and before the words were even all the way out of his mouth, the most experienced, skillful guys in the class just did this spectacular thing which was made all the more breathtaking for its near invisibility and its immediacy. It was a palpable, complex, and instantaneous social coordination they enacted, like a dance of human energy, and I wish I could describe it for you, but what they did was—without in any way shape or form making this kid feel like they were “trying to calm him down,” which would almost surely have made the situation worse— proceeded to 100%