by
Daisy Pitkin
14
Fires
0
terms
2
notes
23
When we’d finished eating, I asked if anyone had a final question or announcement, guessing someone would respond with another joke or an exaggerated call for me to just wrap it up already. For a moment, no one said anything, and then you raised your hand, Alma—a formality that brought a sudden seriousness to the room. You asked a question that stays with me still, though I don’t hear it in your voice or even in Spanish anymore—it comes as a memory of my own translation. You were wondering about the will to fight, a phrase I had used in my story about the shirtwaist strikers in 1909. Las ganas de luchar, I had said, and those were the words you used, too, when you asked. You wanted to know what drives some people to fight while others don’t, or don’t want to, or can’t. Everyone is afraid, you said. So what is it that pushes some people across the threshold of fear? Is it all rage? you wondered. Is it courage? Are the ones who fall down in their fear too afraid or just not angry enough?
When we’d finished eating, I asked if anyone had a final question or announcement, guessing someone would respond with another joke or an exaggerated call for me to just wrap it up already. For a moment, no one said anything, and then you raised your hand, Alma—a formality that brought a sudden seriousness to the room. You asked a question that stays with me still, though I don’t hear it in your voice or even in Spanish anymore—it comes as a memory of my own translation. You were wondering about the will to fight, a phrase I had used in my story about the shirtwaist strikers in 1909. Las ganas de luchar, I had said, and those were the words you used, too, when you asked. You wanted to know what drives some people to fight while others don’t, or don’t want to, or can’t. Everyone is afraid, you said. So what is it that pushes some people across the threshold of fear? Is it all rage? you wondered. Is it courage? Are the ones who fall down in their fear too afraid or just not angry enough?
26
I listened and nodded as one of the other trainers said something about struggles needing leaders and about it being the job of those leaders (Of you, here in this room, he said) to be courageous and to lead their coworkers through their fear. If I had tried to answer then, I think I would have said that people who fight and people who don’t aren’t very different from each other, or that the difference has less to do with anger or fear and more to do with vision—that some people can’t imagine or haven’t yet imagined what good a fight will do, can’t see a version of the world that doesn’t yet exist.
Now, having thought and thought about this question since you asked it in 2004, I wonder if the will to fight is unrelated to vision or imagination, if instead it’s a kind of metamorphosis, a state of being so ravenous for change that you are changed. The tightening skin tightens around the neck and body of the caterpillar, which is already walking around with parts of another, future body tucked inside. The you before the fight denatures you, exploding into newness out of necessity. (“He must shed that tight dry skin, or die,” writes Nabokov of a caterpillar in its final stage.)
I listened and nodded as one of the other trainers said something about struggles needing leaders and about it being the job of those leaders (Of you, here in this room, he said) to be courageous and to lead their coworkers through their fear. If I had tried to answer then, I think I would have said that people who fight and people who don’t aren’t very different from each other, or that the difference has less to do with anger or fear and more to do with vision—that some people can’t imagine or haven’t yet imagined what good a fight will do, can’t see a version of the world that doesn’t yet exist.
Now, having thought and thought about this question since you asked it in 2004, I wonder if the will to fight is unrelated to vision or imagination, if instead it’s a kind of metamorphosis, a state of being so ravenous for change that you are changed. The tightening skin tightens around the neck and body of the caterpillar, which is already walking around with parts of another, future body tucked inside. The you before the fight denatures you, exploding into newness out of necessity. (“He must shed that tight dry skin, or die,” writes Nabokov of a caterpillar in its final stage.)