On Gentleness

It strikes me once again how much I need gentleness in these fraught times.

The last time the grifter was allowed to occupy the White House, I ended up writing a gentle adventure novel — gentle despite the fact that it was rooted in The Three Musketeers. It’s called For the Good of the Realm and the adventures are had by swordswomen and witches. You can buy a copy here if you’re in need of gentle adventures.

The sequel I’m working on turns out to have more violence and complexity in it, which might be why I’m having some trouble with the messy middle right now. I need gentleness, though not at the expense of trying to force a story to be something it isn’t. I didn’t realize I was writing a gentle adventure with Realm until it was finished, and the current book is opening some doors I never knew existed when I wrote the first one.

That said, it may be tricky for me to write something that’s a little harsher right now because – like I said at the beginning – the times cry out for gentleness as an antidote to what we’re facing.

Now in a world with numerous wars and cruel treatment of refugees and, for that matter, of anyone without enough money — people make homes in tents and old RVs in my neighborhood — gentleness is a privilege.

Probably it has always been a privilege, though when reading about “gently bred” ladies of the English Regency period, I am inclined to think those women were more imprisoned than protected by the concept. Gentleness needs to be freely given and available.

I do not want to ignore the evils of the world. We cannot stop them unless we acknowledge that they exist and act on that.

But at the same time, looking at the horrors and knowing you can’t stop them is hard. Not as hard as living through them, but still hard.

I was brought to this realization by two recent posts on social media. In one, a friend was planning to re-read Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future, but going to skip Chapter 1 because they can’t face reading it again.

It’s a very hard chapter to read. You must read it when you read the book the first time, but it will likely be so seared in your memory after that that you can skip it and get to the part of the story that shows a better path forward on any re-reads.

Someone else I follow was watching Furiosa, the prequel to Fury Road, and while they love the movie, had to stop because they found it too hard to rewatch knowing what was coming.

I think that’s why I need gentle right now: because looking at what we’ve been through the last few years, I know some of what’s coming.

And while it may not be coming directly for me (though it always could), that doesn’t make it less stressful.

It would be useful to know how to fight it, but even if there are some ideas about how to deal with tyrants — don’t obey in advance (though all the big shots are doing just that) — I don’t think we yet have enough ideas on how to deal with all the polycrises we’re facing.

(I say polycrises, even though polycrisis means more than one crisis at a time, because all of our crises have multiple parts.)

I’m spending a lot of time thinking about ways to build the future we need despite the additional chaos going on now. But I can’t do that all the time.

So where I can, I seek out gentle. I’m a comics reader. Breaking Cat News is gentle. Frazz, too, mostly. They’re not dishonest or out of touch, but they tell gentle truths.

Carlo Rovelli is gentle in his writing, even when he’s telling us that the present is not the same for everybody at the same time. He’s gifted at telling us complex truth rooted in physics in a way that we can hear it, because it’s gentle.

It is possible to be deeply honest, to seek out and speak deep truth, and be gentle. The darkness out there — the hate, the violence — that’s not the only truth, even of humanity.

One of the myths of our storytelling is that the dark stories are only the “true” ones. While I happen to be a big fan of The Wire, an incredibly well-done cops and robbers series set in Baltimore, I do not think it is the only true story about Baltimore – one of many cities I love.

And I’ve given up on noir detective fiction, despite the fact that some great writers have produced it. All those stories are rooted in worlds of corruption and violence and the assumption that such things are the whole truth.

It’s not that they aren’t true – the gangsters taking over our government certainly demonstrate that – but that it isn’t the only truth, not by far.

Most people are good. Most people will help someone else if they can. Most of us are also trying to survive in a world that could be well-run for the benefit of all, but isn’t. Most of us would do something we find morally wrong to take care of ourselves, our families, or our friends, but that is not our first choice.

The good part is important. It is truth. It’s not naive. If we let the grifters convince us that everyone is like them, we will suffer a great deal more.

Instead, we must remember gentleness, decency, kindness, and such, and share it far and wide, not just with our families and friends – where most of us do try to be kind – but with strangers, with people from different backgrounds and different places.

There are people out to get you, but all too often they are the people who claim to protect you rather than the ones they’re supposedly protecting you from. (Women are constantly warned about “stranger danger” even though they are at much greater risk from people they know.)

So be gentle where you can this year and seek out ways to shore up gentleness in the world. It’s something we can do that the grifters, broligarchs, religious extremists, and other right-wingers can’t.

They don’t even understand it’s important.