You Must be One of the Wonders
My daughter gave me The Secret History of Wonder Woman, by Jill Lepore, for Christmas. I've been wanting to read it. I'm barely into it, and the story is turning out to be as fascinating as I thought it would be. I'm also thinking that I've found my "one word resolution" that my friend Kathryn Sullivan suggested that I come up with for 2017: Wonder. It's perfect. For me, it would mean fewer judgments about whatever is happening, and more just sitting back and looking at it with wonder. What does it mean in the bigger picture? What can I see in this that I am missing? I've remembered another wonderful book that you might want to put on your reading list:
On vacation in the mountains, I was staggered by the beauty of the stars in that mountain sky, when all the city lights were stripped away and I got quiet and still enough to look deeply. I want more experiences like that. I want to read more this year, and wonder at the world that is encapsulated in a work of fiction or non-fiction. I want to wonder about the people that I know; there is much that is hidden in them that I miss when I am rushing by --- and the people I don't know, who are a complete mystery. Some people I will only ever know by reading about them. For example, the man who created Wonder Woman was William Moulton Marston. When he was 18, he wanted to kill himself. Many years later, he explained his perspective: he had believed, for several years in his adolescence and his twenties, that if success came with ease, life was worth living. If it did not, it would be sensible to just "sign off." This was more philosophy than suicidal ideation because as a young man, he found success was his in many ways. He was attractive, he was class president, he was in love --- and that was just in eighth grade. In later school years, he would be" class historian, president of the Literary Society, and editor in chief of the student literary magazine" (Lepore, 6). There were debates, and football championships, and he got into Harvard to study law.
Then things went wrong. He discovered that to write wasn't enough; one had to spell well, and punctuate, and meet certain kinds of expectations about the content, and his writing did not. He was failing English and Medieval History, and it was then that he decided he wanted off the planet. He got some hydro-cyanic acid from a chemist friend. Lepore tells us it would have killed him in under a minute, and after all, Dr. Jekyll had done it when he found himself to be a monster. However, it turned out there was a reason to go on living: his philosophy class. His professor emphasized the moral imagination, which you can read about here, but in a nutshell, it means seeing other people as moral creatures, worthy of knowing and understanding because they exist and not because of what they do or what they achieve.
This is what a writer does, isn't it -- or what he or she should do? Develop a moral imagination, and carry it out in scenes and words? And to do so, it seems to me, a person must start with wonder.
I wonder who I am? who you are? what our world is really all about? If it is, as I have always believed, about learning to love each other, then it feels right to start again with wonder. I don't have to be Wonder Woman, but I can be a wonder woman in 2017. Join me. See your world with wonder, and tell me what you see. I've got a poem coming out soon, a feminist poem about the vagina, in fact, called "Cave of Wonders" -- it will be part of a collection of similar poems edited by Wicked Banshee Press. I wrote it months ago, before the thought of settling on "wonder" for the new year. The time was right for all of this to come together.
Thank you for visiting me here at Sylvia's Daughter Says, and for all of you who are wonder women, here's my song dedication for you and for me:
I'm not signing off, not really...
Tamara
