Lamentations for a Responsible World

Tsering Yangzom Lama

I once watched an interviewer ask a British writer, “Do you believe that writers have certain responsibilities?”

The writer responded emphatically, “No responsibilities, only freedoms.”

No responsibilities, only freedoms. What a thought. Suddenly I felt the same mix of tenderness and amusement I did when my niece first began to speak. She delighted in speech, in giving commands to the adults who filled her life: no, no, yes! More often than not, we acquiesced to the new god in our midst. We knew that this was a brief, fleeting time when the world would behave as she wished.

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A poet writes that “every good poem begins in language awake to its own connections—language that hears itself and what is around it, sees itself and what is around it, looks back at those who look into its gaze and knows more perhaps even than we do about who and what we are.”^[1]

A seeing so thorough that even language awakens to itself.

But what will our kind see with all that looking? What if poetry refuses to arise from the things we are called to witness, to keep alive? What if we see that we are, like our parents, still fighting to live in this world? And if we find within ourselves the same lovely desolation that haunted Milarepa? Could I live in retreat and remain responsible to the world? The choice is as impossible as returning home. This is the basic fact of exile, its impossibility.

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“There are times,” the same poet writes, “when suffering’s only open path is through an immersion in what is.”

The truth is: I wanted to give myself a home in my imagination. I have known that hunger since the first flash of my consciousness.

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Tibetans though. Our capacity for responsibility, for bearing suffering is deemed inexhaustible. Who deems it so? Do we iron the sash proudly every morning, and what remains untended, slumped in the corner like all our other selves?

I was raised on a casual soundtrack of daily lectures to cultivate my moral character. Benedictions rained down from all corners—my parents, cousins, elders, monks, nuns, passing strangers. Be good, be humble, be compassionate, be generous, be obedient. Others before self.

The trouble is, at this particular moment in history, we are responsible for so much. We are responsible for saving our country, for the continuation of our language and ancient civilization, for countering Chinese propaganda, for having Buddhist compassion, for uplifting our families from statelessness, for taking care of our aging parents, for achieving excellence in the West, for upholding our reputation as a people because, apparently, human rights are a meritocracy. A trophy full of holes.

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The Buddha thus spoke: When we suffer, we can do one of four things. We can blame ourselves, blame others, despair, or investigate. The idea is that we should choose the last option. Lead a life of contemplation and self-examination.

But what about when suffering isn’t individual? What about when an entire people are struck with the same near-fatal blow? Can some of us investigate while others keep the orphanages running? Can some of us blame China while others pray for the safety, happiness, and liberation of all beings? Can some of us despair while others dance a little gorshey?

Yes and yet. Yes you can dance a little and yet the collective blurs the shapes of our bodies. Yes you can blame others and yet the collective requires us all to be free, even the oppressor, and even even even us. Even we, who don’t believe in the self, deserve to be free individuals. Yes and yet you can love someone into healing yourself. I’ve seen it happen to a friend of a cousin. I’ve seen it happen in my dreams.

No responsibilities, only freedoms. Wish I could remember his name.

Note

^[1]  Jane Hirshfield in Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry

Tsering Yangzom Lama’s debut novel, We Measure the Earth With Our Bodies, won the GLCA New Writers Award as well as the Banff Mountain Book Award for Fiction & Poetry. Tsering holds an MFA in Writing from Columbia University and a BA in Creative Writing and International Relations from the University of British Columbia. She was selected as a 2018 Tin House Novel Scholar. Tsering’s writing has appeared in The Globe and Mail, The Malahat Review, Grain, Kenyon Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Vela, LaLit, and Himal SouthAsian, as well as the anthologies Old Demons New Deities: 21 Short Stories from Tibet; House of Snow: An Anthology of the Greatest Writing About Nepal; and Brave New Play Rites. She is also a co-founder of LhakarDiaries, a leading English-language blog among Tibetan youth in exile.