MANORATHA

Beautiful tribute from Heyday Books to its founder & his legacy – a legendary publishing house started by Malcom Margolin who passed earlier this year. In another life, perhaps being a publisher who curates beauty and brings it to the world would be a worthwhile life to pursue. Watch the tribute – much to be found there.

Wise old man, a romantic perhaps or someone who recognizes the complexity of the world and the limits of the human endeavor to change/shape things. The last lines of the tribute are beautiful and worthy of a publisher and writer who recognizes that the pen and the imagination it stirs may be the place the battle for the human condition is won or lost.

Malcom Margolin (edited/corrected transcript of video):

Many writers say they’ve never gotten the recognition they deserve. I certainly can’t say that. I’m the most over-appreciated person in the world. I’ve received many awards. I’ve been given credit for skill, credit for savvy, credit for hard work, and keen vision.

But the fact of the matter is that I’ve been lucky. When I was a kid, my vision was to be an ice cream truck driver. I pictured myself stopping at street corners, getting crowds of people together, opening up an ice chest, pulling out all sorts of treasures and giving them out to people who will be happy and will like me – in some way.

I think that publishing is a glorified ice cream truck. I go around and I collect beautiful things and store them away, then bring them out and give them to people and they like me.

One of the main things that I’ve gotten out of hanging out with Indians for the last 50 years has been a sense of the greatness of the people. I think there’s several characteristics of Indian aesthetics.

One of them is that the world wants to be beautiful and that people are there to serve the world in its desire to be beautiful and that the beauty is inherent in the world around you.

It’s not part of your own humanity. That what you do is you go out and you make yourself available to the beauties of the world. And I think there’s a passivity to that that’s wonderful. It’s not something that human beings are adding to the world. It’s something that the human beings are drawing from the world. And your job is to be open to it and to receive it.

One of the things that I’ve loved about being around Indians is the sense of place and the sense that knowledge is too important to entrust with human beings. You embed the knowledge in mountains. You embed it in animals. And when you go out, the world tells you stories.

And I go over to these Indians and that particular rock over there may have been a person in a previous lifetime. They knew the story of that rock. That particular place had powers and this particular place had history and there were these stories that were attached to place and it gave you a sense of who you were. I think stories need places to embed themselves in to give them reality, to give them some kind of sense of rootedness in a particular place.

Without that you end up having generalizations. You end up having ideologies. You end up having dogmas and tenets. We need these places to tell us who we are and to tell us that Berkeley is not just a place that began 200 years ago when white people moved in, but it was a place that had existed for a long time.

For me, one of the big changes I’ve seen in my life as a publisher has been the increasing use of salesmanship in our language. And salesmanship has affected our language so that we don’t know how to talk to one another without selling something. It’s embedded in our tone. It’s embedded in our way of being. It’s embedded in our grammar.

We use language to conquer the world. We use language to define things. We use language as a way of getting power over things.

This whole business of making America great again is so reprehensible. If you talk about winning, you’re just talking about life as a game and life is not a game. Life is something else. And I think we have to get to this other sense of what life is all about. And we’re not going to get to it through winning. We’re not going to get through it with losing either.

We’re going to get through it by following an artistic way, by following a spiritual way, by having something that is different.

There’s a sense of uncertainty that you get from these older generation of Indians where there’s the sense that they have is that the world is bigger than our capacity to understand it. So we have this sense that human beings can understand everything that we can go out and pursue knowledge and get it.

With Indians the sense of the world was it was big it was mysterious there were things we don’t know about and maybe if we’re lucky the world will give us a gift of this understanding and I think there’s something in that uncertainty that I just love. You’ll talk to an old Indian and you’ll ask who made the world and he’ll say “maybe it was coyote I think”.

It’s not the certainty that it was coyote, it’s maybe it was coyote. And then you’ll say something like the people in the next village said it was silver fox and the Indian will say well did they say it was silver fox? Here we say it was coyote.

In Europe, you would have had a religious war in which three million people would be killed to figure out whether it was silver fox or coyote.

There it just it’s not important because the world is an inherently mysterious place. It’s inherently unknowable and your place in it is not fixed. You don’t have rights in the world. The world is a gift.

And I think for me the gift of the world is the sense that the world is not owned by people that we don’t have rights to it. That it’s a gift to us, puts us in our place and it’s a beautiful place to be in. I think it’s a truthful place to be in.

I think Indians use language as a way of expressing wonderment and poetry and ambiguity and for me it’s something we have to learn. What I’m looking for is a doorway to open people’s imaginations. And I think the battle we are fighting will be be won or lost first in the human imagination.