Polyphony and counterpoint in Edward Said's legacy.

1

A leukemia diagnosis (and a lifelong fascination with Proust) motivated Edward Said to begin writing his memoir, Out of Place. The book embodies the self-spectating gaze of exile to articulate the critical division between the Edward he performs and the Edward who studies the performance.

In childhood, Said studied his father’s refusal to express emotion alongside his mother’s disdain for physical touch as a means of comforting her children. From these two inhibitions, he became aware of his own “sensitivity”, a hyperawareness that he monitored like a vulture preying on its carcass. Mired by shame, the young Edward feared the public disgrace of being legible in his feelings. It was the possibility of being recognized by others as an Edward that felt foreign to him, a possibility that materialized in the power of teachers and peers to write the foreign, the weird, the unusual, the less comprehensible:

2

"Princeton in the fifties was unpolitical, self-satisfied, and oblivious.” It prepared Said to be a manager of elite machines—- and he knew this. He resented the facility of the superficial gestures that kept American appearances intact. He loathed and feared the aura of complacency, which might explain why he found it difficult to make friends at Princeton. “I felt that there was no depth, no ease, to the Americans, only the surface jokiness and anecdotal high spirits of teammates, which never satisfied me,” Said wrote. Uneasiness inflected his bilingual existence:

There was always the feeling that what I missed with my American contemporaries was other languages, Arabic mainly, in which I lived and thought and felt along with English. They seemed less emotional, with little interest in articulating their attitudes and reactions. This was the extraordinary homogenizing power of American life, in which the same TV, clothes, ideological uniformity, in films, newspapers, comics, etc., seemed to limit the complex intercourse of daily life to an unreflective minimum in which memory has no role.

“Immersion in reading and writing was the only antidote to Princeton's poisonous social atmosphere,” he wrote of Princeton’s fraternity-boy feel:

Like Walker Percy’s alien anthropologist, Said conducted a close reading of the environment in which he had been placed, and found only two professors who inspired him to think critically, the first of which was literary critic R. P. Blackmur. What Said loved about Blackmur is what he would come to celebrate in his formulations of the “amateur” critic. Lacking a doctorate or “even a high school diploma,” Blackmur had become an English professor, at Princeton. “A lonely, difficult-to-follow writer and lecturer, whose sheer genius in uncovering layer after layer of meaning in modern poetry and fiction (despite his gnarled and frequently incomprehensible language),” Blackmur, to Said, was “utterly challenging.” And the challenge is precisely what Said craved:

[Blackmur’s] example for me opened the secret delight of interpretation as something more than paraphrase or explanation. I never took a course with him or met him, but apart from reading him avidly I intermittently used to go to his lectures on poetics and modern fiction. He was one of the two readers of my senior thesis on André Gide and Graham Greene, a tortured affair …

The “other figure of distinction” was Professor of Philosophy Arthur Szathmary: “a spritely, energetic little figure who was everyone's gadfly, whether student, colleague, or great writer.” To the jaded students and “disaffected outsiders,” Said says that “Szathmary came to represent, and even embody, the intellectual life”:

He was intensely skeptical, asked irreverent questions, and generally made one feel that the accurate articulation of objections and flaws were activities of the highest order. There was nothing of the Princeton "tweedy" ethos about him or anything that suggested careerism and worldly success.


3

"Manipulated seriality is the heart of fascist politics", Jairus Banaji wrote in "Trajectories of Fascism: Extreme-Right Movements in India and Elsewhere" (2013). Banaji predicted Modi could function as a figurehead around which to build a cult of national greatness, a cult complicated by the polyvocality of Hinduism that doesn't automatically privilege a male god. [Note also a lack of "political culture" willing to do battle against burgeoning national greatness mythos on the left.]

“At the heart of fascist politics lies a manipulated seriality”: a refrain that continues touching the world, a leitmotif that exile admonishes against and often, unintentionally, prevents. By virtue of never belonging, one is given to know that belonging is illusory, a temporal construction that cannot persist across time in a globalized world. But one one mourns it nonetheless. One mourns this beautiful monster named Belonging; one samples its unrealizable iconographies. This is the marrow of Svetlana Boym's theories on nostalgia, and her call for off-modern nostalgia that settles no place, that requires no drawing of boundaries or war to map it. A nostalgia that subverts the sacralized nation for the daydream: this appears in Said’s writings as well.

The gradual evolution towards religious extremism among friends and family disoriented Said. Listening to political discussions in Washington, Said found his own unsettledness:

… the inherent irreconcilability between intellectual belief and passionate loyalty to tribe, sect, and country first opened up in me, and have remained open. I have never felt the need to close the gap but have kept them apart as opposites, and have always felt the priority of intellectual, rather than national or tribal, consciousness, no matter how solitary that made one.


4

The final paragraph of Said’s memoir also locates his life and mind in this contrapuntal motion:

Although Said never really goes after the therapy industry or takes the pedagogies of self-esteem to task, his criticism continuously challenged the “solid self” reaches toward certainty. Like the nation-state or the Virgin Mary, the solid self is a fragile construction that lives on the defensive. The solid self (again, like the ethno-state) invents new rules and boundaries that prevent it from being violated by reality.

Edward Said knew that the price of purity was an immaculate, fossilized stupidity, an ignorance so solid that not even millions of tons of bombs dropped on innocent children could move it.

"The Music Itself: Glenn Gould's Contrapuntal Vision" by Edward Said (PDF)

"Glenn Gould, the Virtuous as Intellectual" by Edward Said (PDF)

Mark Sandman and his "Super Sex" tritar.

“Super Sex” comes from Morphine’s 1995 album, Yes. Alongside his usual baritone vocals, Sandman played 2-string slide bass, piano, Chamberlin, tritar, and electric guitar on Yes—-and “Super Sex” is the song where Sandman happens to play the Chamberlin as well as the tritar.

There’s a brief flash to Dana Colley playing the alto and tenor saxophone simultaneously in the video.

Dana Colley playing double sax.

Morphine’s album, The Night, was posthumously released by Sandman's bandmates after his passing. On that note, Jean-Luc Nancy wrote something that holds my attention in The Fragile Skin of the World. I leave it here for future reckoning: “The idea of an authentic man or an authentic life can only be spoken of from a point of view that is neither human nor living, which is precisely what we lack. It is impossible for us to decide in favor of an authenticity whose content is not indicated to us.”

"I made him promise he'd piss on my grave," said Edmund White.

 

“I made him promise he'd piss on my grave,” Edmund White wrote of the lover who broke his heart.

The week bumped over the hump that was Tom Waits’ birthday, and certainly the lyric “Who are you this time?” came to mind as I let Edmund White’s memoir, My Lives, devour me.

The conceit of White’s “lives” is that he inventories them.

If the table of contents enumerates the ten lives that Edmund White lived, the text refuses any assumption that these lives are separate from the one he is living as he writes about the Others, as he welcomes his Others into the fold of selfhood.

Oddly, like the writers associated with New Narrative, White wants to reclaim “realism” rather than abandon it.

He wants a shift in how we describe “reality”.

Ideally, maybe really, such a shift shift would enable us to acknowledge the way reality differs from our discursive approaches to representation.

I made him promise he’d piss on my grave seems like the perfect vow to exchange with a human one has loved when leaving. It is an alternative eternity, an intimate and forbidden homage, a vow closer to standing outside time than trying to tame it.

“This is realism, I thought with grim satisfaction.”

Identifying as a “mystical atheist,” White recounts the spiritual seeking of his adolescence (encouraged by vaguely Christian Scientist mother). Already, he holds realism in high regard as the measure of value.

I'd gone every afternoon for weeks to the neo-Gothic library at Northwestern to read Max Müller's Sacred Books of the East. I'd dipped into the Torah, the Koran and the Upanishads. But Id been gripped by the Buddhist sutras. No matter how pessimistic I might become, I could never begin to approach the extent of Gotama's nihilism. He saw the self as an illusion, desire as the root of all evil, rebirth as the worst of fates and extinction as the only goal. In this world the most and the least one could expect was sickness, old age and death. Whereas the Hindus posited an irreducible soul, the atman, the Buddha preached the doctrine of 'no soul,' anatta. In an unpeopled universe full of nothing but illusion and suffering, not a single entity existed, certainly no deity.

This is realism, I thought with grim satisfaction. No interceding ranks of angels, no accountancy of sins and good deeds, no heaven nor hell, no nosy-parkering into other people's bedroom hijinks. The opposite of hateful, intolerant Christianity.

And all is divine until White and his mother get to the Chicago Buddhist Church in a rundown South Side neighborhood nearly thirty miles away. There, in that Church, they “encountered a group of smiling, waving Japanese men, women and children worshiping Amida, the Lord of the Western Paradise, a personage very much like a Catholic saint.”

He was a bodhisattva in the (to my eyes at least) 'degraded' form of Mahayana Buddhism, someone pledged to stave off the horrors of rebirth and the bleak solitude of nirvana by spiriting his followers away to a paradise where they could struggle toward enlightenment in comfort and in the busy, bustling society of likeminded souls.

“I was bitterly disappointed - by the organ and hymns that sounded suspiciously Methodist, by the flutter of arriving parishioners in big hats exchanging kisses, by the depressingly secular announcements of upcoming bingo games and covered dish suppers,” White says. Bitterly disappointed, he fled the scene.

Disappointment being the gap between what one expects and what is delivered, White inventories his losses:

Where I'd expected a bald abbot stony with meditation, a trickle of sandalwood smoke and a superb indifference to all forms of striving, I'd found a congregation of ordinary folks besotted in the ordinary way with the little pains and little rewards of everyday life.

'I thought it was nice, Mother said, puzzled by my contempt.

You liked it because it was just like some dismal Christian service,' I said nastily.

Contempt, nastiness, spiritual disappointment, aesthetic disaster: the affective expressions clamber over the material disenchantment in White’s telling.

“Even these humiliating occasions when I was robbed could be used as material. Life was a field trip. My writing would turn all this evil into flowers.”

White writes his hustlers gorgeously, engorgedly, edging close to the realism of New Narrative. 

“I was always reading novels, and I knowingly chuckled when a character was described as 'foolish' or 'naïve' but here I was: I was naive, I was foolish, which until this moment I'd never suspected,” he acknowledges, before pivoting to muse on craft:

The reader considers himself to be all-knowing, superior, but now I had to push this conventional flattery aside and recognize that cleverness is not a question of perspective but of accumulated experience in the world. I was slowly putting together my own fund of lived worldliness, more modest but more real than the reader's omniscience.

I was duped again in Cincinnati that summer when I was eighteen. I gave a hustler forty dollars to buy us both one-way Greyhound bus tickets to New York. Our plan was to meet on the corner near my father's new house in Watch Hill, an area of big estates and no sidewalks where any pedestrian, especially a teenage boy with a suitcase, would have attracted attention if anyone had been awake and driving past. I spent a sleepless night imagining how I'd become a blond with the bottle of peroxide I'd put in my bag; I'd be so transformed that my father would never be able to find me, neither he nor his private detectives. Kay, my stepmother, would go to awaken me and find my room empty. No note. A missing suitcase. A drained tub and a wisp of winking foam from my dawn bubble bath.

The guy never came. The hot, steamy Cincinnati sun rose and became more intense, like an alcohol lab burner concentrating and flaming whiter and whiter. I felt so foolish. I was grateful I hadn't already dyed my hair. Then for a second I'd become hopeful again and imagine he'd been held up and would appear in another minute or two if I would just be patient. Then I would remember how uninterested he'd been in the directions to this exact corner - at the time I'd thought it was proof of his quickness that he'd been able to grasp the baffling directions so easily. At last it came to me with pitiless clarity that he was a con man. He'd conned me. He'd tolen wow money and run. How he must have laughed at my naivety. When I saw him on the Square, a few nights later, he waved merrily.

One could learn about life from literature - one could learn to spot a confidence man - but only if one woke up from the smug, dreamlike superiority of the reader, which blinded one to the actual slippery manifestations of vice and dishonesty in the shadowy world of reality. In the novel, at least the reassuring nineteenth-century novel, one was always privy to everyone's well-lit motives and alerted to even the first sign of corruption. But in life - how could one navigate in an unnarrated world? Of course I was always narrating my life to myself but unfortunately I had no access to the private thoughts of the other characters around me. Even my own mind was too prolific to be comprehensible. It was certainly true that I was fashioning the book of my life at all times, trying out sentences, sketching out plot lines, hoarding impressions, restaging the scenes I'd just lived through. I'd already written and typed two novels in boarding school, one about me and the other (my senior thesis) about my mother or some more driven version of my mother to whom I attributed my own sexual obsessions. At every moment convinced myself that I was gathering material for the novel of my life - all experienced from the philosophical distance of the author.

Yes, White confirms: “Even these humiliating occasions when I was robbed could be used as material.”

For: “Life was a field trip. My writing would turn all this evil into flowers.”

And his “sexual obsessions” were not merely obsessive; they also partook of curiosity. “All these encounters with hustlers were as much an expression of fear as of desire, and above all they were animated by curiosity,” he writes. It is a feast, a communion, a religion to replace the failed spiritualities:

I was swallowing the sperm of strangers and this feast convinced me I was possessing all these men. I was like one of those nearly insane saints who must take communion several times a day, who are driven by a desire to eat the body and drink the blood of a long-dead historical human being. That man may also have been a god, but the saint longs for the pulse and crunch of a thirty-three-year-old Jew nailed to crossed boards. In the same way I had this permanent, gnawing hunger for all these street-corner Hanks or Orvilles, for their penises fat or thin, crooked or straight, eager or reluctant.

Impossible not to think of Robert Gluck’s descriptions of cruising the bath-houses here. Hopefully that Gluck review will get published soon, but who knows?

“My Roberto (my hustler and my character) was quiveringly and richly fleshed, his smile soft and unfocused, his body instinct with laughter.”

His first muse was a hustler who went by the name Roberto:

The room was big and clean and the wide window looked out on the square below, and afforded enough illumination so that we didn't need to turn on the overhead light. In the half-darkness his white shirt glowed. He let me unbutton it as we kissed. As soon as we began to touch, Roberto had the sort of gleeful, complicitous smile that says, "Look how wicked we're being." Never before had associated irony with sex between men. For a moment I even suspected that Roberto might be gay or bisexual and surprisingly! still found him attractive. He held my naked body against his and quaked with silent laughter, then moved without transition into long, languorous kisses, letting his eyes rise and wander along the line between the ceiling and the wall.

Roberto's white shirt and tanned skin, his compact body with the sensual ass, his sense of irony and romantic air - all these properties came together to inspire me. That fall I wrote a novel about him while I was in my junior year at the University of Michigan. Like many novels by young people it was derived more from my reading than from my experience, but the character of the younger brother 'Roberto' was based on my very own Lafcadio, my own Tancredi, my own Felix Krull, my own Fabrizio. I had in mind a synthesis of all these gallant young men from Continental literature, plucky characters who had as strong a sense of personal style as my hustler, who were as romantic and long-lashed as a silent movie star and as streetwise as a Neapolitan shoeshine boy.

My Roberto (my hustler and my character) was quiveringly and richly fleshed, his smile soft and unfocused, his body instinct with laughter. I knew almost nothing about him but I could keep returning to my memory of having held him in my arms for a moment, and having rented an hour of his time and leased on short term the use of his torso and hips and lightly downed legs and tan arms flung back to reveal his soft, creased, axial paleness. I liked the notion behind the English term rent boy more than our hustler, since the American word suggested something dishonest and on the make.

Roberto was my first male muse, a mental snapshot I worked up into a full-dress portrait in oil. I wanted to recapture that moment I bought and present him with a portrait in words. I wanted to convey to the reader as well my fascination with the boy. I was like Caravaggio, who paints in a saint's halo behind the curly head of a street urchin with a farmer's tan and a cynical smile. In my novel an older, richer, blonder brother hires a darker, smaller kid - and discovers they are half-brothers, the offspring of the same father but of different mothers, one fair and legitimate, the other an Italian mistress.

That the book, itself, did not rise to the level of Roberto’s mystique doesn’t matter. In the novel White calls his “failed fantasy,” the fact that the narrator’s first encounter with Roberto was commerical didn’t prevent it from being rapidly “elevated to brotherhood and, finally, impossibly, to an almost marital love.”

“The title of the book was The Amorous History of Our Youth, a pedantic fusion of Lermontov's Byronic parody, A Hero of Our Times, and of The Amorous History of the Gauls, a seventeenth-century satire of the court by Roger de Rabutin, Count de Bussy, which caused this sharp-tongued cousin of Madame de Sévigné to be banished to his comely little château in Burgundy,” White confesses in that wry (and very precise) whisper that gives away the snob.

“The most poignant moment in Lady Chatterley's Lover occurs when, unannounced, her ladyship visits the gamekeeper's cottage and sees him, all unawares, washing himself in an outdoor shower.”

Like a lover worthy of his novel, White looked for Roberto on the streets the following summer—-and every other time he wound up in Chicago—but he never found him again. All that remains of Roberto is the whiff of a hot ghost in White’s convoluted, breathless, Brodkey-tuned sentence structure: “Pedantry, satire, literary ostentation, an irritating lack of sincerity - none of these faults could conceal from my eye, at least, that I was quite humbly and gratefully in love with an Italian boy I had met once who had a strangely low and almost strangled way of whispering his words into the big ear of a bespectacled American geek, his awestruck client.”

Roberto’s “awestruck client” quickly pivots into one of the self-lacerating statements that characterize his essays when White adds, “If in my novel inappropriate emotions kept firing off, all these missteps just revealed how inadequate I was to the occasion.”

True to life, true to literature, White admits the men he picked up on Times Square weren’t quite sublime. Nor were the tricks erotic. The reality lacked the heat of his fantasies because “some of these boys were too perfect”:

I liked a flaw, a wound, which acted as an opening to the communion of shared humanity. For instance, a guy named Hal lived upstairs from me and sometimes he'd drop by for sex. He had a badly mended harelip which made his taut, muscled torso and hairy chest and pale, narrow loins seem vulnerable, touching.

The most poignant moment in Lady Chatterley's Lover occurs when, unannounced, her ladyship visits the gamekeeper's cottage and sees him, all unawares, washing himself in an outdoor shower. She glances at his white, narrow hips and his thin back and he never realizes she is there. His back, so pale and thin, is wholly male and vulnerable. If, instead, a big blond showboat, perfect with a blinding smile, an ever-ready penis, came bounding up my steps, his very perfection made me feel somehow . .. orphaned.

“Young and attractive," in his thirties, White frequented the gym thrice a week, hoping to make a good impression on the johns. But the johns had other affinities, which the author analogizes to figures in a passion play or religious iconography:

That “suitable vague” St. Theresa: abject.


“Now, I'd say to myself, I'm going to write a good page.”

While employed by NYU’s New York Institute for the Humanities, White sat in a windowless cubicle and attempted to write his “novel, A Boy's Own Story, fighting the anxiety I usually felt when I wrote.” He details the writing process, the craft, if you will:

The heat and my hangover tempted me to put my head down on my desk and fall asleep. I was so sleepy I would write portmanteau words, which collapsed the syllables of two or three words I'd already sounded in my head. I even started to spell phonetically. My clothes would stick to me. I'd sigh and shift in my chair from one side to the other. One more trip to the water cooler. I'd come back and read through my latest pages and make microscopic changes. I'd sprawl on my desk. Then I'd get fed up with myself, sit up straight, as tall as possible in the chair, and I'd hold my pen as if it were a scalpel. Now, I'd say to myself, I'm going to write a good page. Usually my head was so fuzzy with the morning-after effects of wine and marijuana that I was pleased if I could form real sentences, nothing more.

"I would be horny, if that meant lonely, and anxious to such a degree that only sex could lift me out of this mire with enough immediacy and absoluteness," White says of the intervals between thinking, imagining, and writing.


“ . . . I had no notion that some people were more popular than others, much less that there were acquirable techniques to insure popularity.”

Adolescence introduced him to social scripts and revealed the strange theatre of American dating and gender performance to White. “In that paradise before I bit into the apple of social awareness, I had no idea that one could be ingratiating, seductive or even more or less likable,” he writes. He lacks the MBA techniques that teach humans how to fashion life.

I hadn't yet learned to ask flattering questions, to lead people out, to express sympathy for their pain and encouragement for their pleasures, to exonerate their failings as 'normal and declare their modest successes to be triumphs.? I am sure I was a nice enough guy and even projected a low wattage charm, but whatever glow I gave off was just the crumbling half-life of my sluggish existence. In the same way that I had no idea what I looked like and managed to stumble around ill-shod, badly dressed, unkempt and often dirty, I had no notion that some people were more popular than others, much less that there were acquirable techniques to insure popularity. Boys and girls alike were for me something like human furniture filling up rooms and corridors, as featureless as the real furniture we lived among. Just as we didn't notice the faded flowered slipcovers on sagging couches or the armchairs on which the green plush was worn down in browning patches, so we didn't see this kid or that as magnetic or repulsive. To be sure, I did fall under the physical spell of a Buster or Howie or Cam, but it seemed like a miracle if one of them liked me back.

“It never occurred to me that friendship was biddable,” White concludes.


“We revered Brecht, not Marx; Mayakovsky, not Lenin; Lotte Lenya, not La Pasionaria; both Ingmar and Ingrid Bergman; Elizabeth Taylor the actress and Elizabeth Taylor the reserved English novelist.”

He recollects the tanginess of his early New York friendships. “We arty types, especially the theater queens, were in the middle room, as if we were the intermediate sex,” White writes:

We were neither scrubbed and perky like the Greeks, nor alienated and uncombed like the Beats. We drank but didn't smoke pot, we had nothing resembling a credo beyond a faith in the permanent avant-garde. We revered Brecht, not Marx; Mayakovsky, not Lenin; Lotte Lenya, not La Pasionaria; both Ingmar and Ingrid Bergman; Elizabeth Taylor the actress and Elizabeth Taylor the reserved English novelist. Ten years later and the idea of High Culture would begin to crumble, battered by the American cult of success and the distinction-dissolving ironies of Pop Art. But in the late fifties we still believed in honorable poverty. We still thought that beauty should be difficult, that incomprehension was a first necessary step toward initiation and that time would determine irrefutably which of our current artistic developments had been the one, the only, the inevitable next one.


“I wanted to immerse myself in him, just him, his ideal essence, just as a tomb sculpture in Renaissance France always shows its subject at an ideal age, thirty-three…”

Recollecting his adoration of Stan during his senior year in college, White describes his singular project as "Stanley, seeing Stan, courting him.” For love keeps us riveted, busy, anticipatory.  “Love gives us something to do,” he writes. “It ties our days together, as if a composer had linked all the elements of the score with lightly curving legato marks, swooping from note to note like telephone wires.”

The image of Stan dressed in white on that stage never leaves White's imagination. Stan remains in that "slow-paced, deeply internal performance," animated by his own mesmerization, "as if he were slowly fermenting his own essence and getting drunk on it."

I, too, felt a bit drunk upon reading White’s tomb-analogy, burying my brain in this possibility of memory as a formal gesture that entombs while also provides the image for the iconography. “I didn't want him to be someone else, to impersonate a character,” White says of his Stan on the stage, “I wanted to immerse myself in him, just him, his ideal essence, just as a tomb sculpture in Renaissance France always shows its subject at an ideal age, thirty-three, and whether the subject died much older or younger, he must be presented as he will appear in his perfect form at the Resurrection.”


“You should hold my hand and go through this with me.”

One of his masters was also the man who broke his heart. Like the BDSM wired into their relationship, the breakup leaves White in the masochistic position. He has never felt so powerless. He weeps in his university office. He tells other professors that he doesn’t know if he can get over this. Eventually, he meets up with T, the lover, again:

It was April 12, 2004. He had on my favorite cerulean blue T-shirt. We sat knee to knee and ate beside the bar. The waiter was so solicitous, I could almost say tender, that I felt he knew this was a reconciliation. I told T Pat sarted seeing a middle-class shrink who was 'sure" T must have fet degraded and objectified' by being paid.

T: I didn't mind being paid for something I wanted to do, that was hot, earning money like a hustler, but then when I stopped wanting to do it, I resented the money."

T: I knew I wanted you to fall in love with me because I wanted to be part of your life. And, admit it, if I hadn't slept with you, you never would have thought about me twice.'

T said: 'I didn't want to feel I had to go to bed with you just to please you. That's too much like when I was a kid with my mother. I felt that if I didn't please her my whole life would fall apart and I'd lose everything. I don't want to have sex or do anything just to please someone else.'

In dialogue with T, White gives offers himself as abject, feminized self —- apologetic (I said I was sorry I was being so neurotic, crying all the time and plaguing him with my neediness.); cautious and ego-affirming (Well, the good thing is how we're talking.); critical; wounded (I noticed that my love for him had gone from being "flattering to 'a pain in the ass.'); wistful and unrealistic (I wondered if people still fell in love this way, my way. ); comparative; prone to self-diagnosis (Was it a period piece, my love for I, something akin to Sarah Bernhardt's wooden leg?); redemptive (We never talked about this honestly before, not when we were having sex); looking for a route back into a relationship ('It's like you're so strong, such a bully, you can just say matter-of-factly, "No, we won't ever have sex again" - you can say that and I nod, then I go home and suffer and why should I suffer all alone?); indignant; pathetic; (You should hold my hand and go through this with me.); bossy; controlling; pathetic; crumbly; on the edge of a stool that keeps tipping towards tears.

White envies his students who “bumped shoulders, wore each other's clothes, slept in the same bed for weeks without having sex until one drunken night it half-happened, then the next morning it took place fully.” Their casual fatalism had its own momentum: “they drifted away, cried a bit, hooked up one more time and it was over.” A brisk genre. A formal figuration vastly superior to his own “art nouveau passion.”


"Yes," he said, "that's what I believe."

“I had a small but faithful readership, and I had always placed the overall longevity of my talent, such as it was, above the success of any one book,” White says, locating himself among the minor writers.

Reflecting on the value of his own books and the question of whether he will be read, his compares his belief in the “readers in the future” to an “act of blind faith.” [“Of course people would always read things (captions, e-mails), but would they want to read long imaginative or confessional works written by writers in the past, even the recent past?”]

Following this question further, White inadvertently speaks to what it means to "be read", or how the writer approaches the imagined interlocutor by recollecting an interview with “a trendy English critic.” This critic loathed Jean Genet's novels. White’s love for Genet finally wrenched him out politeness.

"Let me get this straight,” White said to the critic, “Do you think works of art wear out? That one generation can't read the books of an earlier one? That Shakespeare has nothing to tell us now?" 

The dialogue continued:

"Yes," he said, "that's what I believe."

Suddenly all the pretensions of 'universal and 'eternal' art were called into question. I, who'd long since doubted that a 'canon' of white European male books should be read and studied by everyone, was now being asked to frame a more radical question about the relevance of a work by one generation to the next. We still hailed writers for being as original and profound and lasting as Hemingway or Flaubert, but maybe it was an empty rhetorical gesture. Maybe even libraries had a short shelf life.

No matter. I thought you, the reader of the future, the solitary twenty-year-old in Kansas, might be able to hear my voice, scratchy and bleating as it may be, as we can still hear Caruso's. Like Walt Whitman I want to excite at least one young man not yet born; the kid in Singapore or Salt Lake City who gets an erection at the thought of humiliating his teacher.

Is fiction necessary, etc . . .

The first page of Epstein’s “Is Fiction Necessary?”

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"Is Fiction Necessary?" asked critic Joseph Epstein in an essay devoted to lamenting "the strains of literary puerilism" infecting American literature. Epstein hated the fragments, the roman-a-clef is "just an autobiography trying to escape libel laws." He hated how Iowa "ruined" Vance Bourjoily. He detested the absence of point of view, novels that run on stories without "the weight of destiny" and all the modernisms written for the "permanently ageless… who will go to their graves in denim and sideburns, eternally youthful in mind if desiccated in body." 

Epstein wanted solubility— a novel with a strong arc and resolution, arousing foreplay that resulted in climax. Like many, Epstein wanted the experience of heteronormative sex from a novel.

Certainly, sexual frustration isn’t the critic’s whole story. Part of Epstein's “unnecessary fiction” fury can be traced to the blurring of genre distinctions. It is easier to critique a novel on the merits you were taught, and the merits you are teaching seem floppy when presented with literature that isn’t interested in them.

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Eugenio Montale compared the practice of literature to carving a secret amulet in order to placate the world and the gods of darkness. John Gardner (who died in a motorcycle accident) lamented the US literary scene's immaturity, and added that it was useless to keep on pretending the game wasn't a "killer's baseball." Harold Brodkey said anyone who "spent his life working to become eligible for literary immortality is a fool." — And yet, that's precisely what Brodkey did.

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"You never know if you will survive a piece of fiction," Harold Brodkey said, of the danger of writing and touching unbearable, sordid things. Perhaps we read poetry openly, defenses down, because poets are baring themselves on the page, in line with cultural expectations that the poet is one who over-feels things. Perhaps we enter their over-feeling in order to feel relief from our own. On this view, fiction’s difference is related to the reader’s expectations; we come to it with a suspiciousness, a need to be convinced. The fiction writer has to overcome this reticence on the part of the reader (less so in popular, mass-market fiction).

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Across the board, whether in fiction, poetry, or talk-shows, we demand miracles from “empathy.” The buy-in is tempting. Certainly, I wanted to believe friends would relinquish their commitment to judging mothers when they, too, became mothers. But more than half those friends greeted new motherhood with an upgraded, uber-muscular judgment. The mommy wars raged through recipes, extracurriculars, and wine clubs. The mommy wars chased outrage through the hi-drama of their own stupidity.

Yes, I used the word stupidity (utter stupidity, I should have hissed).

Yes, I’m talking about your ‘women.’

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Verisimilitude is touted as the secret ingredient to the magical power of literature to “create empathy” in the reader. But US crime shows have not made Americans more spiritually or emotionally generous—we are more paranoid, more exhausted, more afraid, more conversant with violence and weapons, more invested in intellectual crime solving as salvation and for our protection. To believe one could predict and therefore avoid one’s rape is a statement of control, not a fact about the world. In this case, a delusion is a belief that grabs the past by its balls and pretends it was otherwise.  

[Lo and behold, there I am on a screen: telling audiences, students, friends, strangers, that literature teaches us how to feel for others by imagining them. There I am, lying like my dog Radu in late capitalism.]

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How many times has the functional definition of empathy applied to what I believe my writing should be doing? At what point did I begin to believe I had the power to do this? In which instant did I anoint myself with this ‘mission’? How did doing good come to be conflated with the creation of products intended to stimulate empathy in others, as buttressed by the expectation that others would apply what they had learned from art-products in order to make the world a better place?

Elvia Wilk has written about how neoliberal philanthropy instrumentalizes compassion as "a lever to pull for spare change.” When individuals are emotionally taxed for systemic change, capitalist realism laughs.

"The system of empathy-incentivized giving perpetuates itself by creating the world in which it is necessary,” Wilks writes. And she is not lying.

Neoliberal discourse continuously invokes the power of "empathy transplant" as a solution to social problems. Those who labor as writers, artists, or designers are expected to “trigger” empathy. If we have done a good job of "triggering empathy," consumers will say the book changed their lives.

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Like other Gen X’ers, I watched Sally Jesse Raphael's “Save the Children” ad featuring the famished bodies of Ethiopian children alongside her sad, Hollywood-tweaked countenance. I remember top pop musicians linking arms to sing "we are the world” across the screens of my teens. My generation was raised on the images of distant suffering experienced by “others.” These images did not prevent the rise of committed xenophobia and racist political platforms eager to keep “others” out.

One might even argue that Americans cannot stand seeing suffering—they feel it as a personal violation of their Thanksgiving turkey-massacres. One might argue, for example, that we pay therapists to help us create “boundaries” against the suffering of others, and these boundaries are instrumental in fashioning new markets for exclusion, new weapons for protection, new lists of ‘trauma-prevention’ strategies that double as superstitions.

Every image of suffering is deployed doubly, and thrown back against those depicted as a form of “weakness” or failure. Antiabortion activists assail communities with the images of terminated fetuses. They call it ‘murde’r and then put the photo of murder on a T-shirt in order to demonstrate their sensitivity, or their heart for, unborn life. But it is gruesome really, this “heart for unborn life.” It is as gruesome as the countless boundaries we’ve erected in order to protect the lies from which we fashion our own victimhood.

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“Suspicion” is the belief that one is being lied to or secretly manipulated. The suspicious demand physical evidence and photographs of the gang rape. The demand to see in order to believe is generated, nourished, and developed daily by media.

"The empathy machine…works insofar as it is a trauma machine," Wilk writes. Virtual reality aims to cure trauma through exposure and desensitization. Rather than integrating trauma into life, virtual reality sets it apart and focuses on its eradication. 

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My friend told me the hardest part of the Iraq war was the video games he had to play back in the US, as part of his training, prior to being sent abroad. The desensitization to shooting, and the continuous game of it. "Something in me broke,” he said. "I can't talk about killing or what it means—all of that feels so surreal to me."

The words surreal comes up again and I am thinking about tripping.

“It’s comforting for me to play those games,” my friend adds. “It’s the closet I can come to feeling innocent again, or remembering a self before any of it was real.”

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Not everyone who drinks will become an alcoholic. Not everyone who plays intense first person shooter games will lose the connection between reality and fantasy and become desensitized to human lives. But some will. Some will become alcoholics. Some will become addicted to violence and endorphins. Some will become mass shooters. Some will become better soldiers. Perhaps we waffle on acknowledging this because we want to protect our own access to pleasurable diversion. One suspects we already know the blatantly obvious, namely, the alcoholic abuse and video game abuse are stories of relationships, stories about time, frequency, duration, and investment. Someone who drinks on Saturdays (like someone who games on Saturdays) doesn't have the time to develop an unhealthy relationship with their entertainment. Even if Saturdays are desensitized, six other days of the week draw them back into life among feeling persons, among the suffering and reality.

Yes, I suggested that playing video games is not comparable to the difficult banality of caring for living, breathing humans with complicated needs in a culture that monetizes demands. No, I did not make an argument capable of proving this.

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I’m drawn to how Elvia Wilk outlines the grotesque "relationship between individual suffering and the systems that create it – between the personal story and the statistic." Empathy isn't a crowd behavior, it is an internal feeling that varies across minds, cultures, genders and languages. The “identifiable victim effect” demonstrates that people are more likely to help others when they have a face and a name, but the face and the name also matter. People are more likely to donate money to someone who looks like them or meets their aesthetic standards of attractiveness.

When people use the phrase “Pain Olympics”, I think of the word pageant, that noun for the competition of peacockery in which the most charismatic and beautiful human “wins”. Neoliberalism assumes people will do good if they see the light, get wild, or have a transformational event. There are multiple industries, workshops, retreats, consultants, modules which can lead to those transformational events if one has enough money to afford the transaction. But how much pixelated suffering does it take to create a feeling that leads to action?

Once again, we return to the trauma machine, the goal of causing hurt in order to make others feel ethically. Susan Sontag wrote about this, her writings on pain flatten talk about how pain flattens and ruins humans. I'll abstracted pain create a sort of attic aesthetic of misery in which the view were takes all the experiences of child abuse to be mirrored in that one iconic celebrity image. "To speak of reality becoming a spectacle," Sontag writes, "universalizes the viewing habits of a small, educated population living in the rich part of the world, when use has been converted into entertainment."

Granted, she wrote this before it major news venues like Fox and CNN officially became infotainment.

"There are hundreds of millions of television watchers who are far from inured to what they see on television,” Sontag snaps, “They do not have the luxury of patronizing reality.”


On Nigerian English.

This beautiful poem by Hussain Ahmed.

1

“I speak Nigerian English,” Romeo said nonchalantly, on the first cold day of this year.

We were on a college campus in Kansas. The door to our left had a sign reading no guns or smoking on campus. We stood next to it and smoked cigarettes in the rain.

Although I heard Romeo’s comment, I’m not sure I understood it until several months later, when Romeo, Hussain, and I stood on a college campus in Mississippi and prepared to enter a building for a panel. The reading series was titled “Othered”, and I wasn’t sure how my own experiences as a white, Eastern European immigrant fit into the conversation.

At one point, Romeo and Hussain switched from American into Nigerian English, their voices softening. The language passed like a jazz brush warmly between them.

I didn’t understand a single word of it. But it sounded like home.


2

Inside the building, we read poems — Saddiq introduced a conversation with Nietzsche that remains in my head; Hussain invoked the sacred and the poetics of speaking into ancestry; both provoked interiority and thoughtfulness— I don’t remember what I read. Then we sat on the stage for a conversation led by the brilliant Olufunke Ogundimu, and I struggled to balance the self who writes with the self who would rather disappear. Public conversations always involve this tension, this struggle between the ebullient Alina and the Alina who feels most herself in a notebook, thinking about what others are saying while disappearing into text.

At one point, Saddiq spoke about Islam and his own relationship to Arabic, which he acknowledged as a “colonial language.” He spoke about the Nigerian self that exists between histories of colonization and erasures of distinction. He gestured towards hybridity as it means of remaining whole, or fashioning a livable self that can link the experience of being a Muslim Nigerian immigrant and a Black American professor.

Smiling, shaking his head, Saddiq recounted having been in Walmart when he learned that a niece had been born back home in Nigeria. He was walking between aisles and congratulating his family on the new baby. “Allahu Akbar!”, he exclaimed. “God is the greatest.” “What a blessing.” “God is good.” These are the phrases that people of faith often use when something tremendous is granted. And a baby is something tremendous anywhere in the world.

Suddenly, the space in Wal-Mart grew quieter. Saddiq noticed a white man staring at him, a gun strapped to his hip.

This moment—the moment when one looks up from the world of one’s first language and family to perceives the self as written by American scripts, as read by their limited stereotypes, as displaced by their wary eyes—is resonant. I mean: the world rumbles a bit around you.

The poet steps back to survey the self and make it friendly to the man with a gun.

The writer straddles the space between selves.

The immigrant begins the long process of translation that marks the apology for the homeland self, the “other” one is to beloveds.

The fear of being misunderstood exists in relation to the knowledge of violence; the quickness with which misunderstanding escalates into a threat for the American who loves to order his favorite Mexican food in Spanish but cannot stand a language that does not exist to him.

I don’t have words for how the shape of a room collapses when you realize that you are the danger. And how frightening it is— how terrifying— to discover that you are most threatening when you exist as yourself, in that mouth between languages, in the faith and culture that formed you.


3

That night, we went out to dinner at a lovely Italian restaurant. The writers moved between American and Nigerian English, or Nigerian Pidgin. Saddiq’s young daughter moved between laps and doodled on paper as the adults spoke. She smiled to herself and named her drawings. I was enchanted by her sweetness. Again, there was this strange sensation of feeling at home in a foreign language, or feeling safe in this space where the voices rose and fell in Pidgin, and the faces loosened as their bodies took on the intonation and gestures.

Were they recognizing themselves in it?

It felt as if I was being permitted to recognize them more completely, more fully, aware of what belonged to them—-what existed that remained unknowable—but grateful to see them in this fullness.

There was also a sense in which a homeland was being negotiated and created over pasta, salad, wine, and water. A communion. An encounter in being present as diasporas meet one another within the syntax of their native language.

In my experience, when I (rarely) begin to speak Romanian in the same room as an American, the American immediately takes offense. Perhaps we of the US are predisposed to expect our neocolonial colonial language gets over every border, into every room, and grants us access to any conversation on the planet. Perhaps there is something of the ugly American in this expectation . . .


4

At the restaurant table, the Nigerians took up controversial issues about publication and patronage in their diaspora. They did not chit-chat. They did not practice “active listening” or engage therapeutic modalities in order to communicate. They simply argued, debated, threw up their hands, laughed, and returned to underline earlier points relentlessly. I adored them. The restaurant felt passionately intellectual and Nigerian, and the intensity less fake or performative than the plastic version of American conversational intimacy where nothing is said and everything is expected.

In 1994, Edward Said told a British audience that “the intellectual is beset and remorselessly challenged by the problem of loyalty.” Loyalty provides access to status in diasporas. “An insider” must promote national interests in public, Said continued, but the intellectuals “should be the ones to question patriotic nationalism” and challenge “corporate thinking.” By corporate thinking, Said was referring to the political We, the rhetorical We that presumes to speak for others by nature of its status and expertise.

The diasporic We is complicated. (At present, I am obsessed with Momtaza Mehri’s Bad Diaspora, a poetry collection that pushes against what we owe the We, and how loyalty is constructed across borders.) But the facility of the “me” is also complicated by the expectations of meritocracy and respectability.

I mean: Shame tiptoes into rooms wearing respectable slippers. My diaspora is very conscious of not offending Americanism. Even in Romanian groups and meetings, I’ve been admonished for leaping into Romanian to express something intimate in the language it wants to speak.

"Let’s not do that,” the woman from my diaspora said. “Speaking Romanian is rude to our guests.” Even when the room is limited to Romanians, we are performing for the absent West.

Romanian is rude. Or Romanians are ashamed to be seen wearing it out in public. Romanian stays in the closet between shoes like our dirty little secret.

Romeo Oriogun, Hussain Ahmed, and Saddiq Dzukogi.

5

To return for a moment to the intellectual part, the shameless, Said-inflected part: the commitment at the dinner table was to thinking aloud and to questioning the terms of existence as they have been given. The Nigerian writers were not attempting to prove their loyalty or fidelity to a flag. Nor were they rationalizing a government policy to soothe the ruffled feathers of American exceptionalism. No one used dinner as a staging ground for proving one’s worth to the US meritocracy.

Unlike the worry in diasporic silence, the sagacity of investigation set the tone for the table talk. The discussion occurred as if thinking through ideas came first, as if thinking, itself, was the endeavor worthy of loyalty.

These days, the US is hardly exceptional to anyone except the refugees and immigrants. We are the constituents of earning one’s place, whether visa or citizenship. Our sense of self is implicated in the “land of opportunity.” Our notions of success and value are indebted to it.

To quote Said again:

The intellectual is an individual endowed with a faculty for representing, embodying, ar­ticulating a message, a view, an attitude, philosophy or opinion to, as well as for, a public. And this role has an edge to it, and cannot be played without a sense of being someone whose place it is publicly to raise embarrassing questions, to confront orthodoxy and dogma (rather than to produce them), to be someone who cannot easily be co-opted by governments or corporations, and whose rai­ son d'etre is to represent all those people and issues that are routinely forgotten or swept under the rug. The intellectual does so on the basis of universal principles: that all human beings are entitled to expect decent standards of behavior concerning freedom and justice from worldly powers or nations, and that deliberate or inadvertent violations of these standards need to be testified and fought against courageously.

Let me put this in personal terms: as an intellectual I present my concerns before an audience or constituency, but this is not just a matter of how I articulate them, but also of what I myself, as someone who is trying to advance the cause of freedom and justice, also represent. I say or write these things because after much reflection they are what I believe; and I also want to persuade others of this view. There is therefore this quite complicated mix be­tween the private and the public worlds, my own history, values, writings and positions as they derive from my ex­periences, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, how these enter into the social world where people debate and make decisions about war and freedom and justice. There is no such thing as a private intellectual, since the moment you set down words and then publish them you have entered the public world. Nor is there only a public intellectual, someone who exists just as a figurehead or spokesperson or symbol of a cause, movement, or position. There is always the personal inflection and the private sensibility, and those give meaning to what is being said or written. Least of all should an intellectual be there to make his/her audiences feel good: the whole point is to be embarrassing, contrary, even unpleasant.

[…] the intellectual, in my sense of the word, is neither a pacifier nor a consensus-builder, but someone whose whole being is staked on a critical sense, a sense of being unwilling to accept easy formulas, or ready-made cliches, or the smooth, ever-so-accommo­dating confirmations of what the powerful or conventional have to say, and what they do. Not just passively unwillingly, but actively willing to say so in public.


6

“God bless you,” the grocery store clerk said while ringing up my groceries at Piggly Wiggly today.

In Alabama, “God bless you” is like the quarter one drops in a parking meter to follow the rules of appropriate behavior. No one reaches for a gun when God comes up. Presumably, American Jesus, himself, armed the South with guns in order to prepare for his second coming.

“God bless you” is part of a language that crosses races, including Black persons as well as white ones, and makes itself known in public spaces. But to say “God bless you” in another language is to risk being seen or made visible. To be visible as a person of color speaking a foreign language is to risk being determined unintelligible.

To say God is the greatest in Arabic is to be deemed a security threat by the richest, most powerful country in the world.


7

Representations of the Intellectual by Edward Said (PDF)

“There is always the personal inflection and the private sensibility, and those give meaning to what is being said or written. Least of all should an intellectual be there to make his/her audiences feel good: the whole point is to be embarrassing, contrary, even unpleasant.”

Edward Said stayed with me on the drive home from Mississippi, and I am sharing copy of his book that celebrates the “amateur” over the expert at a time when foreign policy “experts” continue to sell us violence and war rather than visions for the future. I share it out of gratitude for the minds that met in Mississippi, as well as a relentless hope for a future that includes thinking.

And I keep the joy of that restaurant table at hand. I cherish it as a souvenir, a testament to being alive and at-home in the opening world of othered languages and the resistance to a simple, assimilated self.

“The exilic intellectual does not respond to the logic of the conventional, but to the audacity of daring, and representing change, to moving on, not standing still,” Said wrote. In different ways, each of the Nigerian writers embodied this dedication to the audacity of daring as writers and humans. I leave the scene in my mind with one final toast, a toast to the Nigerian voices, and to not selling one’s complicated self for that feeble, “exemplary” standing.


One Jesus sign, among the 7 encountered, on the drive towards Mississippi State University.

The radically-other language is the imagined one.

The child in an imaginary language.

An imaginary language critiques the adult world by refusing its grammar, lexicon, and syntax. In borrowing from the language of children, an invented mother-tongue supplies a fantastic rejection of the insolubility posed by “mature” framing and discourse.

I’ve been thinking about  Janice Eidus' short story, "Robin's Nest," and the percussive intonations of "innocence" in the language of a childhood narrator attempting to deal with the legacy borne by words. When her father's language and explanations fail to describe the mystery of her mother, she formulates new words to explain her mother's silence. The invented language of Ooola offers hope against the authoritarian father, whose authority is maintained by manipulating language. 

Oola, the alternative language, presents inventing and imagining as a form of resistance. During the day, the father makes money as a plastic surgeon. The daughter fears being "sculpted" by him. He makes no secret of his will. 

"Instead of a nose job, I would give your mother a mind job," he tells her. The  man's purpose is to fix the female, the ailing anti war hippie he thinks he saved. 

"A mind job hurts," the narrator thinks. "It pushes words down into your brain." She seeks a text she can read, a language in which she can find herself outside her father's violence. Male violence is the story of creation that the narrator needs to refuse in order to create herself, another story. She envisions her mother's silence as a vessel holding back magic. Envisioning this carves a space within her lineage, within her inheritance, where the daughter can speak outside the words owned by men. Feminism as a means of giving voice, passing mike. 

The harm done by language is both social and personal. The valence is an echolocation, as one sees in the consideration of pretty words, as the narrator wonders if they should add "amnesty" to their private language? Will they keep its meaning or use it to describe something else?

How do we define relational responsibility to our children when we represent their narratives and identities in poems? 

Who narrates the story of the “foreign” orphan?

How is power demonstrated, communicated, and solidified in the narrative choices made by magazines, journals, and academic publishers?

What do "autonomy and consent mean in the context of lived relationships and memorial tributes?

Who, historically, has been more impacted by the privatization and erasure of parenting labor and experience?

*

In For Your Own Good, Alice Miller examines the pedagogical assumptions of corporal punishment (a.k.a. spanking). The final paragraph reads:

Turning away from the truth will never help us preserve love, and the love we have for our parents is no exception. The act of forgiveness will not help as long as it serves to disguise the facts. For love and self-delusion are mutually exclusive. The disavowal of truth, the denial of the sufferings we have been through, is the breeding ground for the kind of hatred that gets deflected onto innocent victims. It is an act of self-deception and an impasse from which there is no way out. Genuine love can face up to the truth.

Implicit in this, the claim that “genuine love” does not face the truth from the safe, protected (arguably cowardly) space of defensiveness.

If Miller has spent a lifetime moving into, around, and through Womanism, the child has been central to her concerns. Paths of Life, for example, explores how confronting our experiences of childhood enable to us to live more richly into the future. How the home environment and emotional relationships we experience prime us for the way we live out our own lives. The neural pathways are thickened with us, programming us to experience the same lives as our parents unless we engage in self-reflection.

Anika tries to talk to her mother about the way in which she felt forced to keep her feelings a secret as a child. She says it is difficult to love yourself when a mother “finds your longing for contact, truth, understanding to be annoying, personally offensive, or even actively dangerous”. I think of the televisions blaring in all the rooms of the American home, offering pretexts to discuss things further from our hearts, further from the thick of things.

For Anika, this disdain for emotions is not something easily shaken off. She explains: “...gradually you arrive at the unconscious conviction that you have to suppress these cravings for any kind of connection if you want to get along with people”. When others suffered, Anika tried to find ways in which it might be her fault. This gave her a means of alleviating the lack of control without giving in to the taboo empathy.

Still proper in her older years, Anika’s mother is disturbed by this encounter. Her response is mainly one of fear- “fear of genuinely understanding the connections Anika was trying to show existed between their two lives”. Anika’s mother can’t break free from the lies she has lived by in order to draw close to her daughter. For her, the price is too high.

Margo and Lilka fear recognizing one another because, to do so, they will need to recognize the part of themselves back when they were friends in prewar Warsaw. The sounds of names breaks down the barrier to memory. Margo admits she married her first husband without loving him because her father told her “love and real life were two different things”. After he died in the Shoah, she took his mantra of love being an illusion without question. Later, while active in the Polish resistance movement, Margo met a man named Janek and fell in love. She felt this “as a return to my own self, to my first love, a love that I had been unfaithful to”. 

The chapter “Gurus and Cult Leaders” points to the importance of finding suppressed memories opening a void of interpretation. Gurus and cult leaders open these doors and insinuate themselves as the answer. Children who have been raised in families where obedience was “enforced” and the father’s authority was never predicated on whether he deserved to wield it or not are prey to cultish religious groups. Miller rejects the Freudian concept of infantile sexuality, which she thinks masks the consequences of sexual abuse in children. Rather than acknowledge their victimhood as children, Freudians and Reichians insist it is natural, a part of growing up- what every child needs to become an adult. 

The open, unquestioning psyche of the child enables them to accept sexual abuse as a kind of “surrogate emotional nourishment”. Miller says “that first, unquestioning love of our parents is so deeply rooted that hardly anything can destroy it, and certainly not insight into the truth.” Since kids can’t understand why someone they love would injure them, they reinterpret that behavior as right. In this way, “cruelty is given a positive valuation in the child’s cognitive system, and that valuation will be retained for life.”

One way in which adults deny the violence done to them as children and continuing the cycle of abuse burned so deep in their brains is through “sophisticated ideological justifications” which “allow them to pass it off as a good thing”. Miller notes that “the less inclination they show to recognize and revise this ingenious self-delusion, the more likely it is that others will be made to suffer the consequences.”

Miller came to this view after studying the childhoods of mass murderers and dictators, in her words:

All of them without exception were exposed to the horrors born of hypocrisy, and all of them ignored or denied the fact in later life. […] The atmosphere of hypocrisy they grew up in taught them to see cruelty as something good and useful.

…

A child battered and humiliated in the name of parental ‘care’ will quickly internalize the language of violence and canting insincerity and come to see it as the only effective medium of communication.

The “knowing witness” is defined as a person who actively helps them to recognize the wrong done to them for what it is and to articulate their sorrow for what has happened. Miller’s view resorts to the Freudian subconscious in order to explain why cycles of violence continue, namely, parents abuse their own kids in ways that repeat their own childhood abuse because feelings are stored in the “form of unconscious memories”. In turn, the unconscious memories “drive them to reproduce those repressed scenes over and over in the vain attempt to liberate themselves from the fears that cruelty and abuse have left with them.”

This is a ‘false’ liberation because “the effects of the past don’t change as long as they remain unnoticed”. The perpetrator goes in search of new victims, projects fear and hatred onto new scapegoats, and thus keeps himself from coming to term with the memories and feelings.

Notably, “liberation” is still at stake in Miller’s metaphysics. Although “liberation” feels limpid to me, Miller’s insights on avowing one’s anger are salient:

As long as the anger directed at a parent or other first caregiver remains unconscious or disavowed, it cannot be dissipated. It can be taken out only on oneself or stand-ins, on scapegoats such as one’s own children or alleged enemies. The variety of hatred that masquerades as religious ideological zeal is particularly dangerous because it’s imperviousness to moral categories makes it unassailable.

When personal hatred is attributed to a divinity, it cannot be discussed except as a means of refusing to be accountable for the feeling itself. The scapegoating of a god occurs in tandem with scapegoating of minorities and vulnerable persons.

*

How can poets address issues of social justice like ableism and economic privilege without speaking to the evidence garnered from their lived experience as parents? 

Henri Lefebvre thought habit memory was a key to how children assumed the identity of a social group. "Dressage" includes the combat boots of the 1990's as well as other historically-specific socializations in fashion and self-presentation. There is the sense that we knew who we were then—or that knowing the self was easier.

*

What does it mean to designate an entire portion of one's life (i.e. parenting) as unacceptable in writing? Or to designate, for example, the neurodivergence of one's child, as an "unacceptable" topic in literature?

Dr. Harlow’s experiments in the 1950’s showed that animals raised by artificial "robot" mothers later turned aggressive and showed no interest in their own offspring. They were primed for limited interaction.

Studies suggest that obedience training established in early infancy "stunts the development of such human capacities as compassion and pity for the sufferings of others". The learned behavior involves ignoring suffering and assessing the self in relation to rule-following ability. It has been suggested that children raised to perform obedience develop into adults that find it difficult to express, inhabit, or permit emotion when confronted with misfortune or tragedy.

*

A few questions for writers thinking through the currency of violence, the sheer cash of it, the money money money and power and glory violence promises . . . and the notebooks in which we can permit ourselves to ask difficult questions about our own roles in the transactions of liberation:

  1. List the lies you remember living in order to make a childhood “safe.” Or list the lies you saw friends living. Note how the lie was understood differently by the child and the adult. Which verbs made things actionable? Which verbs were deemed “appropriate”?

  2. How did “Freudian” notions of sexuality impact the childhood in question? What is relationship between trust and sexual self in your mind, in the self-narrations that sustain your concept of selfhood?

  3. Are there any correlations between having been physically abused or spanked and believing war to be a just and reasonable means of resolving difficult problems? Are there any anecdotes that challenge this association?

  4. Which ideas and/or systems of belief were involved in your socialization? For example, "might makes right"; pledge of Allegiance; flag worship; anti-Muslim xenophobia; highly gendered household roles; Christian misogynies, neoliberal meritocracy; bootstrap exceptionalism, etc.

*

Finally, loosely, to puncture the balloon a bit more, how do neoliberal notions of property, privacy, and ownership inflect our notions of "propriety" in writing?

What happens if one tries to write about the vapidity that is contemporary mothering?

Rachel Cusk on writing A Life’s Work about the strange silences of motherhood


How (if at all) do these questions implicate the failures of feminism and intersectionality in American poetics historically and at present? And to whom does it matter?

On the intelligibility of images.

[ ]

I don’t know how to sleep anymore. Ruined buildings and bodies reach across screens. When closing my eyes, I hear women screaming, mothers wailing, the word precision.

As if trapped in a film reel, sentenced to repetition, the mind keeps whirring back to the period immediately after the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. In public spaces, paranoia spilled from grief, suspicion was fueled by fury; loyalty (as constructed by shifting notions of "patriotism") became the defining point of attack. 

The birth of the Department of Homeland Security.

The word homeland.

The word security.

The chorus of flags. The desire for revenge. The sheer horror of the building debris. The images of humans searching for bodies in the rubble.

What does it mean to be intelligible to another in such contexts? What is the purpose of art?

[ ]

Brief recollections from my life in DC return:  the official Islamophobia turning heads on the sidewalk; the sudden salience of "looking Muslim"; the language of threat; the abstract "homeland security"; the shape of the Pentagon. 

It is 2:13 am and I have given up on falling asleep. It is impossible to avoid meeting memories on the terrain they carved in the brain. My dog snores as I watch documentaries.

In the documentary video narrating the "story of Flight 77," the camera follows an FBI agent with cropped brown hair as she describes walking through the scorched and blackened part of the West Wing. Pieces of airplane metal curled into ribbons and scattered between building materials. In the disaster, the agent is "struck" by the presence of a simple, white sailors hat, a singular object that managed to remain completely white in all the dirt.

The camera flashes to a staged reconstruction of what the agent is describing; the stark contrast between the color white and the gray dust, charred metal, and building parts, is emphasized. 

The agent speaks slowly, says it was almost as if "the hat had been dropped from the sky"— or had come after— even though nothing could have come after, since the agent is the first human permitted to walk through this area. 

The uncanny white hat becomes a memorial image, a strange memorialization. The memorial form implicates us in its mental construction rather than its physical staging. The mind is summoned to preserve the ruinscape with the white hat.  

It was strange, the agent adds. It was one of "those things that sort of stand out because they don’t make sense."


[ ]

In cinematography, "directing the eye" refers to using frame composition, camera movement, or lighting to make clear what is most important in the frame. 

The light settles on a man in a suit sitting at a large desk. The completely white hair on the man's head argues with the dark wood walls behind him. He is talking about a red shoe.

"Such a stark color, the red in that gray scene, that it stood with me," he tells the camera. A tiny white mustache sits above his upper lip, motionless. There are no extraneous gestures. 

"What stood out for me was a single, red, high-heeled shoe."

The man says the shoe was in the middle of one of the Pentagon's completely demolished corridors. 

The shoe was very red, unpaired, totally alone. Its partner was never found. 

The man wonders if the shoe was left by a woman trying to escape. He uses the word "running": was she running out of the building?  

The shoe is the thing which is left behind. Alternately, the shoe is the thing that was blown off. The shoe has a story about what happened in the last minutes of a life, but the shoe will not speak.


[ ]

Near the end of Plato's Phaedrus, Socrates ponders the difference between writing and speaking. He quotes an Egyptian god as saying that the invention of script damages the power of memory in those who write. Then he criticizes writing for its failure to take part in conversation, or to dialogue.

A text is like a painting, Socrates suggests, and it can bring images and ideas but it shouldn't be taken seriously, since the "true" writing is written upon the heart.


[ ]

Walter Benjamin recounts a story from the third book of Herodotus's Histories. For Benjamin, this story shows us the "nature of true storytelling" as distinguished from information or data:

The value of information does not survive the moment in which it was new. It lives only at that moment; it has to surrender to it completely and explain itself to it without losing any time. A story is different. It does not expend itself. It preserves and concentrates its strength and is capable of releasing it even after a long time. 

A story does not expend itself. 


[ ]

In 2021, a giant red stiletto appeared in Santa Barbara. It was visible from the northbound lanes of the 101 just above Ventura. Local news media tried to solve the “mystery of the red stiletto.”


[ ]


[ ]

“A work of art is a form that articulates forces, making them intelligible.”

And there are so many red shoes now.

There are so many white hats.

There is violence upon violence: “things that sort of stand out because they don’t make sense."

There are shoes, hats, hostages, mass murder, bombs, men in uniform, state officials, retirees increasing their investment portfolios to focus on bombs and weapons—and behind this, behind the atrocities and events, behind the social trauma, behind the families grieving alone, there is that lie called homeland security.



[ ]

Dear friends, fellow humans, friends and strangers, I beg you to imagine a future that risks being radically different from the failures of the present.

I encourage you to continue writing, creating, thinking, protesting, hugging, honoring, memorializing, and bearing “with-ness” to the human condition.

Each morning
I wake
in the shape
of an ancient
song: weapon
desperate
to betray its
design.

I implore you to read Mosab Abu Toha’s “Ceasefire Cento” —