Search Results for: The Believer

Reading List

Here are a few notes about the major pieces of writing I refer to in “Between the Wolf in the Tall Grass and the Wolf in the Tall Story.” I’ve provided links to those you can find online.
–Scott Korb

* * *

McCarthy, Cormac. “The Kekulé Problem.” Nautilus. Apr. 20, 2017.

While writing the talk, I read this essay by Cormac McCarthy on the origin of language. Though I make no direct reference to “The Kekulé Problem” in my discussion, the idea that the unconscious exerts some moral pressure on us was rattling around while I wrote and provides a basis for the arguments.

I. The Smartest Person in the Room

  • Pollan, Michael. “An Animal’s Place.” The New York Times Magazine. Nov. 10, 2002.

    For as long as I’ve been teaching food writing, I’ve brought this essay to my students; even after the ideas contained in Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma became too mainstream to teach, this essay, chapter seventeen in the book, still contains surprises.

  • Bloom, Paul. Against Empathy: The Case for Radical Compassion. Ecco, 2016.

    A student introduced me to Bloom’s work after conducting an interview with him for Guernica Magazine in February 2016, while he was at work on Against Empathy. “Between the Wolf in the Tall Grass and the Wolf in the Tall Story” begins, in part, in a reading of Bloom’s book.

  • Coetzee, J.M. Elizabeth Costello. Viking, 2003.

    Of all the books I’ve taught over my career, this one has probably gotten the most play and is among my favorite novels. Coetzee’s ideas appear in much of my writing and I’ve seen no better or more inspiring defense of the boundless sympathetic imagination than in Elizabeth Costello.

II. A Little Boy in the Dark

  • Jamison, Leslie. “The Empathy Exams,” “The Devil’s Bait,” “Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain.” The Empathy Exams. Graywolf, 2014.

    Giving Up the Ghost.” Harper’s, Mar. 2015.

    Perhaps no one has had more, or better, to say about empathy in recent years than Leslie Jamison, and this talk in general owes a great deal to the work I refer to. Jamison has, over the years, become a friend in part through the conversations we’ve had, both in private and in public, about how to write about pain.

  • Korb, Scott. “Good for You.” Virginia Quarterly Review. Winter 2016.

    You can read this essay if you want. (Editor’s note: I think you should. It’s worth your time.)

III. As Weightless as All Others

  • Gornick, Vivian. The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative. FSG, 2001.

    This is among the very best and most influential craft books available. Beyond arguing that writers of personal narratives must “fashion a persona out of one’s own undisguised self,” Gornick establishes a difference between the situation, “the context or circumstance, sometimes the plot,” and the story, “the emotional experience that preoccupies the writer: the insight, the wisdom, the thing one has come to say.”

  • Heti, Sheila. How Should a Person Be?. Henry Holt, 2012.

    In one sense, Heti’s work makes the strongest — most aggressive — case against empathy of any of those included in the essay. We must kill it! For her, a boundless capacity to empathize threatens our very ability to know ourselves and our desires.

  • Scarry, Elaine. “The Difficulty of Imagining Other People.” For Love of Country, edited by Martha C. Nussbaum and Joshua Cohen. Beacon, 2002.

    This essay by Scarry, a response to Martha Nussbaum’s defense of cosmopolitanism, contains this terrifying line, which she italicizes in the original: “the human capacity to injure other people is very great precisely because our capacity to imagine other people is very small.”

IV. Between the Wolf in the Tall Grass and the Wolf in the Tall Story

  • Nabokov, Vladimir. “Good Writers and Good Readers.” Lectures on Literature. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980.

    I first taught this piece in a class about rereading and rewriting called “Returnings,” mainly because of Nabokov’s claim that “one cannot read a book: one can only reread it.” Here Nabokov says we must “notice and fondle details” — turn them over and over, rereading them, I suppose — and he upends the notion that many students bring to classes I teach: that the best books are those containing characters we can relate to.

  • Pamuk, Orhan, “My Father’s Suitcase,” Nobel Lecture, Dec. 7, 2006.

    I’m largely interested in Pamuk’s ideas of a second self, animated not by the imagination but by the generosity of another power, largely because the process of writing makes him ecstatically happy. My own project on ecstasy is currently in the works.

  • Lopez, Barry. “The Invitation.” Granta, Nov. 2015.

    Much of this short essay I quote in the talk. I won’t say more here than go read it.

Essay

Between the Wolf in the Tall Grass and the Wolf in the Tall Story

 

“It’s hard to escape the conclusion that the unconscious is laboring under a moral compulsion to educate us.”

—Cormac McCarthy, “The Kekulé Problem,” Nautilus, April 20, 2017

I. The Smartest Person in the Room

I often say that one of the great pleasures of teaching — writing, or any such thing I teach — is that in front of a room of students, a captive audience, I have a few hours almost every day to work out ideas I’m puzzling over with smart people who are ostensibly there for many of the same reasons I am: to puzzle over ideas. Students don’t always know that’s what we’re doing; they often think I have the answers — and with the simplest questions I often do: yes, you should feel free to write with the word “I” — see, I do.

But more often that not, I don’t have the answers, or, my thoughts on a matter are shifting, still in motion. Ten years ago, I might have tried to hide this fact from my students, if I even recognized it then at all; I might have made it seem like I knew definitely more than I did — or do — in the fear of losing my authority in the lecture hall. I might have avoided certain lines of inquiry — steered the conversation down safer paths — because I couldn’t be sure where we might end up, which may have been in a place where a student knew more than I did, or where I might have simply to say, I don’t know, without the wherewithal or the experience to trust this group of people I was with to figure out something new, together. Without the awareness that I don’t know is probably the most exciting place we can be both in the classroom and in a life of writing, too. So here goes.

‘I don’t know’ is probably the most exciting place we can be both in the classroom and in a life of writing, too.

Once, long ago, teaching an essay I had never taught before — but one I now feel like I know like the back of my hand, Michael Pollan’s 2002 “An Animal’s Place” — I reached a point in the conversation with students known as Awkward Silence. I looked up from the head of the seminar table. Blinks. The shuffling of papers. This was before the ubiquity of smartphones, so they weren’t ignoring me with those yet. I looked back down to the essay. My heart sank — then raced. My mouth went dry. Perhaps you know this feeling. Perhaps you can relate, empathize. Back to the essay, maybe I read aloud:

It can be argued that human pain differs from animal pain by an order of magnitude. This qualitative difference is largely the result of our possession of language and, by virtue of language, an ability to have thoughts about thoughts and to imagine alternatives to our current reality. The philosopher Daniel C. Dennett suggests that we would do well to draw a distinction between pain, which a great many animals experience, and suffering, which depends on a degree of self-consciousness only a few animals appear to command. Suffering in this view is not just lots of pain but pain intensified by human emotions like loss, sadness, worry, regret, self-pity, shame, humiliation and dread.

I looked back to my students. Still nothing — from me or them.

“Excuse me,” I said, just barely holding onto my vision — it was fading fast — and I fled the room. I was gone for about five minutes and returned with a Tropicana and a Kind Bar, blaming it all on my blood sugar — not shame, humiliation or dread, though I certainly felt all that. We went on. Class dismissed. The semester ended. I survived.

* * *

In fall, 2016, I taught a superb group of undergrads in a journalism class. One of the students, a woman in her first year of college, had written a piece that was being workshopped, and another, perhaps the most generous workshopper in the room — our best reader and our best writer, simply because he’d just read and written more — was looking for something else from the essay, for the author to go deeper into the story of the scam, to stop skating the surface of New York City’s store-front astrologers. These are things we often hear in writing workshops: go deeper, stop skating. After some keen insight, the workshopper said to his classmate, “Look, you’re the smartest person in the room, that’s clear. But — ”

Whatever followed the “but” I didn’t hear — he said something useful once again, and class proceeded. We workshopped another essay. The woman’s final piece was better than the original, based on the suggestions he and others made during class. She went deeper. That’s how it’s supposed to be. But did you catch what he said? “You’re the smartest person in the room, that’s clear.” Quite a compliment. And he didn’t mean only that she was smarter than the other students in the room; he meant she was the smartest person, period. Me included. I sat there. I did not panic. I did not flee. He was not wrong.

In any case, I use this introduction to get at something I’ve been considering — or, really reconsidering — sometimes with students, sometimes on my own, sometimes in my writing, about empathy and its place in our creative work. I’ve long believed empathy is essential to what we do when we write — that we engage our ability to feel with, or, as psychologist Paul Bloom puts it in his recent book Against Empathy: that you can come “to experience the world as you think someone else does.” Bloom’s not talking about writing, really, but his definition, and my own summary — the act of feeling with — as I say, has long shaped my own thinking about how I write, and probably how I have taught others how to write.

But here’s what happened. I often teach — and often make mention of in my writing — the novel Elizabeth Costello, by South African writer J.M. Coetzee. This is a thing I did in the spring, 2017. In two central chapters of the book — “The Lives of Animals,” Parts One and Two — the title character, an Australian novelist, lectures on animal suffering at a fictional Appleton College, in an American town called Waltham. She draws controversial comparisons about the citizens of Waltham, who sit by and do nothing while industrial farms carry out “an enterprise of degradation, cruelty and killing which rivals anything the Third Reich was capable of, indeed dwarfs it.” Written here in the limited third person, assuming the consciousness of Elizabeth Costello’s son, John, this section of the novel includes several long quotations from Costello’s lectures, including this, in which she justifies her own authority, as a novelist, to speak in philosophical terms about the lives of animals:

“Despite Thomas Nagel, who is probably a good man, despite Thomas Aquinas and René Descartes, with whom I have more difficulty in sympathizing, there is no limit to the extent to which we can think ourselves into the being of another. There are no bounds to the sympathetic imagination. If you want proof, consider the following. Some years ago I wrote a book called The House on Eccles Street. To write that book I had to think my way into the existence of Marion Bloom. Either I succeeded or I did not. If I did not, I cannot imagine why you invited me here today. In any event, the point is, Marion Bloom never existed. Marion Bloom was a figment of James Joyce’s imagination. If I can think my way into the existence of a being who has never existed, then I can think my way into the existence of a bat or a chimpanzee or an oyster, any being with whom I share the substrate of life.”

Reading this with my class, an argument that seems to bring together aesthetics and ethics, I repeated Costello’s claim: “There are no bounds to the sympathetic imagination.” But we began that day in March to investigate whether what Costello — and perhaps Coetzee — was talking about in terms of sympathy had anything to do with what we often describe now as empathy — what Paul Bloom characterizes in his book as “everything good, … a synonym for morality and kindness and compassion,” or what we find in so much facile writing instruction nowadays, which consolidates under headlines like:

“Why Empathy is the Key to Story”

“Writing as an Act of Empathy”

“On Writing with Empathy”

Or the absolute worst: “Writing with Empathy Will Effortlessly Improve Your Business.”

All this is a simple Google search away.

But does the creative act, the aesthetic act, really depend on such a thing? Is the boundless sympathetic imagination that Coetzee believes in — meaning, the boundlessness of the creative impulse and its potential — really the same as experiencing the world as you think someone else does? Is empathy what we need to write?

Faced with the questions, I answered my students as I’m inclined to do these days when it’s true: I don’t know, I said. But we set to work trying to figure it out.

II. A Little Boy in the Dark

Of course many people know lots more than I do. Many of the people close to me — the psychologists, therapists, mediators, yogis, and pastors, there’s at least one dentist — know lots more than I do about empathy. But the conversation we had in class that day led me to say certain things I was not sure I believed — about ethics and writing and the overlap — until I found myself saying them. Like Flannery O’Connor, who says this about writing — “I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say” — it may be that I’ve found teaching leads me to say new things that I think, or, with help, can come to believe in watching their effect on people and in myself.

Here’s what we came to understand, and what I came to say, about the relationship between empathy and the sympathetic imagination: first, they’re not the same thing. And second, what I’m calling sympathy is more useful, more effective — in life and in art — than empathy.

In June 2014, my wife underwent surgery for breast cancer. The night of the surgery, which was successful, she lay asleep, still drugged I think, at NYU Langone Medical Center, about twenty blocks from our home on New York City’s East Side. Her closest friend was staying with us, taking care of our son so that I could be at the hospital throughout the day and into the evening, and the house was dark when I returned. I’d head back to the hospital first thing in the morning. I was exhausted but not exactly tired when I got home — and I’m not sure I’ve ever told my wife this — I went to a Mexican place called ¡Vamos! across First Avenue from where we live, and read in the dimmest of candle light, under booming techno music, the final essay of Leslie Jamison’s The Empathy Exams, “Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain.” Reading this essay takes about two margaritas.

I think it’s true that the act of reading, in this case, involved a kind of private longing, in my worry, to know what my wife was going through and had gone through already. Though not always the smartest guy in the room — and this reading I did may be more proof of that than anything else — I’ve always been studious, and an essay that offered a grand unified theory of female pain seemed like a good bet for someone seeking understanding, a way to empathize.

But the moment was more complicated than that, because of the performance involved: imagine me there at the bar, hunched over, straining my eyes, alone in a crowded room on a Friday night, reading, and hoping, I suppose, to draw some attention my way. Not to be talked with, but to be seen in pain, perhaps, grieving something. Under the circumstances, sort of ugly. But I was also doing the other thing — right? — seeking understanding, trying to experience the world as someone else does. Not my wife, necessarily, but someone like her — a woman, at least, in pain. And there’s also the truth of the worry, the actual grief involved in a spouse’s illness, her surgery, in visiting hours and the helplessness of having to walk away through the revolving door toward home.

Performances are complicated, which is something we learn in particular about female pain by reading Jamison, who writes, “The wounded woman gets called a stereotype, and sometimes she is. But sometimes she’s just true. I think the possibility of fetishizing pain is no reason to stop representing it. Pain that gets performed is still pain. Pain turned trite is still pain. I think the charges of cliché and performance offer our closed hearts too many alibis, and I want our hearts to be open. I just wrote that. I want our hearts to be open. I mean it.”

There’s no doubt that Leslie Jamison values empathy, and little doubt that she’s empathic — that she spends some fair portion of her life attempting to experience the world as she thinks other people do. I’m sure she tries to feel with other people. You can see it behind her reporting about sufferers of Morgellons Disease or a family who believes their son has experienced a past life. She doesn’t typically believe in these things as the sufferers do — and she’s clear that she’s not agnostic about these things — but you can imagine her trying to feel what they feel. Often in her writing, she’ll describe that act. She’ll perform empathy on the page. Here she’s concluding her essay about the Leningers, whose teenage child, they believe, fought in World War II:

Did I leave Louisiana thinking James Leininger was a reincarnated fighter pilot? No. …

Did I leave feeling that the Leiningers were sincere in their beliefs about reincarnation? Absolutely. … Something more complicated was going on with the Leiningers — and something simpler. It seemed to me that they were just a family seeking meaning in their experience, as we all do. In this case, the human hunger for narrative — a hunger I experience constantly, and from which I make my living — had built an intricate and self-sustaining story, all of it anchored by the desire to care for a little boy in the dark.

Look right in there for the signs of empathy — “as we all do,” she says, “a hunger I experience constantly, and from which I make my living.”

But is it empathy that allows her to write about the Leningers, or to write her grand unified theory? Or her essay “The Empathy Exams,” which I’ve often used as an example of how to borrow forms as a way to arrive at deeper truths than one might be able to by approaching a subject, even oneself, straight on?

Or, is it empathy that allows me to write about my wife — about whom I believe I have felt, and often feel, empathy — when I mentioned her just above, or wrote this about her illness in 2016?

My wife’s health, even after she discovered the cancer, has always been basically good. Surgery required its own recovery time, the emptying of drains, pain medication, and lots of sleep. In the weeks following the surgery, as soon as it was safe to travel, we spent some time on a California beach we love, where she thought she might recover best. She took long, solitary walks and considered her next steps, even while we both knew that, because of me and our son, she’d been stripped of choices that veered too far from what the doctors had prescribed.

Is it empathy that allows Coetzee to write this from the point of view of his character John, Elizabeth’s son, as he drives her to the airport after what’s really been a disastrous few days lecturing on animals and being lectured in return?

“Yet I am not dreaming. I look into your eyes, into Norma’s, into the children’s, and I see only kindness, human kindness. Calm down, I tell myself, you are making a mountain out of molehill. This is life. Everyone else comes to terms with it, why can’t you? Why can’t you?

She turns on him a tearful face. What does she want, he thinks? Does she want me to answer her question for her?

They are not yet on the expressway. He pulls the car over, switches off the engine, takes his mother in his arms. He inhales the smell of cold cream, of old flesh. “There, there,” he whispers in her ear. “There, there. It will all be over soon.”

Is it empathy? I’m venturing to answer no in all these cases — that while Jamison and Coetzee and I are all arguably empathic in our lives, that we may often set ourselves to the task of empathizing with others, when we write, we’re engaged in another sort of activity, tapping into a different, more expansive, more complex, mysterious — and maybe even more ethical — mode of being. Again, Coetzee calls this the “sympathetic imagination.” And soon I’ll explore why I think he means something different with this phrase than empathy.

III. As Weightless as All Others

Vivian Gornick is a writer many writing students know well, especially her book The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative. In a key passage from early in the book, in which she addresses not just personal narrative, but also poetry and fiction — which is why I’m quoting at such length — Gornick is mainly interested in what it takes to create a persona out of what’s often only of interest to ourselves.

To fashion a persona out of one’s own undisguised self is no easy thing. A novel or a poem provides invented characters or speaking voices that act as surrogates for the writer. Into those surrogates will be poured all that the writer cannot express directly — inappropriate longings, defensive embarrassments, anti-social desires — but must address to achieve felt reality. The persona in a nonfiction narrative is an unsurrogated one. Here the writer must identify openly with those very same defenses and embarrassments that the novelist or the poet is once removed from. It’s like lying down on the couch in public — and while a writer may be willing to do just that, it is a strategy that most often simply doesn’t work. Think of how many years on the couch it takes to speak about oneself, but without all the whining and complaining, the self-hatred and the self-justification that make the analysand a bore to all the world but the analyst. The unsurrogated narrator has the monumental task of transforming low-level self-interest into the kind of detached empathy required of a piece of writing that is to be of value to the disinterested reader.

“Detached empathy,” she writes — something, I’d say, like the performance of it we see in Jamison’s essays, and perhaps something like the performance I’m carrying out in this very writing while relating stories about panicking in the classroom and drinking margaritas while my wife lay alone and bandaged in the recovery ward. The persona who does all this performing, Gornick says, is vital: “It is the instrument of illumination.”

Now Gornick will use the word “empathy” elsewhere in The Situation and the Story while writing about work by D.H. Lawrence and V.S. Naipaul and the role of what she also calls “sympathy” in “imaginative writing” — in her case, sympathy for the subject one’s writing about. Lawrence fails in his essay “Do Women Change?” because, says Gornick, “There is not a single moment in the piece — not a paragraph or sentence — when the narrator sympathizes with his subject; that is, when he sees the modern woman as she might see herself, finds in himself that which would allow him to understand why she is as she is.” It’s also in this section that we find another oft-quoted moment from the book: “For the drama to deepen, we must see the loneliness of the monster and the cunning of the innocent.” And Gornick ultimately uses the two words — sympathy and empathy — somewhat interchangeably, or, she uses one to define the other: “What I mean by sympathy,” she says, “is simply that level of empathic understanding that endows the subject with dimension. The empathy that allows us, the readers, to see the ‘other’ as the other might see him or herself is the empathy that provides movement in the writing.”

And I do not disagree with her here — not really — though I like that for Gornick sympathy and imagination are set close by one another in her prose. I also like the notion that for Gornick there’s some aloofness — that detachment — to whatever empathy she’s describing as concomitant with the development of a persona, a character, or a speaking voice. Yet, the matter we were concerned with in my class that day while reading Coetzee — and still the one I’m concerned with now — is an effort to suss out the differences between the sympathetic imagination and empathy as an effort to feel with someone else.

And so back to that day with Coetzee. In her lectures on animal rights and her invocation of the death camps, Elizabeth Costello takes serious interest in what it is that makes us human, and what might disqualify us from a shared place in humanity. It’s happened before, she says, that people have been expelled:

“It is not because they waged an expansionist war, and lost it, that Germans of a particular generation are still regarded as standing a little outside humanity, as having to do something special before they can be readmitted to the human fold. They lost their humanity, in our eyes, because of a certain willed ignorance on their part. Under the circumstances of Hitler’s kind of war, ignorance may have been a useful survival mechanism, but that is an excuse which, with admirable moral rigour, we refuse to accept. In Germany, we say, a certain line was crossed which took people beyond the ordinary murderousness and cruelty of warfare into a state that we can only call sin. … Only those in the camps were innocent.”

She’ll go on to say in the lecture that those of us who ignore — who can’t know about, for our own sakes — the horrors of industrial agriculture are like those who ignored, for their own sakes, the death camps, to which she returns at the end of the lecture:

“The particular horror of the camps, the horror that convinces us that what went on there was a crime against humanity, is not that despite a humanity shared with their victims, the killers treated them like lice. That is too abstract. The horror is that the killers refused to think themselves into the place of their victims, as did everyone else. They said, ‘It is they in those cattle cars rattling past.’ They did not say, ‘How would it be if it were I in that cattle car?’ They did not say, ‘It is I who am in that cattle car.’ They said, ‘It must be the dead who are being burned today, making the air stink and falling in ash on my cabbages.’ They did not say, ‘How would it be if I were burning?’ They did not say, ‘I am burning, I am falling in ash.’

“In other words, they closed their hearts. The heart is the seat of a faculty, sympathy, that allows us to share at times the being of another. Sympathy has everything to do with the subject and little to do with the object.”

It’s here, and with Leslie Jamison in mind, that I began to explore with my students what the differences between empathy and sympathy might be. We tend to think about empathy as mirroring, both feeling and expressing one’s shared experience of pain in full awareness of all that we cannot know about the individual whose pain we’re feeling. “Empathy isn’t just remembering to say that must be really hard,” Jamison writes, “ — it’s figuring out how to bring difficulty into the light so it can be seen at all. Empathy isn’t just listening, it’s asking the questions whose answers need to be listened to. … Empathy requires knowing you know nothing. Empathy means acknowledging a horizon of context that extends perpetually beyond what you can see.”

The heart is the seat of a faculty, sympathy, that allows us to share at times the being of another. Sympathy has everything to do with the subject and little to do with the object.

Empathy sounds so eminently reasonable; it’s problem solving; and in its way — in the ways it can be tested say, part of an empathy exam — it means to reveal just how good the subject is at performing his emotions. “Empathy is a kind of care,” Jamison writes, “but it’s not the only kind of care, and it’s not always enough.”

For Sheila Heti, who has a chapter in her book How Should a Person Be? titled “What is Empathy?,” in its wake, the performed quality, and the mirroring involved in the emotion, are its greatest threats to the individual:

Forever after, though, it would be really hard to untangle how you imagined other people wanted you to behave from how you wanted to behave. How would you even know what you wanted, when at such a young age, desire had been mixed up with empathy and guilt?

How could I castrate my mind — neuter it! — and build up a resistance to know what was mine from what was everyone else’s, and finally be in the world in my own way? That endless capacity for empathy — which you have to really kill in order to act freely, to know your own desires!

Now I’m not sure I’d go that far in dissuading people from developing and deploying empathy, but it does reveal another limit, even as Heti suggests our “endless capacity” for feeling with others. (In this case, the empathy she’s describing is being extended, in her imagination, for an adult who has abused a child — more of that “loneliness of the monster” argument.) But when we consider Heti’s take on the matter — and bear in mind we’re reading her fiction — I actually think there’s really something to her rejection — her murder — of empathy and her embrace of what seems like selfishness.

Bear with me, but here’s a little more of what we realized together in our class while reading Coetzee. After puzzling over the difficult problem of whether those in the class who eat factory-raised meat might still be thought of as within the human fold, we took up Elizabeth Costello’s claim that sympathy — and so, the sympathetic imagination — has everything to do with the subject — one’s consciousness and unconsciousness, presumably — which, when we consider it in light of Heti or Jamison, sets it in stark contrast with empathy, which has the object as its focus. In this way, empathy creates a number of problems for both ethics and our writing life, I think. Consider, just for instance, one of Paul Bloom’s major criticisms of empathy in his book against it: “[Empathy] is a spotlight that has a narrow focus, one that shines most brightly on those we love and gets dim for those who are strange or different or frightening.”

If Bloom’s right, and here I think he is, what’s to say it wasn’t the spotlight of empathy — a bright focus on those they loved, that dimed for those who were strange, they who were in the cattle cars — that led to what Costello describes here?

“The people who lived in the countryside around Treblinka — Poles, for the most part — said that they did not know what was going on in the camp; said that, while in a general way they might have guessed what was going on, they did not know for sure; said that, while in a sense they might have known, in another sense they did not know, could not afford to know, for their own sake.”

For the sake of those they loved.

Bloom has studied this stuff. He calls empathy both parochial and racist, for the way it focuses on characteristics individuals share — they’re gentiles in Treblinka, say — which seems to rely on our ability to see ourselves in someone else. It’s very easy to see ourselves — to recognize our own pain — in our parents and children. Our wives. And there’s some personal relief to be found in relieving the pain of those we love with our empathy. This is selfish, and it’s also the personal reward of empathy — of which there are many: perhaps most notably, to bask in the glow of our own performed goodness.

But the selfishness Heti is talking about is different, I think, and something akin to the focus on the subject — the self — that moves Costello’s argument for sympathy forward. What Costello is interested in — and here, specifically to encourage people to extend their sympathies to animals — is to make the absolute most of the self and our creative abilities. To recognize them. To realize them. She rejects the limitations of empathy and its ever narrowing focus on the object; she rejects the centrality of reason and even emotion in our consideration of where our sympathies can and must lie; and by focusing on the subject — on what our consciousness and unconsciousness makes possible, which is boundless — identifies the only thing that matters, the only limit to our sympathies, when we consider what existences it is possible to imagine — that limit — “the substrate of life.”

And there’s some personal relief to be found in relieving the pain of those we love with our empathy. This is selfish, and it’s also the personal reward of empathy — of which there are many: perhaps most notably, to bask in the glow of our own performed goodness.

Now, Paul Bloom might say that working within this limitation, which is hardly a limitation at all, is an antidote to problems he sees with empathy. He mainly talks about concern and compassion as more diffuse and workable ethical modes. (“We do best,” though, he says, “when we rely on reason.”) And in her acts of sympathy, I like considering the ways Costello stretches an understanding of “the substrate of life”: Beyond imagining the existence of Molly Bloom, and bats and oysters and chimpanzees, Costello also imagines life beyond life — not the afterlife, but the life of the dead, her life as a corpse. And indeed, it’s her own coming death that animates many of her concerns throughout the novel, and her son John’s concerns, too — up to that last moment when, smelling cold cream and old flesh — what deathly things to notice — he says to her, “There, there. It will all be over soon.” But here is Coetzee, pushing the limit, imagining a woman who has never lived confronted with the knowledge that she will one day die.

“For instants at a time, … I know what it is to be a corpse. The knowledge repels me. It fills me with terror; I shy away from it, refuse to entertain it.

“All of us have such moments, particularly as we grow older. The knowledge we have is not abstract — ‘All human beings are mortal, I am a human being, therefore I am mortal’ — but embodied. For a moment we are that knowledge. We live the impossible: we live beyond our death, look back on it, yet look back only as a dead self can.”

Here, through a radical sort of imagining by the subject, is the absolute diminishment of the self. Sympathy for one’s own corpse, terrifying as it may be, creates a world beyond personal pain and the ability to feel with another person. In this case, sympathy is the end of empathy because it removes personal pain — the suffering self — from the equation altogether. This sort of imagining eliminates empathy in ways Bloom advocates for — echoing others like Elaine Scarry. Recognizing the difficulty of imagining other people — other real people, including those we’re close to, but more significantly, “those who are strange or different or frightening” — in an essay that, like Bloom’s work, is really about policy, Scarry describes what it might take to achieve equality between the self and the other. She proposes, as others have before her, not “trying to make one’s knowledge of others as weighty as one’s self-knowledge, but … making one ignorant about oneself, and therefore as weightless as all others.” This is the exact opposite sort of ignorance that plagued those in Treblinka who ignored the death camps.

Now, this is strange advice, perhaps, in light of all I’ve said of the necessary focus on ourselves — the subject — that sympathy requires. How can we take advantage of our boundless imagination while also striving to become ignorant of ourselves? Well, again, Scarry and Bloom are not really talking about the life of the writer. And yet, what if we look back to what Gornick advises about creating a persona? In that process, she warns of the “the monumental task of transforming low-level self-interest into the kind of detached empathy required of a piece of writing that is to be of value to the disinterested reader.” Isn’t “making one ignorant about oneself” just another way of saying that in our personal writing — or through our characters or speaking voices — we “transform low-level self-interest” into an aloofness about the self that makes possible the very self-implication or dramatic irony, or what have you, that turns life into art, our ideas into stories. Christians call this the way to salvation: dying to self.

IV. Between the Wolf in the Tall Grass and the Wolf in the Tall Story

I have a few other writers to bring up in this final section, mainly Vladimir Nabokov and Barry Lopez. One gives me the title of this talk. The other a final example of, and also an elaboration on, the boundlessness of the sympathetic imagination and the power of making oneself ignorant about oneself.

I began in the fall 2016 teaching Nabokov’s 1948 lecture “Good Writers and Good Readers,” which addresses in certain ways some of the themes I’ve been addressing so far. For instance, he talks about the relationship between the beauty of literature, its enchantments, and the moral education books can contain. He speaks too, about how reading should be done — certainly not in an effort to identify with a character in a book, but rather “with impersonal imagination and artistic delight.” (Identification, he says, is “the worst thing a reader can do. … This lowly variety is not the kind of imagination I would like readers to use.”) In what we’re all here learning and practicing to do — all of us — there’s a balance at play, he says, between the mind of the reader and the mind of the writer, the enchanter. Indeed, if you’re convinced by my claims about the relationship between detachment and the creation of art, and you either write this way already or will give it a try, Nabokov’s ideal reader will meet you halfway. “We ought to remain a little aloof,” he says, “and take pleasure in this aloofness while at the same time we keenly enjoy — passionately enjoy, enjoy with tears and shivers — the inner weave of a given masterpiece.”

But if that’s the reader’s side of things — that aloofness and detachment, not exactly absorption — where does literature come from? Nabokov offers us a version of its birth:

Literature was born not the day when a boy crying wolf, wolf came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels: literature was born on the day when a boy came crying wolf, wolf and there was no wolf behind him. That the poor little fellow because he lied too often was finally eaten up by a real beast is quite incidental. But here is what is important. Between the wolf in the tall grass and the wolf in the tall story there is a shimmering go-between. That go-between, that prism, is the art of literature.

We’ve all faced the wolf in the tall grass — or, maybe it was a bear, as we’ll soon see. Maybe it’s a panic attack; the wolf of being outsmarted by a first-year writing student; maybe it’s a spouse’s cancer; for me it’s very often the death of my father when I was a kid. Sometimes it’s our aging parents and our aging selves. I’ve recently been writing about the wolf that is my mysterious son. But, what Nabokov’s formulation suggests is that when we write literature, we must find our ways — like readers — into detachment and then remain a little bit aloof while we write, maybe a lot aloof if we’re writing a Humbert Humbert. Because neither the immediate fear of the wolf, nor the empathy we feel when we face a dying parent and smell her cold cream, is what makes for literary illumination — or, the way that what we write sheds light on the world, or the substrate of life we share. Those experiences — for the fiction writer and the poet and the factual writer alike — must pass through a prism, says Nabokov — of our minds, perhaps, or what Orhan Pamuk described in his 2006 Nobel Lecture as a sort of second self, one who revels, in a sense, and is surprised by the ignorance of the other:

As I sit at my table, for days, months, years, slowly adding words to empty pages, I feel as if I were bringing into being that other person inside me, in the same way one might build a bridge or a dome, stone by stone. … If I think back on the books to which I have devoted my life, I am most surprised by those moments when I felt as if the sentences and pages that made me ecstatically happy came not from my own imagination but from another power, which had found them and generously presented them to me.

If you feel the tension here of mixed metaphors, that’s fair enough: Nabokov is describing writing at the speed of light; Pamuk emphasizes the slowness of what we all do. But the basic point is the same, I think: our words will not shimmer without invention, without the application of what I’ve been calling, with Coetzee, the sympathetic imagination involved in building worlds. Unless our experiences are, in some way, refracted — not just felt, but transformed, by time, by a focus on the telling detail or by the selflessness involved in making ourselves weightless, by deception and invention — of worlds, of the second self — we will not produce art.

I think: our words will not shimmer without invention, without the application of what I’ve been calling, with Coetzee, the sympathetic imagination involved in building worlds.

For Nabokov, Nature provides our model. “Literature is invention,” he says,

Fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth. Every great writer is a great deceiver, but so is that arch-cheat Nature. Nature always deceives. From the simple deception of propagation to the prodigiously sophisticated illusion of protective colors in butterflies or birds, there is in Nature a marvelous system of spells and wiles. The writer of fiction only follows Nature’s lead.

And perhaps, too, does the writer of poetry, and even the factual writer — we follow, if we can, Nature’s lead, in how it deceives us and it how it reveals the truth. Because even if we can agree there may be no true stories — that all art is invention — I’m a believer in truth. Which leads me then to Barry Lopez and the bear in the woods.

In May, 2017, I was in the audience to hear a public conversation between Barry Lopez and the composer John Luther Adams. They spoke about their collaboration over the decades, their appreciation of the other’s work and processes, even the place of birdsong in their lives and art. To open the event, the actor James Naughton read a recent essay by Lopez called “The Invitation.” It was published in Granta in November 2015. Here’s how it opens:

When I was young, and just beginning to travel with them, I imagined that indigenous people saw more and heard more, that they were overall simply more aware than I was. They were more aware, and did see and hear more than I did. The absence of spoken conversation whenever I was traveling with them, however, should have provided me with a clue about why this might be true; but it didn’t, not for a while. It’s this: when an observer doesn’t immediately turn what his senses convey to him into language, into the vocabulary and syntactical framework we all employ when trying to define our experiences, there’s a much greater opportunity for minor details, which might at first seem unimportant, to remain alive in the foreground of an impression, where, later, they might deepen the meaning of an experience.

The details that come alive in this essay are mainly those describing a bear in the woods, a bear feasting on a caribou carcass. Or that’s what it seems at first. Encountering that scene, Lopez writes, “I would tend to focus almost exclusively on the bear.” But as he continues, he reveals the limitations of that approach, what might have led him, long ago, to write something called “Meeting the Bear.” What his companions knew of nature, however — what they could imagine — was that this moment was part of some vastly greater unfolding of events, what Lopez describes as an “immersion in the current of a river.”

They were swimming in it, feeling its pull, noting the temperature of the water, the back eddies and where the side streams entered. My approach, in contrast, was mostly to take note of objects in the scene—the bear, the caribou, the tundra vegetation. A series of dots, which I would try to make sense of by connecting them all with a single line. My friends had situated themselves within a dynamic event. Also, unlike me, they felt no immediate need to resolve it into meaning. Their approach was to let it continue to unfold. To notice everything and to let whatever significance was there emerge in its own time.

If you read this essay, you’ll see notes within about the desire to come to know a place deeply — and to be known, in return, by that place and to feel a sense of belonging. Lopez offers rules to live and write by: pay attention, be patient, be attentive to what the body knows. Here’s the conclusion — if we can call it that — he draws.

A grizzly bear stripping fruit from blackberry vines in a thicket is more than a bear stripping fruit from blackberry vines in a thicket. It is a point of entry into a world most of us have turned our backs on in an effort to go somewhere else, believing we’ll be better off just thinking about a grizzly bear stripping fruit from blackberry vines in a thicket.

Now, I can’t quote lines like this, about an alternative way of experiencing Nature, for an audience of avid readers and then doubt that I’m among people who love language. Nor can I doubt much that we also love that through language we possess an “ability to have thoughts about thoughts and to imagine alternatives to our current reality.” That’s writing, right? That’s also Michael Pollan again; and our ability to generate these alternate realities is also what he suggests makes our pain qualitatively different than animal pain: the pain of the caribou, say. Who knows about that? Like Pollan, I’m a meat eater who tries to be careful about the meat I eat. And the details of what this means we can save for another time, a private conversation — I may not always eat meat; I haven’t always; I’ve become, over the years, both less and more sure of myself, which is sort of the point of all I’ve been saying.

But Pollan’s focus on our pain and the way it differs from animal pain — which, to be fair, is ultimately something he’ll concern himself with very little — reveals the limits, once again, of empathy. It’s a habit of mind that rushes to meaning. Cartesian certainty. (And perhaps — if the parochial spotlight of empathy turns us racist, say — Cartesian cruelty.) It’s no wonder I panicked and had to leave the room.

The writers I’ve been turning to, and teaching lately, lead us to a different habit of mind. This habit resounds in what Pamuk and Nabokov and Gornick and Scarry say, Lopez and Pollan, too, if you read him fully, about building detachment — time, boundless sympathy, another self — into the writing life, resisting whatever need I have to know immediately what a thing means to me. I’ll be a better writer if I resist the pleasure of my own weightiness — and my ability to prove my weightiness and significance to others: I feel your pain; I know the answer; look out, here comes the wolf! If I — and ultimately WE — can get lost, and then eventually found, in the vast weight, in all that’s shimmering, in all of what surrounds us.

The Encyclopedia of the Missing

(James Hosking)

Jeremy Lybarger | Longreads | 4,160 words (17 minutes)

From the outside, it’s just another mobile home in a neighborhood of mobile homes on the northwest side of Fort Wayne, Indiana. There’s the same carport, the same wedge of grass out front, the same dreamy suburban soundtrack of wind chimes and air conditioners. Nothing suggests this particular home belongs to a 32-year-old woman whose encyclopedic knowledge of missing persons has earned her a cult following online. The FBI knows who she is. So do detectives and police departments across the country. Desperate families sometimes seek her out. Chances are that if you mention someone who has disappeared in America, Meaghan Good can tell you the circumstances from memory — the who, what, when, and where. The why is almost always a mystery.

A week after she turned 19, Good started the Charley Project, an ever-expanding online database that features the stories and photographs of people who’ve been missing in the United States for at least a year. She named the site after Charles Brewster Ross, a 4-year-old boy kidnapped in 1874 from the Germantown neighborhood of Philadelphia. His body was never found, and his abduction prompted the first known ransom note in America. Like Charles Brewster Ross, the nearly 10,000 people profiled on Good’s site are cold cases. Many fit the cliché of having vanished without a trace, and if it weren’t for Meaghan Good, most of these cases would have faded into oblivion. Read more…

Every Woman Her Own Bodyguard

"A Lesson In the Art of Womanly Self-Defense," 1906 (Museum of the City of New York/Byron Collection/Getty Images)

Wendy L. Rouse | Her Own Hero | NYU Press | August 2017 | 16 minutes (3,900 words)

On a spring evening in 1909, Wilma Berger decided to go for a short walk after work. Twenty-year-old Berger, an American-born white woman and the daughter of a prominent local doctor, was studying to be a nurse at the Henrotin Hospital in downtown Chicago. As she walked along Ontario Street and approached Lake Michigan, she suddenly felt a piercing pain from a blow to her head. In the next instant, a stranger’s arm reached around her neck and pulled her to the ground. Just as she came to her senses and prepared to stand up, a man sat on top of her, pinning her firmly down. The attacker clenched her throat with a choking grip with one hand and used his other hand to cover her mouth to prevent her from screaming. At first, Berger panicked, but then she decided to relax and wait for her opportunity. As soon as she saw her chance, she caught hold of the man’s arm, pulled him toward her, and sent him flying through the air with a jiu-jitsu move. Berger immediately fled to safety, knowing she had successfully fought back against a violent surprise attack. The publicity surrounding the incident vaulted Berger to local celebrity status as newspapers praised her mental prowess and physical skill in fighting off the assailant. Read more…

How We Got There from Here

Michael Stipe and Peter Buck of R.E.M., 1985. (Paul Natkin/Getty Images)

Anna Armstrong | Longreads | December 2017 | 12 minutes (2,903 words)

 

“Jefferson, I think we’re lost.” — Little America, R.E.M.

The distance between Rodeo and Santa Cruz is just over 90 miles. For the most part the drive is unremarkable — urban, industrial cities and rural, unincorporated towns along the Eastshore Freeway, shaping the wasteland east of San Francisco Bay. But then the interstate gives way to Highway 17 and you begin the ascent to another world. The road is a thin, curlicue curved by the green Santa Cruz Mountains.

As a child I made this trip many times with my parents in our wood-paneled station wagon packed tightly with my five siblings and me — my gaze resting out the window, tracking the miles by the three-minute pop songs on the radio while an endless imaginary flat-panel saw tethered to my slight wrist sliced through the redwoods. Our destination? The historic Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk.

The winding highway was a signal that we were close to the magical unworldliness of rickety wooden roller coasters, salty ocean breezes, barefoot children, bikinied girls, sun-kissed boys, a symphony of voices, crashing waves, tinny arcade bells, the smells and tastes of corn dogs and candied apples — and far, far away from the broke-down, shuttered place of stillness, silence, and late-to-bloom fondness in the rearview mirror. What separated Santa Cruz from Rodeo was not just miles but a tangible joy you could hold in your hands. Coming home sunburned, exhausted, happy — sleeping through the curves of the highway, waking abruptly in time to see the straight line to home.

June 1985. I was 17 years old and newly licensed. I was preparing to make the trek from home to Santa Cruz in my very first car, a 1972 Chevy Malibu that braved a Black Flag bumper sticker in a town that just didn’t get it. The destination? A very different type of spectacle: A rock ‘n’ roll show. The Athens, GA band R.E.M were scheduled to play the Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium.

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The Intimacy of an Android: An Interview With Alex Mar

(Cait Opperman / Wired)

Alex Mar’s cover story for Wired‘s November issue, “Love in the Time of Robots” is an epic look at the life and work of Hiroshi Ishiguro, director of the Intelligent Robotics Laboratory, who has spent his life and career in pursuit of a more perfect android. He has made copies of his friends, family, and himself with his “Geminoid” project, and he delights in the moment when a human confronts its twin. What could have been a simple profile of Ishiguro goes much, much deeper — at nearly 12,000 words, it is one of the longest features that Wired has run in print — as Mar explores the origins of human nature and intimacy, and the desire to turn to a robot for comfort or companionship. “Most of us already allow technology to mediate what was once simple, direct human interaction,” Mar writes, “what really is the difference?” I spoke with Mar via email about her experience with Ishiguro and the freedom of writing at a length far beyond the typical magazine feature.

***

How many times did you meet with Hiroshi Ishiguro? How did your understanding of him and his work change with each meeting?

I’ve been in touch with Hiroshi for over two years and we spent about three weeks in each other’s constant company in Japan, between Osaka and Tokyo. He was immediately forthcoming with me, very open and direct. We had a great, natural rapport from our first Skype chat, and that was a big part of why I decided to pursue the story. Almost immediately he announced himself as less of a roboticist and more of an artist, which I could relate to more than an engineer’s perspective — he was turned on by big concepts and risk-taking.

Over time he did become more open about his family, a subject that’s pretty verboten for him, as he’s always been a firm believer in keeping his family life separate from his public, professional life. (Ironic, considering his first major experiment was an android copy of his then 5-year-old daughter.) He’s a charismatic figure, and he and his work have gotten plenty of press coverage internationally over the years. It took a moment for him to realize I was also interested in very minute details about his life — his childhood, his personal habits — things that he at first dismissed as too boring to discuss. It’s funny how often people assume that the kind of minutia that really makes a story, the intimate stuff, isn’t worth mentioning.

Ishiguro closely studies the small physical cues involved in human interaction in order to build a better android. (He notices, for example, that people never sit completely still.) But you seem to think his understanding of humanity is lacking. How did your understanding of his work change over time?

I don’t know if Hiroshi’s understanding of humanity is lacking any more than yours or mine. It’s more that his project is immense and requires a lot of hubris. He’s studying, measuring, and trying to replicate something that remains pretty intangible: the human presence, which the Japanese call sonzai-kan. The ineffable thing that signals to us that we’re sitting across from a living, breathing, thinking, feeling person. Plenty of people would call that a soul — something that, by definition, is impossible to replicate. So I think the bigger question here is: Do you think that human-ness is something that we can measure and weigh and build from scratch? Hiroshi’s answer to that, at least in public, is a resounding yes. But in private, I think that Hiroshi is conflicted. Personally, he seems to be struggling with his own deep desire for human connection — he spoke to me repeatedly of his feelings of loneliness — and I don’t know if he’ll ever be able to reconcile that with his work.

When did you suspect you would have to be a part of this story? How did you decide how much of yourself to put in?

I consider myself a “literary” non-fiction writer, but not a particularly confessional one. I believe in using the first person sparingly in journalism; in my longform stories I’ve tended to use it more as a light-handed framing device. But with my first book, Witches of America, about the present-day witchcraft movement around the country, I was surprised and a little bit horrified when I realized I needed to go all-in and insert myself as a character. I needed to be honest with myself and the reader about my curiosity about witchcraft, and to be frank about how subjective my experience of these Pagan rituals was — there’s no “objective” way to take part in a religious ceremony. My approach to the book became very personal and immersive, and any other approach would have felt dishonest.

When I returned from my first reporting trip to Japan, I had that feeling again: The subject of the story required a writer who was also a stand-in for the audience. I had to be able to describe in a very immediate way the experience of being around those androids, of being immersed in Hiroshi’s world and his way of thinking about humanity. When events in my personal life began to get all tangled up with the ideas I was absorbing in Hiroshi’s labs, I felt the only honest way to write this story was to weave that in.

Do you think that inventors who work at the edge of what is technically possible — with artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and so on — lose sight of what humans actually want, what we actually need? It seems like much of what Silicon Valley provides serves the interests of a narrow subset of people in the name of helping humanity.

It seems to me that the goal of a lot of research and development is to anticipate a need, or perhaps to create a desire where previously there was none. Android development is less about a concrete need — a robot doesn’t have to have a human face to perform surgery, or rescue someone from a war zone — but it does seem like an extension of the parts of our lives technology has already colonized. So many of our relationships are already virtual or text-based: entire friendships with people we almost never see in person, interactions with avatars people have created to stand in for themselves online. I’m willing to bet that internet porn, for those who are more or less addicted to it, is rewiring their sexual instincts and, to a degree, eliminating the need for actual human contact. And what about the constant need for affirmation that Instagram or Facebook satisfies? Are we really interacting with humans when we’re interacting on social media, or would that shot of cortisol to the brain be just as satisfying coming from a bot? If you go down this rabbit hole, it becomes possible to imagine a market for android companions, whether platonic or sexual, that goes beyond a “narrow subset” of people.

But putting that longer-term apocalyptic talk aside, here’s something else to consider: AI, android science, VR, etc. — these are clearly male-dominated fields, whether we’re talking about Japan or the U.S. Therefore the needs and desires research and development is addressing are, for the most part, the needs and desires of men — the fantasies of men projected onto the not-so-distant future. When I learned that Hiroshi had produced some two dozen attractive female androids, I thought, of course they were female, young-looking, and pretty. He may be a radical, independent thinker, but he’s ultimately following the dictates of an industry built by men.

This is one of the longest features Wired has ever run in print, over 12,000 words. Was having that kind of length helpful for this subject, or was it unwieldy at times to tell a story of that length?

My very first draft of the story was close to this length, and it felt natural. I’m very grateful that Wired was willing to give it that space, about twice their typical feature length. I think there was a consensus that this story needed that kind of room because of how it continues to evolve all the way to the last page. Hiroshi’s work has a breadth of scope that requires that much space if you’re going to push beyond “man who creates good-looking androids” terrain to get to something deeper. My editor Mark Robinson was a real believer in the piece and wanted to avoid any cuts that might subtract from what he thought made it different and strange and intimate.

There’s also the fact that, for whatever reason, 12,000 words is a sweet spot for me with magazine features. I like to hurl myself into the subject and write my way out of it, and it seems to land at that length nearly every time. But I believe that every story has a length that it naturally wants to land at, once you’re plugged into the writing process. That’s why it’s so valuable to have magazines that are willing to take this kind of risk and go long. This kind of freedom is the greatest gift an editor can give you.

Read the story

Where Do We Go From Here?

Donald Bowers / Getty Images for The Weinstein Company

Felling a man of Harvey Weinstein’s stature was undoubtedly going to create aftershocks. It must help that the actresses coming forward with accusations against him are famous, people we recognize, people we believe we love even if we don’t actually know them. It helps us to care about them and, as female crew members afraid to come forward about their own abuse told The Hollywood Reporter, it helps the actresses:

“We don’t have the power that Rose McGowan or Angelina Jolie has,” says one female below-the-liner, and others agree that it is a lot easier for a production to replace a woman on the crew than it is to lose a bankable actor or director.

The female crew members told THR they’re afraid to come forward, lest a producer deem them “a liability” or “a troublemaker.” It’s not the men who abuse that are liabilities, it’s the women who would be so inconvenient as to not shut up and take it. One crew member says what many of us know about human resources departments: “Human resources is not there for us; it’s there for the company. To protect it from a liability.” Again, here, the liability is the person who tells the truth, not the person who behaves wrongly.

Still, since the New York Times and the New Yorker published their Weinstein exposés, less famous women have revealed abuse by powerful men. Men have followed with apologies. (The best one came from Ryan Gosling, who said he was disappointed in himself for not knowing about Weinstein’s treatment of women sooner — we’ll come back to this.) Kim Masters was finally able to get an outlet to publish a piece she’d been doggedly working on for months, in which a producer on the Amazon show The Man in the High Castle came forward to report harassment by a top Amazon executive, who has since resigned.

The #MeToo campaign on social media — originally created by a black woman activist, Tarana Burke, 10 years ago and popularized in the wake of Weinstein by actress Alyssa Milano and others — brought out even more stories beyond the entertainment industry. The #MeToo campaign also seems to have been eye-opening for a lot of men. Maybe you think we should be pleased about this, but I feel more like Alexandra Petri, who wrote in the Washington Post, “I am sick of having to suffer so that a man can grow.”

I received a late-night email this week from someone who crossed a line with me 13 years ago. He wrote that he “struggled for a while tonight” with the email, which made me laugh, that he thought I should care that he “struggled” for a few hours that night, after 13 years. But of course he thought that. His whole email was about him. He wasn’t sure if he had done anything wrong, but thought maybe he had. He appeared to not remember that 10 years ago, I had written him an email of my own, telling him how his violation had hurt me. He had dismissed it then, telling me — a college student who had worked up a tremendous amount of courage to even write him that email — that I was overreacting. Hysterical woman, your feelings are incorrect. He wants forgiveness now, but can’t be bothered to go through his email and see that I told him, a decade ago, exactly what he did wrong and how it hurt me.

Read more…

How Can Alt-Right Women Exist in a Misogynistic Movement?

A woman holding her baby at a Klan meeting in Beaufort, South Carolina, 1965. (Harry Benson/Getty Images)

Days before the events in Charlottesville, Harper’s published the cover story from their September issue about the prominent women of the alt-right: Women who want to bring others into a movement that is misogynist at its very core. In the piece, “The Rise of the Valkyries,” Seyward Darby profiles Lana Lokteff, the “queen bee” of the alt-right who David Duke has described as a “harder-hitting” Ann Coulter with a “movie-star quality.” Lokteff finds likeminded women online and promotes them via Red Ice, a white nationalist media company she runs with her husband. But for women to have a voice in the alt-right, let alone be prominent in the movement, is its own paradox, as Lokteff admonishes women to give counsel to men and embrace classic notions of femininity. I spoke with Darby about what it takes to interview a subject whose very existence appears to undermine her own claims. Read more…

Helping My Son Choose Between the Cub Scouts and His Beliefs about God

Photo by Mary Altaffer/AP

Kate Abbott | Longreads | July 2017 | 11 minutes (2,730 words)

 

My 8-year-old son Henry believes in Santa but not in God. I frequently question when to break the news about Santa, but I’ve never worried about his religious beliefs, or lack of them. He is so young; surely existential questions can wait. At least that’s what I thought before the Cub Scouts required him to choose between his own beliefs and a desire to go camping with newfound friends.

Friends are a problem in his life right now. Henry has had to jump from school to school in his short scholastic career, and since we’ve moved to a new town, he’s had trouble making new pals. My friend is a Girl Scout leader, and her daughters enjoy Girl Scouts, so after a particularly lonely day for my kid, I thought, why not try Cub Scouts, the Boy Scouts for younger kids? I imagined boys in uniforms with caps and kerchiefs, huddled around a campfire after a day of hiking and learning to tie knots. I had visions of Scouts helping an old lady cross the street. I thought of Henry learning the names of plants and constellations and, most importantly, the names of other boys in the pack. I emailed the nearest den leader right away.

Convincing my shy, reluctant joiner to go to a den meeting exhausted me, but when we finally got there he played with the other boys during free time near the end of the meeting, which was more playtime than he’d spent with any kids recently at all. He ran into the living room where I had been talking with the den leader and his wife, all smiles and out of breath. “We’d love to join,” I said.

We were all in: we drove 40 minutes to the closest “Scout store” and the adult Scout employee picked out all of the required bits of clothing and ornaments, down to official Cub Scout socks. I didn’t even blink when the register totaled $148.66. I handed over my credit card and told Henry he was going to have so much fun. He even seemed to think so. His enthusiasm increased and I didn’t flinch when I met with the pack leader later in the week to officially register him. I signed off on the forms freely, not reading them carefully enough, and gladly wrote a check for $100 (the fee for registration and a pack t-shirt). As I saw it, I was paying for more than stuff; I was paying for instant companionship and camaraderie.

At the next meeting, Henry balked at wearing the uniform, but I reminded him that Grandma had spent four hours sewing on all his starter patches and all the other boys would be wearing it too. He deemed the uniform “hideous” but put it on. He really wanted to try because he knew I wanted him to try.

We joined Scouts midyear, so we started off already “behind” what the other kids in the den had done and we would need to work at home to “catch up” on requirements before April. (Feeling slightly contrary already, I asked “Or what?” but I didn’t really get an answer.) Still, we had committed, so we taught ourselves how to tie a square knot by watching YouTube and I signed off as we sped through the basic requirements in the official Cub Scout handbook (spiral-bound edition, because it was far superior to the paperback edition, the guy at the Scout store had assured me). We were going to do this right, down to the spiral-edition book.

Henry has had to jump from school to school in his short scholastic career, and since we’ve moved to a new town, he’s had trouble making new pals.

When we got to the next requirement on the list, though, I had to pause. This one was called “Duty to God” and consisted of several parts. We would have to complete part 1 and choose some of the options from part 2.

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Zadie Smith Takes on Black Pain With a Light Touch

(Brian Dowling/Getty Images)

At the start of the summer I turned down an invitation from a friend to see a play in Manhattan called 3/Fifths. Written and produced by James Scruggs, a black man, featuring a mostly black cast, 3/Fifths is a work of interactive theater that immerses its audience in a dystopian theme park called SupremacyLand. The actors mill about the stage wearing mammy costumes or blackface. They tie ropes into nooses and stand behind prison bars while encouraging the audience to join in on race-themed carnival games. The goal is, to me, straightforward satire, and 3/Fifths seems earnest enough. Theater-goers can experience what it feels like to walk around in a heightened, racially-charged world with the hope they can connect the dots between past and present horrors of slavery, Jim Crow, and mass incarceration.

I didn’t really feel like spending an evening like that. Living as a black woman in the aftermath of the presidential election, unable to block out the news cycle of police shootings, acquittals, and assaults, my nervous system is frayed enough by new and old wounds. I’m in my thirties with a job, student debt, dreams still on the horizon, aging parents, family spread out all over the country, and a niece about to go to college. I don’t need a simulacrum of my experiences to understand what’s at stake.

The use of satire and comedy to have difficult conversations about race has a long history and isn’t problematic in and of itself. Kara Walker does it in silhouette and sculpture; playwright Branden Jacob-Jenkins did it in his play An Octoroon; Ishmael Reed has done it in his novels; Dave Chappelle became a household name doing it. It’s just that on the day of the invitation I was feeling exhausted, more in need of fun and laughter than anything else. When I declined, I said something to my friend like, “Take me to the show the playwright makes about black joy.”

Just a couple of months before, I learned of the visual artist Dana Schutz’s painting Open Casket, then on display at the Whitney Biennial, from the writer and artist Hannah Black’s widely-circulated open letter to the curators, which was co-signed by 47 artists, curators, and critics. I knew of Black’s work from an essay she wrote in the White Review that touched on Brandy’s 2002 album Full Moon. Brandy is probably one of the most important American pop vocalists of the past thirty years, and is underappreciated in the mainstream. Black’s piece treated Brandy’s work with the care I felt she deserved, so I felt a sense of trust in Black’s approach to black aesthetics. In her letter, Black demands the removal of Schutz’s painting, an abstraction of a 1955 photograph of 14-year-old lynching victim Emmett Till in his coffin at his funeral. His bludgeoned, disfigured face is rendered in impressionistic brush strokes.

Schutz — a white woman born in 1976 in a suburb of Detroit, and educated at the Cleveland Institute of Art and Columbia University — does not own the subject matter, Black argues.

Although Schutz’s intention may be to present white shame, this shame is not correctly represented as a painting of a dead Black boy by a white artist — those non-Black artists who sincerely wish to highlight the shameful nature of white violence should first of all stop treating Black pain as raw material. The subject matter is not Schutz’s; white free speech and white creative freedom have been founded on the constraint of others, and are not natural rights. The painting must go.

Black goes on to explain the reverence that black Americans have for Till.

Emmett Till’s name has circulated widely since his death. It has come to stand not only for Till himself but also for the mournability (to each other, if not to everyone) of people marked as disposable, for the weight so often given to a white woman’s word above a Black child’s comfort or survival, and for the injustice of anti-Black legal systems. Through his mother’s courage, Till was made available to Black people as an inspiration and warning.

It was, after all, Till’s grieving mother, Mamie Till Mobley, who insisted her son’s remains be returned to Chicago after his lynching in Money, Mississippi and drowning in the Tallahatchie River. It was his mother who demanded his remains be displayed in an open casket during a funeral that was widely photographed. She wanted the world to “see what she had seen,” to bear witness to the horror, to grieve for her boy. Only the black publications Jet and the Chicago Defender published the photos. The image enraged and emboldened black folks, and it is considered among a long list of catalysts for the Civil Rights activism of the mid-twentieth century.

In “Getting In and Out,” Zadie Smith writes about the consumption of black pain for Harper’s by looking at Schutz’s painting and Jordan Peele’s film Get Out. Smith doesn’t mention Emmett Till much, and she doesn’t mention his mother, without whom we would have nothing to discuss. Smith never writes the words “Tallahatchie River,” nor does the word “Mississippi” appear. She says that Schutz’s painting didn’t provoke any profound feeling in her when she went to see it at the Biennial, and that doesn’t surprise me; it’s a mediocre painting, technically fine but emotionally removed. What surprises me about Smith’s essay is that she questions the “logic” and sentiment of Black’s letter, and writes it off as absurd. I found Black’s letter heartfelt. Its request that the “painting be destroyed and not entered into any market or museum” felt less important to me than her care for Emmett Till’s story, and the ongoing, present-day brutality against black bodies.

I think the conversation about race in America is a shared one, with multiple points of entry. In my mind pretty much anyone can talk about it, or make art about it, because everyone is somehow a part of it — impacted, implicated, or some combination therein. Race doesn’t really matter here in a straightforward sense. It’s too arbitrary a construction, as Smith painstakingly points out, and complicated by too many factors.

I was born in Memphis in the 1980s, so I am both a black American and southern. I remember the story of Till told to me as a child by adults who still used hushed voices. I went to integrated public schools, and then university on the east coast, and have a middle class life. I have always moved among blacks and whites, Latinx and Asians, and everybody else freely. My mother was also born in Memphis, but she remembers colored water fountains, trips to the zoo only on feeding days when there were no animals to see, swimming pools that were drained instead of integrated. Her sense of racial terror is at once more at the surface and deeper than mine—there are things she fears that I never will. She remembers Till’s lynching. My grandmother was born in the Mississippi Delta, picked cotton, and had a male cousin who was lynched. So the story of racial suffering is my grandmother’s even more than my mother’s or mine. We could go on like this, parsing out generational differences and class dynamics forever.

About Zadie Smith: I love her. I have considered her one of my favorite contemporary writers for at least a decade. In her third novel, On Beauty, she talks about American blackness in a way that doesn’t feel offensive or removed as if she thought us boorish. Her 2009 essay “Speaking in Tongues,” where she lets herself gush over Obama’s ability to code switch, and “Their Eyes Were Watching God: What Does Soulful Mean?” are two of my favorite pieces of writing of all time. Writing about her first encounter with Zora Neale Hurston’s book, I love how Smith is able to be her critical, writerly self, and still engage with her blackness, bringing all parts to the page to create this beautiful cohesive whole.

Fact is, I am a black woman, and a slither of this book goes straight into my soul, I suspect, for that reason. And though it is, to me, a mistake to say, “Unless you are a black woman, you will never fully comprehend this novel,” it is also disingenuous to claim that many black women do not respond to this book in a particularly powerful manner that would seem “extraliterary.” Those aspects of Their Eyes Were Watching God that plumb so profoundly the ancient buildup of culture reside that is (for convience’s sake) called “Blackness” are the parts that my own “Blackness,” as far as it foes, cannot help but respond to personally. At fourteen I couldn’t find words (or words I liked) for the marvelous feeling of recognition that came with these characters who had my hair, my eyes, my skin, even the ancestors of the rhythm of the speech…She is my sister and I love her.

But in the Harper’s essay, except in the places where she talks about the genius of Jordan Peele and the black artists at the Biennial whose work was overshadowed by the Schutz controversy, it doesn’t really feel like Smith is engaging in the subject matter with much care or heart. It disappointed me. I do not think it is because she is British-born and I am African American. She said in the piece that she assumed a transnational black identity when questioning herself about whether she was black enough to commemorate Till in a piece of art. I agree with parts of this. Blackness has long been a transnational project, a conversation that transverses and troubles national boundaries.

It is just that the question is wrong. All human beings have rights, in my mind, to the vast array of human experiences. But why does it seem like everyone wants to mine black pain? When I think about work like Open Casket and 3/Fifths, what I wonder is whether there any rules, or any sense of decorum around our experiences. Does anyone pause before making this type of work, or have reverence for it? Do they consider who may be hurt or exhausted by it if it is rendered incompletely? What are the goals of the work? The work that the 1955 photographs of Emmet Till did in Jet is clearly different from the work Open Casket could do at the Whitney. I wonder, what is the point? I also wonder, what is sacred?

I don’t know why Smith seems so removed in her Harper’s piece. When she talks about the paranoia of blacks, an “indulgence” that Get Out exploits, or says that white people revile black bodies less in 2017 than they did a half century ago, I honestly don’t know what to think. I do not know what white folks in America think of me now — some times it feels like nothing and sometimes it feels like utter disdain. When I hear of a young black woman from my university waking up to bananas strung up on her campus with nooses, when I hear Diamond Reynolds crying “You just killed my boyfriend,” despite all of my attempts to avoid that footage, I know it isn’t as simple as love and happiness and friendship and being the “same people.” So when Hannah Black got together with a bunch of other art world folks to stage their intervention, I listened because it felt like care.

Zadie Smith is entitled to her experiences; her writerly exploration of race can be rendered how she feels it must and I will still think of her as my sister. But I wished she had engaged this subject matter with her heart. I needed her to think of the logic of Black’s letter from a place of shared pain, shared experiences, and shared anger. I needed her to really listen to it, before dismantling it.