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"Rembrandt's Eyes" by Simon Schama
A new biography charts the troubled painter's rivalry with the worldly, successful Peter Paul Rubens.
By Matthew DeBord
[11/18/99]

Poetry nation?
Thousands of Americans sent poems to the Favorite Poem Project -- but that doesn't necessarily mean poetry is thriving.
By Melanie Rehak
[11/17/99]

Ivory Tower
On closer reading
At the fifth annual conference of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics, the old guard looks for the the Young Turks to take up their bookish battle cry.
By Boris Kachka
[11/17/99]

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"Sleeping With Extra-Terrestrials" by Wendy Kaminer
American boobs will believe practically anything. But is this news?
By Andrew O'Hehir
[11/17/99]

I wrote a novel in three days
A guy, his best pal and a bottle of tequila. It was a recipe for literary greatness.
By Dave Fox
[11/16/99]

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My need to write about haters and violent people is, on one level, just such an unconscious reenactment. But thankfully, that's not all it is. Writing is one of the safest venues I know for taking risks, and one of its glories is that it can be done supremely consciously. It is also genuinely a way you can encounter anything, endure anything, go anywhere.

Whitman said, "I play not a march for victors only ... I play great marches for conquered and slain persons ... Agonies are one of my changes of garments. I am the hounded slave ... I wince at the bite of the dogs, /Hell and despair are upon me ... crack and again crack the marksmen, I clutch at the rails of the fence ... I am the mashed fireman with breastbone broken ... tumbling walls buried me in their debris ..."

Adrienne Rich wrote, "I came to explore the wreck./ The words are purposes./ The words are maps./ I came to see the damage that was done/ and the treasures that prevail./ I stroke the beam of my lamp/ slowly along the flank/ of something more permanent/ than fish or weed ..." Rich looked for "the evidence of damage/ worn by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty"; Whitman famously became the man bleeding to death, the prisoner, Christ on the cross himself.

You might ask what this has to do with my own pieces that identify with Aaron McKinney or say what it is I have in common with Fred Phelps. The answer is, everything. It is a happy fact that it is impossible to engage in this sort of fearlessly empathetic writing without being willing to share the identity and pains of everyone and everything, if only for a moment and if only in a poem. Empathy is precisely about not shutting off, not rendering anyone outside the category of the human; empathetic writing is precisely about making the most disturbing, painful and frightening traits, people and things acceptable, knowable, identifiable with.

When I use the word acceptable in such a context, I'm sure it pushes some people's buttons. I don't mean condonable or defensible, I don't mean acceptable in a moral way. I mean something far more basic and important: something on the order of un-exileable. Unestrangeable. Ultimately inseparable from the rest of us.

The alarming fact is that all of us have more in common with Aaron McKinney than we have that separates us. All of us are potentially murderers and bigots. All of us have wanted to strangle what we find threatening.

What we do with that fact is the greatest moral task facing us. In fact, the basic reason to write about the violent in an empathetic way is so as not to become them. Becoming them is what I have always been most afraid of and what I will always, wisely or foolishly, work hardest to ward off. Becoming my father has always been the worst thing in the world to me -- worse even than being hit by my father. Truly, I don't want to be either. But while I can't absolutely control whether or not I'll become a victim again, I do have absolute control over whether or not I'll be an abuser.

And the only way to not be one is to see very clearly how I could be one.

Rich and Whitman's empathetic writing about slaves, victims and prisoners has everything to do with empathetic writing about abusers, and it is no accident that they both do both. "Every Harlot was a Virgin once," wrote Blake. Every abuser was a victim once. Every act of abuse is a response to an original perpetration, or to several. Abusers and victims intermingle across the ages and become each other, to a degree that most of the abused never want to see. Abuse has always been the original temptation waiting for every victim, the true nightmare waiting for us.

Next page | It's how we treat the worst people that counts