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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]

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[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
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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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I'm not a Christian, and I'm sure I'll never become one. But the extraordinary thing about what the mythical Christ is supposed to have done is to have become one with everyone, including the lowest, including criminals of every stripe. Tax-gatherers in his day were people who assaulted the poor to get money for the Roman Empire. But he ate with them, and he identified with all wrongdoers and prisoners, and if he were alive today he would seek some protection for Aaron McKinney and take that lost, self-hating 20-year-old in his arms. "What you do to the least of these," he said, "you do to me." Meaning: Punishing him is as bad as punishing me. Subjecting him to violence -- as he will indeed be subjected to in jail -- is as bad as subjecting me to violence. It is the site where abuse is born.

Those who, like me, have campaigned to put certain terrible people in jail need to think long and hard about our responsibility for prisons and the constant violence, rape and degradation committed there in our names and with our tax dollars and our moral authority. We will be judged not by how we treat the best people, but how we treat the worst ones, the ones it is easy to hate, the ones it is easy to think of as a kind of human garbage.

So one reason I have done the kind of writing I do is as a kind of spiritual practice. But I have done it for a number of great, selfish reasons too. One is that by looking at the humiliated, empty lives of the violent, I can see the great lie of our culture for the fiction it is: Violence isn't strength. Everything, even my favorite TV show, "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," encourages us to think that violence leads to happiness, that the abusive have a grand old time socking people, raping strangers, stirring up hate and terrorizing their loved ones.

My experience and the research I've done for my stories tells me this is not the case. I am very glad I am not so estranged from sex as to be able to take pleasure in having sex with someone who doesn't want to have sex with me. I thank God every day that I am not a batterer, someone who can have no real love in her life, and no uncontrolled relationship. Most things of worth in our lives depend on vulnerability and trust, and I am delighted to have learned through my work that, in effect, the violent cannot win. They cannot win because the things that violence gives you -- a very temporary respite from your own feelings of helplessness, and the experience of others' fear and submission -- are not anything worth having.

Because I am a writer and my business is to speak the truth and to reconcile with it, I'll be honest with you here: Part of me wishes I could be violent. Part of me thinks that yes, it would make me happy to crack my fist across somebody's face, and that violence would get me everything I want. I would never know another moment of helplessness, rejection or sorrow. I would force everyone to do what I want and I would have everything I want, always!

It's a myth. The thinking part of me knows it is not true because it depends on controlling the world and something, somewhere would always resist my control. In fact, the violent are as enslaved as the abused because they live in fear of the world going out of control, not obeying them. It is ridiculously easy for them to feel as helpless as their weakest victim.

Which brings me back to empathetic writing and what I get out of it. I've just put a very frightening thing in words, my longing to be violent. Now I will put another frightening thing in words: I'm very, very frightened of my capacity to be a victim. Probably one of the reasons that I write the way I do is that I much prefer to see myself as a potential abuser than as the actual, historical victim that I am. It is terrible to see myself as a victim, to continue looking while I see my great pain and helplessness, my subjection and my shame. The entire culture hates victims and blames them, and I have certainly absorbed some of that hatred and self-blame.

I obsess most days about whether someone has taken advantage of me, whether I've failed to stand up for myself, whether I have somehow colluded with the people who want to hurt me. The idea that I might somewhere in some part of me desire to be a victim is constantly there like a vulture at my internal organs, and is probably the worst legacy that I get from my father. These obsessions are a poison all abused people encounter.

The great thing about writing is it gives me a way to accept both these poisons. Yes, I said "accept them." Toxins hurt because they are what the body cannot accept. Trauma is, almost by definition, what we cannot accept, what haunts us and remains indissoluble, forever unengageable. I will always love writing because it lets me engage with everything, even my own imperfections.

To comprehend means literally to take hold of; the kind of writing that I most respect starts from a premise of entering into all its characters with tenderness and thereby combines the great peace of understanding with a kind of control. Understanding is a kind of control, and control need not be a dirty word here. When Robert Heinlein invented the term grok to mean simultaneously know, eat, embrace, make love to and incorporate, he was invoking the secret logic of all writing, and the reason it is so comforting to write.

When you allow yourself to look at everything, nothing can scare you. Torturers become pitiable under that light and monsters woundable and human; trauma loses its shadowy terror and becomes merely another thing to pity, another thing to embrace and give comfort to.

When you allow yourself to know yourself completely, nothing in your mind can hurt you.

In one poem, Rich tells about an abused woman who ignores her own complicity -- and maybe even agency -- in her children's abuse. Rich says, "Because I have sometimes been [this woman], because I am of her,/ I watch her with eyes that blink away like a flash/ cruelly, when she does what I don't want to see." But the woman, it turns out, does the exact same thing. She "longs for an intact world, an intact soul,/ longs for what we all long for, yet denies us all ... What if ... in every record she wants her name inscribed as innocent? ... What has she smelled of power without once tasting it in the mouth?"

When Rich says that she has been this woman, when Whitman writes that he is both the bullets and the wounded slave, we taste our power for once, that ambiguous brittle taste.

In the spirit of daring to see everything, I'd like to look at the underside of the kind of writing I do. Or one of the undersides -- in a way, this kind of writing consists of nothing but undersides, and some of them are more conventionally beautiful than others. At some points in my writing and my life, my wanting to meet and make love to the enemy has been founded on an impossible fantasy of reconciliation, an urge to deny all harm and enfold the abuser in a seamless web of love that will obviate the need for all conflict and suffocate anger in its stifling warmth.

Next page | My writing: A second body I can place before my own