James Baldwin famously wrote, “If I am not what you say I am, then you are not who you think you are.
The attack on truth and language makes the atrocities possible. If you can erase what has happened, silence the witnesses, convince people of the merit of supporting a lie, if you can terrorize people into silence, obedience, lies, if you can make the task of determining what is true so impossible or dangerous they stop trying, you can perpetuate your crimes.
How do you make art when the art that’s all around you keeps telling you to shut up and do the dishes?
The status quo would like you to believe it is immutable, inevitable, and invulnerable, and lack of memory of a dynamically changing world reinforces this view.
Davis calls PTSD living at the whim of your worst memories.
I wanted language that could be simple and clear when the subject required it, but sometimes clarity requires complexity. I believe in the irreducible and in invocation and evocation, and I am fond of sentences less like superhighways than winding paths, with the occasional scenic detour or pause to take in the view, since a footpath can traverse steep and twisting terrain that a paved road cannot. I know that sometimes what gets called digression is pulling in a passenger who fell off the boat.
I wanted English to be an instrument on which many kinds of music could be played. I wanted writing that could be lavish, subtle, evocative, that could describe mists and moods and hopes and not just facts and solid objects. I wanted to map how the world is connected by patterns and intuitions and resemblances. I wanted to trace the lost patterns that came before the world is broken and find the new ones we could make out of the shards.
My body was a lonely house. I was not always home; I was often elsewhere. I imagined when I was young some science-fiction version of humans becoming brains in jars as a good thing, that our bodies were some sad thing we were mired in rather than instruments of joy, connection, and vitality, the non-negotiable terms of our existence.
You can’t assume that you know why what you’re doing matters. You can’t at least declare failure immediately, because consequences are not always direct, or immediate, or obvious, and the indirect consequences matter.
To hope is to accept despair as an emotion but not as an analysis. To recognize that what is unlikely is possible, just as what is likely is not inevitable. To understand that difficult is not the same as impossible.
Like William Morris, he believed that paradise was behind us, in the old ways of life, and in the organic world, rather than ahead of us in an urbanized and industrialized future.
A manilla envelope came through the mail slot a few weeks later. I had a little queasiness about meeting that teenager directly, and so I waited several years to open it.
You furnish your mind with readings in somewhat the same way you furnish a house with books.
The term inspiration is often thought to be about positive and desirable things, and there’s a sentimental image of the muse as a pretty lady who’s the object of the writer’s ardor. For a political writer the inspirations or at least the prods to write are often whatever is most repellent and alarming, and opposition is a stimulant. Stalin was surely Orwell’s principal muse, if not as a personality then as the figure at the center of a terrifying authoritarianism wreathed in lies.
I felt hemmed in, hunted. Over and over women and girls were attacked, not for what they’d done, but because they were at hand when a man wished to. To punish is the word that comes to mind but for what might linger as a question. Not for who, but for what they were, we were. But really for who he was, a man who had the desire and believed he had the right to harm women. To demonstrate that his power was as boundless as her powerlessness.
There’s a kind of indignation I know well, when someone feels that the wrong done them has been unrecognized, and a kind of trauma that makes the sufferer into a compulsive storyteller of an unresolved story. You’ll tell it until someone lifts the curse by hearing and believing you.
Some men told me they wished someone would sexually harass them, because they seemed to be unable to imagine it as anything but pleasant invitations from attractive people. No one was offering the help of recognizing what I was experiencing or agreeing that I had the right to be safe and free. It was a kind of collective gaslighting.
We often say silenced, which presumes someone attempted to speak. In my case, it wasn’t a silencing because no speech was stopped; it never started, or it had been stopped so far back I don’t remember how it happened. It never occurred to me to speak to the men who pressured me then, because it didn’t occur to me that I had the authority to assert myself thus or that they had any obligation or inclination to respect my assertions, or that my words would do anything but make things worse.
The rights of man” was one of the great phrases of the French Revolution, but it’s always been questionable whether it included the rights of women.
To become a person that occasionally, strangers want to reward because they’ve felt I’ve given them something, is an amazement. Once a young woman passing by an outdoor booth where I was signing books, burst into a spontaneous jig at the sight of me. And that might be the pinnacle of my career. To be somehow an occasion for someone else’s exuberance.
Disagreement can be useful even when its intention is adversarial. Half my muses have been haters.