Please sponsor my 5k swim coming up in April and help support Marie Curie Cancer Care, an organisation which provides home nursing care to people with terminal illnesses.

Some of the discussion around the long-overdue arrest of Roman Polanski I take very personally indeed. The man who raped me was an artist—a poet, not famous, not great, not even as well published as I am, but an artist nonetheless, so when I hear people suggesting that an artist’s work can somehow expiate the crimes he has committed against another human being, I have to consider it from that angle. Let’s say the man who raped me wrote a collection of poetry so remarkable that even I felt the need to learn from it in order to improve my poetics. This would have to be a truly astounding work because I’m not all that skilled at compartmentalization. Based on my knowledge of his work with its rhetoric-pretending-to-be-important, it is highly unlikely that he could ever produce anything like that. Still, if he did: would it change anything he did to me? Would it make up for any of it? For the trauma? For the pain? For the loss of my sense of autonomy?

Of course not. Nothing that man could ever do would change the reality of what he did. To suggest that a cruelty committed against an individual can be canceled out through the some more generalized set of good works is to engage in a sort of moral bookkeeping that is fundamentally inhumane.

But what effect then does committing such crimes have on the value of an individual’s work? It’s very easy to paint a line between the life and the work and to say that one should not impact the other, but if you do that, then you construct a second identity for an artist in which s/he is a pure avatar of ideas. The problem with that (besides all the general issues with constructs) is that when an artist goes to create, they still have all of the rest of who they are hanging about them. Experiences, beliefs, attitudes: those don’t change just because someone has put on their art-making galoshes today. To actively avoid applying knowledge of those factors to the evaluation and understanding of a work of art may make certain cases simpler or at least more comfortable, but it is as much an error as ignoring any other aspect of context would be.

When the man who raped me uses a word like “sex”, it has tremendously different meanings from when the man who loves me uses it. I’m not sure that should only be the case when I read or hear it. I don’t believe that interpretations from my position should be waved aside as biased (as if any human were ever purely objective) or invalid in a broader sense.

But it’s messy, right?

That’s part of how you know it’s valid. A legitimate consideration of art as a human endeavor should be messy because humans are messy. Artists are messy. Audiences are messy. The creative process is messy. To try to present a clean and simple picture of any of that is a disservice not only to art but also to the experience of being human and all the horrible and wonder things that entails.

Rite of Recall

in the fairy grove my hand is warmed
by Martyn’s   we’re always
meeting at a conference on vampires
where emergency fire doors hold in coffee’s
bitter scent, tea steam, and a very nice bean salad

we’re always walking
through Central Park at dusk
smelling roses & pansies
of the Shakespeare Garden
we didn’t find that time

and I bring him to the top of Fuji
where we shiver into each other until light
and I bring him to the top of Tai Shan
to show him that red sky I remember
deserving its reputation and its hundreds
who climb or take the ropeway

his hand like crinkling leaves
filters out the horrors, yes horrors
there’s nothing else to call it
when a man you loved has raped you
when strangers hold a knife
against your soft belly for cash

under the hawthorn we’re building
words for Francis Bacon & Edward Hopper
we’re building a home on the edge of loneliness
left since we’re together
to the ashy snow

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Like Kim Gittleson at Double X, I never liked Lord of the Flies (though I was forced to read it in ninth grade rather than fourth). This isn’t because I can’t stomach violence; besides my own work sometimes being bloody-minded, I quite enjoyed The Wasp Factory, and if you’re willing to admit the evidence of non-written works, there’s also the fact that Inland Empire is one of my favorite films. My problem with Golding’s little book was how shallow the depiction of violence and its roots came across. Gittleson touches on this:

A group of pig-headed boys trapped on an island in an implausible 1950s-era Lost scenario don’t want to work, try to one-up one another in increasingly dangerous displays of male bravado, form rival gangs, and eventually start killing one another. Shocker! Anyone observing playground dynamics would have been able to predict that outcome.

The problem for me wasn’t that the outcome came as no surprise so much as the fact that Golding didn’t push the exploration much further than playground dynamics. If you are going to take the violence to the extreme of murder, then you had better have some insight to go with it. That’s what Natsuo Kirino, whose remarkable Real World I finished just the other night, does so well; she uses the extreme situation of four teenage girls helps a boy who killed his mother as an opportunity for careful psychological depictions. There is nothing like that in Golding.

Moreover, there is something cowardly in needing to isolate people entirely from society in order to show how brutal they can be. As Golding should have known, given that he was a would-be rapist, violence thrives even in the midst of “civilization”.

Gittleson starts her piece by asking Should what we learn about an author’s personal life change the way we view his or her work? Literary interpretation is gloriously subjective, so the answer depends on who is doing the viewing. I will, however, say this: I was not at all surprised that Golding attempted to rape a young woman. It is typical of those most interested in erasing any notion of childhood innocence (a notion which is admittedly not entirely accurate concept) to focus on boys as violent and girls as not sexual per se but sexually available.

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Last night I went to the cheap wine and poetry event at Hugo House. I came away feeling that it had, overall, been mediocre, but the truth is that by the time the reading began I was in no mood to be open to poetry. It began when I wanted to get a glass of the $1 wine and was carded but had not brought my ID. If someone would like to explain to me how we can call this a free country when a 29-year old can’t even get a drink without showing ID, I would be quite grateful.

But that’s a relatively minor complaint. What truly put me in a foul mood was the introduction to the event, in which the audience was admonished to drink responsibly lest the organizers have to carry you outside “and let the homeless have their way with you”. It’s funny because if you drink too much you get raped! And by gross homeless men! And it’s like totally transgressive to talk about homeless people as a criminal element!

The really funny thing is that I can almost guarantee you that there was a rapist in the audience laughing at the joke. Laughing because it reconfirmed him as not in the class of people usually considered rapists—as too clean, too economically secure, and not lurking in the bushes. Laughing because it reconfirmed the victim as responsible for avoiding the situation in which she is raped, as if rape just happens. Laughing, like everyone else in the room, not because it was funny but because applauding such sentiments means you can be criticized.

Laughter invokes the “just a joke” defense. All I could do at the time was mutter in disdain because if I had made noise about it, I would have been deemed hysterical.

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Sleeping Beauty, Briar Rose, is an obvious analogy for the situation of the dollhouse’s inmates, but this episode made good use of it. Little Susan’s efforts to edit the fairytale so that Sleeping Beauty saves herself represent not only the way victims may blame themselves for not escaping but also the desires of the audience: we want Caroline to wake up and kick ass. (The uncomfortable corollary to this is that we may be said to blame her character, just as much as the writers who created her, if she does not. What we may be getting here is a heroine closer to Anne Sexton’s Briar Rose than to Buffy.) At the same time, little Susan’s suggestion that the Prince has simply come at the end of the curse to take the credit and Susan-Echo’s statement that Sleeping Beauty made the Prince and made him fight for her alert the audience that saviors may not be as virtuous or independent in action as the traditional tale would have us believe.

All along, Paul Ballard has been guided by messages sent through Mellie and Echo; once Caroline was able to tell him that she was underground. In the last episode, we saw him as a rapist; in this one, Agent Loomis has to remind him that the actives are victims, not dolls. He has, without even entering it, taken on the attitudes and language promulgated by the dollhouse. This is not because of his personal weakness per se but because of how the organization behind the dollhouse manipulates pre-existing attitudes, particularly those of rape culture.

Not one of the men who fight over/for Caroline-Echo asks her what she wants. In part, this is because it is impossible (for Ballard, at least) to reach the real Caroline. Alpha, however, implants her a persona who at least lusts for him (and who doesn’t seem to resemble the original Caroline). A desire to act similarly lurks behind Ballard’s efforts to rescue her.

How this turns out remains to be seen. Briar Rose has set up the potential for a dramatic season finale. Ironically, it seems we may see Caroline kick ass after waking up in the chair—just not in a way that involves saving herself.

ETA: BuddyTV has a petition going to save Dollhouse from cancellation.

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