Read my latest story, "The All-Nighter", at 52|250.

You Know

I want to write about caffeine withdrawal, but I don’t know how
to wake up without something bitter to chase my dreams

I want to write about a post-binge sweat, but I don’t know how
to break through the ache to remember—never mind have tongue in throes

I want to write about the morning after, but I don’t know how
I found the subway in the rain

I want to write about rape, but I don’t know how
to make it, New

I want to write about you, but I don’t know how
I want to write about our happiness, but I don’t know how
to make it
endure

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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• Francis Bacon at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (artsjournal.com)
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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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• Author admitted rape attempt (guardian.co.uk)
• William Golding, “Lord Of The Flies” Author, Tried To Rape Teenager, Private Papers Show (huffingtonpost.com)
• Iain Banks talks to The View From Here (iain-banks.net)
• The Wasp Factory (cognitive-edge.com)