alienation: part seven hundred
the latest from cellblock 69
It is very easy to read a story that is told in the first person and believe it is about yourself.
I have never liked memoir as a strict genre. There are some that break out of the penitentiary of hagiography or self-aggrandizement and transform personal experience into something else entirely. Annie Dillard watches Dave Rahm fly his stunt plane. We see an event through her eyes, but she molds that event into something else, a synecdoche about writing, a story about writing. Her feelings and thoughts are present in the experience, but she works to pull something from the cage of her consciousness and give it far more meaning than it would have had otherwise. We are not her, and she is not us, and yet, we are all tied together.
That cage is the thing that occupies me. Everyone talks about the screens, about how the “social” technologies that have achieved dominance in the past 15 years are killing us, but I don’t think anyone has articulated simply the traditions that have brought us to this point, and why in spite of everything that beams into your brain from your phone being slightly toxic, we continue to push our faces closer and closer to the screen.
The memoir, the my-life-as-I’ve-seen-it-thus-far-o-logue, is an old form, a predominantly male form, and a very Western form. I’m reading William Tecumseh Sherman’s memoirs right now, in fact. There are bazillions of texts where guys be writin’ about their experiences, where other people’s lives become little anecdotes in the grand narrative of “How me became I.”
These works do something that I find trivial—they get the reader to empathize with the writer, because, like I said before, they fool the reader into thinking that they’re the writer. It’s one of the easiest things to do, people are empathy machines. I would empathize with the squirrel that’s burrowing into my attic if they wrote a compelling enough travelogue about a quest for the perfect acorn. It takes a great deal of reason to write, and we love a reasonable king.
The byproduct of rampant egocentrism is that the sum of the human: suffering, tribulation, success, failure, joy—all is sublimated into the consumer object. And boy are we ever saturated with things to consume. Each day, the “world” is presented to us through our screens as a bespoke product that we choose to engage with or ignore. Currently, as the genocide of Palestinians continues in Gaza, the media narrative here in America has shifted to imagery of starving people. In the controlled and disciplined worlds of our egos, watching children be exploded by bunker buster bombs or drones that our tax dollars financed was not a product that many people were buying. Explosions means war and war is complicated, or at least that is what we all have been told. Israeli soldiers killing 50-75 Palestinians a day? Bad guys on both sides!
Starvation, on the other hand, that is a familiar concept, the starvation of a population is more sympathetic, yes? That’s a product that people can buy.
The nightmare of this framing should be evident, but it is not. When an entire cultural tradition becomes subjective, literally always meant to be framed or interpreted by the viewer/reader/consumer, events can only be processed through the “I.” Most Americans have never experienced violence on the scale that the average person living in Gaza has, but some Americans have been hungry from time to time.
What is completely lost from this conception of things is morality. It is wrong to kill, to allow others to be killed, to allow others to starve. It is wrong to watch real people starve. But if we create gilded cages where all it feels you can do is watch, the moral component of being a viewer starts to disappear. Wrong, right, they’re just morality-as-consumer object. The only power you have is the power to judge, and that is no power at all.
The reporters who are living and dying in Gaza to bring information about what is happening to their people desperately are trying to bring morality to your screen. They will likely die for it, more than 200 of them have. These events are not color and context for our memoirs.
I must begin the process of divesting myself from caring so goddamned much about myself, through filtering empathy through my own hall of mirrors.
This is a large ask, but I remember that it seems so large because the vast majority of media is devoted to keeping me in the cage. Rediscovering rage, rediscovering feelings of anything beyond resignation and defeat is essential to resist. The great trap of egocentrism is that nothing can happen to the viewer. If we can convert violence, death, and injustice into pornographic flogging, there is nothing we cannot distort or control.
I am reminded of Barbara Christian: “I can only speak for myself. But what I write and how I write is done in order to save my own life. And I mean that literally. For me, literature is a way of knowing that I am not hallucinating, that what I feel/know is. It is an affirmation that sensuality is intelligence, that sensual language is language that makes sense.”
I keep writing these screeds, these rants and bloviates, demanding something to become different, a repeated scrawl on a wall. It has to go somewhere.
Anyway, I have a board game youtube, you can watch stuff here.