When we write, if we tape our feelings down to the page, if we do it with any thoroughness and honesty, they become rapidly an artifact. Later, we return to them like reading history. Those were the things in my mind that day. We can see the way seas of our thoughts change, and yet the way they laid down sediment, flattened for new waters to rush over them, that sediment still contours the currents in the ocean now.
The post I wrote last weekend about George Floyd and the uprising against police brutality–that was itself product of near a week’s reflection, but I look back now, and they seem like thoughts half-formed. I nod.
On Thursday, during the last lessons of the school year, students organized a protest here. We marched and chanted around the campus, and students shared rage and fear and solidarity at an open mic. Taking part, listening, I felt a little closer to home, and closer to this place.
Yet I feel even now the temptation of a simple answer, of what is right and wrong and what the right way forward is. I am tired. I am reminding myself that simple answers close down thought and action. I want to read more about white privilege and make my allyship more meaningful than performative. I found this list of scaffolded anti-racism resources yesterday, which I’ll work with. I’m tired, but I want to sit more with the complexity, and use the privilege that I have, and deconstruct more biases. Breathe. Okay. I can do that. I hope the white folks among you will come with me, as you’re able, as you can.
In writing, these questions of complexity bring me to a tension. I wonder, is our role to sift, order, and comb through life’s complexity to offer up an answer, or is it to record life in all its messiness alone? Does it presume too much to interpret? Do we fail in our task if we hold back?
Ariel Dorfman, Chilean-American playwright, wrote to this question in the afterword to his 1991 play about the aftermath of Pinochet’s dictatorship, Death and the Maiden:
A multitude of messages of the contemporary imagination, specifically those that are channelled through the mass entertainment media, assure us, over and over, that there is an easy, even facile, comforting, answer to most of our problems. Such an aesthetic strategy seems to me not only to falsify and disdain human experience but in the case of Chile or of any country that is coming out of a period of enormous conflict and pain, it turns out to be counterproductive for the community, freezing its maturity and growth.
Dorfman’s play ardently resists this temptation of the simple answer: as its protagonist Paulina seeks revenge on the man she believes to be her persecutor, the motivation of all characters, the core ethical questions, and even the literal details of characters’ actions are left ambiguous. Reading it, we might be left unsettled, and we will certainly be left thinking. And this is true enough to the way life works, and I am left feeling sure of less than I did before. It creates understanding by breaking down the understanding we thought we had.
A perspective slightly different: last week, I finished listening to the the final novel in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet. In the final seconds of the audiobook, this line made me pause and rewind:
Unlike stories, real life, when it has passed, inclines toward obscurity, not clarity.
Ferrante’s story too is rife with complexity, yet what she says about stories here–that stories, as a general truth, tend towards clarity; they make clarity of the mess. Even if that clarity is not stated explicitly, perhaps it is there, try as we writers might to obfuscate it, or to make the reader find their way there on their own. But if anything, we should, as Dorfman suggests, avoid the trite resolution. If we offer answers, let them grow from careful listening.
Take care of yourselves this week, and your communities. Keep writing. Best wishes for the week ahead,
Jimmy
Words like trees 
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