Alexander Maksik: I was twelve when I first read e.e. cummings' "i sing of Olaf glad and big." I'm certain that what first drew my interest then were the lines "there is some shit I will not eat" and "i will not kiss your fucking flag." I still remember my teacher, Chris Richard -- black hair, muscular, imposing, and impassioned. I can see him dealing mimeographed copies of the poem onto our desks -- each letter soft and round and blue. He was the teacher who dropped a black bible on the floor, stood on it and said, "A book like any other."
At the time, I cared nothing for school, was always ditching campus to smoke pot beneath the Santa Monica pier. I was a wretched student on academic probation, who would one day fail all of his classes and have to repeat the ninth grade. And yet, here is Chris Richard's voice, deep and frightening: "i sing of Olaf glad and big/whose warmest heart recoiled at war/a conscientious object-or." He is reading to us. Or perhaps he is reciting from memory:
Olaf(being to all intents
a corpse and wanting any rag
upon what God unto him gave)
responds,without getting annoyed
"I will not kiss your fucking flag"
And:
Olaf(upon what were once knees)
does almost ceaselessly repeat
"there is some shit I will not eat"
Whatever discussions there may have been about form and history are lost. But what is sharp in my memory are two things powerful enough to have shaken me, however briefly, from my cultivated apathy: cummings' cool descriptions of Olaf's torture and my teacher's evident passion.
He felt deeply and that feeling was inspired by something beyond us and our tidy school. His intensity was an indictment of disengagement, an indictment of people like me, safe in our shrugging scorn, our affected adolescent indifference. The courage was in caring. And it was Chris Richard who began to turn my apathy into contempt for apathy. In that classroom, at twelve years old, I was so angry, so sad on Olaf's behalf, so hypnotized by my pacing teacher. I wanted to do something about it. And if a short poem could make me feel this way, could show me something I'd never seen, well then what I wanted to do was write.
Watching him pace the classroom, I saw someone who was my opposite -- a person outraged, and engaged with the world. He was not slouching against a wall trading in irony and sarcasm, pretending nothing mattered. And now, 28 years later, as a writer, I return to these familiar questions: How do I respond to those things, which so often inspire anger and sadness, hopelessness and fear? And do I have some duty to respond? My instinct says that I do, but I struggle to understand how. Or even what it means exactly to write in response to the ugliness I see outside of my own life.
I believe that the only argument fiction should ever make is one in favor of empathy, that fiction must never be polemical. I do not believe that stories should necessarily be set within countries, or circumstances foreign to their readers, or that writers have any obligation whatsoever to write characters beyond their own immediate experience. A writer's only obligation is to write what she feels most compelled to write. Nonetheless, I can't shake the sense that I have a responsibility to respond, no matter how obliquely, to what I find unjust. I'm terrified of becoming inured to suffering and cruelty. I do not want to travel, or walk through a city, or read a newspaper, and ignore what is before me. To do so is to shirk my responsibility as a writer. And yet I fail constantly. My tendency is to go numb to it all. To stop seeing. To stop feeling. To ignore those things on the street I wish didn't exist. Writing has become for me a kind of antidote to that tendency, a way to avoid closing my eyes. But the questions remain: How do I imbue my fiction with anger, and sadness, and outrage? And what does it mean to write with passion and caring, to write the way that Chris Richard taught?
My answers are unsatisfying. The best I have is this: I hope that I will continue to feel. It is not, in the end, a question of subject, but one of emotion. The enemy in my writing, as in my life, is a willful blindness and a deadened heart. It is the kind of riskless disengagement I cultivated as an adolescent. In "i sing of Olaf glad and big" outrage is as palpable and as potent as lust and wonder are in cummings' other poems, and for that matter in so many of the stories and novels that have made such a difference in my life. I want always to write with great love and empathy. But I also hope that in some way, no matter how obliquely, my writing will always mean, "There is some shit I will not eat."
Re: In Partibus Infidelium
Originally Posted by Chip
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