Pressing Back

[susanstinson]

The deepening need for words to express our thoughts and feelings which, we are sure, are all the truth that we shall ever experience, having no illusions, makes us listen to words when we hear them, loving them and feeling them, makes us search the sound of them, for a finality, a perfection, an unalterable vibration, which it is only within the power of the acutest poet to give them....

...But as a wave is a force and not the water of which it is composed, which is never the same, so nobility is a force and not the manifestations of which it is composed, which are never the same.... It is not an artifice that the mind has added to human nature. The mind has added nothing to human nature. It is a violence from within that protects us from a violence without. It is the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality. It seems, in the last analysis, to have something to do with our self-preservation; and that, no doubt, is why the expression of it, the sound of its words, helps us to live our lives.

Wallace Stevens, from The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination, 1942.

Comments

[stillwell.livejournal.com]

This reminds me of an lj conversation I had with charlottecooper recently. We were talking about the terrorist attacks in London and the attacks on the World Trade Center and how people often need to make their own stories of survival in order to cope and contextualize the experience. We also talked about how those same stories can become mythological and restrictive sometimes. Interesting to think about *

[susanstinson.livejournal.com]

It is, that's so interesting, the need to make coherent stories out of experiences such as the attacks and how, unless they're deep enough, flexible enough, open to variations but also somehow accountable to -- what? -- I want to say the physical world, but I'm not sure -- those stories can become constrictive, both things.

When you wrote about coming home from the action thinking of seeing the people covered in ash walking over the bridge -- the grey people, I think you said -- just that image, that memory as you told it, holds so much.

[stillwell.livejournal.com]

When you wrote about coming home from the action thinking of seeing the people covered in ash walking over the bridge -- the grey people, I think you said -- just that image, that memory as you told it, holds so much.

Yes, and it says so much about my experience and prespective, it gives me the ability to talk it out / write it out, a sense of control that is limited, but has its own truth to it. Yet if it looms so large that it begins to define who I am, it diminishes me. I think it can be hindering to, making it hard to reach out for fear of not being understood.

[susanstinson.livejournal.com]

Yet if it looms so large that it begins to define who I am, it diminishes me.

Yeah, you know, it seems to me that the willingness and ability to struggle to understand and (maybe) talk about those tensions between knowing something viscerally, having experienced it, seen and smelled specific things, and then telling it, and then not having it be the only story, or the only set of stories or not always a story, or to not always be telling, even if it's always a pressure -- inside and out -- to give it a shape that can be worked with, that seems true, it does seems to me that staying with those tensions is such an uncomfortable and important act, or way of being.

Don't know, but reading you and becca and bounce_n_jiggle and nerddog today and over the past few days has meant a lot to me. The struggles to talk about this are so powerful and so much fuller and messier than the public rhetoric.

[stillwell.livejournal.com]

Yes, that reaching out and pressing is what transcends. It seems to me that it matters more even than being understood.

Thanks so much for listening and being someone who really lives in that press *

Necessary Angel

[(Anonymous)]

This is so relevant to your writing, Susan. Especially the bit about self-preservation - the imagination pressing back. The scarier the world gets the more we need people to help us understand how we got here. I keep thinking about fundamentalism, in all it's manifestations, and thinking the only way we're going to get 'through this' is to view each other, especially those least like us, as fully human, which is what you do so brilliantly in your work.

Re: Necessary Angel

[susanstinson.livejournal.com]

Thank you, sweetness anonymous, who I know for sure is sallybelle -- maybe accidently logged out. It's so important to me that you think this about my writing, and it makes me kind of trembly that you're saying it now, when I think you've been reading the newest draft chapter of the new book. See you very soon.

Re: Necessary Angel

[sallybelle.livejournal.com]

Oh yes the above was me. Gotta pay more attention.

[oneroom.livejournal.com]

This is wonderful. Thank you so much.

Last night on NPR, there was a conversation between a Lebanese novelist and an Israeli novelist. At one point, the Lebanese novelist (Khaury? I think so) shouted, "But writing is not about identity! It is about identification!" He was talking about identification with the other. Reaching out through writing to identify with she who is most other.

This morning, I finished reading Borges's This Craft of Verse. He says character is a mirror of the person. Character, from the Greek, to etch. In writing, we must believe in the character more than anything else.

[susanstinson.livejournal.com]

Writing is not about identity, it's about identification with the other. God, that's good. And it also, maybe, writing has to be both, because having some sense of who you are as you're writing, what lenses you're seeing the character and worlds through, is one of the things that makes it possible to imagine other positions, other worlds.

[oneroom.livejournal.com]

I was getting all excited when I was writing about it this morning because it ties in with one of my favorite philosophers, Emmanuel Levinas, who talks a lot about the radical other - Levinas is hard to unravel, but one thing I took from him was that the radical other is found within oneself. (Being human means being finite and infinite and that's paradoxical and what is more other than that?) Levinas says in order to be ethical we must prostrate ourselves before the other. (Our other and others' others. Heh.) When Khaury talked about identification, he suggested that our identity is found within that identification with the other - and when we refuse to participate with that identification we are ...starving? Less whole, certainly.

Like Nussbaum! Empathy through story - we find ourselves and empathy for ourselves through the stories of others, when we write and when we read. I understand me better when I see myself through another's story. Could that be true?

[susanstinson.livejournal.com]

I'm thinking a lot of things in response to this, both the ideas that you're expressing and your passionate engagement with them are so exciting. I'm also feeling kind of wiped out with allergies and with the day, so probably can't even begin to approach the beauty and difficulty of these ideas. I know that this idea that in order to be ethical, we must prostrate ourselves before the other (with all the complications in who and where this other might be)is going to be lingering with me. One of the things work on this book and reading Calvinist theology has given me is a kind of unexpected respect for the value of -- what? have to stop before I say it because the word has such a troubled history -- honorable and thorough humility. But only, really, in the active grasp of the paradox you brought up, of being human and so being finite and infinite both. Oh, I don't know, there are so many dangers in being lost in the self and in a practice of trying to find the self in another's story, and what feels to me like just as many astonishing beauties and unbelievably harrowing paths to calm, good, steady places in both of those things, too.

But the impulse to participate in identification (or something else? actual or imaginative relationships that aren't force or romantic, that take account of the persistence of human flaws) with another, with a group of others, to have that impulse and then to work to follow it, to be intellectually and emotionally and ethically ambitious in those ways, and to keep holding a relationship with such ideas, with such possibilities, with another at a hideously lazy moment or after a stretch of such laziness -- well that's stunning. And it takes me back to some of the things stillwell was talking about above, holding those tensions, the work of that, the prostration of that. Such beautiful effort, and all in this world, with all of its ugliness.

Empathy through story is something that compels me and pulls me and wakes me and thwarts me and changes me more than I can tell you. I'm not sure, but I think it's a profoundly important thing to explore.