{{ NUMOL BITES }}

{ “the bluest eye”—writing-as-telepathy—words—empathy—use of negative emotions in fiction }

edit [winter 2012]: reading this now, i think parts all of this are extremely sociopathic demonstrates an extreme lack of empathy [edited late March 2013, not sure i have any business using that term, also yeah ALL of this not PARTS] and i’m sorry.  also removed a part that i think positioned pale skin as “normal”, that’s disgusting and i’m sorry for that as well.

edit [March 2013]: also this seems really appropriative and “it’s all about meeeee” and centering my own [white cis] opinions and feelings, god this is disgusting, i’m really sorry.  [further edit from later that month] also 1) i feel like i was also missing and/or twisting the point of The Bluest Eye and 2) removing the part of this post that positioned pale skin as “normal” is hiding the evidence so for the record it was a metaphor that involved blushing (i can’t remember now what it was exactly).  i’m sorry for all that, too.  i’m sure i missed more — there are obviously a lot of layers of gross evil shit in this post.  if anyone reading this wants nothing to do with me, i won’t give you any shit for that.

edit [April 2013]: also i was definitely getting something out of the pain of the characters in the book that as a white person i should not have been/had no right to have been (“pulled out of myself” as i put it) and that is disgusting and i am sorry for that also.

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I’m reading Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye.  It’s awesome.  It’s the most telepathic writing* I’ve ever read, which makes it a rough read at times due to the subject matter.  So I was thinking about that, about how telepathic and amazing her writing is, and for the first time in 23 years I had my mind blown by the fact that a person learned to do this.

23 years of listening to music and watching TV and probably 12+ years of getting sucked into the Internet for hours at a time, all the amazing and talented things I’ve seen/heard people do, and I had never really had that thought before.

It had never occurred to me that this fantastic ability is a learnable skill, rather than a gift bestowed upon us mortals by a lightning bolt from the heavens.  Which mostly just proves how long it takes me to get something really obvious.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how powerful words are, and how much I’ve been underestimating them.  Yeah, they’re often inadequate.  But look at something like The Bluest Eye.  Hell, look at what a single word did for Jane Laplain:

Cis and trans are not descriptors of some inner truth; They expose the external imposition of an alleged truth.

This rethinking of “normal” gender identies as cisgender life trajectory has had a profound effect on me personally. I’ve finally been able to stop comparing apples to pineapples, ie my life, my body as it compares to those of my mother, sisters, etc. I’ve been able to see that their lives are no more natural or correct than mine, and no less artificial, no less constructed or arbitrarily defined than mine. I do NOT have to adhere to a cisgender standard in order to find value in my own transgender life. That’s HUGE.

** This next part is incredibly subjective so prepare to be annoyed if you don’t agree with me **

There’s something else I was thinking about, connected to the extreme discomfort that parts of The Bluest Eye produce: that a book does not have to be a fun read to be a good read.

Let me back up a bit: I’ve only recently started letting myself feel real empathy.  I was doing some sort of intentional blocking off of empathy throughout most of my young life and I don’t even know why.  I did not feel much besides anger towards others IRL and hardly felt anything [un-repressed] in regards to fiction.  So I’ve been opening up a little more lately (sorry to get so personal on you in my first post you guys), and it’s amazing.  And scary.

Before, I’d watch a good grim-as-fuck movie and think it was fun because it was so well-done.  Nowadays, I watch well-done grim shit and think it was good, but not fun — because I actually care about the characters when they’re done well, so I do not particularly enjoy watching them go through hell, even though I do get something out of it that’s hard to describe.

Very recently, I read something, a review (warning for ableist slurs), that introduced me to the concept of a thing not needing to be fun to be good.  This should have been something that I had at least considered before, but remember: pseudo-numb, “edgy” Younger Me would not have understood this, because Younger Me did not feel particularly bad for suffering characters… but of course now I do.  The review is of a video game (Pathologic), but bear with me because it is an example of how negative emotions can be used to great effect in a fictional setting:

Pathologic fearlessly wields desperation, brutality, hopelessness, exhaustion, cruelty, even ignorance and pain, and, if you can stomach it, the result is phenomenal. Pathologic could not ever be described as fun. Tramping back and forth across town, trying to stem the torrent of deaths while aching to know what’s going on /is not fun./

….It creates an interesting, desperate situation and brooks no compromise in letting you experience it. And in unflinchingly making you suffer, you identify with these characters you control to the point of becoming them.

So if a work of fiction can make you feel a character’s pain, you can, on some level, become the character.  You could say this is true of any emotion, and you’d be right, but I believe that this is much more true of negative emotions than positive.  It could just be that I personally respond more strongly to negative feelings, but I don’t think I’m alone in this.  I would love to hear your opinions on this, probably-non-existent readers.

Pain — when communicated well enough to register in the audience — is incredibly conductive.  It can also be weirdly therapeutic for some people; for me, because of its empathy-super-conducting properties, it can give me a little vacation from my own brain.  It pulls me out of myself so I can air myself out, if that makes sense [which it doesn’t, not even to me].

Unfortunately, it’s nearly always a lot fucking harder than communicating positive emotions.  Communicating pain is more viscerally difficult, because doing it right usually involves “getting your hands dirty” by either reaching into your own real pain or using [stealing?] someone else’s.  It’s also easier to screw up; mis-step even slightly and you will summon a helldemon create a cringeworthy, corny, maybe even unintentionally hilarious mess.  Seriously, compare the unintentional hilarity of drama-fail to that of happy-fail and I bet you’ll find a lot more of the former than the latter.

All this is not to say that positive emotions in fiction cannot be powerful.  Obviously it can uplift you, inspire you, pull you out of a terrible place, give you something to dream of, to reach for.  Hell, there was at least one part of The Bluest Eye that seemed mostly positive that pulled me out of myself almost as much as the scary/ugly/depressing parts.

But I cannot overstress the importance of fictional pain.  It’s not just a prop for the self-pitying or people who glamorize suffering.

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* See this quote for an explanation of how writing = telepathy (although I can’t vouch for the blog itself because I’m not familiar with it).

{ Poetry Coroner }

jaded16india:

So I wrote this silly poem a while ago that kinda-sorta fits in with this Whole English Tongue Business rather well, if I say so myself. 

———-

English Literature. 

In class we play with tongues

turn, taper, tamper

the tongue twists tales to totem

people to ghosts, ghosts to stones

these consonants to syllables.

We know how to break them now

as we peer into books

we learn the might of 

whose words which words where words

open the mouth wide, 

uncurl the beast, breathe out meaning.

So then my grandmother asked me 

What Happens To The Tongue After Class?

i want to show her that it still works 

so i reach in and pull it out 

she pets it and asks it to speak

muffles form and then they break

as the tongue starts lapping up

silences within loose spaces.

So then she asks me Which Class Is This

as i fit my tongue in, it readjusts its form

i try to say ‘In Class We Polish Our Father Tongue’

it dissolves in my throat

and now all that is left is

paper, pen, ink, scent and sometimes 

shadows of caged syllables. 

(via oncejadedtwicesnarked-deactivat)

{ The infamous Virginia Woolf… }

haterina:

wholesomeobsessive:

Would any of my lovely followers happen to know anything interesting about her that could aid me in the writing of this essay?  Focus on To the Lighthouse.  

Thank you.

Signal boooost~

(via torayot)

{ We should have remained statues. }

ohtheclouds:

We should have stood still and clung to the wind
We should have dug our teeth into its feathers
We should have strapped our bodies to a mountain, and turned our lungs into stone

that is awesome.

(via ohtheclouds-deactivated20110219)