A Sense of Doubt blog post #1935 - Function of Art in response to "I Can't Breathe"

https://news.artnet.com/art-world/hong-kong-artists-protest-1622485

A Sense of Doubt blog post #1935 - Function of Art in response to "I Can't Breathe"

I am not black.

I have never been black.

I have never suffered any racism.

I have enjoyed not just white privilege for my whole life but male, middle-class, elite education, American, white privilege.

I say this to make clear that my authority to write on the issues surrounding #BlackLivesMatter and #ICan'tBreathe is very limited and very removed from any personal experience.

And yet, like so many of my similarly white and privileged friends, I care so deeply and passionately about eliminating racism that I have spoken with zealot-like intensity in class rooms, thundering away at my favorite themes, such as "race was invented to rationalize racism," "All cool, all great cool music, the very idea of cool was invented by African-Americans," and "I have never been afraid when pulled over by police, but maybe you should be" as detailed in the following blog entries:


A Sense of Doubt blog post #1424 - Reparations and Redemption - a Musical Monday Mix for 1901.14

A Sense of Doubt blog post #1390 - A Debt Not Paid - Appropriation and the Co-Opting of Modern Music

Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #371 - I am not afraid of the police, but maybe you should be

I am proud of many more of my posts on racism. Check out my "racism" category along the right side list from any blog page.

I feel that it is the highest calling of writers and artists to aim their art at these issues and to add to the protest and maybe provide words or content that may mean something to somebody.

I don't always want to use my own words to give voice and perspective to the events of our nation. And so, the bulk of today's post will be the words of another author, but first, I like to preamble when I share.

I question my own outrage. Am I entitled to my outrage from my place of privilege? Is my outrage just a pose, a veneer?

Much like when expressing my own grief on these pages (some might say "wallowing"), I questioned my feelings when others experienced a much more incalculable loss: a small child of nine years old losing a parent, my friend whose 19-year -old son died tragically after one college term from a bizarre accident, and the countless people who have lost loved ones, like George Floyd, to the hatred and venom many white people hold on their hearts, even those who say "I am not racist" followed by a second clause starting with "but."

Is my grief any worse than theirs? Is my outrage justified?

As before when I expressed this feeling -- such as in HEY MOM#88 and in HEY MOM #521 --
many friends counseled me that all griefs are unique and important. We're all on our own journey of individuation and enlightenment. Denigrating our own experiences through comparison to the experiences of others that seem more tragic or intense is not healthy.

A friend of mine sent me these sage words of wisdom, which may be words we can all cleave to:

"Each death tears a hole in the fabric of the community. It destroys the threads beyond repair no matter if the death comes as an expected end to life (as we all must face) or as an unexpected shock. There is no way to fix the fabric, only to eventually patch what remains."

Like my grief, I question my outrage as well for similar reasons: part imposter syndrome, part lack of legitimacy, part lack of any similar experience.

And yet, I feel the outrage. I have deep and abiding anger at those who hate and kill and brutalize and beat senseless. Some of those vicious thugs are cops. Some of them are just racist white people, generally ignorant and programmed for hatred, violence, fear, and bigotry.

I can't make all the changes the world needs with my own hands right in this moment, but I can add my voice to the outcry of "no more." Enough is enough. Change, real and complete change, is long overdue.

I might not have suffered the bigotry and had a family member killed or been killed myself, but at this time, like with the COVID-19 pandemic, every voice matters, very action matters, black lives matter.

In searching for an image to stand on top of this blog post, I found this image from Hong Kong from August of 2019, and I liked it because it incorporated masks protecting individuals themselves and others from infection though months before the spread of the novel coronavirus and COVID-19. It is a powerful image of protest and art that I felt would help to introduce the article written by author Cat Valente.

I walked some streets and stood out in the cold protesting when  I was younger. I am not opposed to doing it again, though the distance to a significant protest, the threat of violence and retribution for that violence, and the risk of viral infection has kept me home and considering other ways to participate while thousands of my fellow Americans take to the streets, raise their voices, take a knee, and rally to end the institutional and deeply rooted racism that still plagues our country.

And for me, writing has always been that way to raise my voice of defiance, righteousness, and conviction.

Though I also spoke to my students about the issues of activism and Black Lives Matter, all I have done so far is to create content on this blog and transmit those posts via social media.

Not as many of my words today (though some) because I want to share the words of Cat Valente, an author that I follow on Patreon.

I love this part especially much:

I don’t think any of the men who are right this very second running human beings down in their cars or shoving them into the concrete or shooting them in the eye or sneaking between the lines of people who give a shit to light buildings on fire so that brutal force can be justified and public sympathy withdrawn are avid readers. Oh, maybe a few of them like a mystery thriller on an airplane, or a big splashy full color photo book about WWII from time to time, or a political figure’s overgrown rant, but I feel pretty solid about saying that none of them are devoted fans of Jane Austen, or Emily Dickinson, or Toni Morrison, or Langston Hughes, or Octavia Butler, or Maya Angelou, or N.K. Jemisin, or W.E.B DuBois. In fact, I’m going to go out on a limb and say I don’t think anyone who is a devoted fan of any of those writers has ever or ever would crush a man’s neck with their knee for nine minutes while people begged them to stop for no reason whatsoever but that they felt like it.


Because stories are one of the first ways we begin to learn empathy.

Her post may be weirdly circuitous and not always on point in its stream of consciousness feel, but it's relevant, it speaks to me, and I am pleased to share it with my blog audience, all two of you.

IN THE IMAGE BELOW, CROSS OUT 2015 AND ADD 2020:

https://news.artnet.com/market/ferguson-protest-art-a-year-later-323965

https://magenta.as/historys-most-powerful-protest-art-29150c02931?gi=dd1dd93c214

Catherynne M. Valente

https://www.patreon.com/catvalente

The Story of Us, or, Read a Fucking Book Once In Awhile, Why Don’t You?: Empathy, Crisis, and the Function of Art Right Now

It seems impossible that it is the end of May. That the sudden green on the trees outside my window is real and not just a new, edgier kind of snow. That the only reason the humans where I live are not quite as confined to our homes on account of an invisible death borne by hugging and singing is that our aristocracy has told us it never existed and the dead are not dead, and instead of standing in the sun telling ourselves it is safe, even if it isn’t, to feel like life is possible again for just a moment, our country is burning.

I have no idea what to talk to you about this month. I had decided to write about creating art in the face of the world falling apart, and then I realized I wrote about that in March. I had completely forgotten. Because time has ceased to exist, and reality, and space, and memory. Everything has gotten so much worse than it was in March when I was, apparently, since my brain has peaced out, writing about Shakespeare and saying it would all be okay and you don’t have to write King Lear during the quarantine, not yet remembering that no matter how hopeless things seem, well, you can always strike a match, and then they are still hopeless but also on fire.

It seems a lesson I should have learned down to my marrow in 2016. And yet I have to learn it all over again just about quarterly, because the part of me that always believes in goodness and empathy and the Tooth Fairy keeps trying to put on her happy hat and get to surviving.

And so I don’t know what to tap into this glowing thought-machine because I literally cannot think about anything else but the cities on fire and the broken faces and the stopped breath and the cruel laughter of the people who are supposed to protect us. I’m working on a pretty heavy short story right now; yesterday I couldn’t think about anything else either, so I gave up and wrote a scene for a character in which she loses an eye at a protest because a cop shoots her at point-blank range with a rubber bullet. 

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8373001/Journalist-left-blind-one-eye-shot-rubber-bullet-Minneapolis-protest.html

And I came home to someone I follow on Twitter having lost an eye at a protest because a cop shot her at point-blank range with a rubber bullet.

Given that the story is about seeing flashes of the future before they happen, it rattled me to say the least. Everything is connected, nothing is connected. I keep thinking about poor George Floyd, not in his horrible final moments, but when he woke up that Monday morning, eating breakfast, tying his shoes, unable to come close to the outer rim of a whisper that it was the day he would die, and because of the loss of him, for him, the country would burn from ocean to ocean.

And who am I in the face of that, a white queer woman in Maine, where we pretend we don’t have these problems, who can sit in a comfortable chair with enough privilege to know a cop probably will not crush her throat for nine long minutes in this life (but not enough to know that some other man won’t someday), who cannot go to a protest because I cannot risk or leave my baby, because that invisible death is still out there, walking hand in hand with visible death now. What is my worth if I am not there, if I am not doing something, if I am just typing into a screen about things that aren’t even real—even if they sometimes become real between my desk and my front door? Humans are garbage at feeling helpless, if we didn’t know that before we sure as hell know it now, and I’m not different. I feel like shit because I’m not doing anything, because writing doesn’t feel like doing anything, because I am lost right now just as everyone is, and I cannot see my way out.

The fuck am I supposed to do but watch and weep 280 characters at a time?

What is the worth of any of us when it has become so manifestly clear that all the powers that be see in our souls is the money we can generate and the compliance they can compel? When a man in government goes on television and calls us human capital stock, and is neither fired nor even reprimanded, but defended by some of the very people he meant, people who in turn watched a man call for his mother while the life was crushed out of him and immediately began to work themselves up to saying he deserved it, what does a fairy tale matter, however prettily written, however well meant?

Or is my value only in that my prettily written and well-meant fairy tales generate taxable income to fund the men who took George Floyd’s breath, the man who called us livestock, the soldiers marching into Minneapolis as I write this, the seventh homes and yachts and beautiful meals of the people who own the companies that I work for?

I want to be able to bring this around to an uplifting conclusion, but I don’t know how it’s going to go. It’s not going to be funny or pithy or a good time for anyone. I’m pretty sure of that.

But this is what I got, because I have to find a way to work through the flames so I can continue to eat, and we all have to find that way through, because not only are we human capital stock whose kings would rather kill us all than let us hunt one lonely rabbit on their land, but because the authoritarian’s big move is to strip from us everything but the most basic necessities to survive long enough to serve, before taking those too. I still believe what I wrote in 2017. Fucking hell, I have to believe it, or I will pitch myself into the sea, that the opposite of fascism isn’t anarchy, it’s theatre, because theatre, art, music, stories, all of it, imagination, everything, tells us without compromise or hesitation there is something bigger and more important in this world than the state.

So here’s my gambit, here’s my hope left in the dusty filthy bottom of Pandora’s costume box, here’s my footlights and my curtain, here’s my one-woman-show: 

The origin, goal, effect, and very real danger of art is empathy.

Empathy is a fairly new-agey, milquetoast passive word for the extraordinary ability to feel what another person feels as keenly as if what happens to them is happening to you. Sympathy is different. It’s like the difference between simile and metaphor. Sympathy means you feel for someone. You feel about them. Empathy means you feel as if you are them. Empathy is a big fucking deal. It’s not something everyone can do, by a fucking obvious long shot at this point. If there is something that “separates us from the animals” as folk do love to say, it is the potential to perform this astonishing feat of feeling. It is not a mistake that the animals humans have decided are the most intelligent and worth not making extinct sometimes exhibit something close to empathy for us. Dogs, cats, elephants, dolphins, apes, horses, some birds. Perhaps that is what made us think we could domesticate some animals and not others in the first place.

What is happening right now is happening because of empathy, and because of its lack. Millions of us watched a man die slowly, horribly, for nothing and no reason. And some of us felt his suffering and the injustice of it as deeply as we felt anything that had happened to us. And some of us did not. Some of us felt nothing, or felt kinship with the inflictor of pain instead of the victim of it. Or felt an instinctive drive to find some way to say the dead man had done something wrong, or was sick anyway, or otherwise had only himself to blame, because if that could somehow be made true, then they themselves could sleep soundly, knowing they were safe, knowing it couldn’t happen to them, because they would never do anything wrong, or be sick, or call down the state upon their own necks simply by existing.

The thing about empathy is that it isn’t empathy if you only have it for people who are like you. Who look like you and talk like you and live like you and spend like you and dance like you and remember like you and love like you and whose families have always been just the same as your families, down the years and miles into forever. That is not empathy. That is self-interest. That is nothing but the instinct to admire and understand yourself, not feeling, keenly, what a stranger feels and rooting your actions in that connection.

And it strikes me that I don’t think Derek Chauvin is a big reader. I don’t think any of the men who are right this very second running human beings down in their cars or shoving them into the concrete or shooting them in the eye or sneaking between the lines of people who give a shit to light buildings on fire so that brutal force can be justified and public sympathy withdrawn are avid readers. Oh, maybe a few of them like a mystery thriller on an airplane, or a big splashy full color photo book about WWII from time to time, or a political figure’s overgrown rant, but I feel pretty solid about saying that none of them are devoted fans of Jane Austen, or Emily Dickinson, or Toni Morrison, or Langston Hughes, or Octavia Butler, or Maya Angelou, or N.K. Jemisin, or W.E.B DuBois. In fact, I’m going to go out on a limb and say I don’t think anyone who is a devoted fan of any of those writers has ever or ever would crush a man’s neck with their knee for nine minutes while people begged them to stop for no reason whatsoever but that they felt like it. 

Because stories are one of the first ways we begin to learn empathy. 

Now, I’m not saying no monsters read books. Plenty of people who enjoy inflicting pain and/or hate the bulk of their species read. Hemingway fans? Sure. Bret Easton Ellis? Definitely. Salinger, for some reason? Demonstrably. Ayn Rand? Fucking clearly.  Mostly because their books are about assholes. So the empathy effect often backfires and makes more assholes. Though I will note that many of those folks either discovered those books in school and never read anything else, or lived in a time when reading was a much more common past-time that crossed a great deal of class boundaries. And surely the Karens of the world do, stereotypically speaking, read quite a bit…of books about good rough-hewn cops catching the bad guys who killed women who look just like them, or about women who look and act just like them finding passionate love or losing it. Reading is not magic, in and of itself. Hell, most people who even knew how to read historically were men, and most of them had less problem oppressing and using any woman they could hold down than you and I do firing up Netflix. 

The magic comes when you read about people who are nothing like you at all.

The very act of reading a story requires you to imagine the feelings and experiences of a person who is not you, who did not have your life, who did not make your choices, who will suffer almost certainly before your eyes, because that’s what creates narrative conflict, and insist you witness their suffering and try to imagine a way out of it. It is the first way children have to experience life outside their home, their parents, their school, their day to day functioning, from the very smallest age. Oh no, the red truck with the human face is sad. I don’t want the red truck to feel sad. When the red truck feels sad, I feel sad. I want the red truck to be happy. Then I will feel happy.

And when writers are very, very good, they can make you feel like you have disappeared and there is no barrier between yourself and the self of the characters in the books, that you are experiencing their lives and world with no less vivid immediacy than your own life and world. They can make you feel, as sharply as you feel everything that happens to you, the joy and agony and failure and triumph and love and longing of people who do not actually exist. Science fiction and fantasy writers can do it with characters who aren’t even human. They can even tell you how to live through a pandemic.

If your very real, physical, mortal heart can beat faster for the fate of a hunting dog or a unicorn or an orca whale or an alien, it can beat for a person you watch die because he looked different from the man who killed him. 

And that’s why authoritarian governments don’t much care for people reading fiction that isn’t propaganda. 

And it’s why representation is important. Not because of quotas or woke points or whatever new reason the internet has barfed up to dismiss the whole idea. Because if your very real, physical heart can beat faster and ache and rejoice and feel utterly connected on a cellular level to a black person in a book or a Hispanic person on a screen or a trans person on a stage or a woman’s voice in your ear, it opens the door to that connection with real people in the real world, and that connection is dangerous to those who thrive on rigidly drawn lines separating one kind of human from another. Remember what I said about empathy—it doesn’t count if you can’t do it for people who are different from yourself. POC and women and sexual and gender minorities the world over, as a group, have spent their lives learning to empathize with the dominant default demographic as a means of sheer survival. The representation of light-skinned, cis, straight, overwhelmingly male images and voices in every kind of media has created and enforced that empathy, both in those who do not resemble that model and those who do. Without other figures in which to root human feeling and connection, that light-skinned cis straight male becomes the only kind of person a culture considers it possible to empathize with. What do you mean the handsome white man did a bad, 90% of the stories I’ve ever heard are about handsome white men being right about things. What do you mean a policeman is a criminal, I’ve spent 40 years watching movies and reading books where the only policemen who do anything wrong are promptly stopped by other policemen.

And that is why the unwoke internet fights so hard against the idea of diversity in stories anywhere. It is an existential threat to their self-image and the superiority of their place in their culture. I am not the kind of person who can be murdered any time, in broad daylight, in front of a crowd, weeping, unable to breathe, for no reason. I am the kind of person for whom context always matters, who receives the benefit of the doubt without hesitaiton, whose pain and experience matters, who others feel for and want to help. If other people become the kind of person I am, then I can become the kind of person they are, and I cannot face the idea that the cold curb and the weight of that knee might come for me, too.

What’s happening right now is a war of stories. A man had a full on tantrum, crying “all lives matter” because the idea that black lives might and crowds could be chanting about a group mattering that did not include him makes his brain rip itself in half and start munching on his spine, then started firing arrows into a crowd because he was so fucking stuck on his narrative that they are evil and he is not that he shot people, then lied to the press that he was beaten for no reason. That guy lost it because the dissonance between the story he believed he was in and the one unfolding around him ate his sanity.

That was yesterday.

So the stories fight and people are the cage where the match goes down. Science says the virus is real and numbers are rising. The government spins a fairy tale that sunlight heals all things and the warm wide world is safe again and knows that their story is seductive in its ease and plentiful barbecues by the lake. They shut down testing on a bet that their story can win because so many want it to be true and the other one sucks. If I listed all the twisted fairy tales our government has tried to make true since 2016 (all beginning with the biggest lie, that Midas is Midas, and has goldened everything he’s ever touched) I will starve to death at this desk. It is becoming a superpower just to be able to discern reality beyond this goblin-state’s wild imaginings. The more people push back against their stories, the harder the boots come down. The President’s greatest weapon is a social media site that does not allow compositions long enough for any nuance at all, and with it, Rumplestiltskin speaks his dreams into reality.

We have to fight for the story of reality, because they surely are fighting for the story of their dreams and imaginations. The difference between the two cannot be more starkly stated than two headlines I saw this morning: Violent Protests Rock Major Cities and Police Violence Erupts Across the Nation.

Part of this world is deathly committed to the preservation of the story where the white strong guy in the uniform is always the hero, and the black guy on the ground is always a villain deserving what he gets. They are literally incapable of thinking of themselves as the guy on the ground. The rest of us hear George Floyd crying for his mother. We feel his panic and fear. We break when he says he can’t breathe. We are frightened for ourselves and our children because we know we can be the one on the ground, any time. And those who did not are finding out as police brutalize journalists and crowds indiscriminately while the people on television talk only about property damage. 

As if our bodies are not our property.

The police themselves invest in that story with everything they have. That they are always right. That they are good and correct. That they know more, and deserve more, and are above those they police. Everyone is an addict when it comes to stories that cast them as heroes, but the cops have been sitting pretty on a culture that’s hawked that yarn since the first badge got pressed. They will not let it go. They will not hear another story. 

They are not big readers of other people’s stories.

And so they attack and arrest and brutalize any journalist they see, because every journalist they see is somebody else’s story escaping the event horizon of the binary dualistic authoritarian narrative. Microsoft lays off its human journalists and uses AI to replace them, because if people’s actions can be manipulated by bot farms, and the reporting on those actions is done by bot farms, then vertical integration is achieved there is no longer any need to listen to anything but the program coded by rich white men to tell themselves the story in which they are safe and nothing bad can happen to them.

If they can make sure we are all reading that story, too, it will become true.

The entire reason the last few days have unfolded as they have is because there was a story people could see on their screens, the mediator of reality these days, and feel the injustice of so piercingly. Every new video from a different angle told a new and worse version of this fucked-up Rashomon where the police always did it, but somehow, with every iteration, they did it more. And the piercingness of that injustice comes directly from the stories we have always told as a species about those who sin being punished, murderers not getting to live free and happy lives, about justice and morality holding true in the long run, while we watch four monsters smile and sleep in their own beds. Even if those stories aren’t true, even if they’ve never been true, the passion with which we try to make them true fuels the progression of civilization into something just slightly less than barbarism.

We are living in a war of stories: one that says only people like me are special and THEY want to take that away from me and one that says no one is special, but everyone is worthy.

And unfortunately, a lot of people are categorically incapable of not choosing the story where they are the most special beings in the universe. Why do you think evangelical Christians are constantly talking like they’re in a Lord of the Rings LARP? People are desperate to be in an epic story where they are special, because real life sucks ass and it’s boring and sometimes saving lives isn’t dramatic or cool with awesome music, it’s just sitting in your house quietly going mad, and the zombie apocalypse is never coming but the introverts’ pandemic is here, and the danger of that near-universal desire to be part of a massive glorious, but ultimately simple, tale of good and evil is that it turns into inquisitions, and crusades, and bloody revolutions, manifest destiny, and decades of infiltrating political parties to take rights away from people you don’t like, and straight-up Nazis really fucking quick.

I am too special to be forced to care about you is where way too many of us have landed, and it’s not just America, either.

But you don’t land there if you have a robust and active empathic drive. Empathy is the parachute that keeps you out of that burning goddamn swamp of solipsism.

So that is all I have to justify my own existence at the heat-death of the universe. I make these little things and they are silly and stupid and sometimes they have fairies or rock stars or griffins or loving humans or other mythical beasts, and I lob them into the future, into the hands of people I will never meet, some of whom haven’t even been born. I am an empathy demolitions expert. All I hope is that one day some of my tidy, pretty little bombs will go off and light up the mind of somebody else and change how they see the world outside themselves. Just a little. We certainly know books can explode people. Ayn Rand goes off all the time. But maybe, once in awhile, other fireworks can illuminate the sky rather than the hell of unfeeling.

Art begins in the longing for connection, for understanding, the forging of connection and empathy so strong it erases the boundary between art and the audience, the effect of that connection is, sometimes, when the moon is right, to reduce the weight of loneliness and separation in the world, and authoritarian states hate all that shit with the fire of a billion suns because when people aren’t lonely and separated along artificial, government-sponsored tribal lines, when people can feel the feelings of other human beings as keenly as their own, when everyone is worthy and no one is more special than anyone else, when something brighter and kinder and more interesting than than loyalty to the regime and the joy of obedience appears in people’s lives and says hey, baby, it’s okay, you’re not alone, lemme tell you a story, let’s draw a picture, let’s sing a song, nobody fucking wants to lick boots anymore. Licking boots is gross, and it’s boring, and it’s never your shoes that end up clean.

But we are so lonely right now. We are way more than six feet apart. We’ve all been locked up for so long. And I’m not just talking about quarantine. We are lonely and we are separate and we don’t know how to get out of this tale whole. I said I don’t know how uplifting this would come out in the end, and I still don’t. We’re not in the third act yet. There are still choices to be made. To be made by billions of lonely little kids in big kid shoes who have not, as of late, been on best behavior.

The most radical thing you can be on the teetering edge of totalitarianism is kind. You take in the refugees. You open your attic. You care for the sick. You make the hard choice. You do not collaborate with the ones causing pain. You do not nod when the great powers insist some are superior to others, even if you are the some. You comfort the broken. You witness for the dead. You protect the person under the knee, not the knee. You turn on your camera. You wear your mask. When someone says humans are livestock, you shout them down until the dark at the end of all things. You speak the truth even when the automated loudspeaker is deafening. You feel. Even when it would be safer for you personally not to.

And you tell the story of how we survive and find the sun again.

How we find each other again.

Because that story exists. But I’ll be fucked if I know how it goes. 

Everybody get a pen. We’ve got work to do.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/arts-and-entertainment/wp/2016/07/13/the-most-powerful-art-from-the-blacklivesmatter-movement-three-years-in/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/arts-and-entertainment/wp/2016/07/13/the-most-powerful-art-from-the-blacklivesmatter-movement-three-years-in/

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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2006.05 - 10:10

- Days ago = 1799 days ago

- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.