Involuntary witness

Yesterday, Lilith and I ran into the man with the small one-eyed dog named Rosie. He wears a narrow gray beard, cap and high athletic socks. A year ago he told me Trump was not corrupt; SHE was, and noted I belonged at UH with "all those leftists." Not that he liked Trump, mind you; called himself a "radical centrist." I greeted Rosie by name, and Lilith greeted her by nose. The man and I stood next to each other. I looked at the dogs. "At least it's not so hot this morning," he said. "Oh the weather these days!" I responded. "Have a good walk." "You too!"


Misogyny, the philosopher argues, is not a psychological, but a social, disorder. The man who trolled women loves his mother, his sister, and his spouse. But he hated the woman who wrote with such authority.


I sit in another living room and listen as they tell me about the horrors of literary analysis, the unnecessary difficulties of poetry. This, I know, is not intentional, though note that my professional life is being attacked.


There was the time my photograph was on the front page of the Weekly. I picked up six copies as we left for Nepal. "What are you doing there?!" a friend emailed me. Apart from that, nothing, ever.


There is the time a friend was accused of "breathing audibly" as she left a classroom, having mis-spoken and then apologized for it. There was the time a website was created to take down a poet scholar who is only sometimes arrogant. There was the time we were asked why we did not sign onto the complaint. There was the time of the whisper campaign, so quiet he didn't hear of it. There was the time she was refused a parking pass. There was the time she was asked not to step on campus again. There was the time she had to negotiate to leave early, and no reasons were given. There was a time of children in cages, of black men shot, of no identifying markers of strangulation. There was the time of pedophilia, of theft for its own sake (an aesthetics of greed).


She says she was told not to send her 17-year old son to the mainland by himself. Sex trafficking.


There's the impossibility of dealing with another's trauma, of embracing to vaporize it until it comes again, the next wave with strong undertow, pulling your feet out from under you. Please go to bed now. Please keep crying. Please come back.


Involuntary witness: to see at the moment what occurs becomes language, at the moment of passing between fact and symbolic action. To admire the way symbolic action overwhelms its apparent subject, while wanting to return to that subject. The hooked moon over Mauna Kea, Marthe crying out with joy at the summit. Laura was sick on the way down. These are two ways of feeling the mountain, with joy and with terror. Do we divide them into temporal spaces: present and future? Or do we split them into psychological spaces, one open to the sky and the other confined to the back seat of a small car?


The prose required to get at this moment is far more dense than the idea of words folding over impressions like batter that sweetens as it diminishes. There is meaning in the vision and meaning in the putting it down, but they are not the same vision. Claudel's words about the red being deeper than any intensity of blue. It's scale, not content.


"Where am I?" I am on my bed, typing. I am beside the conflict, or on its both sides. I am not of this place, though I love it. "I know my place."




Note: Kate Manne, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny; also Merleau-Ponty's Visible and Invisible book.