Make It Scream, Make It Burn

by Leslie Jamison

Now the mystery of one particular whale survives as a man sitting at his kitchen table, pulling out weathered folders to point out the ordinary-looking graph of an extraordinary song.

As the paramedics were wheeling Leonora away from her apartment on a gurney, she asked them to turn around and take her back so she could lock the door. This was how she knew she’d regained faith in her own life. If she wasn’t going to die, she didn’t want to leave her door unlocked.

We project our fears and longings onto everything we’re not—every beast, every mountain—and in this way we make them somehow kin. It’s an act of humbling and longing and claiming all at once.

“Have mountains, and waves, and skies, no significance but what we consciously give them, when we employ them as emblems of our thoughts?”

His gibberish is more interested in what isn’t legible than in forcing the unknown into false legibility. It’s more interested in acknowledging the gaps than in voicing the projections we hurl across them.

Don’t assume the contours of another person’s heart. Don’t assume its desires. Don’t assume that being alone means being lonely.

She had a deep desire to understand her life as something structured by patterns, woven through with signs and signals and voices. She was hungry for a logic that might arrange all the isolated points of her experience into a legible constellation.

She hated how people considered her childlessness an insufficiency. Her artwork was the closest thing she had to progeny, and that was okay with her.

Maybe every song is a healing song if we hear it in the right mood—at the end of the right seven weeks, or the worst ones, the ones lost to us forever. Maybe desire and demand are just the same song played at different frequencies.

When we pour our sympathy onto 52 Blue, we aren’t feeling for a whale, exactly. We’re feeling for what we’ve built in his likeness. But that feeling still exists. It still matters. It mattered enough to help a woman come back from seven weeks at the edge of death.

“You can never tell the story about somebody that’s precisely the story he would have told about himself.”

Maybe I was too scared to push back against the stories people told themselves in order to keep surviving their own lives.

I felt emotionally, spiritually, and intellectually allergic to a certain disdainful tone that implied it knew better, that it understood what was possible and what wasn’t. It seemed arrogant to assume I understood much about consciousness itself—what it was, where it came from, or where it went once we were done with it.

In some deep unspoken part of my psyche, I’d convinced myself that agnosticism and acceptance were moral virtues unto themselves, but in truth I wasn’t so sure. Maybe I wasn’t doing anyone any favors by pretending that my belief system was tolerant enough to hold everything as equally valid. Maybe there were experiences I couldn’t relate to and things I might never believe.

If we told ourselves stories in order to live, what did we get from stories that allowed us to live again? It was about something more than buffering against the terrifying finality of death. It had to do with recognizing the ways we’re shaped by forces we can’t see or understand.

Stories about past lives help explain this one. They promise an extraordinary root structure beneath the ordinary soil of our days. They acknowledge that the realities closest to us—the rhythms of our lives, the people we love most—are shaped by forces beyond the edges of our sight. It’s thrilling and terrifying. It’s expansion and surrender at once.

Was it naïve or even ethically irresponsible to believe I should find common ground with everyone, or that it was even possible?

Love is not immune from the human hunger for narrative.

my defensiveness had never really been about the facts. It had always been about the vision.

If recovery said, “Your soul isn’t this special thing,” then reincarnation said, “Your soul isn’t even yours.” If recovery said, “You could have been this other person,” then reincarnation said, “You actually were this other person.”

And if reincarnation is a story some people find comforting, then it’s also true that the soul is just a story, too: the notion of an essential, singular self in each of us.

Ultimately this is what appealed to me about the story of reincarnation, that it asked me to believe in a self without rigid boundaries—a self that had lived before and would do it again. In this way, it was a metaphor for what I was struggling to accept about living at all: that nothing we lived was unique, that we were always—in some sense—living again.

Reincarnation struck me as an articulation of faith in the self as something that could transform and stay continuous at once—in sobriety, in love, in the body of a stranger.

Come back remembering, so you can tell us where you’ve been. We want to know.

We say, Wow. We say it again. We stay humble.

We walk toward the lights. We are safe, or else we aren’t. We live, until we don’t. We return, unless we can’t.

It embarrasses me to be associated with her request, with her sense of entitlement, with these justifications—I hurt more, I need more—perhaps because I recognize myself in them.

I bet she felt like a victim before she ever started hurting. I am actually thinking these things, and I am someone who has written indignantly about the world’s tendency to minimize the pain of women in precisely these ways, for precisely these reasons.

Now I want to read everything about her more generously, in order to compensate her for the indignity of becoming a character in my story, the woman with the voice, when she was already another kind of character, in another story entirely.

We claim something not by making it, but by making it useful. What we squat inside can begin to constitute us.

Sometimes I feel I owe a stranger nothing, and then I feel I owe him everything; because he fought and I didn’t, because I dismissed him or misunderstood him, because I forgot, for a moment, that his life—like everyone else’s—holds more than I could ever possibly see.

If you learn to pay attention, he says, “it will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars.”

This is how we light the stars, again and again: by showing up with our ordinary, difficult bodies, when other ordinary, difficult bodies might need us. Which is the point—the again-and-again of it. You never get to live the wisdom just once, rise to the occasion of otherness just once. You have to keep living this willingness to look at other lives with grace, even when your own feels like shit, and you would do anything to crawl inside a different one; when you would claw one Peaches out of the way, and then another, and then a third, just for a shot at some shell of respite. A 3:30 a.m. wake-up call in

Does graciousness mean you want to help—or that you don’t, and do it anyway?

The definition of grace is that it’s not deserved. It does not require a good night’s sleep to give it, or a flawless record to receive it. It demands no particular backstory.

You thought the story kept changing, but the most important part never did. She was always just a woman in pain, sitting right in front of you. Sometimes it hurts just to stand. Sometimes a person needs help because she needs it, not because her story is compelling or noble or strange enough to earn it, and sometimes you just do what you can. It doesn’t make you any better, or any worse. It doesn’t change ...

Of course, my aversion to Second Life—as well as my embrace of blemishes and shortcomings in the physical world—testified to my own good fortune as much as anything. When I moved through the real world, I was buffered by my (relative) youth, my (relative) health, and my (relative) freedom. Who was I to begrudge those who had found in the reaches of Second Life what they couldn’t find offline?

Pick up my stepdaughter from drama class? Check! Reply to my department chair about hiring a replacement for the faculty member taking an unexpected leave? I was on it! These obligations felt real in a way that Second Life did not, and they allowed me to inhabit a particular version of myself as someone capable and necessary.

It felt like returning to the air after struggling to find my breath underwater.

I came up gasping, desperate, ready for entanglement and contact: Yes! This is the real world! In al...

Although many users see Second Life as offering an equal playing field, free from the strictures of class and race, its preponderance of slender white bodies, most of them outfitted with the props of the leisure class, simply reinscribes the same skewed ideals that sustain the unequal playing field in the first place.

The cop avatar claims it was a misunderstanding, but so much racism refuses to confess itself as such—and it’s certainly no misunderstanding when white men on Second Life tell Sara that she looks like a primate after she rejects their advances; when someone calls her “tampon nose” because of her wide nostrils; or when someone else tells her that her experience with bias is invalid because she is a “mixed breed.”

So much dwells in surprise, in otherness, in missteps and unforeseen obstacles and the textures of imperfection: the grit and grain of a sidewalk with its cigarette butts and faint summer stench of garbage and taxi exhaust, the possibility of a rat scuttling from a pile of trash bags, the lilt and laughter of nearby strangers’ voices.

its reality is different from what happens when two people find themselves enmeshed in a relationship in the physical world—when the self has to stand behind the words she has spoken or the secrets she has disclosed, when she has to inhabit the daily constancy of her home.

The more important point is that the impulse to escape our lives is universal, and hardly worth vilifying. Inhabiting any life always involves reckoning with the urge to abandon it—through daydreaming; through storytelling; through the ecstasies of art and music, hard drugs, adultery, a smartphone screen. These forms of “leaving” aren’t the opposite of authentic presence. They are simply one of its symptoms—the way love contains conflict, intimacy contains distance, and faith contains doubt.

Choeung Ek was essentially a meadow and a generator and a toolshed full of ways to kill someone. By the time I visited, it was a meadow full of bones. This was not lyrical truth but literal fact. I watched my own shoes picking between and stepping over them. The dead were not done with us yet.

walking among bones was something else—stepping between the shards of a dead man’s ribs, between scraps of old clothing and shoe rubber. It felt disrespectful to walk over the dead but also honest. We are always doing it anyway.

Perhaps it was better to accept that not everything human was something I could know.

being away from other tourists didn’t make me feel less like a tourist. Just the opposite. I was looked at, sussed out, wondered about, and rightly so, because what was I doing there, anyway? I felt my own lack of use.

There’s a notion that spontaneity permits authenticity, liberating us from the freight and tangle of too much context, too much research, too much intention.