Make It Scream, Make It Burn

by Leslie Jamison

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.

We tell stories about why we’re lonely, or what we’re haunted by, and these stories about absence can define us as fully as our present realities.

She is a difficult woman from New York trying to convince me that we should be difficult women from New York together. But I’m not a difficult woman from New York. I’m not any kind of person from New York. I just happen to live there.

It makes me think of that David Foster Wallace commencement speech, “This Is Water,” the one that everyone finds inspiring except the people who think it’s unbearably trite and find it pathetic that everyone else is so inspired by it. I’m so inspired by

We were all going to look at these things, and then stop looking, and then keep on living just like we ever did. Genocide tourism turns public history into private commodity. The past is parceled into ticket stubs and photographs, into the souvenir of experience itself, so it can be taken home.

It felt disrespectful to walk over the dead but also honest. We are always doing it anyway.

True statement: Sri Lanka is paradise. Also true: every paradise is made possible by blindness.

This jarring quality summons the French aesthetic of jolie laide: the idea that something is beautiful because of its imperfections, not in spite of them.

What does it mean to make art from other people’s lives? What distinguishes exploitation from witnessing, and when is that witnessing complete? Is it ever?

I have spent much of my life as a writer chasing poet C. D. Wright’s suggestion that we try to see people “as they elect to be seen, in their larger selves.” But it’s an impossible dream. Making art about other people always means seeing them as you see them, rather than mirroring the way they would elect to be seen.

It’s back to the Borges problem: in order to do justice to the world, the map has to reproduce the world in its entirety. But does more of a thing always make it truer?

Why disdain Vegas for openly admitting what was already true everywhere? The whole world was making promises it couldn’t keep. The whole world was out to scam you. Vegas was just upfront about it. It put marquee lights around it. To me, Vegas felt like the urban-planning equivalent of the homeless man we passed whose sign said: WHY LIE? I WANT BEER.

One definition of living might be the perpetual swapping of story lines. We trade in the scripts we’ve written for ourselves and get our real lives in return.

Marriage isn’t telling your best stories to a new lover; it’s asking your husband about his day and not glazing over at his reply.

With parenting, you could do everything you were supposed to and it still might backfire, because you lived with a tiny, volatile human who did not come with any kind of instruction manual.