Charles M. Russell (1864–1926). “Waiting for a Chinook/The Last of 5000,” c. 1903. 88.60
Recently after my reading of portions of my new memoir, Little Brother, a woman from the audience approached me with a passionate question. Most questions are not passionate—they come from curiosity or politeness. But this woman’s was passionate: she had to know why I called my little brother’s death suicide.
“What would you call it? An accident?” I asked her, although it is hard for me to imagine how climbing a twenty-foot-tall electric pole and cutting a wire could be called an accident.
“Accident” was not what she wanted. She couldn’t find a word that would satisfy her. She told me that she had done equally daring things at a young age, such as producing a major shock through rewiring something—it wasn’t clear what.
I told her that I didn’t think Jonathan wanted to die but there are risks so obviously dangerous that we must guess that some wish for an end is implied—or is this the final and biggest and most deadly act of grandiosity?
We left it there. I sensed that she was hanging on to some evidence of daring that was precious to her, something she prized, no matter how dangerous: her ability to take a major risk. Perhaps the account was just too precious to share in the face of my skepticism.
I understand that. We need to feel a connection to the heroic, so often defined as inherently male.
Is this the reason we hang onto “the wild man”—or boy?
I don’t think we women are masochists. I never have. Sure, we sometimes cut ourselves, starve ourselves, drive too fast, and so forth. But I never have believed this is pursuit of pain but rather pursuit of the heroic. We tend to assume that with men.
I love Bill Hearne‘s old cowboy song about Charlie Russell, the painter, famous across the west. I don’t think Russell was a wild man; he accomplished too much. He probably drank a lot in line with the typical behavior of men then and now, but as far as I know he didn’t walk around waving weapons or engage in gratuitous violence.
Yet Bill’s song extols the wild man for whom “God made Montana.” And Russell, born in Montana, painted violent scenes, such as the torture of Indians or a cow starving to death, circled by wolves waiting for the kill.
Of course painting and writing about violence are not the same as committing violent acts, but the attraction is always there in the films and television shows we watch, in the deadly madness of soldiers, in the pounding march toward war which we are hearing now—and in the good woman hanging on to violent and abusive men, trying to persuade them to go to AA—always fruitless—trying to bribe them with food or sex to quit the bottle and the drugs.
It goes nowhere. Yet nothing we can say, write or sing kills the attraction. Perhaps only when we women, like my questioner, proudly embrace our own risky behavior will we be cured.
This leads me to another issue, connected perhaps by only a thin thread. When I was teaching a class via Zoom last week on writing memoir, I ran into my first experience with triggering. I’ve heard about this concept but it has never come up before in one of my workshops. Frankly, it left me speechless.
I’m always delighted to have an African-American student in one of my classes. Last week it was an attractive young woman who, when I began by asking each student to choose an adjective that best describes her, chose “Quiet.” I wondered if she was so used to being silenced or ignored that she had decided not to speak.
She didn’t say much until another student, a white woman, began reading a skeletal description of an incident in her family’s history that led up to a lynching. She stopped before describing the lynching but we all knew where she was going.
When I asked each student for her reaction, the black woman said she couldn’t answer because she had been “triggered.” After that she more or less disappeared from the class.
I felt terrible about this and wondered if I could have handled it more effectively; apologizing for her suffering seemed to make matters worse. But in teaching writing, and in my own work, I don’t censor. If writing is to have any meaning, the writer must be willing to describe terrible scenes, evoking feelings of anger, agony and despair. Otherwise, Tolstoy could never have written the war scenes in War and Peace. In fact most of Western literature would have to be discarded.
It seems now that most writing by English-speaking writers is being discarded unless it is written by a member of a previously marginalized group. This is right and good, the old wrongs need to be corrected. But it still stung when my latest agent told me she couldn’t sell any of my writing because “No one is interested in white privilege.” Perhaps an example of a different kind of triggering.
Teachers at every level are dealing every day with the issue of triggering. Are we really, as human beings, so frail, so besieged and unhappy, that asking us to empathize with the suffering of others is unendurable? Or asking us to recognize talent and common humanity in a member of the now-discredited white upper class?
If so we have gone a long way down the wrong path.
Triggering reminds me of my observation of how some parents here treat their children: children old enough to walk rolled around in strollers, grownups kangarooed with infants strapped to their chests or backs, children so frightened of strangers it is no longer possible to smile or offer a comment.
Are we teaching our children that life is just too dangerous? And is this perhaps at the root of the idea of triggering?
And is it possible that our fear of whiteness will come to match our fear of blackness? Both after all, for different reasons, are powerful.
Your editor, so difficult during her too long delay in approving your book for publishing, expressed her lack of interest in white, privileged people, knowingly including you. It is possible, like others before her, that she was envious of you and needed to « take you down a notch. » Many of us, I believe, have been attracted to you, a privileged, white woman, unafraid to speak her truths to power and to powerless, as well. I long ago gave up defending you to people who would deny you your voice. Many of those same people would irrationally oppose all efforts to limit gun ownership.
What an unfortunate, strange world, yes?
The editor you mention sounds like someone who should seek another line of work. I strongly disagree that it is “right and good” to discard or discount anyone’s writing or point of view. The idea of being inclusive is excellent, but that contains everyone by definition. People like this editor are divisive and kill literature, deciding who has the right to speak by gender, race or sexual identity, not talent or interest.
Tolstoy, of course, was a count. By this logic, he should have been silenced! Right.
This comment is about Charley Russell. I grew up in Montana, in the very area he portrayed in his paintings. He was born in St. Louis and moved at a young age to Montana to be there instead of the city St Louis. He had a good relationship with his parents. He was working as a night hawk on a ranch owned by a corporation when he painted Waiting for a Chinook. The owner wanted to know how the herd was, and he did this painting on a scrap of paper, or an envelope. I have a wonderful book about his life, and he was a very interesting person, and the only reason I think his paintings are so valuable today, is that his wife was a very good businessperson, and she knew how to market his work to collectors in New York. At that time the West was very romantic to people in the East. He eventually made a good living with his art and was always well respected in Montana. I am an artist, and it is always interesting to me why some artists are well known, and other good artists’ struggle. In this case, the wife made all the difference. Last note, Russell’s family was not poor, they often sent him paintings supplies.