insults and injuries
Thursday 31 August 2006 | I like a cookie
Doesn’t it really say something about Santa Fe, proud capitol of New Mexico, that its largest public high school is named “Capital High”? This morning I drove past “Capital Christian Church,” too. But hey, Christians don’t need to be able to spell, they’d protest; Jesus is coming and they’ll all be raptured while the rest of us overeducated snobs roast in the eternal fiery flames of the underworld.
And perhaps they have a point.
One day recently I solaced a Brujo thrice daunted by the indifferent world: “I don’t care if everyone thinks you’re a liar, or irresponsible, or an idiot—you’re my lying irresponsible idiot.”
(I further advised him to sling either an appropriate ethnic slur their way, or a Shakespearean insult, those pribbling malmsey-nosed barnacles!)
Sometimes one is sorely daunted—whether by misspellings or by what Richard Hugo refers to as most writers’ conviction that they are “a wrong thing in a right world.” I frequently quote the otherwise irritating Joyce Carol Oates—probably too frequently, at that—from her essay “The Death Throes of Romanticism“:
Nemerov shares with Stevens and Plath certain basic assumptions: that poems are “not the point” in the natural universe, and that the poet, therefore, is not in the same field of experience as the swallows. Poetry, coming from the mind of man, not from the objects of mind’s perception, is somehow a self-conscious, uneasy activity that must apologize for itself. […] This is a tragic assumption in that it certainly banishes the poet himself from the world: only if he will give up poetry and “find again the world” has he a chance of being saved. It is a paradox that the poet believes he will honor the objects of his perception—whether swallows, trees, sheep, bees, infants—only by withdrawing from them. Why does it never occur to romantic poets that they exist as much by right in the universe as any other creature, and that their function as poets is a natural function?—that the adult imagination is superior to the imagination of birds and infants?
In art this can lead to silence; in life, to suicide.
To which I always respond huffily—why does it never occur to them? I’ll tell you why, missy—because it doesn’t occur to the rest of society, and it’s hard to uphold the natural rightfulness of your function when everything around you persistently informs you how useless and what a waster you are. In art, this can lead to mediocrity, and in life, to going completely freaking bonkers.
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