Beauty can be important in an person's life. And people beguiled by the beautiful are less dangerous to others than those obsessed by the thoughts of supremacy. If an afternoon of reading poetry has given me a feeling of profound well-being, I don't then need to go out into the street and seek satisfaction by strangling prostitutes. Art can be central in a person's life. If the art we create is beautiful enough, will people be so drawn to looking at it that they'll leave behind their quest for power? Beauty really is more enjoyable than power. A poem really is more enjoyable than an empire, because a poem doesn't hate you. The defense of privilege, the center of our lives for such a long time, is grim, exhausting. We're exhausted from holding on to things, exhausted from trying not to see those unobtrusive people we're kicking away, whose suffering is actually unbearable to us.
--Wallace Shawn, "The Unobtrusives," Tin House, 10/1

…exhausted from trying not to see those unobtrusive people we're kicking away, whose suffering is actually unbearable to us…

When I was in chronic pain, I felt as if I were a tuning fork. I vibrated whenever I felt myself in the presence of someone's waves of pain. Once, I froze upon seeing a middle-aged man in blue jeans and a leather jacket jiggety-jog through the entrance of the supermarket. I could feel the cold sweat along his vertebrae, felt the squeaky hip ball joints as they dry-ground the sockets. I tried to guess what pain relievers he was on, because given the jaggedness of his gait, and the tightness across his back, the analgesic wasn't working as lubricant, either.

My pains have become white noise, omnipresent, but most days I paint over it with life's vibrancy. I don't notice fellow sufferers as often, although I may still have a moment when I wince as someone's pain crashes into me.

I've made myself look at things I don't want to see. I've made myself read accounts of hardship to know that I'm not alone, and to resolve to find the ways that I can help.

I listen to those who come into my office and tell me of mundane pains (she dumped me)—and it always feels like it's the first time anyone had ever felt this; to the excruciating (he raped me), the unfathomable (he beat me), the cruel (she gave me away).

Write, I tell them. After I advise them to seek counseling.) Write at the uncomfortable spot. Write at that place where your chest is in a vice. Write to your tears. Write in your tears. Write past them.

I've been told that I'm encouraging a generation of narcissists—it's all about me, me, me.

No, I say. When they get themselves to that place where it hurts to write, to tap into that which makes us human, then their humanity expands.
And when they do that, worlds open up.

I write about a few things. My love of nature is a font of new material. Last night, it was the herd of eight deer that stood at the side of the busy road, grazing on what the melted snow had revealed, and forcing a parade of red brake lights as people prepared for the deer to be spooked.

But I also write about shit. I make myself write about painful topics—the loneliness of PTSD, the agony of being gang-raped in your country's civil war, the suffering that I see all around me.

I wonder why I write such things. I have learned, finally, to stop writing these things as rant and plaint with no solution; if I write about something, I want to be able to refer someone to a resource that will provide them with more knowledge or relief. I tell myself I'm helping others. Maybe so.

But truth is, I'm helping myself. If I didn't write, didn't blog on a regular basis, I think I would fill up like a basin of  sewer water. I can take it in—because taking it in must be done—but then I can change it somehow, try to sweeten it in such a way that someone else might let themselves see it, too.

I don't want to be part of an Empire. I want to be part of a Vision.

I walked around for a long time pretending that, as Hobbes told us, life in the state of nature was nasty, brutish … and short. It was easy enough to affect such a state: I wore my cynicism like a war medal. The shit I had seen when I was younger had entitled me now to an adult life of not having to look, see, or listen.

But I teach. And how can I model an attitude toward the world that will simply send out into it more critics, more gossips, more scolds? Is it not better to try to encourage them to create art, even if for right now, that art is about themselves?

I have a modicum of skill with words. I write for pleasure, and when I'm doing that, I'm all passion and slickness and openness and air. But when I'm writing for service, I'm sharp as steel with discontent that I've attempted to hone into something crafty.

This essay, for me, is pleasure. Now, I have to re-focus my gaze on the commitment I have made to the women of the Congo.

Thanks for indulging me.