Scribblings with Green Chalk

Forgive me, I’ve been away with my head. Unaware of the intricacies of blog etiquette, I didn’t leave a hiatus post.

While I was gone, my absent blog persona was tagged by the lovely Wildly Parenthetical. Since we don’t have that much of a personality split, I reply–though outrageously late.

Here it comes:

1. Pick up the nearest book (of at least 123 pages).
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people.

Having put aside the Polish edition of Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception and the German edition of Szczypiorski’s Początek (do read that novel!), I reach for the book I don’t seem to be able to finish: Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain. It’s on my bedside table most of the time and we’re outwaiting each other. I have not gotten to page 123 yet, so it’ll be a surprise:

That the war deaths occurred on behalf of a terrain in which pianos could be played and bicycles could be pedalled, where schools would each day be entered by restrained and extravagantly gesturing children alike, must be indicated by appending the direction of motive, “for my country,” since the deaths themselves are the unmaking of the embodied terrain of pianos and bicycles, classmates, comrades, and schools.

For My Country. Thus “to kill and die”–or in the idiom that embraces both simultaneously, “to hurt” (to hurt within one’s own body) or to “alter body tissue”–are alike in having no interior referent and, if they are to have one, requiring a separate specification. But precisely because there is nothing “interior” that itself stipulates and in doing so limits its referent, the act of “dying” or “killing” can be lifted away and coupled with a different referent. (Scarry 123-124)

Earlier, Scarry writes about the image of war in Homer and gets Homeric with her syntax, so I might have lost count.

This passage encapsulates what drew me to the book in the first place. Scarry’s thesis is that pain is mostly uncommunicable, transcending language. Transcending our ability to relate. What does it mean to empathize, when oftentimes we can’t even see that the person next to us is in pain? Even when we notice, we never feel their pain… Is our mental image of their pain anything close to what they could be feeling? Is pain just an “element of blank” to the one who isn’t experiencing it, like one of Dickinson’s poems tells us? And the person in pain… a body, distant in its suffering? If so, how easy is war?

My on and off reading of the book does not allow me to offer a full-blown meditation on these questions. I’ve got reader’s block. Don’t pick on me.

I tag the following charming people, who hopefully cannot empathize with me in my predicament: Denise of Wohnen in Wien, Bowleserised, Aulelia of Charcoal Ink, Anthony, and BD (do I have the right link?).

When I started Scribblings a few months ago I didn’t think I would ever write about this. I honestly believed that I would be able to leave it out and just move beyond the whole issue. Beyond the remembered sights and sounds, and stories — stories that I once felt defined me, which is to say, soiled me. The greatest challenge of writing about this is for me the fear of lapsing into narcissism. I can almost hear accusing voices saying, “what’s so exceptional about you? isn’t it just wallowing in self-pity?” There is nothing exceptional about me. But I think no one should feel that their life is a story of violence: of violence engendering violence, a hidden dark element in them attracting violence. But when I say no one, I also mean to exclude myself from the scope of those stories.

(more…)

It’s usually them, a distant, vaguely defined group of the abject. We know they’re there, but they don’t have faces. They come to embody the reverse of the norms we live by, clinging to the idea of romatic love, clinging to lust, clinging to the images of family, and clinging to disgust. Useful but useless. Always used.

There is still no language to talk about prostitution and not enough courage to talk about them as people with faces and personal stories. There is no way we could rationally talk about their rights, since most societies choose to pretend they do not exist.

This article about murders of prostitutes in Edmonton, Canada is a glimpse into the larger narrative of hypocrisy and violence, spanning centuries. The article links to the murdered women’s pictures and presents them as mothers, sisters, wives; individuals rather than mere bodies for rent.

I know that it’s a bigger question whether any perpetrator sees the victims of their crimes as persons in their own right. Given the fact that in this case the victims were chosen solely among sex-workers, it does seem like a misogynist crime, attacking a “safe” target: women rejected by society in principle, partly invisible, those no one would stand up for. The families of some of them strongly deny that they were prostitutes, probably some of the relatives only found out about this after they died. The story’s caught up in a spiral of shame. Many, perhaps all, of the families feel stigmatized by the publication of the photos. This is not a truth about their lives they would wish to reveal. Whatever the actual details were, however heinous the deed, there is the troubling connection between the womens’ profession and what happened to them. In a sick and insane way, the perpetrator(s) (?) channeled the desires to penalize the abject. The society left them a niche to operate in by denying sex-workers their rights. If you’re invisible, no one will hear your scream.

I remember watching a debate about sex-workers’ rights on French TV. Among the participants, there were several ex-prostitutes. Not hiding their names nor faces, they spoke openly about their situation and demanded legal recognition of their existence. I don’t know what that led to but I was stunned to see real people speaking up about real problems instead of the usual “experts” throwing theories and hypothesies at each other. And finally talking instead of blushing.

What do their relatives and neighbors feel when they look at the pictures of the dead women? What do you feel?