When I was in high school, I volunteered at the local library where my job was to help children learn to read. It was not an easy job, but I did some good in the world, and made some money doing it. The money went into a bank account. When I was ready to graduate from high school, that money paid for my registration to college. It is a miracle to watch someone learn how to read. It is a miracle I went to college. While reading Kaveh Akbar’s Pilgrim Bell (Bookshop), I remembered my high school job to teach children to read and recalled what it felt like to inhabit the desperate, frustrating, and sometimes miraculous space where a person becomes literate.
Poetry is as much about remembering as it is about reading. Any teacher will tell you that the process of teaching someone to learn how to read feels anything but miraculous. It is a slow process, frustrating. At no other time can you feel words desperately wanting to mean something, the mind grasping for meaning and not finding it. In his new stunning poetry book, Pilgrim Bell, Kaveh Akbar metaphorically transforms this frustration into an extended metaphor representing the long and slow process by which a person finds grace. If learning to read is the torturous process by which a person learns to translate sounds into words, and words into meaning, mystical grace is perhaps the process by which a person unstitches herself from the warp of meaning, undoes the threads of words and matter that tie a soul to this planet, finally undoing even the matter itself, until, what? Nothing.
“The Miracle” and the Miraculous
“The Miracle,” one of the early and more remarkable poems in Pilgrim Bell, starts with a reading lesson. Akbar writes: “Gabriel seizing the illiterate man, alone and fasting in a cave, and commanding READ, the man saying I can’t, Gabriel squeezing him tighter, commanding READ, the man gasping I don’t know how, Gabriel squeezing him so tight he couldn’t breathe, squeezing out the air of protest, the air of doubt…”
It was this passage that reminded me of what it felt like to teach a child to read.
All this training, for what?
So that God might speak to man, is Akbar’s answer, though he doesn’t quite put it in those words. He puts it into these words: “It wasn’t until Gabriel squeezed away what was empty in him that the Prophet could be filled with miracle.”
What is grace but another name for being empty? Being holy. Perhaps the pun on the hole is no mistake.
The poem continues: “Imagine the emptiness in you, the vast cavities you have spent your life trying to fill—with fathers, mothers, lovers, language, drugs, money, art, praise—and imagine them gone.”
The paradox of mystical poetry is the ineffable cannot be described in words.
Varieties of Mystical Experience
When Dante wrote the Paradiso, he encountered the same difficulty. How does a man describe God in words? Dante explains that he is able to write about what he saw through the process of accommodation. We are not to take the imagery of the Paradiso literally, nor are we to imagine time as unfolding in a linear fashion. The Paradiso happened in one instant, the imagery of pure blasted light. Dante describes it as his brain literally being smite. Dante writes: “I have seen things that one who comes down from there cannot remember and cannot utter” and “much is permitted there that is not permitted to our faculties here” and then this: “to signify transhumanizing per verba is impossible; therefore let the comparison suffice.” (Translation Durling Martinez, Bookshop).
The experience might have been God; the unfolding of the rose was all Dante.
And so, mystical poetry can be personal because, as Akbar writes: “The key, filed smooth to fit every lock, opens none.” Perhaps nature is manifold in its beauty and horror only to ensure that there would be something in everything to awaken each person. Religious experience is indeed full of variety.
All of this is to say that the mystical, if is arrives, it arrives as mystery, in the mind itself, in multiple forms. There are six poems titled “Pilgrim Bell” in this collection, and each instance provides a new variety of mystical experience. Each instance is almost a renewed call to prayer.
Akbar notes in the first instance of “Pilgrim Bell,” “My savior…Up until now he has been. / a no-call no-show.” The turn of phrase is brilliant. It takes us from belief, to disbelief, and the poem spins wildly around that axis.
“Pilgrim Bell” returns again in another form. In the second “Pilgrim Bell” Akbar almost seems to console himself about his inability to access the mystical. “The stillness you prize. / Won’t prize you back.”
There’s an irreverence, and also a reverence in these poems. “all piety leads to a single / point: the same paradise / where dead lab rats go.” There’s frustration and doubt when transcendence doesn’t arrive.
There are marvels here enough to fill a whole book, and Akbar does it. His abundance is almost sickening sweet. He knows it. There’s a poem called “Cotton Candy.” There’s not much that is bad here. Akbar wouldn’t have it. “It’s so unsettling / to feel anything but good.”
Like Meditation
St. Francis of Assisi. Watercolor. Janice Greenwood
Have you ever meditated, reader? I have. I have meditated while trying to teach children to read. Sometimes it worked. More often I just breathed. Akbar also has a poem for this. It’s another “Pilgrim Bell.” It goes: “How long can you speak. / Without inhaling. How long. / Can you inhale without. / Bursting apart…”
We can hold the universe in our heads with our literature, but in the end, our voices can only say so many words on a single breath.
Akbar confronts the problem of evil, but he doesn’t wrestle with it. It arises. It falls away.
Akbar is concerned to have “envied the wicked when I saw / the prosperity / of the wicked.” He doesn’t linger long in doubt. “Tell me how to live. / And I will live that way,” he writes, in another instantiation of “Pilgrim Bell.”
There are so many “Pilgrim Bells,” and these are also extended metaphors, reminding us that there are so many forms for experiencing the divine, so many ways the divine manifests.
Akbar writes another “Pilgrim Bell.” Here he ends it with: “Every person I’ve ever met. / Has been small enough. / To fit. / In my eye.” The body itself is mystical. The mind, too. The spirit of Emily Dickinson resides in this. After all, she wrote: “The Brain—is wider than the sky.”
Perhaps the brain is beneath our feet, too? I have read that the fungi connect the forest together with as much intricacy and complexity as a human brain, each tree a node, each weed a node, too. The fungi bringing together the oldest tree, so that the eldest can feed the youngest seedling. In this manner, the ancient old growth feeds the first leaf of the tenderest shoot. Nature is indeed mystical.
I wouldn’t know this had I not read it. But do I know it at all? Akbar describes heaven as a place with no opportunity costs. Just abundance. He plays on Eliot’s “Do I dare to eat a peach” when he writes “Every orange I eat disappears the million / peaches… I could have eaten.” But in his mother’s heaven he can eat all the peaches he wants.
The last poem in the book, “The Palace” is the weakest. How do you end a book about grace with grace? You cannot end it.
Simone Biles’s recent withdrawal from the Olympics, citing the need to focus on her mental health, is a reminder that mental health is inseparable from physical health. If there was any doubt about it, Biles reminds us that physical performance and mental well-being are intrinsically linked. And yet, half the population (mostly male) has spent a good part of the last week critiquing Biles’s choice as weakness while the other half (mostly female) has spent a good part of the last week celebrating her courage. I think this phenomenon has more to do with misunderstandings about the nature of mental illness, than it has to do with issues of sexism and race. Though, of course, it is also about sexism and race.
We understand that physical injury can manifest in many forms. Gymnastics can be an incredibly dangerous sport. As Maggie Astor wrote in the New York Times, the media often writes about Kerri Strug’s broken ankle, but seldom writes about the many women who died or who were paralyzed after breaking their necks. Even if we don’t talk about it, we accept that physical injury can manifest in many forms, and that each of these forms can potentially result in an athlete’s withdrawal from the Olympics. In Tokyo this year, the risks include everything from strains and sprains to catching COVID-19.
What we don’t talk about are the many ways that mental health concerns can manifest. The first association many people have when they think of mental health is “depression,” but mental health is a nuanced subject. It doesn’t just encompass depression, though a great many Americans suffer from it. Mental health is a broad umbrella that can encompass issues including anxiety, stress, social withdrawal, sleep, self-concept, body image, self-esteem, mood, perception of reality, and more. The brain can be as nuanced as the body, and the mind influences the body. Extreme anxiety can result in a loss of your kinesthetic awareness, or the “twisties,” as some have called it when describing Biles’s recent confusion in the air.
Severe anxiety can result in panic attacks. While few panic attacks are life-threatening, I can’t imagine it safe to have one while trying to perform dangerous aerial maneuvers. I’m not suggesting the Biles suffers from panic attacks. I’m just noting that a range of mental health conditions can manifest physically. Along those lines, depression can do more than just make you sad. It can reduce your energy level, and even affect your ability to sleep or feed yourself. I can’t imagine trying to summon the will to perform on a world stage while also experiencing depression.
Extreme stress can cause you to freeze, and given the complexity of a gymnastics maneuver, I don’t imagine the average viewer would even be able to perceive those minute moments of hesitation. Some disorders can result in a person losing touch with reality or cutting social ties. These disorders can also have as much an effect on the body as they do on the mind.
Social isolation (something which many athletes are experiencing because their families couldn’t be present at this Olympic games due to COVID-19), also has real emotional and physical effects. According to Cleveland Clinic, when a person experiences loneliness, their cortisol levels can increase. Cortisol is a stress hormone. In athletes who have calibrated everything about their performance from diet to sleep, we can’t underestimate the effects that even a slight uptick in cortisol could have. Athletes train for pressure, but many have not trained to endure high pressure without social support of family and loved ones, as they will have to do in Tokyo.
Athlete. Watercolor. Janice Greenwood.
As someone who has experienced anxiety, depression, stress, problems sleeping, and more throughout my life and at different points in my life, I can say that sometimes anxiety and stress can express itself physically as literal nausea. I’m not a gymnast, so I can’t say for sure, but I imagine it would be very hard to complete a vault while feeling that way. I am a rock climber though, and I have experienced anxiety while climbing. I have, on a couple of occasions, almost seriously injured myself trying to push through anxiety. There were many days where I’d sit at the bottom of a climb doubled over in pain from the anxiety. These days, I know better than to push on when I feel like that. But knowing better is a skill that comes from experience. I worry about younger athletes who have been trained to perform at all costs. They may not have that wisdom unless it is taught as part of their training. Perhaps Simone Biles’s greatest legacy will be this. It’s not trivial.
We often deny that the pain we experience when we are going through emotional pain is real pain. Harvard Health notes that extreme stress has real physiological effects that can include inflammation, high blood pressure, insomnia, and changes in appetite. And when we are grieving, there are physical changes that take place in our hearts and blood vessels that can put us at greater risk of a heart attack.
Maybe athletes will be the first among us to fully articulate the close relationship between the mind and the body. The New York Times, in a piece of journalistic video excellence, features Alexi Pappas, an Olympian who was diagnosed with clinical depression after her Olympic run. Pappas explains that the training and motivation that prepared her for the Olympics may not have initially prepared her to tackle depression, but that after seeking help, she was able to re-think her approach to mental health. She asks: “What if we athletes approached our mental health the same way we approached our physical health?” And what if it wasn’t just athletes, but people in general? What if we all treated our mental health with the same care and diligence with which we’d approach a broken bone or a bad flu?
We all may not be Olympic athletes but in America today, we live in a culture of overwork, a culture that celebrates the all-nighter, and the hustle. Athletes push themselves hard, but so do people in the arts, who often do their day jobs, and then their arts jobs after. In fact, many industries celebrate this idea that if you’re not sleeping, you’re doing it right.
Pappas writes in more detail about her depression in her book Bravey, explaining that the same relentless pursuit for excellence she applied to the Olympics she used in her creative pursuits and also in her healing from depression.
There are many ways a person can wear herself thin. In creative or physical pursuits, there’s always a fine line. There’s pushing yourself, and then there’s hurting yourself. There’s motivating yourself and then there’s ignoring pain. Pappas writes: “Chasing a dream is a never-ending negotiation.” Part of that negotiation is knowing when to step away, or when to take a break.
Simone Biles was courageous in stepping back from the Olympics. But I think she did more than that. Given the sheer difficulty of the maneuvers she had been trained to attempt, she not only was courageous, she also probably saved her own life.
Maggie Smith’s Goldenrod is a beautiful mess. Smith is the author of Keep Moving, a grief diary characterized by its spare one-day-at-a-time, one-sentence-a-day format. But for those readers who enjoyed the relentless minimalism of Keep Moving (I was one such reader and wrote about it here), Goldenrod offers more in terms of sheer material, but fails to deliver its abundance consistently. Smith does better when she gives herself less to work with.
Grief creates a kind of gravity, a kind of gravitas. The underlying grief of divorce that motivated Keep Moving gave it its lyrical gravity and power. But Goldenrod lacks such internal intensity. The center cannot hold.
When we were all locked away during COVID-19 nurturing our sourdough starters, Maggie Smith did the same thing, and came up with a poem called “Prove” to prove it. The act of writing is compared to letting dough rise, but the metaphor is forced enough to be comic rather than serious. Either way, I’m not sure the dough has risen in Goldenrod.
I try to approach reading new books of poetry by established poets in the same way I imagine the established poets assess unpublished poets in first book contests. That is to say, I like to give established poets the same amount of patience they give manuscrpts in the slush pile. The poetry manuscript contest format doesn’t encourage charitable reading. After all, when you have 800 manuscripts to eliminate, it’s easier to think about why something doesn’t work than why it does.
I don’t know about what another editor would say, but Maggie Smith’s Goldenrod would have gotten rejected if it were in my slush pile.
Her poetry feels less like lyric and more like resignation. Whether she’s writing about police brutality, mass shootings, or child separation at the border, Smith has nothing new to bring to the conversation except lament.
In the opening poem in the collection, Smith refuses to name North American birds by their birdsong, though she claims to have tried to memorize them. At first I found her resistance to the tendency in American poetry to name every bird in existence interesting. Lyric poets like Mary Oliver have an almost taxonomical obsession with naming birds and flowers, and yet the tendency fails to do much for the poetry. Smith makes clear early on that she is no such poet. The second poem in the book echoes the same theme. “I’m no botanist,” Smith declares. “If you’re the color of sulfur / and growing at the roadside, you’re goldenrod. / You don’t care what I call you, whatever.” There’s a delicious defiance in this refusal to call a thing by its name, particularly in a poet. And yet, the refusal serves no purpose.
In the time of climate change, can the refusal to name an animal or plant even be considered heroic or praiseworthy? For example, in Hawai’i, the kiwikiu is a critically endangered species. It has a distinctive song. I have never heard a kiwikiu in the wild. And yet, a researcher knew its song and was able to identify it, and in doing so, was able to show that at least one bird still lived on the slopes of Haleakala. And this might not matter to you, but it matters in Hawai’i, where many native animals and plants are under critical threat of extinction.
As more species of birds and other animals go extinct due to habitat loss, pollution, invasive species, and climate change, I often wonder if we truly feel these losses given how little we see in nature that is ours. In order to feel the loss of something, you must first know it.
In this context, Maggie Smith’s refusal to know the names of the birds doesn’t feel honorable or noble. There’s no point to her not knowing, just plain old American distraction and distractibility. Smith’s poem about goldenrods ends with the poet looking at herself in the mirror. And just like that, we’re back to Narcissus, but to no greater end. Smith isn’t even true to her own denial, naming birds and plants specifically in other poems later.
And then, just as suddenly, Smith drops that thread to write about “the president” calling “undocumented immigrants animals.” What follows is terrible poetry. Child separation is likened to a predatory bird eating a roosting bird’s egg. In one of the most maudlin lines in the book, we are asked to consider the instinct of the mother bird who returns from hunting and continues to sit on a broken egg. Nothing in this poetry suggests that Smith has had any personal experience with deportation, child separation, or even has known someone who is a refugee. I wouldn’t go as far as to call this poetry exploitative, but there’s the uneasy feeling of watching a bystander trying to put herself too much in the center of the action here.
The poet moves on. “The sun comes up, and soon / the you-know-what will hit the you-know-what.”
How many worthy books of poetry sit in slush piles right now that will never be published, that have more lyrical, linguistic, and poetic sense than all this?
For all Smith’s early refusal to call nature nature by its multiplicity of names, she sure relies on it quite a bit to get her point across. She even has the requisite poem about starlings. And like almost every modern and contemporary poet these days, her oeuvre wouldn’t be complete without a poem called “Walking the Dog,” which is entirely forgettable. Howard Nemerov and Matthew Dickman also have poems about walking dogs, but theirs are much better, and can be read if you follow the links.
The thing about poetry, and there is a thing about poetry, is that it is not ours once it has been written. Once a poem it out there, it belongs to everyone else.
As Smith herself writes: “Isn’t that what you’ve been taught—nothing is ours?” And yet, for a poem to belong to everyone, it must first belong to the poet who writes it. I don’t think these poems ever belonged to Smith. If you understand what I’m saying when I say this, you understand something intrinsic about poetry, about writing, and about the importance of personal risk in any creative endevour.
When Smith has something to say about distant things, the poems fall flat. Stones are yoked to violence through the conduit of them both being “teachers.” But the precision of the extended metaphor is hazy at best.
There are some better moments in the book. The second movement contains a series of poems about motherhood that explore the concept of birth and death and the unknowability of the self.
But even this intimate series of poems is broken by the news. An unfortunate poem that juxtaposes her son’s safety to that of men shot in the streets is followed by an even more unfortunate poem where babies are caged and crying in Spanish. Another poem compares a child living in a transitional neighborhood to a weed. Smith shows understanding of neither perennials nor children living in low income neighborhoods, nor any evidence she has had close interactions with either. She would do well to read up on regenerative agriculture and maybe volunteer.
And that’s why Smith’s book made me so angry. It made me angry because the poetry itself became a form of activism, which replaced actual action. For all the time Smith spends not identifying the plants she writes about, there’s nothing in the work to suggest that Smith spends any significant amount of time around plants, or that she went to a single protest against gun violence, or that she took the time to personally help or contribute to even one child she writes about crying in a cage or living in a transitional neighborhood. It’s easy to get commiseration with a poem written at the comfort of your desk, much harder to live through the solutions.
Fern. Watercolor. Janice Greenwood.
Smith is at her worst when trying to make sense of the news in her poetry, and at her best when she permits her imagery and syntax to unfold the meaning of small personal griefs and fears without exerting too much conscious control over the material. She is at her best when she writes about motherhood and her divorce. In “Not Everything is a Poem,” she writes hauntingly and beautifully about her son’s sickness. Smith is superb when she keeps it close to home. Aren’t we all?
Smith notes that she tells herself “a story about my life, / a story I call “Talisman,” a story / that might end well if I tell it right.” There’s something moving here about the knowledge that a life well lived is well lived because it’s a good story, even if it’s a story only told to the self.
A good story is a series of small details that resonate.
The poems Smith writes after her divorce, are also small, but wonderful.
“Poem Beginning with a Line from Basho” took my breath away. Given world enough and time, I imagine Smith could write a stunning book about single motherhood and the desire to return to the golden age of a broken marriage. Goldenrod, though, is no such book.
There are also exceptions to the terrible political poems. Just when I was about to give up on Goldenrod entirely, I read the poem “Small Shoes,” a poem about the refugee crisis and about light pollution, but also just a simple poem about looking up at the stars.
Perhaps this is why I was most disappointed in Goldenrod. Smith knows how to write poetry. She just didn’t do much of it in this book.
It has been almost 25 years since Gavin de Becker wrote TheGift of Fear (24 years to be exact). To place the book in its proper historical context, I am probably best served by comparing it to the cinema that debuted around the same time. 1997 was the year of Titanic and Dante’s Peak. The fact that one of the best-selling books about violence would come out at a period of time when cinema was exploring the connection between human hubris, technology, and natural disaster is accidental, but worth noting. Dante’s Peak, for those who haven’t seen it, is a movie about the terrible things that happen when government officials in a small town fail to heed scientists’ urgent warnings that a volcano nearby is about to erupt. 1997 was the year of the O.J. Simpson civil lawsuit (Simpson had already been exonerated for murder). The Columbine High School Massacre had yet to happen. Male violence and anger has often been normalized as a force of nature. When a man is angry, it is only natural. When a woman is angry, she’s crazy. In light of these assumptions, De Becker’s thesis is simple: when a woman feels fear around a man, for whatever reason, she should honor that fear.
America was a violent place in 1997, but I don’t think De Becker could have imagined America as it exists today—where the news cycle is dominated by mass shootings and stories of police brutality. If fear is a gift, in 2020, we have been particularly gifted to have a lot to be afraid of. Male violence may have once been characterized as another force of nature we’d have to deal with, but today we have nature itself to fear: a global pandemic, massive wildfires creating their own weather systems, heatwaves, rising sea levels, droughts, and the collapse of entire ecosystems. That most of us can go about our daily lives without being in a constant state of paralyzing fear most readily proves De Becker’s thesis, which is that too often we ignore our fear signals, to the detriment of our own safety.
In order to honor your fear, you need to feel you have agency. Whether that agency is possible or imagined doesn’t matter. When it comes to making a change, you need to believe that you can act. De Becker believes that a woman can make herself safe by trusting her intuition, but this is too simplistic and puts the onus on the woman. Women will be safe when men stop being violent.
One wrong calculation can ruin a proof. One wrong line can break the illusion a painting is trying to create. One wrong measurement can take the architect back to the drawing board. And yes, one wrong sentence can indeed ruin a book. De Becker’s The Gift of Fear is a highly flawed book, but the flaw can be diagnosed in just one sentence.
In his chapter on domestic violence, De Becker writes this: “the first time a woman is hit, she is a victim and the second time, she is a volunteer.”
If we bring our microscope close and study this deeply flawed sentence, we’ll find that it is but a positive test result that diagnoses the great ideological pathologies that infect this book.
De Becker writes that he has received pushback when he has said this line before, but he is unable to even entertain the notion that he may be mistaken. Instead, he puts the sentence in bold and defends it by saying he writes it to show women that they always have a choice. But this paternalistic defense doesn’t stand.
De Becker writes that he had a difficult childhood, but this doesn’t mean that he doesn’t enjoy privileges as a white male who has had some degree of success in his life. Women and people of color acutely understand what it means to walk into a room knowing that the default mode won’t be immediate credibility, acceptance, or respect. De Becker finds it impossible to inhabit a mind that may not have always been believed nor respected. After all, in order to respect your own intuition, you first need to respect yourself.
The sentence is disturbing because it also affects those who interact with abused women. DeBecker has trained law enforcement agencies, human resource departments, as well as schools and universities, all important institutions that often serve as first points of contact for victims of domestic violence. DeBecker’s statement only reveals that he knows nothing about the dynamics of domestic violence. In No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us, Rachel Louise Snyder goes into great depth about the many reasons why women don’t, or can’t leave an abusive or violent situation.
The idea that the second time a woman is hit, “she is a volunteer” serves to shame women who stay in abusive situations, while failing to take into account the strong reasons why a woman might stay in such a situation. Could a woman really be called a “volunteer” for staying because she fears losing her children, her home, or her financial stability? Could she really be called a volunteer when she knows that calling the police on her abusive partner cannot guarantee that he will be incarcerated for any period of time sufficiently long enough for her to get away. In No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us, Rachel Louise Snyder writes about several women who recanted their police statements when their abusers were released from jail after only being detained for a short period of time. They recanted not because they weren’t afraid. They recanted because they were terrified of what their newly-released partners would do now that they were free. In both case studies where the women recanted, they were murdered.
Abusive relationships are seldom isolated to physical violence and often include threats (I’ll take away the kids if you go), financial abuse, and more. In 1997, homelessness and access to affordable housing wasn’t at the critical level it has reached today. For many women in abusive relationships, there is truly nowhere else to go. When shelters are available, they require a woman to alter her entire life, and possibly even remove her children from school. As Snyder notes, domestic violence is quite possibly the only crime where we expect the victim and not the perpetrator to change.
De Becker’s statement is myopic because it empowers society to look down upon women who stay in abusive situations, without fully accounting for the good reasons why a woman might stay. De Becker himself writes that as a troubled child he had sympathetic adults in his life who believed in his agency, and this made all the difference. Imagine being a single woman, surrounded by people who don’t believe in your agency. Imagine having no one, and nowhere to turn. To use the word “volunteer” when you understand the full context of how cycles of abuse function is disgusting. No woman volunteers to be hit.
Much has been written about the validity, and the need to express, female rage. I think it’s important to take a moment here to pause, and let my reader know that I am incredibly angry. The Gift of Fear makes me angry. Carlos Lozada, in his Pulitzer-prize winning critical review “Why Women’s Rage is Healthy, Rational, and Necessary for America” offers a decent enough account of a man finally coming to terms with female rage. But my anger isn’t general. Mine is specific. I cannot read The Gift of Fear without thinking of a close friend of mine. Though we grew up together, we have been estranged for several months. The story of her adult life for many years now has involved her involvement with abusive men, all verbally abusive, some physically abusive. It has taken me many years to understand why she’d choose to stay, and I’ll admit that for many years I did not understand. My friend was never a volunteer. She was a woman desperate to be loved, a woman who had come to expect little from a world that often gives women so little credit. She had therefore become numb to the violence the world could show her, and more specifically, numb to the violence the men in her life could show her.
Tree and Moss. Watercolor. Janice Greenwood.
And yet, aspects of The Gift of Fear make the book feel radically ahead of its time. De Becker writes about the reality that restraining orders fail to protect battered women and in some cases can actually make their situation worse. He is right. He writes critically of toxic masculinity, though he doesn’t quite call it toxic masculinity in the book. “Recklessness and bravado are features of many violent people. Some might call it daring or bravery, but … ‘heroism’ has two sides.” He highlights the fact that many of the characteristics celebrated in male action heroes are the very same traits one sees in domestic abusers and violent men.
De Becker is also ahead of his time when he writes about the difficulty women face when rebuffing potentially unwanted approaches, especially from strangers. He writes, “A woman who is clear and precise is viewed as cold, or a bitch, or both. A woman is expected, first and foremost, to respond to every communication from a man. And that response is expected to be one of willingness and attentiveness.”
De Becker is also astute when evaluating gender-based double standards: “If a man in the movies wants a sexual encounter or applies persistence, he’s a regular everyday guy, but if a woman does the same thing, she’s a maniac or a killer. Just recall Fatal Attraction, King of Comedy, Single White Female, Play Misty for Me, Hand That Rocks the Cradle, and Basic Instinct.” De Becker also adds the revolutionary idea that high school health and sex education should explicitly teach women how to reject and teach men how to hear no. What a radical idea.
And yet, the book’s problems are a deep void from which the book cannot recover. De Becker has difficulty understanding some key facts about being a woman in America, but he also has no clue about how race plays a key role in the subject of his book, particularly in how race plays a role in policing in America.
De Becker urges his readers to follow their intuitions when it comes to fear, but he completely omits the way that racism and racial bias might play a role in fear and risk assessments. In fact, the role that racial bias plays in risk-assessment is ignored entirely. De Becker doesn’t mention race at all.
De Becker writes: “The inner voice is wise, and part of my purpose in writing this book is to give people permission to listen to it.” And while this advice might still hold true in Instagram self-help feeds, it hardly holds true when you consider it in the context of policing or mass shootings.
The book urges its readers to make split-second life and death decisions based on their gut feelings and intuition. And yet, it appears that this very type of training may be to blame for so many instances of needless police brutality and violence. In policing, the decision to act or not to act violently is one that can indeed be made in a split second. If race isn’t considered a factor, it is no wonder why a disproportionate number of brown and black men find themselves on the receiving end of police brutality.
If de Becker’s book were merely another self-help book, I could see where someone could say that I’m just beating a dead horse. The book is old. But de Becker’s The Gift of Fear is not a dead horse. Police Chief magazine author John F. Muffler cited The Gift of Fear in an article titled “Mitigating Targeted Violence in Our Communities: Learned Lessons From Past Attacks” published in 2020. If this is any indication, it is clear that The Gift of Fear is still being used as a resource by police departments and police officers. In his 2010 Foreword to the Special Kindle Edition, de Becker mentions changes to society that have taken place since 1997, which include the risks posed by the Internet, social media, and violent video games, but he doesn’t mention the role racial bias might play in fear assessment or mistaken assessments of risk.
Gavin de Becker protects clients that include government agencies, including the Central Intelligence Agency, the Department of Justice, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the United States Capital Police, and the Supreme Court of the United States. The company also notes that university police departments and 14 state police agencies are its clients. The offerings of the company include Advanced Threat Assessment trainings. How much do these trainings and offerings mirror what we read in The Gift of Fear? Given that the public has a stake in the outcome of these trainings, I don’t think these are trivial questions. And, as a legal content writer, I have written about how police training can impact the outcome of civil and criminal cases.
All this isn’t to dismiss The Gift of Fear outright. There are aspects of the book that offer fascinating insight into risk assessment and fear, and many of these insights are ahead of their time. De Becker writes about how a violent man might use niceness to encourage reciprocation in a potential victim, noting, “We must learn and then teach our children that niceness does not equal goodness. Niceness is a decision, a strategy of social interaction; it is not a character trait. People seeking to control others always present the image of a nice person in the beginning.”
There are some aspects of human manipulation that de Becker delves into in explicit detail. He writes that a person who is lying will give too many details. A person looking to manipulate and control may offer unsolicited help and refuse to take “no” for an answer. De Becker explains, “‘No’ is a word that must never be negotiated, because the person who chooses not to hear it is trying to control you.” A “no” unheeded in the context of an intimate relationship or friendship is a bad warning sign enough, but in the context of an interaction with a stranger, it is the most important warning. In many cases, a man seeking a potential victim will test his victim by seeing how she reacts to his refusal to take no for an answer.
De Becker explains that his strategies aren’t meant to be applied in a “one-size-fits-all” manner, but he writes that the only strategy that is right for all situations is to “listen to your intuition.” And yet, while this might be good advice for a woman encountering a random man in a dark alley, this very excuse has been used to justify police shootings across the country. In high-stakes situations, when intuition fails, an innocent person can end up dead.
Human folly takes many forms. We ignore legitimate fear and sometimes fear the wrong thing. Violence in America is a tragedy and an urgent problem to be feared for sure. Inequality is a tragedy and an urgent problem, certainly one that should leave us all fearful if not for ourselves, then at least for our children’s future financial security. But when it comes to what we’re doing to the planet, if our fear doesn’t turn urgent soon, we might someday find ourselves turning on the faucet (how mundane, how reliable), and find no water there to drink. If this doesn’t chill you, I understand. I keep telling my best friend to let me buy her that ticket to Hawai’i and get away from the abusive relationship, but she still hasn’t come.
About the Writer
Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.
I find it necessary to open this piece with the disclaimer that I am not a medical professional and none of the information to follow is meant to diagnose or treat any condition. Instead I write from the perspective of someone who, from time to time, has experienced the distinct sensation of choking to death and being unable to breathe. A couple of therapists of mine have called this experience a “panic attack,” though I’ve also read that the closure of the airway I’ve experienced can also be called a laryngospasm.
The first time I had a laryngospasm I thought I was dying. The simplest way I can think of to describe it is to imagine feeling like your throat is closing up. I compare it to being choked, but from within. Something inside my throat had tightened up and wouldn’t let go. I couldn’t breathe. I’m not talking about hyperventilation; I’m talking about not being able to bring air into my lungs because of a blockage in my throat not caused by food or a foreign object.
I later learned that this occurred because my vocal chords were spasming, making it possible for me to breathe out, but not possible for me to easily breathe in. It’s difficult to say whether the panic preceded the constriction of my throat, or whether the constriction caused me to panic, but I’m inclined to believe the latter. After all, the sudden onset of the inability to breathe is more likely than not to cause panic, whether or not one happens to experience anxiety.
I had my first laryngospasm in New York City, while surrounded by friends. We had been smoking marijuana. While inhaling the smoke deeply, my throat closed up. The episode frightened everyone in the room, me most of all. “You had a panic attack,” a friend said, casually explaining that I might want to go to a doctor for anti-anxiety medications. The evening continued as if nothing had happened.
Marijuana may have been the trigger of my first laryngospasm, but in the years since, long after I’ve largely sworn off smoking, I’ve had these spasms after drinking water too quickly, when experiencing post-nasal drip, in certain social situations, and most disturbingly of all, I have had these attacks occur while I was sound asleep, finding myself unable to breathe upon waking, the rudest of all rude awakenings.
These attacks last for less than a minute, though the feeling of imminent death, along with the inability to breathe is one of the most terrifying experiences I’ve ever had.
Friends and family have watched me have these episodes, and they have also been frightened. My father thought I might have been having an asthma attack. My boyfriend said he thought I was sleepwalking or at least in an altered state, and possibly about to pass out from my effort to breathe.
Over the years, I have found ways to handle the episodes, mostly by remaining calm, exhaling slowly, and reminding myself that I was having a panic attack and that I was not about to die. Trying to breathe only makes the spasm worse, and ironically, the solution to resolving the spasms is holding one’s breath or breathing out slowly, which is counterintuitive when you feel like you’re choking. In the midst of a laryngospasm, your panic will make you want to force air into your lungs.
I have spoken to my therapists about the episodes and they have said they were likely panic attacks, but I believe there isn’t much out there in the way of medical literature to help people who experience this frightening variety of asphyxiation.
Hyperventilation, which is typically associated with panic attacks, occurs when you breathe so rapidly that you over-oxygenate your body. Laryngospasms result in the literal closure of the throat and spasm of the vocal chords. Unlike hyperventilation, during a laryngospasm, the throat closes up almost entirely, leaving a person literally wheezing, unable to get air into their lungs no matter how hard they try.
Laryngospasms can indeed be caused by anxiety, but they can also be caused by acid reflux, postnasal drip, vocal cord dysfunction, and other medical conditions.
Causes of laryngospasms vary and the treatment is largely context-dependent. According to the book Complications in Head and Neck Surgery, laryngospasms can occur in children (and more rarely, adults) when they are administered anesthesia or when a ventilator is removed, and anesthesiologists must be trained to treat this “protective reflex, which may lead to either partial or complete airway obstruction.” Anesthesiologists are trained to listen for a high-pitched sound “produced upon inspiration.” If not treated immediately in this context, laryngospasm can lead to “cardiac collapse, and death.”
Dr. Phil Jones, a physician and associate professor at the University of Western Ontario notes in his blog that “post-extubation laryngospasm is a serious problem, because unless it is treated successfully, it is quickly followed by “bad things” including… negative pressure pulmonary edema.” All of this terrifies me. Especially given that Dr. Jones notes that “in a young healthy patient breathing actively against a closed glottis, it [being negative pressure pulmonary edema] can develop within a few breaths.”
Protected Heart. Watercolor. Janice Greenwood.
As more people recover from serious COVID-19, I wonder whether reports of this condition will grow in number. An article published in the Orlando Sentinel notes that the condition can arise after a person experiences a severe cold.
I am not sure if laryngospasms outside of the anesthetic context can cause these serious complications (though my horrific experience with laryngospasms makes me fear the worst), but Dr. Jones explains that the laryngospasms can be stopped without medication by applying pressure to the “laryngospasm notch,” the soft tissue located somewhere below the ear, where the mandible bone gives way to soft tissue. A YouTube video demonstrates this as the “Larsen Maneuver.”
The fact that there seems to be a ready mechanical treatment for laryngospasms shocks me that this treatment isn’t more readily discussed.
Dr. Jones’s solution seems to agree with other anecdotal treatments for laryngospasms. The Seattle Times published a letter by a woman who experienced laryngospasms explaining that by rubbing soap on the base of her neck, she was able to stop the spasms. The woman explains that she now wears a chain around her neck on which she hangs a pouch containing the magical soap. I have my doubts about the soap, but wonder whether it’s the mechanical action of rubbing the area that results in the positive effect, something similar to the Larsen Maneuver video above.
I’m not a medical professional and my own solutions to my throat constriction has come from trial and error. My solutions include staying calm, reminding myself that the vocal cord spasms will pass, breathing out slowly (highly counterintuitive in the midst of an attack) and sometimes leaving the room where the spasm initially occurred. I don’t doubt that my particular laryngospasms are related to anxiety given my family history of mental illness and my own history of anxiety.
We often classify anxiety as a psychological phenomenon with psychological symptoms characterized by avoidance behaviors, social withdrawal, depression, trouble sleeping, panic attacks, and more. But anxiety also has a very real physical component. A person experiencing anxiety, a panic attack, or a laryngospasm triggered by anxiety or sleep is experiencing something physiological. This may manifest in increased heart rate, sweating, trembling, hyperventilation, or, in my case, the laryngospasm.
I had a laryngospasm a few days ago. I woke up unable to breathe. I ran out of the bedroom, unable to calm myself, unable to remember I needed to breathe out slowly. I struggled to draw in air through my constricted vocal chords. I eventually collapsed on the couch, still wheezing, my body covered in sweat, my muscles trembling from the strain. My boyfriend held me and somehow, the force of his arms wrapped around me was able draw me up from the panic of not being able to breathe, allowing me to calm down, and exhale.
But the effects of the attack still linger. My throat still hurts. My vocal chords are sore. I feel like I have strep throat, but know I’m injured. I’m exhausted. I feel like I’ve had a physically demanding day (which for me would either involve surfing or hiking all day), but I haven’t really moved from my bed in days. I know all this pain is the physical manifestation of my throat closing up on me. I’ve gone to doctors and they ask me if I want to get on antianxiety medications and refer me to therapy, but I know how to manage my anxiety, a condition I’ve been dealing with my whole life.
Anxiety is one thing, choking to death because your vocal chords are having a Charlie horse is another matter entirely. Anyone would panic.
I taught my boyfriend how to do the Larsen Maneuver. I now know where to touch my neck when the next laryngospasm happens. I’m deeply curious about whether it will work, and I’ll report back here after I try it.
I suspect that there are many others out there like me, who live in fear about when the next attack might occur and who worry if they’ll be able to breathe again.
What gives me comfort is that every time these attacks have happened, the spasms have stopped. Sometimes they last only for a few seconds, sometimes for longer, but eventually, my throat opens up and I can breathe again.
Anxiety disorders and mental illness remain a mystery even to the doctors who study these conditions. Medical treatments for anxiety work sporadically, or well for some and not at all for others. I have found that daily meditation, time in the ocean, avoidance of substances, time set aside for reading and writing, and social interaction helps me cope.
The laryngospasm reflex is a protective mechanism of the vagus nerve (the nerve responsible for various functions, including heart rate, mouth movement, the movement of the vocal chords, and the nervous system). The spasm’s function is to prevent a person from aspirating food or liquid. I suspect that marijuana use may be connected to laryngospasms, but I also suspect that, in my case, anxiety may also play a role.
As marijuana becomes legal across the country, I wonder whether this condition will occur more frequently. As more people recover from severe COVID-19, I wonder whether they too might experience this frightening condition. While sleep-related laryngospasm is identified as a sleep disorder, the European Respiratory Journal says there isn’t much in the way of peer reviewed literature about this condition.
Either way, I’m putting all this out there because I don’t think I’m the only one waking up unable to breathe, or who experiences this type of unique panic attack.
About the Writer
Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.
I finally just finished reading Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens. I don’t think I would have read the book, but for the fact that for the past several years, Where the Crawdads Sing has comfortably taken residence near the top of the New York Times Bestseller’s list for fiction in both the hardcover and paperback categories. I finally gave in and had to see for myself what all the fuss was about. I’m sure that curiosity is also part of why the book has dominated the bestseller’s list for so long.
I have to admit that I had a couple of false starts with the book. A while back I tried reading it as part of a book club, but after about a dozen pages, life and work caught up with me and I didn’t finish. About half a year ago, in the midst of the pandemic, I tried reading it again and gave up about 50 pages in. I found the prose as slow as marsh water. The language was occasionally good, but not excellent, and certainly not material for literary classic in the making.
And yet, week after week Where the Crawdads Sing taunted me from its perch atop the New York Times Bestseller’s list and from its dusty place on my bookshelf, and I got more and more curious.
The ending must be good, I kept thinking. It must start slow and then pick up pace. And so, last week, when I sat down to read Where the Crawdads Sing, I set my mind to finishing it. I’ll admit I had to force myself through the first two hundred pages, a slow-paced ramble through the life of a child abandoned in the swamp. But the last hundred or so pages of the book delivered all the promise of a bestseller, and I can see why it has appealed to such a wide audience.
I found myself somewhat heartened by the fact that such a slow-paced book could be so popular. Maybe American readers still have patience for the tale carefully and slowly told. Maybe there is still room in the American psyche for the subtle. The poetic, even.
The Times reports that Where the Crawdads Sing has sold over 4.5 million copies. But why? In a world where sexy romance and Stephen King-style horror dominates the market, what is it about Where the Crawdads Sing that draws such a crowd?
I have several theories why this slow-paced novel succeeded.
First, the last 100 or so pages of the novel deliver a fast-paced courtroom drama climax to the murder mystery that tantalizingly opens the novel. If the novel is a roller coaster, the last 100 pages are its thrilling drop, but I was left feeling uncertain if the drop was worth all that climb.
Where the Crawdads Sing feels almost like two novels, folded into one. There is the slow life of the marsh and Kya, the protagonist abandoned in it, woven together with syntactical acrobatics that only a former naturalist could perform (Delia Owens is a zoologist and conservationist), and then there’s the murder mystery and courtroom thriller that make up only one-third of the novel.
Owens weaves the two together decently well. There’s a fascinating tenebrism between Kya’s slow-paced marsh life and the fast-paced courtroom thriller that closes the novel. I’d be willing to endure Kya’s obsession with insects and marsh plants for 100 pages, while I wait to find out what really happened to the deceased and possibly murdered Chase Andrews, but 200 pages buoyed by a thin and somewhat maudlin love story, felt like a little much. When Kya’s brother returns later in the book and asks her how she made it, Kya herself says, “That’s a long boring story.” I couldn’t help but agree.
Leaf. Watercolor. Janice Greenwood.
Still, I can see the last 100 pages of the novel keeping many readers awake late into the night, and sometimes, that’s all you need as a reader to make the book a good recommendation. Like restaurants, books succeed and die based on the recommendations of their guests, and I can see Where the Crawdads Sing getting passed around merely on the strength of its ending.
But that brings me to my second point, and the second reason why I think the novel succeeded. While Owens is hardly a poet, poetry is woven so intimately into this tale, it is ultimately impossible to extricate poetry from the story itself. Again, Owens’s Where the Crawdads Sing is hardly the material of literary legend, but its use of light verse will appeal to a certain audience raised to believe that Rupi Kaur should be our modern poet laureate. For readers whose interaction with poetry likely ends at Mary Oliver, there will be delight in the poetry on offer here. What fascinates me about the inclusion of poetry in this novel is that the novel itself admits to the weakness of its own poetry. About one of the poets featured in the book, the narration notes, “Tate had thought Hamilton’s poems rather weak.”
Yet, it is not the verse itself that holds the narrative together, but the quiet poetic moments that serve as the real structure of the story, its true joints and beams. Owens has her moments.
There’s Owens’s description of the angry ocean, where “Waves slammed one another, awash in their own white saliva, breaking apart on the shore with loud booms.”
The first sentence Kya ever reads is this: “There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot.” Tate, Kya’s love interest is a good critic, and he notes, “That’s a very good sentence. Not all words hold that much.”
But again, these lines hardly elevate the book to the realm of the bards.
So what is it, really about Where the Crawdads Sing that drew so many people in?
Where the Crawdads Sing debuted at a time when Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird was seeing renewed attention due to Lee’s publication of Go Set a Watchman. You can’t read Where the Crawdads Sing, with its southern drawl and courtroom drama and not think of To Kill a Mockingbird. In Where the Crawdads Sing, Boo Radley is Kya, and Jumpin’, the Black man who helps her survive, Atticus. For those who wanted Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman to offer more of the redemptive air of To Kill a Mockingbird than it had, perhaps Where the Crawdads Sing satisfied that unmet need that Harper Lee could not or would not give.
The book also manages to skirt divisive politics, only lightly addressing issues of racial inequalities and segregation, while depicting a somewhat separate, but peaceful co-existence between the White and Black members of this particular fictional southern town. Racial issues are all but glossed over. For those looking for an escape from racial consciousness, politics, or civilization at large, Where the Crawdads Sing lets readers hide in the woods with Kya for a while. The book is hardly progressive, and violence against women plays a central role in furthering the narrative. Perhaps the most political moment in the whole book was when Owens discusses the fact that the big developers plan to drain the swamp and build hotels, hinting at the reality that Kya’s world won’t last for long. We all emerge from Where the Crawdads Sing and return to the real world, where the destructive phrase “drain the swamp,” triggers something very different, but perhaps something not so different, at all.
I recently spent several weekends reading a thousand-plus page environmental impact statement prepared for a state-level project in my hometown of Honolulu. I’d never read an environmental impact statement before, but I had an interest in the proposed project, which involved creating a beach in Waikiki where there has historically been no sandy beach by dumping tons of sand (anywhere from 4,000 to 6,000 truckloads, according to the report) on a significantly stressed coral reef where endangered sea turtles are known to forage for food. This project is a response to climate change, and more specifically, a response to rising sea levels which threaten coastal real estate in Hawai’i.
According to the environmental impact statement, the project would require the burial or relocation of 28 coral colonies in order to create the beach. The project may also have an impact on historical sites important to indigenous people. Kanaka Maoli have expressed concerns that the project could disturb burials near a site where former chiefs made their homes and surfed, while also further degrading a beach that has suffered many degradations over the years. There are also concerns that the addition of the new beaches may impact renowned surfing locations. Many locals note (myself included) that past construction work in Waikiki beach has affected the way Canoes (a popular local surf spot) breaks.
Diamond Head Runoff. Watercolor. Janice Greenwood.
I’ve written elsewhere about the environmental impact statement in detail, where I analyze sections of the report that gave me pause, but my concerns here are more general and have more to do with how these environmental impact statements are pursued in general, particularly at the state level, and the potential impact this can have on natural resources including water, land, and endangered species.
One of the things we ask of our journalists and providers of key information is that they avoid conflict of interest. Conflict of interest is when a person cannot reliably work on one project because it would create a conflict or competing interest with his or her personal or professional interests. Conflict of interest issues are why we don’t ask critics to review their own books, why we generally ask artists to not write about their own art, why a prosecutor would never be put in charge of getting a conviction for her own spouse, mother, or child, and why it’s generally frowned upon for professors to date their graduate students. And yet, in the case of an environmental impact statement that would determine the environmental and cultural soundness of creating new beaches in Waikiki, the company that completed the environmental impact statement is the same company that would be contracted to complete the project if the project were to be approved.
We expect that certain pieces of writing come to us from an unbiased source. Journalists strive for this. An environmental impact statement, supported by pages of scientific findings, generally carries an air of authority, the sense of unbiased truth. And yet, it is important to understand that interpretation of science is an art, subject to the same vagaries and biases as those of the art critic. We must consider the source and his or her potential motives. How a piece of scientific writing is structured can impact how the piece is received. The choice to put more or less weight on certain types of research can also impact the conclusions one reaches about a given subject.
As I read the environmental impact statement, I found many issues and concerns that come down to matters of interpretation and composition.
For example, the report claims that monk seal sightings in Waikiki beach are “rare” and “exceptional” events, but the truth is that monk seal sightings in Hawai’i are rare and exceptional events in general given that monk seals are a highly endangered species. Yet, on April 26, a monk seal was born on Kaimana Beach (Star Advertiser), and parts of the beach had to be closed so the mother could nurse her pup. I have seen monk seals in the water while surfing in Waikiki and have also seen them basking on the section of beach where the proposed construction would take place. And while my sightings of monk seals in Waikiki are anecdotal, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration relies on reported monk seal sightings to track and monitor individuals. Yet, if you read the environmental impact statement, you’d think NOAA’s efforts weren’t scientifically sound or meaningful. The report claims, “The majority of monk seal sighting information collected in the main Hawaiian Islands is reported by the general public and is highly biased by location and reporting effort.” This statement itself is interpretive and subject to bias.
Are environmental impact statements often subject to conflicts of interest? When projects are proposed at the federal level, federal agencies are required to submit environmental impact statements under the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 (NEPA). According to the American Bar Association, “federal agencies typically outsource the writing of an EIS to third party contractors (including lawyers, scientists, or engineers) with expertise in their preparation and in relation to the proposed project.” At the federal level, contractors preparing an environmental impact statement must complete a “conflict of interest disclosure statement” according to Cornell Law School.
However, laws governing environmental impact statements at the state level are governed by state law, and these laws can vary. Under the Hawai’i Environmental Policy Act (HEPA), there is no mention of the need to avoid conflicts of interest. Either a project can be found exempt from needing to complete an environmental impact statement, a state agency can complete an environmental impact statement, or an environmental impact statement can be approved by the mayor or a state agency.
Hawai’i has a history of public projects going badly. The Star Advertiser recently reported on a 20-mile, $12 billion dollar “troubled” rail project whose most recent issue includes “wheels too thin and tracks too wide.” The costs of completing a project to improve Waikiki’s beaches are unknown, according to the environmental impact statement. Hawai’i residents would be wise to ask more questions before approving a project whose costs are unknown based on an environmental impact statement completed by the same entity that will be contracted to complete the project were it to be approved.
I focus on this one environmental impact statement as an example, and to raise wider questions about these documents in general. Environmental degradation is increasing as a rapid rate as demand for resources increases. A UN Report titled The Case for a Digital Ecosystem for the Environment included among its many goals this one: to “establish standards for environmental impact assessments.” Even when government agencies complete their own environmental impact statements, there is the risk that the agency itself will want to hide environmental problems or its own shortcomings. We need a more rigorous standard to evaluate these potential conflicts of interest.
Should state agencies or the governor have the authority to approve projects whose impacts were assessed by the same contractor the agency would hire to complete the project? As we stand now, our fragile environment stands to suffer, and the door is open to corruption.
About the Writer
Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.
In contemporary criticism, there is little appetite for digression. Social media gives us enough digression anyway. We want our critics to get right to the point. Online short-form venues have no appetite for the strange detour or rambling mind. We are so busy watching our own minds think on TikTok and Twitter, we have no time to watch others do the same, or perhaps we are so accustomed to the ramble that we have no patience for the formalized one. And that’s perhaps why Jenny Diski is so remarkable in her posthumous collection of essay and criticism: Why Didn’t You Just Do What You Were Told. Diski’s discourse is discursive. Its substance is digression. As Johanna Fateman noted in Bookforum, “If you’re accustomed to handing in reviews at about one-third (or at less than one-tenth) the length, you’ll find plenty to slash—whole swaths in a single stroke—plus sentences and clauses to trim, easily shrinking her paragraphs down to a reasonable size.”
I have the uncomfortable freedom of not having an editor. I say uncomfortable because my errors and failures are entirely mine and I don’t have the luxury of someone smarter than me to help me refine or expand my pieces. I do trust myself, for what that’s worth. When a writer finds a good editor, it’s a miraculous event, and I’ve known of writers who will not take raises at other magazines or publishers just to be able to maintain a relationship with a given editor.
It is a luxury to write with the freedom I have, to expand and contract into whatever form a given piece deems appropriate, winding the cocoon as expansively or as tightly as I please. Criticism and essay is a space where there is room for forgiveness for bias. Even The New York Times makes mistakes, but in critique there’s space to breathe in the messiness of first-assessments, and room to embrace the narrow room of the first-person. I can write so expansively because I give myself permission to do so. But, isn’t this the genesis of all art?
All this brings me to the question of whether Jenny Diski could be a successful critic were she young today. First of all, there are under 100 paid full-time critics writing for publications in America (according to Jerry Saltz, and I believe him). Read any local paper and chances are the reviews are syndicated from the New York Times (budgets are tight, I get it). And the few critics who have jobs, have very limited space and words in which to make their points.
Thanks to the internet, social media, and YouTube, everyone can be an critic. The wide success of Yelp is only one example. We only have only so much patience for the grotesquerie of a professionally paid critic. And so I wonder whether a writer like Jenny Diski would have ever found a regular space in any reputable magazine in the America or London of today (and by regular space I mean full-time job), as much as she has been respected and honored in those same magazines recently. Her collection of critical essays was received well by many reputable critical sources, including the New York Times.
Criticism has value to the culture in so far as it helps the culture assess what has value. A good critic can open us to new creative possibilities, and offer us a buffet of creative experiences we otherwise would have never encountered. Critics deserve work. Each major city needs its small cohort of good critics.
The Glory That Shines More in One Place and Less Elsewhere. Watercolor. Janice Greenwood.
And here I must make a digression of my own, to a recent post made by Jerry Saltz, the Pulitzer-prize winning art critic. Saltz recently posted on Instagram about being offered $250,000 to write for Substack, another platform where writers can make money from subscriptions to their newsletters.
Saltz refused the offer, saying he’d prefer to write for his current publication rather than engage in the “fishy” practice of trying to get readers to subscribe. I take this to mean that Saltz would prefer to outsource that job to his magazine’s marketing department, and that’s fair enough.
Saltz explained: “I think it is not my real work to write for the ‘subscribers.’” In broken prose, he added that he doesn’t want “a ore-screens [sic] paying audience who already reads it likes me. I want to reach strangers…I like being in my huge department store @Nymag.” Saltz post was heavily criticized by the social media mob, especially because he said he was “poor” despite making a six-figure salary at his magazine job. Saltz later apologized for the post, explaining that he understood that he was not poor. The post was an unfortunate mistake, but I think it’s important to look closely at Saltz’s post because of what it reveals about criticism today.
First, it is clear that Saltz reaps the benefit of having a very good editor at New York Magazine. There is a clear distinction between the polished prose of his published pieces and the writing you find on his social media feeds, and I don’t think speed or the medium alone can account for it. Don’t get me wrong, Saltz is an excellent writer, an agile thinker, and a fabulous critic, but I believe he benefits immensely from editorial insight and oversight. Secondly, Saltz may love his department store at New York Magazine, but the internet is a city of department stores, small mom and pops, and lemonade stands. Sometimes it amazes me how little writers understand how the internet works.
I have my issues with Substack, but not because it connects established writers to subscribers, offering some of them a better revenue stream than many magazines can offer, but because it creates another ghetto where unestablished writers basically write for free to enrich another Silicon Valley startup with 20 employees. When we switch to platform services, we cut out the middlemen and women: with Uber it was taxi companies, with AirBnB it was the hotels, and with Substack it’s editors and magazines.
Just as the publishing industry is now dominated by blockbuster writers, so is Substack also dominated by a few show ponies. The Jerry Saltzs and Roxane Gays of the world can probably get better salaries through Substack than they could at a traditional magazine. But for good writers with smaller audiences whose audience is in the few thousands (like mine, at present), not millions, Substack cannot offer anything more than the promise of another platform into which to pour your free content and labor with no promise of compensation. It’s basically an unpaid Medium, except when a writer gets paid subscribers, the platform benefits financially, too.
The lure of the quarter million paycheck will keep many would-be writers working for nothing. This is not to say that I’ll never join Substack. When I have a strong enough audience willing to pay for my gated content, I’d be more than happy to join such a platform. Nor is this to say that Substack is a bad idea if a writer is truly trying to grow an email list and newsletter, and is willing to start with a free model if her audience is small. I would never expect to get a Jerry Saltz kind of salary through Substack. The vast majority of young writers who imagine they’ll pay the bills through Substack alone will find themselves frustrated, and possibly give up before they’ve even given themselves a fair chance to grow into the kind of writer who could benefit from Substack at some point.
All this is to say, we should all be supporting critics, and writers, and artists.
Jenny Diski was free to write about everything from Anne Frank to Antarctica to Jeffrey Dahmer. She wrote about these subjects on her own terms. I sometimes wonder what the world would look like if we paid more critics a living wage, if more writers could make a living wage from writing, and if more artists could make a living wage from their art.
Pema Chödron writes that “Spiritual awakening is frequently described as a journey to the top of a mountain.” The image of the spiritual awakening as a rarified experience that separates an awakened person from the rest of the world fails to adequately approximate what the old Buddhist masters would call a proper spiritual awakening. Spiritual awakening, for Chödron, who writes on ancient Buddhist tradition, is not a journey of transcendence, but a journey downward, into the pain and chaos of the world, towards the difficulty of connection, and the messiness of the world, not away from it.
And so these are the opening lines of Pema Chödron’s Comfortable with Uncertainty, an exquisite collection, where excerpts from longer meditations and books have been arranged like a ring of prayer beads. Pema Chödron is a teacher at Gampo Abbey in Nova Scotia. She practices the Shambhala Buddhist tradition that she studied under the tutelage of the master, Trungpa Rinpoche, who is credited as being among the first Buddhist monks to bring Buddhism to the West. In Comfortable with Uncertainty, 108 of Chödron’s most treasured writings have been collected to form what Emily Hilburn Sell describes as “a crystal bead with 108 facets, to be contemplated as you wish.” Buddhist monks often carry around a “rosary” with 108 beads, touching them as they pray. For those of us who happen to be less into fondling beads, and more into literary rituals, Comfortable with Uncertainty offers a practice more for the mind than for the hands. As an aside, I find it telling that in the first five drafts of this essay, I had mistakenly written the title to Chödron’s book as Uncomfortable with Uncertainty, as if my stubborn conscious mind would not admit the discomfort of uncertainty so readily.
It is easy to see the practice of meditation as a solipsistic act, a world-abnegating practice that drives its practitioners into deeper circles of navel gazing and self-indulgent isolation. I had my own doubts about how beneficial sitting still might be, given the veritable assault rifle of thoughts that passes through my conscious mind on a daily basis. Writers relish the non-sequitur of their own mindless chatter. The thought of trying to still my mind to pure thinking about thinking and refine even that down to nothing at all seemed to be antithetical to who I was as a writer.
And yet, I have found in my own practice the opposite has often proven to be true. In the quiet I sometimes find the most profound realizations of my life.
Just today I realized that the artistic act of mark-making carries with it not only the emotional state of the mark-maker in the act of making, but emotional states recalled. Only when the emotional state in the act of making aligns with emotion recollected in tranquility can the artistic process be complete.
I’m not alone in finding solace in meditation. It has become a marketing enterprise.
Just prior to the pandemic, boutique meditation studios opened up in cities like Los Angeles, New York, and Washington, D.C. promising practitioners beautified spaces in which to experience transcendence. These boutique meditation studios were forced to close during the pandemic, and many remain unopened, leaving the would-be meditators who would have been willing to spend hundreds of dollars a month for a particular kind of ambience to face themselves in the narrow confines of their own homes.
If I don’t count the times I meditated as a teenager and imagined myself transformed into a blade of grass, I have been meditating regularly for six years. The consciousness of youth is more permeable than the consciousness of adulthood, and I believe that we spend a great deal of money, alcohol, marijuana, and time trying to project ourselves back into those semi-permeable states. Notwithstanding my youthful attempts at meditation, the fact that I first began my serious adult meditation practice more recently highlights how much of my life has been characterized by doing something. I’ll admit that in the beginning of my adult meditation practice I felt incredibly stupid sitting on a meditation cushion. My life up to that point had been characterized by doing, by achievement. Always moving, I’d first gone to university, where my compulsive studying and ambition to get straight As kept me up all night, and then more ambition took me to Columbia University to study poetry. I wanted to walk in the footsteps of Federico Garcia Lorca. Then I was off to Canada, following love, and after that, I chased mountains, hoping to find transcendence literally at the top of cliffs.
Perhaps what is most revolutionary about the act of meditation is that it requires that a person do absolutely nothing for a period of time every day. In a world where our worth is derived from what we do, the choice to not do something, even for a little while, can feel extraordinary and not a little subversive. I admit that for a long time, I felt guilty, sitting down doing nothing. Even today, sometimes I still do.
The modern literature on spiritual awakenings is classified by what one does, the symptoms one experiences, as if spiritual awakening were another task of self-actualization to put on one’s vision board or another antidote to illness, if not illness itself.
For Chödron, spiritual awakening is not a single action, but a practice. Instead of transcending suffering, we inhabit it. We get humble. That is, we go down to the root of what humility means. Humble comes from the Latin word for humus, which means soil. Soil is a vibrant ecosystem of death and decay, as well as growth and life. It is a place where bacteria and fungus feed on corpses and where roots draw water and minerals into their cells, the petals of their flowers, the flesh of their fruit. It is the place where light captured in the pore of a leaf runs down into the ground, fusing the ecosystem beneath with energy and life. This process feeds us. It is what creates oak trees and apples.
Decaying Buddha. Watercolor. Janice Greenwood.
Spiritual awakening is often characterized as the absence of pain and suffering. For Chödron, spiritual awakening is the exact opposite. It is the courageous act of choosing to embrace suffering. Transcendence comes through the passage through life’s difficulty, while making the choice to do so with generosity, patience, discipline, exertion, meditation, and finally, wisdom.
