Page 12 - Dark Matter:Women Witnessing Issue2
P. 12
"This Moment the World Continues": Writing Under the Sign of Species
Suicide4
Jan Clausen
Premise: "The Writer" is not a special kind of human being, but an ordinary kind of human being for
whom Language is a primary medium for engaging with the riddle of Necessity and Invention that is
at the core of all of human life, and arguably of Life itself.
For the writer, many sorts of Necessity are key. There is the unending pressure of material necessity,
summed up for all time in Herman Melville's famous plaint: "Dollars damn me." There are the social
bonds, the tugs and pulls of family, friendship, community-‐-‐a mesh of gift and obligation that may feed
the writer even as it keeps her from her desk, a paradox memorably explored by recent generations of
mother-‐writers in such books as Tillie Olsen's Silences: When Writers Don't Write, Adrienne Rich's Of
Woman Born, Jane Lazarre's The Mother Knot, and Reiko Rizzuto's Hiroshima in the Morning. There are
the necessities, the givens, of Language itself-‐-‐what the poet George Oppen called the Materials—
including the histories of literary forms.
Today I am going to focus on another register of Necessity, the one having to do with the threshold our
species has crossed, entering on an era in which a heedless exercise of our collective technical
ingenuity has brought us to the point of rendering extinct not only a vast range of non-‐human life
forms, but our own much-‐touted “higher intelligence.” To put it a bit more starkly, for some time now
we have had no choice but to proceed "under the sign of species suicide," a circumstance requiring a
vast, unprecedented effort of social re-‐invention-‐-‐ and hence a monumental effort to revise how we
imagine and depict reality. In this effort, I believe, writers have a great role to play.
In the following brief extracts from my journal of recent months, you can see me groping—as I always
am—for some access to this inscrutable Necessity that calls on all our powers of Invention.
4
Adapted from a keynote address given at the summer 2014 Goddard College Master of Fine Arts in Writing Program
residency, commenting on the residency theme, "Necessity/Invention"
