Page 16 - Dark Matter:Women Witnessing Issue2
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wrenching alterations to the poet’s supposed eternal preoccupations (Marilyn Hacker’s “love,
death, and the changing of the seasons”)—all of this is so big, so intimidating, so complex as to
offer us a perfect excuse for throwing up our hands and retreating to more familiar writing
territory.
2. The guilt factor. It is difficult to think honestly about the vast damage that the human species
is currently inflicting on the biosphere and its own survival prospects without feeling acute if
thoroughly useless guilt about one’s own inevitable failure to "make a difference."
3. ( In other words)? Acknowledging this level of necessity flies in the face of a utilitarian culture
that emphasizes practical solutions, fixes, formulas, “the power of positive thinking." Americans
disdain “losers,” and you might start to look like one if you focus too intently on the level of loss
inevitably flowing from our planetary predicament.
4. There’s little or no "market" for writing about this stuff. It's not entertaining. It’s not
“relatable.” In fact, it risks discarding the capitalistic premise that "the market" offers the
ultimate measure of value. You will not be trending on Twitter. Your Amazon numbers will tank.
5. Writing honestly in a time when our dominant social and technological structures-‐-‐the very
"inventions" meant to support and sustain the human project-‐-‐have become acutely toxic for
the present and future of that project is not simply a matter of facing difficult content. It
challenges us intensely on the level of form, inviting us to scrutinize some of the most basic
assumptions underpinning our literary traditions. We need to question the role of the individual
hero or heroine, asking how we might envision a sort of collective protagonist arising from the
countless ill-‐assorted motives, acts, and accidents that combine to determine our species fate.
Narrative order, the satisfactions of well-‐made plot-‐-‐how do these serve a confrontation with
realities that are multiple, interlocking, endlessly complex, under nobody’s control? How might
we approach a literature in which humanity itself may be no longer at the center? Among other
things, we need to question automatic assumptions that the conventions of "apocalyptic"
narrative, with their obsessive emphasis on ending, offer us much that is useful in coming to
grips with our strange situation.
