Alison Clement's Blog

One of the Dadists, maybe Man Ray, used to say if you don’t like something, then go look at something else. I think of that a lot these days where everything elicits an opinion, a vote, a certain number of stars. Where if a person has a problem with someone else’s ideas or what they said or how they parked in the lot at Trader Joe’s or if they used the wrong word, it’s something to comment on. Maybe take a picture. Put it online. Or maybe I’m on Twitter too much. Man Ray, if it was Man Ray, said if you don’t like something, find something you do like.

I’m not talking about things that actually harm people, like wars and racism and our former president, etc. Toxins, climate crisis and white supremacy.. Just to be clear.

I showed a friend the part of my memoir about race [image error]and she said, “A white woman has seen some racist shit. So what?” First I deleted it. Then I began to wonder why I’m saying anything at all. I called my friend Sue Hyde. I said, “Maybe I don’t have anything that needs to be said. Maybe it’s time for us white people to shut the fuck up.”  One thing is this: when I look at the picture of the white cop murdering George Floyd, kneeling on his neck, casually like it’s nothing, of course the compassion is all with Floyd. But if I had to choose which of those men to be, which life to inhabit, it would have to be George Floyd. Who would choose to be a person like that cop, a dead soul, who would choose that? Racism destroys us all. And we all need to talk about it, even if we say the wrong thing sometimes.

The hardest part of being Catholic is the Catholic relationship to suffering. Suffering burns off sin, we are taught. Suffering is a thing that saves us. It’s an offering we make. I wake at night thinking now about the children we’ve put in cages, and it hits me as if new. Why torment yourself? What purpose does it serve? No one cares about your grief here. God does not care about that. And your grief does not absolve you. Don’t imagine that it does.

I’ve been writing all my life and sometimes I’ve felt bad for doing it too much, and other times I’ve felt bad for doing it too little. Sometimes I’ve felt that my writing is exactly what it needs to be. I mean not that it’s perfect, but it’s mine. When my second novel was published, my agent then told me to next write something like Jennifer Weiner’s GOOD IN BED, an international bestselling chick lit novel that is written by Jennifer Weiner who is the best at writing Jennifer Weiner because she is Jennifer Weiner. Maybe if I’d taken my agent’s advice, I’d be more successful, whatever that is. Have more money.  Instead, I started writing a novel about eugenics.

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Is there anything more demoralizing than reading your 17 year old journal? The writing is terrible. Also, I don’t know why nobody sent me to rehab.  They did send me to talk to Father O’Hara once, and he read poems from the Bible to me, which was nice. The Song of Solomon. It was lovely.

I recently sent off a manuscript I’d worked on for years. I worked on it for so long that when I started, social media wasn’t a big deal. When I started, the sexy actress was Kate Hudson. There was no Instagram. One character is stalking another one without Google. So that story had to change. (Also, by the way, we have to set our stories before 2017 now or they get upended by trump.) So now I’ve started working on another unfinished manuscript and some guy just pulled out his flip phone.

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If you hope to write even a single line, do not get up and check for the latest deaths among the YPG. No. It will only make you feel small and stupid. Do not check Twitter and read about Pablo Neruda’s rape of a Tamil woman. Do not check Instagram and see the face a woman killed fighting alongside her father in Afrin followed by a young woman in beautiful clothes throwing out her arms in front of a waterfall because she’s an American, #livinglifetoitsfullest or something like that. If you hope to write in the morning, drink a cup of coffee and, for a moment, just look at the page and let yourself believe in it.

Near the beginning of Orwell’s book Down and Out in Paris and London, he describes the brutal rape of a young French woman, and his point is not anything about her being held captive in a basement in Paris, but only about the man who exulted in telling the story of raping her. He could do anything he wanted, the man said, and Orwell, that great humanist, doesn’t wonder at the notion that what he might want to do is exult in the humiliation and powerlessness of another. It was “an incomparable rapture,” the man says, describing his rape of a young woman –– a peasant, he thinks, possibly sold by her parents –– and her terror. But the woman is nothing but a backdrop. Orwell’s point is simply the eccentricity this man. A “curious specimen.” That’s all. I love Orwell and I won’t stop loving him for this, but I do wish I could send a message back in time telling him he’s got hold of the wrong story here. It’s the wrong story and now, especially now, after #MeToo, these stories will never again be simply a footnote, to be taken for granted, the background, these stories, as so many women have known all along, upend whatever else is happening.

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I think I’m too distractible to write in a coffeeshop. Instead of figuring out what Rose will do with the alarming information she just discovered, I listen to the girls next to me discussing electrons. I listen to some guys complaining about a co-worker. I listen to the men at the next table speaking in Spanish, trying to see how much I can understand (not much). Should I resume my decades long attempt to learn Spanish or should I study French? Can I go to France? If I went to France, specifically Soumensac where part of this novel takes place, could I write it off on my taxes? Or do only rich guys with airplanes get to write expense off now? Shouldn’t I be writing letters to Congress? If I do write a letter maybe I should write about Afrin.

etc.

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The neo-Nazis were having pizza too. My French student sat at the table next to the Nazis with her girlfriend and child but she must not read the newspaper or follow local social media because she didn’t seem to know. The neo-Nazis’ pictures are all over the place. They are quite famous in our little town.

They remind me of the bikers I hung out with, years ago. The bikers liked to be part of a team, too, a badass team, a team other people were afraid of, instead of them being the ones afraid all time. When one of them got killed on his motorcycle, I went to the funeral. When we walked into the church, all of us together, everyone turned, frozen and afraid, and the bikers loved it. Later, we drove out of town in formation, the bikes in two lines in front, cars and trucks in back, and the police escorting, haranguing on their loudspeakers. The bikers gloried in it. So much of it was about attention, and fear and being part of something bigger than yourself. I don’t get the Nazis who don’t seem like people in a permanent state of down on your luck. I don’t get what forms them, but I do see how they must love the way our attention moves away from our own concerns and goes, not to big gibbous moon outside, not to the smiling French woman and her son and sweetheart, but to them.