currently reading: The Book of Delights by Ross Gay
books finished:
The Collected Schizophrenias by Esmé Weijun Wang
The Talented Ribkins by Ladee Hubbard
Look Back and Laugh by Liz Prince
books bought:
The Talented Ribkins by Ladee Hubbard
books received:
The Book of Delights by Ross Gay (e-galley)
The Collected Schizophrenias by Esmé Weijun Wang
Hey you,
This week I have been thinking about the differences between acknowledgement and reckoning. I started wondering about the distinction while I was reading The Collected Schizophrenias, Esmé Weijun Wang's forthcoming essay collection (out 2/5). She returns over and over to the fact that she has used and continues to use her Ivy League education as a sort of shield with which she can avoid facing the worst of the stigma that comes with mental illnesses like schizophrenia. But it doesn't feel she goes beyond surface-level acknowledgement. And I don't think she should have to – it's not that it's something I want her to apologize for, or to make excuses for. Rather, I think the fact that it's brought up in pretty much every essay, several times, means of course readers are going to see it as the pistol she's hung on her wall, and of course we're going to feel disappointed when it doesn't go off. When it doesn't leave the wall at all.
But this question of reckoning also feels very personal. This week I published a piece at Popula about the time I did jury duty (you can read it here), and once I saw it live I thought maybe it wasn't fair that I wrote it, maybe I hadn't properly reckoned with the consequences of what I did, or what I did not do.
Perhaps the problem is that I don't really know what reckoning looks like in a practical sense. I have lived with my inaction, but what is my other option? I think my mistake is conflating living with and reckoning.
The dictionary says reckoning means settling accounts, but I hate when I'm reading an essay and the writer quotes the dictionary. I think of reckoning as dealing with. What would it look like for the situation to be dealt with?
I'm not sure it could be.
In her book Cunt, which was formational for me, Inga Muscio poses this hypothetical-that's-not-really-a-hypothetical-at-all:
A man could, feasibly, sacrifice his coffee break raping a woman.
That woman would then spend her entire life dealing with it.
So would her daughters.
So would theirs.
This distribution of power is not acceptable.
I wrote, in that jury duty essay, about the time a man hit me. It's not what the piece is about, really, but it felt important to include. And yet I agonized over including it. I spent hours – days! – deciding to include two lines about it, deciding which details to include, making sure it was anonymized enough. I prepared myself for tough questions from my family and friends which did not come because the only thing keeping me from acknowledging just how mundane that event is was the fact that it happened to me.
And I bring this up not to say it's comparable to rape or to intergenerational trauma, but because I can't stop seeing the parallels. He did this one thing that I'm pretty sure he has not thought of since, or even as it was happening, and I... spend the rest of my life flinching when someone comes too close, spend the rest of my life worrying that I'm going to accidentally identify him. Because on some fundamental level it feels rude to make him acknowledge what he did. Let alone to make him reckon with it.
But what is the difference? And how do you know when you're done?
Now that I made it needlessly heavy, I would like to turn to the next item on the agenda: talking about how much I love diary comics.
I really love them!
I think diary comics are remarkably effective ways of conveying a lot in a tiny amount of space. I'm not sure how this seems to be universally true, but it does, and Liz Prince's collection Look Back and Laugh was no exception. Even if you're not looking to like, extract deep meaning from them, I still find reading diary comics a reliably great way to spend a day. And they are the sources of some of the funniest things I've read. Take this excerpt from Alabaster Pizzo and Kaeleigh Forsyth's Hellbound Lifestyle (which, as I write this, I'm realizing I'm not 100% sure is technically a "diary comic," but I think it is, and anyway, whatever, don't be such a pedant):
In conclusion, this week I have been thinking about acknowledgement and reckoning and diary comics and trundles.
Your friend,
Smalls