Charles D'Ambrosio - Loitering - New and Collected Essays

“But when good people do bad things and do them on purpose, we are left without our normal, comforting rationalizations. It’s very scary because in the end we are left to wonder: What about us?”

Thus ends the flow of rhetoric, on a note of pretend wonder. Tonally this piece took condescension to familiar heights for the Seattle Times . To begin, who exactly does that possessive include? It’s my feeling McDermott’s “our” refers, not to mine or yours, but to his and, by extension, the Times ’s “normal, comforting rationalizations,” and that with this statement he’s entered metajournalistic territory, sort of embedding a ghostly self-reflexive footnote to himself about the nature of the newspaper business and its questionable ability to cover anything that isn’t “normal,” etc. What’s “scary” here is the paper’s brief venture outside its objective stance and into the mysterious and confusing moral universe, a place it probably doesn’t belong. Put differently, the Times , with its protectorate sensibility, its wooden prose, and its stolid remove from the fray is really just trying to tidy up the universe in the image of itself. I can’t tell, but it kind of seems to me from many readings of the final paragraph that McDermott’s blaming Letourneau for failing to clarify herself into a cliché à la Veronica Lake, that he’s accusing her of being beyond understanding, of not fitting his story, of eluding his dated language, of monkeying with his sense of the normal, the comforting, the rationalized. Ergo we get “scary.” Withal the entire column is written in the storybook language and syntax of a Junior Scholastic reader, providing a universe of “good people” and “bad people,” a world where things are “very scary” or a fuzzy warmth is evoked by acknowledging that in situations like this “the answers are as simple as human history, and as complicated as the human heart.”

A sentence like that sounds awfully resonant but you have to wonder if the writer in laying down the words had anything real in mind beyond the creation of sound effects. Read the sentence more than once and the vaguely axiomatic philosophical construction, the balanced but weary knowledge of the world’s ways, the parallel repetition of human , the apposing of heart and history , might give you, as it did me, the sense of a sentence whose meaning probably mystifies everyone but the writer.

The easy interchangeability of the terms (if Letourneau were a man, X a girl) strikes me as a queer and cruel exercise in abstract thinking that depends on a mistake and a horrible forgetting. The mistake is to confuse what’s merely similar with what’s equal—“nothing is really equal” (Nietzsche) — and then pass it off as logic. On even the superficial level there seem to be plenty of differences between the two situations, but on the existential level there is nothing but difference. Letourneau and Mark Blilie are two different people, not data, not exempla, not variables awaiting quantity or value in a math equation. And this leads to the forgetting. What kind of damage is done to our ability to love or understand and thus fully judge one another when daily we’re encouraged to forget that people are people and view them instead as so much pasteboard, scenery, clutter, generalized instances (of murder, of rape, of embezzlement, etc.)? Here’s a confounding particular: from what I’ve been able to gather, the boy/the child/the victim, X, is actually a couple of inches taller than Letourneau. In terms of physical gifts alone he’s a young man. But this was never brought up in the Times /Post-Intelligencer reportage, although it would, it seems to me, slightly alter or maybe completely redo a reader’s picture of the child/the boy/the victim. Certainly it would affect your understanding.

There is in the press that will toward allegory, that tendency to find the model in every situation, to treat the swiftly passing moments of a vivid and specific life as illustrations in a large, stable, highly abstracted story. But what if the case of Letourneau does not apply to you and me in any parabolic sense? What if it’s singular and freakish? What if it’s exceptional, elusive? Where do we turn if we want to fully understand life in this anomalous form?

“The sympathetic heart is broken,” D. H. Lawrence wrote. “We stink in each other’s nostrils.” Perhaps this harsh assessment of the modern soul is true, but perhaps what’s even truer, today, is that we no longer even smell each other. One Florence Wolfe (affiliated with an outfit called Northwest Treatment Associates) prefaced a televised discussion of “the situation” by claiming she “had no sympathy” for Letourneau. This struck me as a bizarre kind of prophylaxis. She was basically holding her nose. You can hardly explain anything without explaining the explanation and thus risking a regressive freefall, but here goes. “The great secret of morals is love; or a going out of our nature, and an identification,” P. B. Shelley wrote. “A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination.” Just so I don’t come across as a total poet-loving fruitcake (it’s just that the interests of language were underrepresented in this case, that’s why I keep bringing in these witnesses, these poets and novelists), Adam Smith — a free-market economist! — also helped make central the sympathetic identification that imagination allows us to extend to others. And Keats refined the idea further in his famous letter on negative capability, describing a state in which “man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts.”

(This is not to say that I think we’d be better off if these poets, these drunks, suicides, melancholiacs, queers, and ninnies were heads of state, only that they provide us the best record we have of the shifting sensitivities of language, the changes that in turn most carefully register movement in our evolving consciousness.)

At any rate, by the eighteenth or nineteenth century, imagination is seen as a pretty important epistemological faculty, and one of its key ingredients happens to be sympathy. This general idea hasn’t entirely disappeared, despite various attacks, most of them non-philosophic-intellectual-academic and instead technological, economic, geographic — whatever, but still, it seems odd that an expert whom presumably we’ve turned to for insight announces as a kind of caveat that sympathy is going to be removed from the equation of her understanding. Other experts did the same thing, e.g., Patrick Gogerty from Childhaven, who was quoted postsentencing in the Post-Intelligencer as saying, “This is pure and simple exploitation of a child,” when quite clearly there was nothing pure or simple about the situation, and the conditions (purity, simplicity) imposed on his point of view were just a framing device used to narrowly focus the idea of “exploitation” by excluding other, wider possibilities. This, I don’t understand. Imagination, Wordsworth said, is amplitude of mind. But maybe sympathy’s just a pain in the ass, maybe a sympathetic understanding would only muddy the works on television when all that’s being asked for is a minute or two of high-cost clarity. Maybe a reasonable person understands you have to sacrifice certain things if you want your face on the small screen. And so in a devil’s pact with the boob tube you unload your ballast of sympathy in order to deliver clarity, maintaining the au fond quality of your expertise, which is the providing of rock-solid and irrefutable and immobile answers. That is, you deliver ideas, insights, opinions, etc., as things. But why should I concede Florence Wolfe authority when it seems to me she’s stated in advance that she plans to use only a limited perspective on the matter? She pulls out a pin and puts a prick in Wordsworth’s amplitude of mind, deflating it just a little, and at that moment disqualifies herself, it seems to me, as someone to take seriously.