What does it mean to retell a story of rape as one about seduction?
What does it tell us that this retelling happens all the time in real life?
an ongoing, even obsessive infatuation with prepubescent girls: See, for instance, his Thérèse Dreaming, and The Guitar Lesson. More recently, a controversy at the Metropolitan Museum of Art ensued over Thérèse Dreaming in particular. A petition called for its removal or for a plaque of some sort that gives the painting clearer context within the exhibition. The author writes, “Given the current climate around sexual assault and allegations that become more public each day, in showcasing this work for the masses, The Met is romanticizing voyeurism and the objectification of children.” The Met refused to remove the painting, saying through a spokesperson, “Moments such as this provide an opportunity for conversation, and visual art is one of the most significant means we have for reflecting on both the past and the present and encouraging the continuing evolution of existing culture through informed discussion and respect for creative expression.” When the retrospective opened in 2013, the art critic Jed Perl, writing for The New Republic, suggested that these paintings should not stand in the way of a full appreciation of Balthus’s artistic achievement. Paintings such as Thérèse Dreaming, and The Guitar Lesson “can be properly appreciated only when we accept them as unabashedly mystical, the flesh a symbol of the spirit, the girl’s dawning self-awareness an emblem of the artist’s engagement with the world.”
“How is this not pornography?”: My student doesn’t realize that he is several decades late to this debate. In 1990, after the Washington Times revealed that the University of the District of Columbia had acquired Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party as a gift, members of the House of Representatives debated the work’s merits and whether to cut off funding for the institution. “It’s not art! It’s pornography!” shouts Representative Robert K. Dornan during the heated eighty-seven-minute exchange. Dornan waves a copy of the Times article at his colleagues in the chamber: “full color photographs!” of “women’s genitalia area!” He’s flustered, red in the face. Eventually he folds the paper back on itself and huffs away from the podium, shouting: “It’s obscene!”
It is worth quoting Representative Ronald Dellums’s response in full:
[Representative Dornan] used the term pornography and raised the question of the difficulty of dealing with moral issues. With respect to the issue of pornography: I think that it is pornography to see nuclear weapons standing erect with only one function and that is to destroy human life on this planet beyond comprehension. Pornographic are military weapons that look like phallic symbols capable of doing nothing but destroying human life on this planet. You want to talk about pornography? You want to talk about deadly art? We deal with pornography every single day but we don’t talk about it in that context. Mr. Chairman, obscenities and immoral issues: I find war immoral, I find poverty immoral, I find the fact that we can all drive from our jobs to our various homes throughout this country and see thousands of human beings eating from garbage cans and living in homelessness. That’s immoral. We can address the real immorality of this nation, but we sit here pompously and arrogantly talking about immoralities and obscenities and profanity and pornography, when the real pornography, the real scandal, the real pain, the real obscenities and immorality are not really fully addressed and adequately dealt with. Yes, Mr. Chairman, members of the committee, sound and fury: signifying NOTHING.
Or the Venus of Urbino, which depicts a naked woman reclining coyly: Mark Twain, in his 1880 travelogue Tramp Abroad, describes this painting as “the obscenest picture the world possesses” because of a certain “attitude” of one of her hands. He writes:
If I ventured to describe that attitude, there would be a fine howl—but there the Venus lies, for anybody to gloat over that wants to—and there she has a right to lie, for she is a work of art, and Art has its privileges. I saw young girls stealing furtive glances at her; I saw young men gaze long and absorbedly at her; I saw aged, infirm men hang upon her charms with a pathetic interest. How I should like to describe her—just to see what a holy indignation I could stir up in the world—just to hear the unreflecting average man deliver himself about my grossness and coarseness, and all that. The world says that no worded description of a moving spectacle is a hundredth part as moving as the same spectacle seen with one’s own eyes—yet the world is willing to let its son and its daughter and itself look at Titian’s beast, but won’t stand a description of it in words. Which shows that the world is not as consistent as it might be.
there likely won’t be justice for the girls: All at once, it seemed, a hashtag campaign was launched to save the Nigerian schoolgirls. Friends changed their profile pictures to an image that read “BRING BACK OUR GIRLS.” One friend posted an Instagram photo of all the names of the missing girls tagged #bringbackourgirls. There was an absurd photograph circulating of Sylvester Stallone parading down the red carpet in a shimmering purple suit, with his entourage of minor celebrities all in red carpet finery, each carrying a white paper sign that read “BRING BACK OUR GIRLS.” An image of Michelle Obama appeared on the cover of the New York Post in which she holds a sign that reads #BringBackOurGirls. In the ensuing hours, this image was turned back on the First Lady as a meme, with people Photoshopping their own messages onto her sign. Of these, #TakeBackYourDrones was the most popular and pointed, a clear indictment of her husband’s reliance on drone strikes, which some estimate killed thousands of young girls throughout the world—more than Boko Haram ever could—while they were at school, or in the kitchen washing dishes, or playing with friends in the yard.
THE PRECARIOUS
a single proto-Indo-European syllable: In English we have so many words that mean “to see.” Among the oldest of these is the proto-Indo-European root word okw, from which we derive terms like autopsy, binocular, and optics, as well as words like amblyopia, which means “a weakening of the eyesight without any apparent defect in the eyes,” and words like ferocious and window Okw gives us the word atrocity, a term we think of as meaning a terrible horror, but is in fact a word that emphasizes that someone survives the horror to see it. “Atrocity” similarly requires a witness, a person to see for oneself, with one’s own eyes.
rumored to show real footage of people dying: There were actually two movies: the first was Faces of Death, originally released in the late 1970s. People were said to pass out from the sheer gore of it, though the creators of the film have since admitted that they used B–horror movie techniques to make fake footage appear real. In response, another film, Traces of Death, followed in 1993 and did show actual archival footage of people dying or being killed, including the televised suicide of R. Budd Dwyer, a Pennsylvania state treasurer who shot himself during a press conference in January 1987.
The day of Dwyer’s suicide had been a snow day in much of Pennsylvania, and children were home from school watching television when the press conference interrupted regularly scheduled programming. The press conference aired in the morning, without redaction, while children looked on. After that, the news outlets began spinning different versions of the press conference into existence: one in which the footage pauses after Dwyer puts the gun in his mouth but before he pulls the trigger, one that pauses before he puts the gun in his mouth, another in which he does not pull the trigger, does not take out the gun, never even opens the envelope.
But the violence changes the person who looks: The particular phenomenon of observing another’s suffering through photography is the subject of Sarah Sentilles’s Draw Your Weapons. She writes:
This is what happens when you see a violent photograph. . . . First, shock. The other’s suffering engulfs you. Then, either despair or indignation. If despair, you take on some of the other’s suffering to no purpose; if indignation, you decide to act.
To be able to act, you must emerge from the moment of the photograph and reenter your own life. But as you leave the world of the photograph and
return to your life, the contrast between the two—the photograph’s world and your world—is so vast you know whatever you might be able to do, whatever action you might be able to take, will be a hopelessly inadequate response to what you have just seen.
The object of your shock has shifted. No longer is it the violence in the image that shocks you. It is your sense of inadequacy. You are too small. Violence is too big. You have failed before you have even begun.
The photographs were taken by Harold Edgerton: Edgerton was a mechanical engineer and taught engineering at MIT. He had invented something he called a stroboscope—a bulb full of inert gas connected to a battery that, when ignited by a current, created a flash of bright light, controllable down to fractions of microseconds, which allowed him to capture on film the fastest bullet or rapidly beating hummingbird wing. Among his most famous works are the photographs of atomic bomb explosions, including the Trinity test in July 1945. He had been commissioned by the government to take these particular photographs.
The Trinity test was just that: a test. But the test, along with Edgerton’s photographs, proved that the government would be successful if it unleashed the real thing. For years after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, photographs of the destruction were suppressed. Under the Allied Powers’ Press Code rule that “nothing shall be printed which might, directly or by inference, disturb public tranquility,” prints were routinely confiscated in order to squelch any evidence of atrocity. But in 1952, when US forces ended their occupation of Japan, photos began appearing in waves. In one, a woman nurses her baby in the back of a pickup truck. The woman has a smear of blood on her cheek; she looks at nothing in particular. The baby fiddles with the open neck of her shirt; its face and head are burned, charred, caked, and splattered with blood.
“Don’t make me out to be an artist,” Edgerton once said. “I am an engineer. I am after the facts. Only the facts.”
photographs of birds in flight: Edgerton’s motion studies are in many ways reminiscent of the much earlier motion studies conducted by the French physiologist Étienne-Jules Marey, who in 1882 invented something called the chronophotographic gun. The chronophotographic gun looked very much like a regular gun and worked similarly as well, except that when a person squeezed the trigger, the gun turned a pair of discs that captured twelve successive images in a single second instead of delivering a quick and painful death. Using these photographs, Marey studied the motion of horses, birds, dogs, chickens, sheep, donkeys, elephants, fish, microscopic creatures, mollusks, insects, reptiles—even the famous photographic study about cats always landing on their feet. Marey came to think of motion as a force, alongside weight and gravity, light, heat, and attraction, and decided that all forces lie in wait for an opportunity to become manifest. “Thus, a stretched spring will at the end of an indefinite time give back the force which has been used to stretch it,” he wrote in Animal Mechanism, “and a weight, lifted to a certain height, will restore, the instant it falls, the work that has been employed upon raising it.”
This principle of stored force, or tension, inspired Hiram Maxim with an idea for an automatic weapon that could use the recoil force of firing a bullet to at once eject the spent cartridge and reload a new one. Even his earliest “machine gun” was capable of continuous fire of four hundred to six hundred rounds per minute, equivalent to the firepower of one hundred ordinary rifles. Maxim’s invention forever changed the way people fight and think about war by giving a handful of soldiers the capability of creating casualties on a scale like never before. Armed with only four Maxim guns, four soldiers mowed down five thousand indigenous rebel warriors in Rhodesia in 1893. Machine guns became more widely used in World War I, which saw carnage previously unequaled in human history. In just the first battle of the war, the German army killed twenty-one thousand British soldiers along the Somme River in France.
Some of the very earliest films show footage of the carnage of this war: footage of dead soldiers in ditches, wounded soldiers climbing over their bodies to escape to safety, soldiers checking dead bodies for a pulse, bloody bodies, piles of bodies, dozens of bodies by the side of the road, soldiers loading giant bullets into cannons over and over and over, giant casings piling on the ground, bodies hanging from nooses or decapitated, bodies burned to a crisp. I have to remind myself these are not just bodies but humans: old men, young men, old women, girls, children, babies.
This footage might not exist were it not for Marey’s chronophotographic gun, an essential step in the evolution of film photography, although it is usually Eadweard Muybridge who gets the credit for this innovation. As it happens, Muybridge visited Marey in France in 1881, just as Marey was turning his attention to his motion studies. By that time, Muybridge had succeeded in capturing the motion of a galloping horse. Marey delighted in these photos and suggested he also try birds, noting the method of the chronophotographic gun. Muybridge declined, though historians don’t say much about why. Some suggest he was too proud or perhaps too committed to his own methods. I suspect it had something to do with the gun itself, with the fact that it looked almost identical to the kind of gun one uses as a weapon: point, aim, shoot. Years earlier, Muybridge had been charged with murder for shooting his wife’s lover with a revolver point-blank in the chest. During the trial, his defense argued that any reasonable man would have done the same thing. The all-male jury agreed and ruled the murder a justifiable homicide. Hearing this, Muybridge collapsed on the floor, wailing, shaking. He had to be carried out of the room, had to leave the country, had to go to Central America on a photographic expedition for a year, perhaps proving what the prosecutor had suggested to the jury during his closing arguments: that “no man suffers this kind of insanity without some permanent mark.”
by making us more capable of violence ourselves: While I was working as an Americorps VISTA peace educator in 2001, just after the attacks on the World Trade Center, I learned that by the time most children have reached the age of ten, they have witnessed at least a hundred thousand acts of violence in the media and that bearing witness to so much violence damages our empathy in profound and devastating ways. Our natural orientation as humans is toward one another. To see another harmed harms us also. We are a little destroyed every time we watch another destroyed. As we age, we learn to turn inward, increasingly orient our care and attention away from others and toward only ourselves, not out of apathy but rather as a response to ongoing trauma, until we finally abandon empathy entirely out of self-preservation.
“What allows a life to be visible in its precariousness”: See Judith Butler, Precarious Life.
“When we are afraid, we shoot”: See Susan Sontag, On Photography.
See Søren Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing.
ON MERCY
“To have great pain is to have certainty”: See Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain.
What makes pain subject to doubt: So many scientific revolutions are quiet ones. In 1971 the McGill Pain Questionnaire was developed by two researchers, Ronald Melzack, a psychologist, and Warren Torgerson, a statistician, as a means to give patients and medical practitioners a shared language of pain. Melzack began collecting pain words as a postdoc while researching phantom limb pain. He worked with Torgerson to organize the words and divide them into classes and categories and an intensity scale to determine the pain experience.
people like Brewer, who can kill with no remorse: “Life unworthy of life” is perhaps a way to paraphrase every death sentence in the modern era. It is troubling, then, that this exact phrase was used to justify the early eugenics movement in Germany and was a designation for certain segments of the population that, according to the Nazi regime, had no right to live and consequently were euthanized. The same three drugs used to execute those condemned to die by the state are also used to end the suffering of the terminally ill.
“I hope you find comfort in my execution”: I first encountered many of the last words collected here at Goodbye, Warden (www.
goodbyewarden.com), and confirmed them with the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, which maintains a database of all inmates executed in the state of Texas (549, as of this writing). Each inmate’s record supplies demographic information for the inmate (name, date of birth, highest education level completed, race, height, age, etc.), as well as a brief summary of the incident for which they were sentenced to death; each record also offers the inmate’s last statement: some go on for paragraphs, others only a few words.
“The flakes are skyflowers”: From “The Snowfall Is So Silent” by Miguel de Unamuno, from Roots and Wings: Poetry from Spain 1900–1975, translated by Robert Bly.
They leave the chamber with smiles on their faces: “The instinct for retribution is part of the nature of man,” wrote Justice Potter Stewart in Furman v. Georgia, the 1972 Supreme Court case that placed a four-year moratorium on the death penalty in the United States, “and channeling that instinct in the administration of criminal justice serves an important purpose in promoting the stability of a society governed by law. When people begin to believe that organized society is unwilling or unable to impose upon criminal offenders the punishment they ‘deserve,’ then there are sown the seeds of anarchy—of self-help, vigilante justice, and lynch law.” When this verdict was overturned in 1976 in Gregg v. Georgia, it was in the spirit of honoring this “instinct for retribution.” Retribution is as valid a justification for execution as any other, or so the prevailing opinion goes, because some crimes are so heinous that to deny retribution would be an affront to human dignity.
The Reckonings Page 20