The Mystery of Good and Evil
What great literature does and does not teach us. Flying insects in slow motion.
Image by Nino Carè from Pixabay
Politics Isn’t Everything
Here is a link to a powerful and thought-proving piece (Political Fiction: Why Is It So Hard to Write?) about the topic mentioned above. It’s a longish essay by Mary Gaitskill, with a video link and two audio links, which I highly recommend as well. The formal theme is that there are more important things than politics, an idea that seems lost in our times.
Since I’ve been alive (or a teenager anyway) I’ve been aware of forever arguments about whether or not fiction should be political, written to address injustice or at least to support social morality. Right now this could seem like an especially frivolous question: wherever you are on the ideological spectrum, social issues are sitting atop us like demon beasts, that is, if “social issues” is even a strong enough phrase for the literally burning evidence of planetary destruction, daily gun violence, grinding economic fear, violent racism, unpredictable pandemic illness and pointless war being waged by an unhinged superpower, all on rumbling sub-crawl under our daily lives.
Even in less harrowing times, social institutions and the political machinations surrounding them are huge facts of life that we are all subject to, regardless of where we live on the spectrum of class and privilege; the stories of small, soft humans—all humans—caught up in the wheels of such institutions are dramatically compelling even when they are badly written. Multiply that times ten when what is happening makes you want to cry out, not as some little person carefully writing and looking out the window, but as a member of a group, because groups are more politically powerful.
In the course of giving some powerful examples from great literature (click on those links!), she summarizes:
What I am saying is that stories about political systems or social struggle are most poignant and effective when they acknowledge that we are all up against such harsh mystery whether we are a powerful statesman or a poor child.
And in conclusion she writes:
[I am] expressing honor for art that illuminates this mystery of our human nature, where good and evil are constantly and unpredictably mixed. Because I think as artists it is of primary importance that we remember this paradox and maintain humility before it.
What all of these excerpts have in common: They understand and in the case of the last two, portray the brutal world of political struggle and war. But they never forget the larger context in which such struggle lives: the bit of sky, the strangeness of a face, the children humming to themselves in unswept corners, the innocent cry from an otherwise evil heart. The inutile beauty of that part of humanity and nature that does not care about power and dominion over others and which has nothing to do with commonsense.
This is the great insight of the Bible, of course, with one significant difference. The author seems to ground human dignity in the mysterious fact that we are both good and evil, and that we need to respect that. The biblical idea seems to be that we have dignity because God created us and loves us in spite of the fact that we are a mysterious mixture of good and evil. But the conclusion is the same: every person deserves respect and, of course, love.
I’d be interested in your reactions.
Slow Motion Insects Take Off!
Adrian Smith is no novelist, but I think he instinctively gets one point of the essay above: That a close study of the wondrous details of life helps one transcend the petty political squabbles we sometimes get stuck in. Smith is in charge of Evolutionary Biology and Behavior Research Lab at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences and North Carolina State University. And he loves filming flying insects as they take off. And he does it with a slow motion camera, which allows us to marvel at another dimension of God’s creation.
Grace and peace,
Mark