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"For there is nothing covered, that shall not be revealed; neither hid, that shall not be known. (Luke 12:2)" // "In all desire to know there is already a drop of cruelty. (Nietzsche)"
So opens Maggie Nelson's The Red Parts. Reading it felt like holding your hands up to your face and yet watching something terrible unfold through gaps between your fingers. Precisely what that terrible thing was (is?), however, remains elusive: the speculation and recreation of how one murder (or a couple dozen) unfolds? The way suspected criminals and the victim's families are treated throughout a judicial trial? The wider ecosystem of the patriarchy that normalises violence against girls and women? Or that creeping horror directed at my own self, the reader, in my incessant need to know "the root of the matter"?
Nelson is frustrating, saintly and all I wish myself to be in the face of repeated tragedy and manmade horror. All I wanted of the book was a chance to dissolve my person, my own history of childhood abuses, into the rest of the faceless, angry mob that demands a verdict and a tell-all: justice for the deceased. Yet Nelson implodes that idea entirely, asking what justice means for those already dead, how resolution can ever possibly be offered to those who remain, and what we are to do with the emotions that we're left with.
Midway through the book, Nelson attends a vigil for a serial rapist sentenced to the death penalty. Despite how her own life has been affected by the murder of her aunt (possibly linked to a string of other related rapes and murders), she insists on attending, considering herself a bodhisattva, someone who "[enters] challenging situations in order to alleviate suffering" (p. 79). I am conflicted, myself an angry mobster, but one against capital punishment. My latter persuasion wins over, but this only lasts for an instant as Nelson's next line again disturbs whatever stable moral ground I thought to anchor myself on.
An essayist on ethics proffers this: "'My own view is that [a transfer of concern from victim to criminal] occurs in large part because of our unwillingness to face our own revulsion at what was done. It allows us to look away from the horror that another person was willing to cause. ... By repressing anger at wrongful violation, we may be attempting to deny we live in a society in which there really are fearful and awful people.'" (p. 80) Indeed, what is there to know beyond the painful possibility that sometimes violence is random, hate is unjustified, and all we do is continue to suffer through hurt?
The Red Parts, at least to me, is an astounding, baffling exercise of begrudging compassion for the hurt parts of myself and other people. I have no doubt that the finer points of Nelson's exploration of the issue are lost on me in this current state, but this only means I will be back for another re-reading or two as I interrogate the limits of my own care and understanding afforded to all of us whose lives have been affected by male violence.
"For there is nothing covered, that shall not be revealed; neither hid, that shall not be known. (Luke 12:2)" // "In all desire to know there is already a drop of cruelty. (Nietzsche)"
So opens Maggie Nelson's The Red Parts. Reading it felt like holding your hands up to your face and yet watching something terrible unfold through gaps between your fingers. Precisely what that terrible thing was (is?), however, remains elusive: the speculation and recreation of how one murder (or a couple dozen) unfolds? The way suspected criminals and the victim's families are treated throughout a judicial trial? The wider ecosystem of the patriarchy that normalises violence against girls and women? Or that creeping horror directed at my own self, the reader, in my incessant need to know "the root of the matter"?
Nelson is frustrating, saintly and all I wish myself to be in the face of repeated tragedy and manmade horror. All I wanted of the book was a chance to dissolve my person, my own history of childhood abuses, into the rest of the faceless, angry mob that demands a verdict and a tell-all: justice for the deceased. Yet Nelson implodes that idea entirely, asking what justice means for those already dead, how resolution can ever possibly be offered to those who remain, and what we are to do with the emotions that we're left with.
Midway through the book, Nelson attends a vigil for a serial rapist sentenced to the death penalty. Despite how her own life has been affected by the murder of her aunt (possibly linked to a string of other related rapes and murders), she insists on attending, considering herself a bodhisattva, someone who "[enters] challenging situations in order to alleviate suffering" (p. 79). I am conflicted, myself an angry mobster, but one against capital punishment. My latter persuasion wins over, but this only lasts for an instant as Nelson's next line again disturbs whatever stable moral ground I thought to anchor myself on.
An essayist on ethics proffers this: "'My own view is that [a transfer of concern from victim to criminal] occurs in large part because of our unwillingness to face our own revulsion at what was done. It allows us to look away from the horror that another person was willing to cause. ... By repressing anger at wrongful violation, we may be attempting to deny we live in a society in which there really are fearful and awful people.'" (p. 80) Indeed, what is there to know beyond the painful possibility that sometimes violence is random, hate is unjustified, and all we do is continue to suffer through hurt?
The Red Parts, at least to me, is an astounding, baffling exercise of begrudging compassion for the hurt parts of myself and other people. I have no doubt that the finer points of Nelson's exploration of the issue are lost on me in this current state, but this only means I will be back for another re-reading or two as I interrogate the limits of my own care and understanding afforded to all of us whose lives have been affected by male violence.
