Writing Horrible Things, Part III
Hang on. This is a long one, the final of three posts about my book, The Devil’s Child. Or, it’s really about writing about horrible, terrible, evil things, things so awful that there’s no way to write about them, but if we turn away, split away from even part of what’s true, we’re lost. I’ve thought about this a lot. If you are the character Barbara in these poems, who’s split away into multiple personalities to save herself—and then when you actually do split away by having a child, you have to inoculate the child. A terrifying moment for me is when Barbara’s...
Read MoreI’m Thinking about Meditaton and Art
As a long-time Buddhist practitioner, I’ve particularly liked teaching Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” I get to ask, “Is it true? Is ‘beauty truth, truth beauty’? Is that really ‘all we know and all we need to know’? If they have all their cylinders firing, students get curious about what Keats means by truth, where it can be seen, what it has to do with beauty, and what beauty might mean. Buddhists, of course, have been asking such questions for over 2500 years. If I take Keats’s assertion and question it from a Buddhist perspective, I get something like: Are there...
Read More