A new unity is possible in America, but only if we realize how difficult unity is

Mrs. Heretic posted a link to an article on her Facebook timeline yesterday about a speech George W. Bush recently gave. Her posting of this article seemed to approve of what Bush said. Later in the day, she said something to me about being nostalgic for Bush. If I had been able in 2004 to look ahead into the future long enough to hear her say that, I'd have probably refused to live in that timeline, because I'd have assumed someone had hijacked her brain.

In 2004, we moved from Chicago, where we had just finished grad school, to the D.C. area, where I had just landed a new job. I showed up in March, but Mrs. Heretic, who still needed to stay in Chicago until the end of the spring semester to finish up her MA in women's studies, didn't come until the end of April. When she showed up, she came with about ten of her classmates from the women's studies program, who joined her at the March for Women's Lives. They made t-shirts that they all wore, which said, if I recall correctly, something like "Boobs Against Bush."

A sign from the 2004 March for Women's Lives

I wasn't a fan of Bush, either, especially his decision to get America involved in military adventurism in Iraq to achieve nebulous political goals, but to Mrs. Heretic and many other liberals, he was the devil. Or at least, he was a sheep surrounded by devils. The rhetoric from the left about Bush painted him as the dumbest and worst president in history, and often cast him as extremist.

Now that we really do have the dumbest and worst president in American history--one who, if not an extremist himself, certainly plays with the fire of extremism, and only escapes being an extremist because that would involve the commitment to a single idea of which he is incapable--Bush no longer seems like such an enemy to liberals. When we listen to him now, we remember a time when the Republican Party at least pretended to try to represent all Americans, when they really thought they had a chance to win over Latinos, so there was a large faction of them fighting for reasonable immigration reform. We remember the term "compassionate conservatism," and recall a time when presidents at least could somewhat lull us to sleep on their policies we didn't like by drowning out the bad parts with tons of rhetoric everyone agreed with.

I mentioned earlier the idea of going forward in time from 2004 to 2020, but what if we could go back in time from 2020 to 2004? What would our rallies back then look like? Would we still burn Bush in effigy at every rally? Or would we try to build a consensus where we could in order to accomplish some worthy goals, while expressing our firm opposition to the policies we disagreed with, but without demonizing him or his supporters personally?

The problem with civil politics is that the politics of confrontation has seemed to work so well for so long. Politicians have used it as a strategy because their strategy experts told them to. But confrontation isn't really a strategy; it's a tactic, one that should only be used for a limited time for limited purposes with very specific aims. Continuing to use it long-term might win you some battles, but you'll lose the war, not because your enemy vanquished you, but because the whole battlefield will turn to poison that kills you along with your enemy. That's where we are now.

There's a paradox in politics that the larger your coalition, the stronger you are relative to those outside your coalition, but the more internal stresses you face. The more groups you bring in, the more you can defend yourselves from outside forces, but every new person brings new opinions and wishes, and balancing those becomes more difficult with every new member of your coalition. This explains some of the perennial disorganization within the Democratic Party, which is more heterogeneous than the Republican Party.

The best way to manage the competing interests is to reduce the number of things everyone has to agree on in order to maintain the union. You don't have to actually believe other races are equal; you just have to believe they're equal before the law. You don't have to believe homosexuality is moral; you just have to believe it deserves protection under the law.

Hillary Clinton used the slogan "stronger together" in her 2016 run. I don't disagree with the principle, only the smugness and certainty with which it was used. Being together might make us stronger, but only if we realize how much work it is to keep everyone together. We're not going to sprinkle slogans over differences and wake up to unity. Unity involves minimizing the space we need to agree on to keep the union working, which means not fighting over things that don't matter. It involves realizing how deeply other people hold some beliefs and how hard it will be be to get them to bend. It involves realizing how fragile a democracy is. It means cooperating with some people who hold beliefs you personally find abominable, because there is no other choice. And maybe it involves realizing that the compromise with others is only a temporary one, meant to achieve nothing more than comfort and peace in this life. You might even use the word "secular" to describe it. We can be in the world and work with others but not be of the world by agreeing with them.

James Mattis, in his critique of Trump this week, went beyond just criticizing the President to a hope for union. He called what demonstrators are seeking a "wholesome and unifying demand." Nearly everyone in the union can understand the core desire of the demonstrators: to not feel fear of the police. Sticking to that desire as the central aim will likely continue to garner sympathy. Attacking police as thugs or state-sponsored terrorists will not. I'm not speaking about emotional truths here, but practical ones. That kind of talk won't keep the union together, which means a failure to achieve goals.

Moreover, in attacking anyone who doesn't immediately fall into ideological lockstep with whatever saucy Tweet someone just blasted out means you're going to be attacking people you might later find could have been someone you could have worked with. For how long did we call Bush, McCain, and Romney racists? Do we regret now any of the things we said about them? Do we see now how demonizing someone slightly to our right can end up bringing us someone far to our right? (Or whatever political space Trump is occupying on a particular day, depending on what news he watched that morning.)

Mattis also hoped the people could find unity in spite of Trump:

Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people—does not even pretend to try. Instead he tries to divide us. We are witnessing the consequences of three years of this deliberate effort. We are witnessing the consequences of three years without mature leadership. We can unite without him, drawing on the strengths inherent in our civil society. This will not be easy, as the past few days have shown, but we owe it to our fellow citizens; to past generations that bled to defend our promise; and to our children.

Wouldn't it be something if the most polarizing president in history ended up making us somehow more united, if he helped us to turn back some of the increasing polarization that has built up since the first troops from World War II started arriving back home? To do that, the first step is to realize it won't be easy. It means people who deeply disagree about issues on which they will never change each others' minds will have to get along. It means people who fundamentally dislike each other will have to get along. It means realizing unity isn't a fuzzy liberal's dream, it's a necessity we can't live without. 

The tricky "what good will this do" question

The most surprising thing to me every time there's a crisis isn't the panoply of opinions I see expressed, it's the certainty with which people hold those opinions. I don't claim to be the smartest or the most informed about any issue out there, but I've certainly put in more work than a lot of the people I see posting opinions that start with "What you need to understand..." or words to that effect. Everyone's a guru.

I suppose I can understand the impulse toward certainty; nobody wants to be caught idling during an important moment, and uncertainty is the enemy of action. Nobody can ever be fully certain of anything, but there are times when the need is so urgent, we simply must act based on the best information available.

Fair enough, although I believe "action" for many people begins and ends with social media slacktivism. Those who are doing more, who are out there on the front lines, are welcome to accuse me of dithering. It's in my nature to be too willing to keep thinking after the time for action is at hand. For both good and evil, I'm indecisive by nature. I will accept the criticism that comes with that.

But it's also true that even in a war, there is a time after the first bullets start flying to take a step back and evaluate how the attack is going. Based on watching the media for the last week, both news and social, I think one can broadly categorize the reactions to the anti-police-brutality demonstrations (APBD) and the looting that has followed in its wake as follows:

1. This is good and long overdue, without qualifications. We don't need no water, let the motherfucker burn.
2. There are valid concerns here that have gone unaddressed for too long. Destroying property of innocent people, especially in the communities of those most affected by police brutality, is of course a bad thing, but just like police supporters feel a few bad cops shouldn't tar all police, APBD supporters say we should listen to the valid concerns and not be distracted by the few vandals.
3. Often quoting Dr. King, some point out that even the vandalism is the "cry of the unheard," and therefore should be understood, if not condoned. 

Conservative responses are somewhat mirrors of the first three

1A. Black lives have been improving, if you get past the media always whipping everyone up into a froth over isolated incidents. Life for black Americans is not as bad as the media wants us to believe. (And here there is a possible branch of this argument saying that the people taking advantage of this are operatives or outsiders with their own political objectives.)
2A. Just like there are some bad apples among the demonstrators, there are some bad apples among cops. Being a cop is hard, and there will always be some people who don't do it well.
3A. Perceived injustices should be taken care of within the system. Whatever your complaint, you cannot seek redress from a system you are actively undoing through contempt for basic property rights. And more importantly, this won't solve anything, it will only make things worse.


(And then there's a stand-alone reaction, one that worries about the possible effect of these demonstrations on the spread of coronavirus.)

I wonder if anyone has ever coined the malaphor "Fiddler on the Roof is on Fire," because that would be Donald Trump to a tee right now. 

Saying "they all have a point" isn't the same as saying they're all equally valid

I'm already indecisive, so when I say things like, "Well, there's some truth in all of these things," I fear I'm opening myself up to the double-whammy of being both indecisive and conciliatory. But saying there is some truth in them all doesn't mean there's equal truth. Generally, the APBD supporters are in the right. But conservatives, as they are wont to do, do come equipped with some annoying truths. The reconciliation of these disparate viewpoints seems to me to run something like the following.

Of course, policing is unfairly carried out on communities of color, and this unfair policing is taking place within the context of a thousand other injustices, all of which were viscerally on display when an officer kept his knee on the neck of a man who didn't seem to be resisting. These unfairnesses are the direct result of history and policy. As Ta-Nehisi Coates keeps pointing out, if aliens came to Earth, and they studied American history and then looked at the current situation of black Americans, they would not be confused about why black Americans are in the situation they are in. Given this historical injustice and its link to the present, a present which just got a very palpable illustration, the peaceful demonstrations are completely valid, and even some of the violence is understandable.

But I'd like to look at the end of argument 3A: "it won't do any good." Supporters of APBD will say that's not the point, that this is the natural expression of trauma, and the point isn't to "do good," but to express what cannot be bottled up any longer. Okay, I can understand that. But how long does the exemption from results last?

The fact is that violence can be an extremely useful political tool, although it's a difficult one to wield. As Coates has pointed out, those who laud the approach of a Dr. King over Malcolm X forget that King's camp was happy to use Malcolm X to get concessions out of LBJ. King would ask for something, and if he didn't get it, he would say, "Well, you can always try to deal with Malcolm X," at which point LBJ would give in. We can praise King's non-violence, and we should, but his non-violence was partly effective because it was better than the other option for a government that had a war in Vietnam to worry about.

Of course the vandalism--some of which is probably coming from outsiders with their own agendas-- can be understood to a large degree as the spontaneous outcry of anguish, but what if the violence stopped being random targets that happened to be in the way, and took on a more strategic flavor? What if it changed from mob violence to political violence?

Why is spontaneous violence tolerated more than planned violence? 

This whole "you have to understand this violence as the inescapable outcry of the injured" response, when continued in perpetuity, is in danger of becoming irresponsible. We've been having these kinds of demonstrations for a long time now, every time some emblem of what people of color feel to be their every day reality is goes viral. Why has there not been a more effective planned and political response, one that persists over time? Could it be that the very effort on behalf of some well-meaning people to just understand the anger and not pass judgment upon some manifestations of it is part of the problem? I'm seeing a lot of white people anxious to signal their own sympathies with the protesters talk coddlingly of the traumatized, as though they were children unable to control their own rage. It's a non-threatening kind of sympathy, because spontaneous violence doesn't lead to change. It doesn't "do any good," as the conservatives would say, but for a particular breed of social media liberal who only wants to demonstrate that their feelings are on the right side, that's just fine. "Doing good" isn't the point. We're here to pat people of color on the head and tell them we understand their feelings.

But what if spontaneous violence became planned violence? At present, one of the weaknesses of APBD is that there is no central leadership. This is also true of Black Lives Matter. There are many local chapters, but no centralized hierarchy. This means the protesters have no list of demands to be met. There's no agenda for the government to respond to. Much like the government now has a power vacuum because the president is largely absent or ineffective during the protests, the protesters themselves present no figure with whom the government could negotiate even if they wanted to. Those attending the protests have no unified platform. There is no organized political movement taking place, at least not one of any consequence.

Say that changed, and a central organization with a centralized leadership formed, and that leadership decided to hit certain, strategic targets, minimizing loss of human life but maximizing economic and political impact? Say this group kept this up for a while, then pulled back and offered talks. Even if the government refused, because it doesn't negotiate with terrorists, it would still offer a lot of strength to other groups outside of the one committing the violence. If a credible threat presented itself, it could change the complexion of politics, and it could actually "do good" to the group with the grievance.

Naturally, the local nature of police force is one of the reasons it's hard to create a national movement. There are a lot of issues no president could solve, because they involve working with governors or mayors or city councils. But an organized national movement could effectively mobilize to make change in one location at a time, as happened during the Civil Rights Movement. The Democratic Party could be part of this, but its leaders seem happy to just say the right sentiments during times of crisis. When we say that questions of utility miss the point, we absolve political forces on the left from the responsibility to organize effectively. Our attitudes about violence are a symbol of this absolution.

For some reason, we seem as a society far more tolerant of ineffective and temporary shows of violence than considered and long-term ones. We call the former "the cry of the unheard" and the latter terrorism. It's an extension of the criminal distinction between crimes of passion and pre-meditated murder, as though it's less awful to murder someone when you've found out they're leaving you than it is to murder them for the insurance money.

I'm too indecisive to actually be recommending violence. I'm asking a question

I'm not talking about the utility of violence to recommend violence, I'm talking about it because there is so little talk generally about what kinds of actions might be useful, which says a lot about why we continue this cycle of incidents and disorganized responses. The outright assumptions we make about violence without even discussing those assumptions reveals a lack of seriousness about attaining the desired ends.

Why are so many liberals at the moment willing to brush aside the question of whether the violence will "do any good"? Whence this liberal pessimism about our ability to change the political course of the country? And what does our over-confident assurance that the question isn't what's important say about the lack of actual political goals on the left? Why are we willing to tolerate sporadic acts of violence with no end in mind but we completely shut off the idea of violence as a potential tool in organized political activity? Is it because we are so shocked by intentionally using violence to achieve an end, or because disorganized violence mirrors our own disorganized political approach?

Myself, I'm not going to pretend I'm excited to go storming buildings to see change. Generally, I think the change that needs to happen will take time and concerted, slow effort. It will take people being useful day-to-day. My political action isn't radical or violent; it's to try to do little things. We vote for change. We support black businesses. Mrs. Heretic has taught for a decade in some of the populations that are affected by injustice. We try to help those kids when we can. One of the ways we help them is with the money I make in my day job, a job that is, without a doubt, the opposite of anything radical. I've adapted to the world as it is in order to try to make living in the world as it is a little easier for a few people.

That leaves me stumped about how to respond to a crisis like this. Do more little things? I'd like there to be an identifiable political or activist movement with goals I mostly agreed with to join, but there isn't. There have been multiple instances of anger boiling up into spontaneous action in the last decade, but no lasting political movements with an agenda to capitalize on that anger.

For those still willing to dream big, I don't know why we think asking about the effectiveness of the tactics being used to bring about the world of tomorrow isn't a valid question. What does that say about us if we brush aside questions of utility because we don't even think the oppressed are capable of effectively organizing a political resistance to the oppression?

Violence is an incredibly difficult tool to wield well. No matter how focused you try to make the violence, there will be collateral damage, as the government finds out every time it tries to surgically strike terrorist leaders. I'd be happy if nobody needed to go down that path, if we were able to find a peaceful way to greater equality. 

But absent that, we should stop insisting the efficacy of the protests is a moot question. If we shouldn't be asking "what good will it do?" of random acts of violence, then we certainly have a responsibility to be asking, "What will do good?" I'd like an efficient political left. I've been making do with a disorganized, chaotic Democratic Party since I changed sides in my twenties. I'd love something with more focus, something I could even see myself being an active part of instead of just a default voter for.

All of this concern for sadness among liberal well-wishers, both our own and the sadness of the oppressed as we imagine it, seems to me misplaced. It's an abstract "won't someone please think of the children" kind of concern. The question isn't about caring enough or feeling the right thing. It's about what we want to accomplish and how to do it. Taking the protests and the issues that are behind them seriously seems to me to include questions of efficacy, namely why the left seems to find it so hard to muster any. 

I keep saying I hate writing really short stories, but they seem to be what people want to publish

This is just a quick post to say I got another story published yesterday. This is in a newer journal called Bridge Eight. I hadn't heard of them until I saw they were accepting submissions, but looking at some of the other stuff they've published, I'm proud they picked one of mine. This one's a pretty quick little story. I keep saying I don't particularly like writing shorter ones, but that seems to be what a lot of journals are looking for, and I've had more of the really short ones published than the longer ones.

The story's here. Since people seemed to like my very short story, I'll make this a very short post, as well.

Nonplussed: the dazed protagonist in "I Am Here To Make Friends" by Robert Long Foreman

All the books on the craft of fiction warn writers not to have passive protagonists. Your hero can't just face a world that either she doesn't understand or which doesn't understand her, spend the length of the story immersed in that lack of understanding, and then end the story still dumbstruck by how strange and unfamiliar the world is. This is a hard lesson for writers to learn, and many a promising MFA candidate never gets past it. Maybe that's because the sorts of people who seek to tell stories in the first place really do spend a lot of their lives feeling alienated, misunderstood, and generally like the world is too much for them. But most eventually learn to make their characters want something, have that want be frustrated, and then cobble together enough of a conflict out of the quest to fulfill that desire that editors will publish the story.

We're so used to the cycle of want, followed by inability to achieve the wanted thing, followed then by some kind of epiphany that allows the character to achieve what he wants--the "tyranny of the epiphany" as Jim Shepard calls it--that it's entirely arresting to read Robert Long Foreman's short story collection I Am Here To Make Friends (Sundress Publications, 2020, 215 pages). Arresting, because most of the stories involve a protagonist who breaks the rules by not being sure what they really want, mostly being passive and misunderstood, and yet every one of the stories is a joy with more than enough forward momentum to keep the reader happily flipping pages to the end. Stories without clear stakes aren't supposed to work that well, but these do, and the reader is left shaking his head as one story or another works when it doesn't seem like it should, like walking through a hall of optical illusions.

No story exemplifies this dazed protagonist as much as "The Vinyl Canal," which is mostly about the narrator's annoying acquaintance who becomes obsessed with scratching grooves in the songs he doesn't like on his records so the record player will skip over them. There is some movement in the story to take the subject matter outside the interior musings of a pompous college kid more in love with his thoughts than his thoughts merit: police brutality and American love of the easy way out enter the narrative, but they never quite form a conflict. The kid disappears, it might have been the police who did it, and then the story ends. The narrator is observing a world that doesn't give up its secrets, and ultimately, it's too much for her to keep plumbing the depths.

This cycle is repeated in: "Appraisals," about a man who accidentally is mistaken for an appraiser at a convention who decides he will just tell everyone what they want to hear; in "Turkey of the Woods," in which an addict of some sort finds a brain in the woods he mistakes for a mushroom; and "Lost Origins," in which a slacker becomes obsessed with finding a code in a strange video he bought in a bargain bin at a thrift store. These characters crack jokes other characters don't find funny, and make discoveries nobody is interested in hearing about. Being misunderstood, though, doesn't make these characters crave understanding enough to do something about it. There is no overcoming of anything to achieve a goal. Instead, there is a direct refusal to confront challenges. When the main character in "Lost Origins" finds out his girlfriend wants to break up with him, he simply says, "Fine, I thought. I saw this coming." When he then starts a new relationship, his new girlfriend says something he disagrees with, but "I wasn't about to start an argument. I was in love."

So why does all this passivity work, contrary to all the rules writers have been taught? One reason is that the jokes really are funny. The people who hear the protagonists cracking wise may not get them, but the reader does, and it creates a sort of bond. We feel that we want to reach through the story and form a secret society with the main characters.

Much more than this, though, is the way these stories remind us how appropriate it is to feel disoriented. Maybe it doesn't always make for compelling fiction to be so uncertain what the point of life is that we don't even know what to wish for, but that is a totally normal reaction to realizing we've all been dropped off on this planet with no guide book. It's appropriate to feel nonplussed, a word Foreman uses a couple of times, and which means to be so confused by a situation, one doesn't even know what course of action to take. The etymology of "nonplussed"--and many of Foreman's characters are deeply interested in the etymologies of words--is simply "no more." It means there is really nothing else left to do, because something has left you so dazed, there's no action that makes sense.

No story exemplifies this more than "Awe," the opening story. (I am putting to the side two stories in the collection, both of which have to do with guns, and both of which are sort of oddballs compared to the others.) The narrator hears his friend talk about what a life-changing experience it was watching his child be born, so the narrator goes on a wild Internet adventure to find a couple or a mother who will let him watch their child be born. He tries to explain what he needs:

"So, you want to see me give birth out of--what--curiosity?"
"I heard about it from Gary--my friend. About what a mindfuck it is." I was paraphrasing. "I mean, how much it changes you to be in the room when someone's being born. Gary's a different guy now, in a good way."
"And you need that."
"Sure."

Of course he needs that. We all do. We all need "awe," which is the only thing any character in any of the non-gun stories in this book wants clearly enough his quest to achieve it can be called a conflict. When he achieves his goal of feeling awe, there is nothing else he needs to feel alive and to also have some sense of communion with other living beings. To be alive is to feel disoriented, to feel awe, to be so nonplussed that there is nothing left to add to the experience. These stories, which resist everything they will tell you in MFA programs, feel like they have exactly the right amount of what's in them, and I wouldn't want to add anything more.

Writer problems: pseudoplagiaphobia

I vividly remember my first college class with a research paper as part of the requirements. A few weeks into the course, a day was set aside for us all to announce out loud what subject we had chosen and the outline of the paper we planned. It was very important to me that I be the first to present my planned paper. Why? Because I was certain that the idea I'd landed on was so good it would be obvious to everyone else, and if I didn't present it before everyone else got a chance, three other students would announce they were doing versions of the same thing.

After a few semesters, I finally realized that I was older than most of the others students, had spent time in the Marine Corps, and was therefore a lot more serious about going to college than nearly everyone. Which meant that nobody was stealing any of my ideas. In fact, they usually showed up to class on the day we were supposed to announce our topics without any idea at all what they were going to write about. In other words, my fears that just because something had occurred to me meant it would occur to others were almost always groundless. I got over pseudoplagiaphobia, the fear of falsely appearing to have stolen an idea from someone when I was merely the victim of having had the same idea as someone else. (Side note: a quick Google search tells me I might be the first to coin this word, but I'm sure a more industrious researcher might tell me I'm wrong.)

It's a whole other story writing fiction, however. In college, I only had to worry about whether someone else in my class would happen to have the same idea as me, and the odds of that were pretty long. But when I'm writing something where the potential audience includes the whole world, there's a much bigger pool of other writers to worry about having had "my" idea first. Worse, there's no possible way to investigate the collected writings of all humanity in order to know if anyone ever did something similar enough to what I've done that I might be accused of stealing it. I could check for titles, of course, but generally, I already know whether my title is sui generis without having to check, and that's not really what I was worried about, anyway. Repeating a title isn't a big deal, but repeating a story--or coming close to repeating a story--is. With the whole world to worry about, the odds I'll stumble into something someone else wrote become a lot higher.

This doesn't usually bother me, but it did bother me over the last few months when I, probably like a lot of other writers, was pushing my way through my COVID-19 novel. (I mean I wrote it during my free time I got as a result of COVID-19, not that it's about the disease.) The novel started out as one thing, but it pretty quickly morphed into something else, and when it changed, I suddenly knew where I wanted to go with it. The change was something I was really happy with, but about halfway through writing, I started thinking that surely, someone else had done something similar at some point, because if it occurred to me like that, it must have occurred to someone else.

Like the thing pseudoplagiaphobia itself worries about, there's probably nothing new about an obsession over whether your idea is really new. The best advice I can give to you if you're suffering from it is that if you've been writing long enough or if you're talented enough that people might actually read your work, then you're going to have a style unique enough that even if you do happen to stumble into the same plot points or character sketches as someone else, it's still going to feel pretty solidly your own.

The professor in one of those classes from my undergraduate years later became a friend of mine. He once was talking about how early 20th century writers were struggling with trying to find something new to say, and in an off-handed way, he threw out this line: "The Barenaked Ladies sang 'It's All Been Done,' and even that was already done a hundred years ago." The good news about the impossibility of coming up with something truly novel is that people are fairly forgiving about ideas with a lot of overlap. Hell, Moulin Rouge came out barely two years after Shakespeare in Love, and even though the second was nearly a transposition of the first to a different era and visual aesthetic, people gave both a ton of awards. (And if memory serves, that was also about the same time Hollywood found that yes, America did have room in its heart for two separate disaster flicks about an asteroid hitting Earth.)

It's true that in a very big world with a lot of talented people writing fiction just like you are, there's bound to be somebody who did something like what you did. If you're really unlucky, there might be a story out there that's a lot like yours, and you won't find out until you've published your own work. That's not really a reason to write in fear, though. You're as likely to end up with readers finding the two works to be in conversation with each other as you are to be accused of stealing an idea you didn't even know existed before you. If that happens, it's probably a good thing. Teachers love assignments that force students to compare and contrast, and if you've got something that forms a Venn diagram with another story, you might just end up being on somebody's syllabus.

You can probably rest easy that if you read a reasonable amount and write well enough to find a readership that you don't need to spend years making sure nobody already did what you are doing.

(Now, that being said, here are two things I've discovered you will have a very, very difficult time not repeating: coffee shop names and craft beer names. Seriously, I've had to put these in stories before, and I've spent hours coming up with one clever--or so I thought--idea after another only to find that yep, some guy in Des Moines already has a coffee shop by that name or there's a brewery in Michigan making that very beer. If you need to put a coffee shop or a craft beer in your story, it's best to just kiss the idea of being clever good-bye. I'd recommend having the owner of the cafe or the creator of the beer commiserating over how hard it is to come up with a new name, because it really is.)

Wrapped up in something I don't completely understand: "Lagomorph" by Alexander MacLeod

Often when I'm looking at submitting a story to magazines, the editors will provide guidelines to writers that include a "what we're looking for" section. Unless this is very specific, like, "We are a magazine that is looking for queer stories by queer writers," these "what we're looking for" sections aren't very helpful. They all tend to come down to, "We can't explain it but we know it when we see it."

I'd criticize this, but as I was going through the 2019 O.Henry Anthology--their 100th such anthology--I decided this year I would only blog on those stories that I really connected with. This left me in the same, embarrassing boat as all those editors. Namely, what does it mean "to connect with" a story. To me, it really means nothing more than the feeling that the story landed. I mean landed like a punch lands. It left a mark on me, and I know, before I have to live the next ten years, that I'll come back to thinking about that story again at some point.

There didn't end up being that many stories in this year's anthology that landed. I only blogged about five, the one I'm about to do included. That doesn't mean there weren't good stories. In addition to the ones that "landed," there were several more I enjoyed, and I can't think of any that enraged with with their presence in a best-of collection. Maybe I'm getting cynical, or maybe I've just read so much short fiction in the last seven years, it's getting harder to land punches on me. I'm the same way with TV now. Here in the Golden Age of American Television, I'm often refusing to even start new shows, much to Mrs. Heretic's annoyance, because something about them just tells me they're not going to land. This is especially irritating to Mrs. Heretic, because I often can't really explain why I know they won't land; I can't even explain exactly what landing means.

Mystery as close as your nose

I indulge in this digression because "Lagomorph" by Alexander MacLeod is entirely about this can't-put-my-finger-on-it sense that accompanies all of us through life. It's the story of a pretty typical man who gets married and raises three kids, with all the accompanying sense of vertigo those years of running from work to van shuttle service bring. At one point, when the kids are all between the ages of seven and thirteen, "the moment just before they made the turn into what they are now," the family makes the milestone decision to get a pet. Because the wife is allergic to cats, they get a rabbit.

The story is written from the husband's point-of-view, and he's looking back after the kids are grown and he and his wife are amicably separated but not yet divorced. He's not quite sure what happened to his marriage. In fact, bewilderment is the narrator's main characteristic. Not in a wishy-washy way, but more in an open-to-the-mystery-of-life kind of way.

The symbol of this bewilderment is the rabbit, Gunther, the "lagomorph" of the title. Gunther is something of a fuzzy, cute incarnation of the mystery of life who sits on the narrator's lap to have its ears scratched. The narrator's description of the rabbit comes packaged together with a sense of disorientation and confusion from the story's first words:

Some nights, when the rabbit and I are both down on the floor playing tug of war with his toy carrot, he will suddenly freeze in one position and stop everything, as if a great breakthrough has finally arrived. He’ll look over at me and there will be a shift, his quick glance steadying into a hard stare. I can’t escape when he does this and I have to look back. He has these albino eyes that go from a washed-out bloody pink ring on the outside through a middle layer of slushy grey before they dump you down into this dark, dark red centre. I don’t know, but sometimes when he closes in on me like that and I’m gazing down into those circles inside of circles inside of circles, I lose my way, and I feel like I am falling through an alien solar system of lost orbits rotating around a collapsing, burning sun.

The rabbit symbolizes the ineffable enigma of existence partly because it's so hard to know what a rabbit is thinking: "Even when I imagine that I am reading him correctly, I know that he is reading me at the same time--and doing a better job of it."

Rabbits always have an ability to surprise

It isn't just the inscrutability of the rabbit's moods, though, that make it such a symbol of why life confounds us. In Moby Dick, the white whale is a symbol for something similar to what MacLeod is getting at in "Lagomorph." But the whale is a mystery partly because it is so remote and distant. It lives in the depths of the ocean. When it does meet with humanity, it's usually in a destructive way. Gunther, though, is a common mammal. The author--somewhat Melville-like--gives us a number of rabbit facts while telling his story, one of which is the fact well-known to folk wisdom about how prolific rabbits are at reproducing. The rabbit is as different from Melville's whale as an animal can be, and yet there it is, as inscrutable to MacLeod's narrator as the whale is to Ishmael.

What makes Gunther such a remarkable and surprising element in the story is that while he embodies life's unspeakable mystery as much as Melville's whale, the rabbit is right there next to the narrator throughout. "Our rabbit--my rabbit now, I guess--he and I are wrapped up in something I don't completely understand." The ineffable isn't a powerful god with knowledge it keeps hidden out of spite, it's a fluffy ball of fur next to us that's legitimately as confused as we are. It's wrapped up in the ineffable with us, a passenger on the same ship. The narrator points out that rabbits are altricial: they are helpless when born. They're like us, then, born into a world that is too much for them from the moment they enter it. Life may be, like a rabbit, a "fickle, stubborn creature, obsessive and moody, quick to anger, utterly unpredictable and mysterious," but it's also in the same boat. Maybe God faces limitations just like we do. The mystery of life is so profound that even whatever personifies the mystery of life is also confounded by it.

This is what makes "Lagomorph" so arresting. The narrator isn't undone by some outside force. The one outside force that threatens the narrator and the rabbit in the story ends up being something the narrator dispatches easily, and in fact he ends up feeling bad about treating the outside force as a threat, wondering if he can even justify his actions he resorted to out of fear. What undoes the narrator are the small things that are with him throughout the story, the marriage the fell apart even while he treasured it, the children that have no become themselves and don't live with him anymore, the rabbit that is both common and "a nearly unique organism in the history of the world."

The real punch of this story is that something doesn't have to come from the depths of the ocean to be other and mysterious and to knock us flat with a sense of how small we are. Life isn't just ineffable, it is ineffably sweet, and that is part of what makes the experience of it such anguish. The mystery is as close as the ends of our fingers, stretched across the couch.

A story that works at the sentence level: "Julia and Sunny" by Sarah Shun-lien Bynum

I got through my now-annual blogging of all the stories in the Best American Short Stories Anthology in good time back in the fall, but even though I scaled back what I intended to do with the O. Henry anthology to just blogging about the ones I liked, I've gotten very waylaid. It's actually a good thing; I've been using some of the time lately to do my own writing. The end result has been several stories revised, three news ones written, and now, over the last five weeks, a draft of a novel. I'm going to let that draft marinate for a few days while I forget it, so I can go back to it with fresh eyes for editing. In the meantime, I'll go back to the O. Henry anthology and blog about a few of the stories I connected with.

Maybe it's the different approach I chose, but I didn't find much to like in the O. Henry anthology. There weren't a lot of stories that enraged me, the kind where I feel honestly offended the editors chose to use one of the precious, career-enhancing spots in the anthology for a story so clearly undeserving, but I also didn't find many stories I was still thinking about days later. That might be because I only read the ones I didn't really like once. Often, when I blog on BASS, where I read every story twice because I'm going to be blogging about them all, I find a story I didn't like that much after one reading suddenly seem much better after the second go-through. Maybe if I'd read this whole anthology twice, I'd have found more to like.

Be that as it may, "Julia and Sunny" by Sarah Shun-lien Bynum was a story I liked not only after the first read, but very much during it. There's a little bit of serendipity in that. The story is about a divorce, as witnessed by the married couple who are best friends with the two people getting divorced, Julia and Sunny. It so happens that a couple Mrs. Heretic and I are very close to, a couple we've known since we were dating, is getting a divorce. They've been on the ropes for a while, but they split up definitively in the last few weeks--during the COVID-19 lockdown, no less, which made it a lot more shocking. (One of our first questions was, "Where is he going to live?")

When couples get divorced, they often feel shunned by their friends who are still married. The general thinking is that the ones who are still married are looking at the divorced friends like they are carrying some sort of disease, like divorce is contagious, so you'd better stay away from the ones who caught it. Or maybe it's just that nobody likes a reminder that what happened to someone else could happen to them, too, especially when it's a couple whose friends mostly have only known them during happy times, like parties or shared vacations.

The narrator is still dealing with this shock in the first sentence of the story: "Our friends, our very good friends, are getting a divorce." On one level, this repetition of "our very good friends" may sound like simple emphasis, and it is: the two couples shared a long friendship together with a lot of happy memories. On another level, though, this sentence is protesting too much. The narrator is no longer certain of her friendship with these two, a fact that is leaving her unsure of a number of other things. She is trying to reassure herself--these guys are our very good friends, right? Because she isn't really that sure: "There are moments when we feel as if we don't know them anymore." Her concern is that if the friends can get divorced, maybe they were never really friends, and if that's true, then what else might not be true? Maybe our own marriage isn't really that solid.

These "talking yourself into something" passages are all over the book. When dissecting Julia's happiness, which the narrator and her husband had always taken for granted, they equivocate a bit too much on why she should have been happy: "True, they had landed in a city that was a bit off the beaten path, it was hard to get direct flights, the school options weren't terrific, he had persuaded her, for (their daughter's) sake, to adopt a small hypoallergenic dog that she hadn't wanted, her father was showing signs of dementia--but still, on balance, in fact by all imaginable measures, her life was good." (One of the funny, easy-to-miss details in this story is that Julia will later use the dog she didn't like as an excuse to stay home by herself instead of go on a vacation with Sunny.)

On a sentence, level, much of the language of the book registers a shock the narrator is trying to process. What makes it so hard for her is not just all the things that make it tough for every couple to watch friends getting a divorce, it's that so much of her own internal conception of her own marriage comes from Julia. The narrator and her husband were already married when Julia and Sunny started dating. They got to know Julia first, as she came over to their apartment to ask for advice on dating early in her relationship with Sunny. (Sunny is a man. I was confused in my first read-through for a while, because it wasn't "Sonny," and I thought they were a lesbian couple until the text clearly spelled him out as a man.) Julia saw the narrator and her husband in a particular way: wise in the ways of love and cute together. Seeing themselves the way Julia saw them changed their own self-image: "She made us feel romantic." Or: "We were new to this, and sometimes just the sight of our clothes hanging companionably in the closet, or our large and small shoes jumbled in a heap by the door, would send us into a sort of diabetic swoon. With Julia around, we wanted more than anything to while the day away discussing Sunny, and never to have to send ourselves to the library, or to class."

Julia looked at the narrator and her husband and saw them as in love, and this helped confirm for them that they really were in love. Without Julia and Sunny as a couple, though, this undoes all of that foundation the couple had built on for years. This is why the narrator is so in shock and half in denial throughout much of the narrative.

What finally enables the narrator to get over the loss to her self-image or her marriage is another shock. The narrator and her husband kept hoping for Sunny and Julia with a "stubborn hope," but when the narrator meets Sunny unexpectedly at an airport, she realizes that the relationship between her family and Julia's may not have been to him what it was to her. I won't give it away, but it's a more profound shock, perhaps, than the divorce itself, partly because the narrator's couple was, if anything, sort of on Sunny's side in the divorce.

This second shock ends up being a good thing, though, and it shows not only in the resolution, but in the very language of the last page. The narrator is able to finally accept that although the divorce does not make sense to her, it is reality, and she should accept her own reality, rather than continuing to rely on the self-image she has built out of her own imagination of what was. Or does it? With the story's last sentence, there is still just a hint of the redundant equivocation, suggesting she is still the same person with the same tendencies, but now slightly more under control. It's a more subdued equivocation. Her focus on the details of what is actually in front of her is what frees her from her enslavement to her own memory: "The three of us lean into each other, and it's not exactly a group hug but more like the kind of huddling that animals do in the cold, our flanks rising and falling with our breaths. We stand there sleepily for a minute or two, and once in a while, I'll think I smell something faint and intoxicating...Then, as easily as we came together, we break apart and go about our business, knowing that soon enough we'll be bumping up against the same bodies, whether on the landing or in the kitchen or somewhere else. Just knowing that, it seems to me, is plenty as it is."