In this American dark age we must all take a moment to travel through time. Dark ages are marked with violence, disease, economic and cultural erosion, scientific perversions as well as, surprisingly, technological advancements. Technology for violence and the science of war thrives in these periods while libraries shrink. Arts investments dwindle and our knowledge of history, both distant and immediate, fades. Some believe we are just now on the brink of a dark age, and yet those not invited to benefit from certain privileges of whiteness have been in one for centuries. The black American and the white American live in two bodies during the same hour with eyes that see vastly different shadows. Racism is an integral part of the American experiment. There is no more time or energy left to waste arguing that truth. Genocide of the indigenous peoples, enslavement of the African, abduction and incarceration of the Japanese American, exploitation of the modern undocumented immigrant and the current carceral state that grinds black and brown bodies into profit for private corporations is racial in design, an obvious and grotesque reality. That is the strategy of institutionalized national racism. Oppressed citizens of that nation possess no country. The land below them is controlled by the state, so they become nomadic and vulnerable to exploitation and abuse by delusional agents of the state. Black Americans have been citizens of a nation without a country for a very long time.

I tell my students of fiction that every character must exist in three temporal realms: past, present, and future. Without that consideration, characters will feel inauthentic. This is a lie. We all know people who seem either cursed or just stupid, who flounder between the same bad choices again and again. It is as if they have no memory of their last bad relationship, no ability to recollect and learn and strategize differently. That kind of person has a past, of course, but refuses to see it. When we deny our past we erase our experiences, our knowledge of what is possible. The only people that have no past and no experiences are children. Denial of the past means you have to think as a child thinks, act as a child acts, relegating one’s daily existence to the surprise of a child. The infantilization of the American psyche is essential to perpetuating grotesque institutional structures that require the suffering of many to pay the debt of power to very few. Yet, it is human nature to fantasize about the past. To live in history with judgment, whether it is reverie or regret, is dangerous.

I will not evoke any adages of wisdom or recount the overwhelming narratives of police violence because the hour calls for imagination, not nostalgia. Nostalgia is a paralytic curse as productive and healthy as consuming the meat and wine of a dream. We don’t need to dine with ghosts. That brings us to the present. When people live only to judge the past, the present body is neglected, left to rot. And yet, when they turn fully away from the past, ignoring it entirely, they are subject to incarnations of old traumas. When we carry the past objectively into the present with honesty, our memories become assets. A nation must remember its whole history fully without judgment to guard against reliving previous horrors. This kind of relationship with the past also prevents mistaking history for destiny.

I’m a very spiritual person. I know that we are all the same spiritually, yada yada, but the physical body has rules. The body must be protected and honored as sacred. The nomadic black American body is in jeopardy. She has been bound and hunted for centuries, her pain has become commodified into an operatic spectacle for the world to despair and consume. Those witnessing the protests across this nation are splitting in various factions. Some support the protesters but not the looters. Some support the police but not the president. There are those who want to be neutral, nonparticipatory, refusing to believe the truth that their own bodies are intrinsically knitted to the fate of us all. The rest say let the thing burn and drown the ashes. Just maybe they are all right? What if we must try everything?

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Paint brushes and watercolor paints on the table in a workshop, selective focus, close up

“In the Universe, there are things that are known, and things that are unknown, and in between them, there are doors.” —William Blake

Psychiatrist Daniel Siegel explains how the brain is like a folded hand. A fist. The thumb against the palm represents the limbic regions, brain zones dealing with emotions, stress. The folded fingers are the cerebral cortex, which help with rational thought and regulating moods. The fingernails are the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain used for decision making, ethics, and morality. All these zones work together as a team. Faced with panic, the fingers spring up, we lose rationality, ethics, and are left with our emotions. We often rely on our basic instincts: fight, flight, or freeze. We may feel disorganized, unable to concentrate or make decisions, suffer from mood swings, frustration, and bouts of adrenaline. The trick is to find a way to bring those fingers down. Keep everything connected.

We’ve been in confinement in France for over two months. Here in Brittany, under lockdown, when I’m not writing or online lecturing, I’ve been working as a clinical arts therapist. Three days a week, I leave the cherry tree blossoming in our garden and head along empty roads to a psychiatric hospital. On the car seat to my right is the file I dutifully compiled the first day of confinement. It contains my regulatory paperwork, proving my right to leave my house, forms ticked and completed: name, date of birth, address, hour of departure, arrival. A photocopy of my passport. A stamped document from my employer. Everything is signed.

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John Opie, Mary Wollstonecraft, ca. 1797, oil on canvas, 30 1/4 x 25 1/4″. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

A young Englishwoman named Mary Wollstonecraft lived by her wits and her pen. At thirty-four, Mary did not expect to marry, but she soon met an American adventurer named Gilbert Imlay and believed she’d found her soul mate. In love, they moved to Paris where they had a daughter, named Fanny.

But Gilbert began to travel more and more, and soon it became apparent he had a wandering eye as well. Heartbroken over this desertion, Mary drank laudanum. She survived, but within a matter of months was despondent again and jumped from a bridge into the Thames.

Miraculously she was rescued and nursed back to health by William Godwin, like Mary a political radical, to whom she quickly developed a strong attachment. Later married and happy, they read Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther aloud together the night before she went into labor. Tragically, Mary died a few days after giving birth to a second daughter, also named Mary, who would be raised, along with Fanny, by William Godwin, who would remarry.

His new wife had a young child of her own, Claire, and the three girls grew up as sisters; they became known as Les Goddesses. When Mary was seventeen, a famous poet named Percy Bysshe Shelley came courting: he first paid favors to Fanny but quickly fell for Mary and the two eloped to the Continent, taking Claire with them.

Fanny, crestfallen, stayed behind and, like her mother, drank laudanum. The real story concerning the lives of these extraordinary women is filled with many paradoxes, and without a doubt it is more fantastic than any fiction. Read More