More specifically, as a writer, should you acknowledge the disturbing realities of climate change in your work? Even if it turns people off or freaks people out?
When my little poetry book, Of Some Sky, was published, I didn’t realize how allergic people are to thinking about climate change. I mean, it’s not like I was saying anything half-awake people didn’t already know, and I was even having a little fun with it. But boy did they not want to read about it! The response was something like: This book will make you want to slit your wrists . . . but there’s some decent laugh lines. Well, OK. But it raises a bigger issue for writers: whether to say what is true about the topics we think are most important or, in contrast, to say only what is palatable about topics people most want to read about. It would be too easy to turn that into a purely aesthetic issue – of “true art” vs. “pandering to the mob,” etc. Rather, I think it has to do with ethics and character. Part of the question hinges on the relation of writing and reading to the rest of life. If you’re spending all your time “making a difference” by writing lovely nature poetry that never directly addresses the ongoing end of nature, are you any nobler than someone who is cranking out cheesy bestsellers to pay the bills – and going and getting arrested with XR on the weekends? But the issue of what you’re writing about and how you are doing so is important, too. Nature writing can be just as escapist as mediocre fantasy fiction. Neither the writer of bestselling thrillers nor the nature poet who avoids the topic of climate collapse is talking about the elephant in the room (before it goes extinct, anyway). Maybe they genuinely don’t feel anxious about their or their family’s fate; or maybe they suppress their awareness and their fear of what’s happening. But just because you aren’t lying doesn’t mean you’re telling the truth. The influential French philosopher Michel Foucault spent the last years of his life studying this issue, by focusing on the concept of parrēsia. This Greek term is a compound word: pan (everything) + eirein (to say, to speak) = say everything. That is, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. But it's a bit more complicated than that. Parrēsia took on a central role in Classical Greece. Originally it meant permission to tell the truth, as granted by a master or a king to a servant or subject, with the promise to refrain from removing the truth-teller’s head (the “kill the messenger” phenomenon was a real thing, back in the day). Later, parrēsia was seen as a characteristic of the free person – the nobility or, in more democratic times, the citizen. The Cynic philosophers used parrēsia by lecturing any unfortunate bystander within earshot about the folly of their ways (the precursor of “call-out culture”?) – perhaps one reason there are not many Cynic philosophers around anymore. With the development of Athenian democracy, it came to mean the right and duty of the citizen to speak up – to say what was on his (his) mind for the health of the state, regardless of how people might feel about it. Consequently, the opposite of parrēsia is flattery – whether it takes the form of kissing up to a monarch or playing to the crowd. It is usually used in relation to speech, but could easily apply to writing, as well. So, there are a couple of characteristics of parrēsia that follow from this, according to Foucault. The first, is “breaking with or as disregarding the traditional forms of rhetoric and writing. Parrēsia is an action, it is such that it acts, that it allows discourse to act directly on souls . . . .” That is, the point is to hit people in the gut, not to tickle their ears – the goal is the unvarnished truth (frankness), instead of artfulness. Secondly, “somebody is said to use parrēsia, and deserves to be considered as a parrhesiast, if and only if there is a risk, there is a danger for him in telling the truth.” Consequently, “In a political debate, if an orator takes the risk of losing his popularity because his opinion is contrary to the majority’s opinion, he uses parrēsia. So, as you see, parrēsia is linked to danger, it is linked to courage. It is the courage of telling the truth in spite of its danger” (43). T.B.C. . . .
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June 2021
Kristin Prevallet Author/Editor
I'm a writer & teacher in Lawrence, Kansas who actually believes the scientists. I wrote a book of poems called Of Some Sky that seems to have something to do with all this. |