AWP 2016, part 3: introverts rampant

See, you got some 20,000 people (I think) roaming all over, up and down the escalators and stairs and over from the Los Angeles Convention Center to the Marriott Hotel, approximately next-door but only by Los Angeles standards (my phone app claims that I walked six miles the first day), and I would guess that more than the usual proportion are introverts. So, you have many people getting very excited at making social contact, very nice, but people who then require some quiet time to replenish.

Some people found islands of quiet in noisy places. Some resorted to the Emily Dickinson Quiet Space. That is, the people who were able to find it. I did find it; it was mostly empty, which was fine, but it was also cold and white, a small banquet room, which was weird. Ten large round tables with ten hard chairs at each one; each table used by only one person; people who jumped and glared when I sneezed, or clicked. No photos came out, btw; what is there to show about starched linen? I had hoped for comfy chairs, even a sofa or two. At least I could prop my chin on my hands and shut my eyes. And I swear:  I have never seen so many blank books in one smallish space, particularly being scribbled into diligently.

Thanatos, du Donnerwort

 

Boots on the ground carrying machine guns, at the Musee d'Orsay in Paris, France, during an exhibition of Manet's work.

Recently my husband and I rented Amour, a beautiful and pitiless movie about being trapped by love when one person in a marriage develops Alzheimer’s. If you have not yet seen this film, I will say only that no one walks out, yet someone is abandoned. I don’t think I am giving anything away when I mention that, finally, the intact spouse suffocates his wife with a pillow. Very difficult to watch; I think I forgot to blink. It got me thinking about other pillow suffocations that have been presented to me, for instance, in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. More recently, though, on The Blacklist, the urbane and infinitely calculating character played by James Spader suffocates the heroine’s father with, yes, a pillow. Then, tears in his eyes, he kisses the dead man on his forehead. The suffocated person is always a patient, has always asked to be killed if they arrive at that miserable level, is always embraced by their merciful murderer. There is, however, something about seeing it on television—network television!—that stops me in my tracks. We are willing to show all kinds of death on television, gory and traceless, kind and vicious, needful and gratuitous; now that anything and everything can be recorded, these scenes are available to children. However, the notion of there being some dignity or necessity in two people having sex, that these might not be wearing any clothes, that it means something powerful to them emotionally—that is considered something that children should not see. Doesn’t have to be explicit, or pornographic. (We have the Internet for that.) Just saying that there are many more incidents of adults being murderous and of it being deemed necessary than of any dignity or rightness attaching to adults being sexual. Yet again, Freud was right: Death wins out over Love.