mother of violence

fog of everything

I once put down a riot on the psych unit with thirty seconds of piano snatched from the public domain and played overhead on a loop. Zoom out and set the scene. Halloween night 2013. The unit is at capacity. Ninety-two patients. Male female white black ranging in age between eighteen and eighty-seven. Full spectrum cuckoo. The med windows are open and the bodies churn around the nurse station like a headless snake. The patients push and shove at each other, at the air around them. Others stand in pockets of rigid silence and flash out of frame. Violence is always swimming just beneath the surface of a psych unit, you can see the ripples. Ninety-two psych patients already on edge overdue for meds in an enclosed space is a physics experiment come to life. Look here kids, see the molecules crash around and bang into each other gathering momentum. Watch the heat rise. Watch the ripples spin around you. 

Violence is inevitable. Violence is necessary, I used to say. Back when I was teaching I’d spend at least a week on the question of violence and how to deal with it in the telling of stories. The distilled version being that there is no such thing as drama without conflict and conflict is the mother of violence. The model scene was a family reunion, birthday party, waiting room, passengers on a bus. Wherever. Anytime you put multiple characters in a room with or without weapons and alcohol and bad blood between them the result is conflict. The idea is to slow and steady ratchet up the conflict. To escalate, to push thorns into the skin of the situation until it blows. Violence may be psychological at first but nearly always becomes physical if left to fester long enough. Violence is not silence. Violence is not unkind words. Violence is the closed fist, the boot. Violence is the knife. I told my son once if you want to hurt somebody hit them with your elbow. I told my students the best or most effective violence happens off the page. The most disturbing images are implied, overheard or glimpsed but never quite seen. The best or worst violence happens offscreen. Don’t go slowmo just for kicks. Don’t show the bullets fly. Don’t linger on the torn flesh. Don’t zoom in on tooth and claw. The impulse to show everything in hard or soft focus to slowly pan the details of violence in poorly lit rooms and shadowy corners is gratuitous. If you want the reader to feel and taste the violence then zoom in on the aftermath. The bloody sneaker in the driveway. The ripped shower curtain. The torn hello kitty underpants in wet grass. The smeared handprint on a pillowcase. Violence is everywhere. Violence is swirling beneath the surface just out of sight, until it isn’t. Until it shows itself. Until it explodes in all its shame and glory. And yes all it takes is one little detail like hello kitty to make the reader lose his mind.

Back to the psych unit. The temperature is spiking, fights and scuffles popping off in every direction. Everywhere you look nostrils are flaring, bodies pressed too close, arms windmilling and shirts coming off. The staff is outnumbered ten to one. If the patients come together as a unified mass we can’t hold the unit down. If things escalate past a certain point we can’t keep them or ourselves safe. I pick up the phone and hit the button for the overhead. The audio squelches and goes to static. No point in calling a code. There’s no backup coming. Tempted to order a hall lockdown and offer to buy the peace with extra cigarettes but in a moment of pure inspiration I take out my phone. Now mind you this is 2013. I’m carrying a Motorola Razr with three downloaded ringtones. The exorcist theme, nah. Edith Plaf singing non je ne regrette rien aka the Inception kick tone. Maybe. And the crucial piano dance track from the Charlie Brown christmas album by Vince Guaraldi. The quality is scratchy and distorted but after two minutes half maybe two thirds of the patients are bobbing around doing the snoopy dance and everybody is cool. The chaos still present but redirected, rewired. Violence averted for a few more heartbeats. Looking back I realize the halloween riot that never happened was snuffed out by a meme, a shared memory. The patients and staff on the floor that night were from every dusty strange disconnected corner of the demographic rainbow but everyone of them knew the snoopy dance. 

The algorithm feeds off conflict. The algorithm digs violence, craves it. And soon enough the algorithm will be predicting the next mass shooter. The next suicide. The next terror attack. The next October 7. And the media knows too well the rule about offscreen violence. They show us primarily the aftermath. The bloody clothes and scorched earth. The lost shoes. The shadows of children picking through the rubble. The jackals are itching to show us the paragliders’ first person snuff films but they resist out of presumed decency and respect for victims and their families but also because they know the rumors and whispers of the slaughter are more effective. The imagination is our most fearsome terrorist. But the snuff films are out there. I have searched and found footage of the adorable hippie kids being raped and murdered at the nova music festival and trust me the images are brutal. Unspeakable visual residue that you will never unsee, flashes and echoes of every cool sweet weird beautiful Jewish kid or crush you knew growing up and for me there were dozens and that shit will haunt your sleep and turn your stomach and bring fury to your mouth.

Violence is inevitable. The IDF soldiers who have seen that footage want to not just kill every Hamas fighter they can get their hands on, they want to hurt them. They want to punish and destroy them. They want to erase them. And they should. The Israeli soldiers are fighting for their land, their people, their family. And they don’t give a rat’s fuzzy ass about collateral damage. They tell us they do but they are lying. To their mind every Palestinian is Hamas, or will be tomorrow. Every woman killed in the bombing is the mother of a Hamas fighter. I personally wish they might find a way to let the women and children exit the kill zone but I understand the logistical nightmare that would present. I understand too that Palestinian males over the age of twelve are presumed rightly or wrongly to be Hamas and they will not be offered safe harbor anywhere. The Hamas fighters meanwhile want to maim rape and kill every Israeli under the sun. They want to butcher them, to desecrate their remains. They want blood. And they should. They have been treated like animals, like untouchables, like non persons. They have had bombs dropped on them. They have been murdered and starved and humiliated. They have been contained and controlled in a narrow little concentration camp for decades. They have suffered the wrath of petulant gods and ruthless diplomats alike. Violence is inevitable, necessary. The IDF will do what they must and Hamas will fight to the death. Israel will get Vietnam in a boxed urban setting and the Gaza locals who don’t get martyred end up in a surely more hellish refugee camp in Egypt. I don’t know, game it out a dozen ways but how else does this go. Ethnic cleansing happens off the page and faraway more often than we like to think.

I was born in Mississippi, grew up in Tennessee. And like every white boy in the postmodern south I was given the civil war question to eyeball and spit on and wrestle with in my head from a young age. If you were nineteen in 1865 what would you do boy. Would you pick up a rifle and put on rebel gray or go north and fight with the Union. Or would you tend your crops and sit it out. Would you head west, maybe try your hand at cowboying. Would you watch the fascist Sherman burn Atlanta to the ground and not taste blood in your mouth. And would you survive the war only to go home to sit down and shut up while Tennessee gangster Andrew Jackson cooked up his own private holocaust along the trail of tears. I wish I had good and pure answers to all those questions but I don’t. My grandmother’s best friend was Eudora Welty. My dad’s side of the family goes back to pioneer times in West Virginia and would have been shot as traitors by Robert E. Lee. I’ve explored every possible what would you do white man storyline I can spin up in the most high def internal streaming I can muster. And consider this one. If the mass shooter Robert Card had taken a thousand collaborators with him to rape and kill fourteen hundred innocent civilians at various bowling alleys in Maine, then took his posse to hide out in a narrow strip of Vermont ghetto that we had already conveniently boxed in by walls and razor wire and by the way they worship the wrong god, what would we do about it. I don’t mean to speak for everyone but I reckon we would bomb that stretch of our own promised land to a bloody pulp then sort out victims and perps later. I don’t know what to make of the phrase thoughts and prayers other than dive inside this shit and imagine it visualize it try to taste it from every perspective you can dream up and I wish there were some shared memory some version of the snoopy dance other than say the whole Abrahamic origin story that would make the people of Israel and Palestine put down their weapons and act like good neighbors but maybe there isn’t one maybe it’s too late and besides aren’t your white christian evangelical relatives kinda sort of pulling for this to go proper biblical with leviathan and trumpets and balrog and such and before long the algorithm will be feeding us a kaleidoscope of personalized stories of violence blunted muted overblown misconstrued and deconstructed into pure fog of war noise but how long before we have some of our own troops taking fire over there and another mass shooting or two maybe a bombing at the Texas border whispers of the draft coming back and the real stupid personal shit gets started. I mean isn’t this the script we’ve been writing for the past thousand years. Where else does this go.