Writing as Quiet Activism

A Project Manifesto (Process Journal)

In order to have a constructive discussion, we have to agree on the definition of conceptual words in the immediate context. I’m thinking of the way people use the word journey vs. excursion, for example. Brave. Peace. Risk¹. I think sometimes when we disagree, we focus on trying to impose our own subtle definitions of words on one another, rather than using words as tools to discuss what’s important. I think we spin our wheels in our uncertainty.

It’s a sophist’s game, right?

Still, while I completely agree with Richard Flanagan’s statement, I want to say that dramatic, in my mind, means something very different from melodrama(tic). As a dramatist and a poet, I think it matters.

Melodrama—by formal definition²—doesn’t follow the scientific laws of cause and effect. Emotions are exaggerated, and the narrative focuses on plot rather than people (my wording). On the other hand, Drama, as an artform, is closely tied to the concept of mimesis, a copy or representation of real life. Good drama demands complexity, subtlety, and perspectives. This is true, regardless of dramaturgic techniques like cathartic jump-scares, or delicious psychological torquing.

In Ancient Greece, the purpose of drama was to teach us to be good citizens. We talk in theory about protagonists and antagonists, but I have yet to find a professor who can convincingly pinpoint the protagonist in Medea, following Aristotle’s precepts.

In good drama, we may not like a character’s actions, but we have the ability to understand them—with effort and compassion.

But do we live in a dramatic world? I think we do. Dramatic can mean “sudden and striking”. Striking can be an emotional word, but it can also mean significant. It can be a verb of eradication.

I think the real question is whether we even have the ability to avoid seeing the dramatic nature of the world:

[…] I am bewildered.— I had no intention to write atheistically. But I own that I cannot see, as plainly as others do, & as I sh^d wish to do, evidence of design & beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent & omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidæ with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice. […] On the other hand I cannot anyhow be contented to view this wonderful universe & especially the nature of man, & to conclude that everything is the result of brute force. I am inclined to look at everything as resulting from designed laws, with the details, whether good or bad, left to the working out of what we may call chance. Not that this notion at all satisfies me. I feel most deeply that the whole subject is too profound for the human intellect. […]³
Yours sincerely & cordially | Charles Darwin

Without the Ichneumonidæ wasp Darwin writes about, caterpillars would decimate entire crops. We don’t know the total damage that would be done to the ecosystem were we to eradicate the parasitic wasps, but we know it would be significant. It’s not our rational mind that is repulsed by the dramatic efficiency of the wasp’s world.

It’s not our rational mind that wants to shield children from learning how Ichneumonidæ feeds their young. It’s not our rational mind that allows us to sit our children down in front of video games in which they pick a side: humans killing other humans, playing a melodramatic and bloody war.

Mimesis:

With the help of their mimetic abilities, children acquire the meaning of objects and forms of representation and action. This is especially true of the development of their aesthetic sensitivity and their ability to experience empathy, pity, affection, and love.⁴

I believe lifelong learning is a fact, not a matter of choice. But the perspective from which we learn is a choice.

There are an endless number of conflicts and imperatives in the material world that we have trouble coming to terms with. I think I carry the torch of 19th Century Naturalism in that I believe writers can use drama to try to examine the world. To ask how we can do better.

My wasp project is rooted in memoir, but it telescopes through metaphor to ask universal questions:

Can we hold fear without malice?

Can we forgive without overbearing?

Can we thrive with paradoxes?

1. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/people-have-very-different-understandings-of-even-the-simplest-words/

2. https://www.dictionary.com/browse/melodrama

3. https://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/ce/3/part10.html

4. https://bit.ly/4aLCcIp