2/19/21: Affliction (1997): Doing Things Right #poetry
In the 1980s, a guy at NYU got me a free pass into the Creative Writing Program there
can you imagine — someone did that for me — handed me something worth tens of thousands of dollars
and I don’t remember his name
A girlfriend that I had at the time thought he was gay
He wasn’t
He didn’t have an agenda
She did
She wanted an excuse to cut me loose
She didn’t need one
She was a cold “visual artist”
Who did things right
she followed all of the recommended steps in her painting
and in her career
It was my time of exposure to people who did things right
Russell Banks was my creative writing teacher at NYU for a couple of months
I quit the program
It wasn’t for me
Russell Banks wrote the novel that was adapted into the film “Affliction”
He wrote “The Sweet Hereafter” and some other good work
A proper body of work
A proper literary career
He did things right
I’ve got nothing against doing things right
But when you do
you don’t come up with anything new
I was a refugee from a legal career
I couldn’t detect a difference between legal files
and Russell Banks’ fiction
or my ex -girlfriend’s paintings
I couldn’t detect a difference between legal careerism
and literary or art -world careerism
I was on the other extreme
I was living on friends’ couches
and unashamedly eating in soup kitchens
I was a couple of years from a nervous breakdown
Wildness was slowly turning into rage
My eventual psychiatrist
who used to be a Navy shrink
Dr. Viener
I remember his name
He taught me more about writing than Russell Banks ever did
and loved me more than that girlfriend
Who never loved me at all
I have no idea why we were together
I guess we just wanted to have a non -romance and an angry break -up
I needed someone to hurt me so i could get on with my desired project of avoiding intimacy with women or anybody else
and she needed to get a brief of justification to get rolling on her useful lifelong habit of cutting people loose who were of no use to her ambitions …
Russell Banks just thought I was doing things wrong
and would never get them right
and he was correct in his assessment
he really wasn’t interested in me
he knew that I was in the wrong place …
the insight was mutual
and eventually I went away
Banks wrote stories about marginalized people suffering
but never connected — I don’t think — the suffering to creativity
The creativity belonged to him
Not the characters
Their pain was the raw material of Banks’ creative satisfaction
and to a properly lesser extent
the fodder for his recognition and awards
Banks saw pain
but he didn’t see its redemptive qualities
Just like the society that rewarded him
The limitation of Banks’ writing is that he never got outside of society
He chronicled suffering
He painted portraits of empathy
and left it at that
I think that — I really don’t remember
I just know for sure that what Banks was doing was not for me …
I see Banks type every word of the novel “Affliction”
I see the director story board every shot
I see the actors neatly prepare for their roles
and rehearse their scenes
Every moment of the film
every word
every image
every emotion
is chosen
Meticulous and precise
So much exertion to understand what happens
and then report
their immaculate findings
The affliction of the title is the wound of an adult man who was abused as a child
I admire this movie
in spite of its stiffness
It’s so focused
A masterpiece of attention
protecting itself from all strangeness and surprise
It’s important to study wounds
but I want answers
Maybe Russell Banks was trying to figure something out for himself with his writing
He had questions
I just follow along and wonder
I used to have these sweet Irish friends who sentimentalized sadness, loneliness, failure and death …
Banks fetishizes same
I think suffering is Banks’ gilded cage
He can’t afford to quit suffering
It’s how he made his name
And that old girlfriend has spent her life hanging pictures of dead things on the wall
and Dr. Viener
and the U. S, Navy
gave me answers.
Copyright 2021 Richard Thomas
