Vast and Fractal

Identity and empathy on the banks of the rainbow river

When I teach creative writing classes, one of the prompts I often give my students is to write a “persona poem,” or a poem written as someone (real or imaginary) other than themselves. This assignment is good for writers in the same way, I think, it’s good for all of us to visit unfamiliar views—it’s an exercise in empathy. The marvelous poems that many students produce are proof that deep perspective-taking can bring about surprising, as well as surprisingly deep, insights.

As a somewhat guarded and perfectionistic young poet navigating academia in my twenties, where I was compelled to share my poems with classrooms of peers and professors for regular critique, I discovered that it was often much easier for me to write in other’s voices—characters I seemed to channel from another plane—than to write openly as myself. Listening to and speaking through these other voices were like turning a palm-sized gemstone around in my hand and watching light refract off its many sides. The gemstone was me, and it was not me. The facets of the gemstone were also a web of possibilities, alternative lives and worlds. These characters acted simultaneously as shining windows into the sources of my fears, my questions, my griefs, and as a kind of shield for my personal vulnerabilities and the intimate details of my own life story that I didn’t want to expose.

Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I by Gustav Klimt

As a result, my first two poetry collections—Best Bones and Darwin’s Mother—contain poems written from the perspective of a house servant, a blackfly, an 18^th century farmer, a monk, a ghost, an archeologist, a chimpanzee from Dr. Harry Harlow’s infamous primate experiments in the 1950s, of Charles Darwin as a child, a mother cicada, Achilles, the Virgin Mary, and an AI robot. As I’ve continued to evolve as a writer, I’ve become more comfortable speaking plainly as myself (hence this newsletter), but the other voices remain with me. The insects and ancestors and dinosaur bones are murmuring alongside and within my own voice. What began in part as a method of self-protection has expanded my understanding of self into something vast and fractal.

Now, when I’m teaching the persona poem and want to add an additional twist, I’ll sometimes further specify the prompt: that the poet should write in the voice of a non-human being, such as an animal, plant, or mineral, or alternatively, that of a person very different from themselves or with whom they disagree on matters of importance. For a magnificent example of the latter kind of poem, I recommend reading “Skinhead” by the award-winning African American poet Patricia Smith (reader discretion is advised, however, as the poem has disturbing and violent content).

The connections between reading literature (specifically literary fiction and poetry) and improved empathy are well-documented. Reading literature (as well as writing it) allows us to enter into the minds, bodies, and hearts of characters that we’ve never met before, and to struggle along with them in their challenges, joys, and griefs, and the complexity and mixing of emotions. This ability—to enable us to take another shape, to take flight, to travel places we’ve never physically been, to live another’s life (if briefly)—is, I believe, a kind of magic.

Social Media use, by contrast, has shown inconclusive results in studies on empathy. One large study of young adults in the U.S. showed a decrease in empathy and increase in narcissism for social media users, though the researchers note that these impacts likely vary culturally, since in the U.S. people are more likely to post on social media in “self-focused” ways. Empathy aside, social media clearly has a significant role to play in increasing depression and anxiety, as well as causing addictive behavior. Meanwhile, another impact of screen time is that it’s taking the place of books (check out the graphs here and you’ll see how precipitous this is for young people). Although it’s true that the internet and social media are also a kind of time and space travel—showing us images of places we’ve never been and connecting us with a diversity of people around the world—it also prevents us from focusing, from lingering on any of it in particular, making it difficult to process the constant stream or to develop our own views and ideas on a matter.

In my experience at least, scrolling is very unlike getting lost in a novel, having my head turned inside out by a poem, or actually writing. Instead, the image and information flows feel like sailing on a kind of enchanted rainbow river: It’s colorful, sometimes vibrant, unpredictable, but moving too quickly to really appreciate anything within it. Scrolling, I remain forever moving, forever on the surface, and never getting anywhere.

Rainbow Agate Gemstone Slice by N Akkash

This concerns me, because I think the times in which we’re living require of us a finely-tuned empathy, an ability to look each other (and reality) in the eye, and the capacity for nuanced thought and sustained attention—not quicktakes and soundbites. I think it needs our creativity (not “content-creation”), our embodiment, our non-GPS navigational skills. And hear me out, but I think it would also be helpful if many of us had experience really trying to imagine what it might feel like to be a rock, a tree, a turtle, a king, a shepherd, a sick child, an immigrant.

My fantasy, unlikely as it may be, is this: That as the negative impacts social media has on mental health and our ability to speak to one another in open-hearted ways become increasingly clear—along with the openly nefarious intentions of the tech overlords who profit from these sites—that there will be a large exodus from the rainbow river. People will put their phones in a closed drawer, then go outside and lay in the grass for a good long while, not doing anything in particular. Maybe on the third day of this new freedom, as they begin to dream up collective ways to resist the institutional crisis and ecocide-in-progress, they might see a pencil on a nearby table, pick it up, and write a poem.

As an example of the prompt I mentioned above—writing from the perspective of a non-human being—I’ll leave you with “Prayer from a Mouse” by poet Sarah Messer. This poem holds a special place in my heart, because I framed a broadside of it for my son before he was born and it’s been hanging in his bedroom for the past eight years. I love how the devotional nature of this poem (Messer is Buddhist) is emphasized by the smallness of the mammal who speaks it in comparison with the vastness of the Divine. The “mouseness” of Messer’s own longing comes through this mouse in a way that shows both empathy and understanding of actual mouseness as well as the mouse-like aspects of our own experience, one shining facet on the infinite gemstone of being.

Prayer from a Mouse
by Sarah Messer

Dimensionless One, can you hear me? 
Me with the moon ears, caught 
in ice branches?
	
Beneath the sky’s long house,
beneath the old snake tree,
I pray to see even a fragment
of you—
 			whiskers ticking
 
a deserted street,
a staircase leading 
to the balcony
of your collarbone.

Beloved King of Stars, I cannot 
contain my animal movements.

For you I stay like a mountain.
For you I stay like a straight pin.
		
But in the end, the body leaves us 
its empty building. 

Midnight petulant
as a root cellar. Wasps crawling  
in sleeves. I sleep 

with my tail over 
my face, enflamed.

Oh Great Cataloguer 
of Snow Leaves, I pray 
that you may appear 
and carry every piece 
of my fur in your hands.