The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates by Joyce Carol Oates Read Free Book Online Page B

allowed into one’s written recording of a life. Why is this?—that the interior world, the preoccupations of one aspect of consciousness, should crowd the exterior world out?—when in fact (as we all know, Samuel Beckett no less than Arnold Bennett) the world that surrounds us most immediately is the world we look to, and which shapes our imaginative worlds to a far greater degree than we might admit. […] Life here in Windsor, on the banks of the Detroit River, in relatively tranquil surroundings—though a short fifteen-minute ride from the University—has allowed me to develop aspects of myself that would not have been activated back in Detroit: absolutely futile to deny this. There, our house was broken into one day when we were gone, we returned to a mess—bureau drawers yanked out, clothing tossed onto the floor—my modest jewelry strewn about (and very little taken: the thief’s shrewd judgment), curious bloodstains on the parquet floor of the dining room. The psychological shock of having one’s house burglarized…of seeing one’s possessions and intimate things thrown about…a very real experience, unforgettable, yet I’ve only approached it in a poem so far. Perhaps it is, or was, too powerful…? Then there was the riot of 1967—the riots—fires a few blocks away on Livernois, looting and general panic, and National Guardsmen stationed nearby: valuable to have experienced, no doubt, and yet hardly the sort of thing one would want to re-experience. Worse, we were in New York City when it began, and heard rumors that the mayor and the governor had been killed, and that Detroit was going up in flames…. So wereturned as quickly as possible, felt the need to return, and drove east into the city along Seven Mile Road, astonished at the familiarity of it all—the placidity—the sunshine—the neat trim green sprinkled lawns of northwest Detroit—only when we approached Livernois did things seem more grim, more sensational. Home owners, we felt the riots as threats, necessarily; but the rioters themselves must have felt a marvelous exhilaration, a sense of sudden, absolute, unguessed-at freedom—the freedom to destroy, which is usually the privilege of the ruling classes. Had I been “Jules” of them , would I have behaved as “Jules” did…? * The answer is: Of course. So would everyone. But we are not “Jules,” and cannot judge.
     
    Still, judgments must be attempted. It is wrong to kill, it is “wrong” to be violent. But it is even more wrong, more reprehensible, to put human beings into the position—psychologically and morally—where their life’s energies can be expressed only in destruction, in killing. Violence is an admission of impotence. Violence is a kind of impotence. But who has brought the impotence about, who is to blame…?
     
    Windsor too has its problems, its urban difficulties, pollution falling from the skies (blown across the wide river from Detroit’s factories, primarily from Detroit Edison), and a considerable drug problem, so it is said. But there is not the air of defeat here, or dismay. The problems are large enough to draw interest to them, small enough to seem soluble. Of course they will not be solved—it is not in the nature of most problems to be “solved”—but in the meantime no one despairs.
     
    Found a letter of Anne Sexton’s mailed on June 4, 1973.
     
    She committed suicide not long ago; carbon monoxide poisoning at her home in Weston, Massachusetts.
     
    The shock of finding the letter—And the mingled fear, dismay, excitement in rereading it—The wish that I could write to her again, as I didthen, and she would write back—and again, and again—in this way mortality defeated, destiny thwarted—
     
    Strange that I did not notice, or at any rate take seriously, certain remarks in her letter that were very, very sad, in a helpless way. My tendency to interpret other people as if they were myself speaking…and their words only