Massoni Reader Response #1

Jennifer Massoni
Professor Abinader
ENG 271: Theories of Creativity and the Teaching of Creative Writing
February 9, 2010

On Empathy

Writing requires empathy of its craftsmen and women. As a writer, I am inclined to place empathy ahead of most, if not all, contributing qualities. By definition, a display of empathy entails not only understanding of, but also identification with the feelings of another. Writers must imagine themselves as their characters when crafting motivations, decisions, heartaches, and reactions to others. As I concluded on the blog this week, we do this “so that we, too, may communicate something true.” In my mind then, empathy is truth.

Many of this week’s readings draw a connection between empathy and creativity. Considering the variety of expression from Sidney Bechet, N. Scott Momaday, Brian Eno, and Isadora Duncan as well as their collective diversity of experience, empathy becomes the bridge that escorts the reader, viewer, or listener of a work of art to understand perspectives from which he or she has not necessarily viewed the world. This is the ultimate vulnerability of creative expression—the permission to be understood, and perhaps misunderstood, by one’s audience. The following writers either explicitly or implicitly refer to the component of empathy in their respective creations.

In “The Second Line,” Sidney Bechet describes New Orleans as a place of significance to him and his music, the big-band parades specific to his city, and the larger implications such a place had on the movement of jazz. Outside of these memories, Bechet explains little in terms of his professional experiences as a jazz saxophonist, but his ability to describe these scenes reveals far more about how he came to embody this genre of music. From the outset, he includes himself in the collective experience: “Everyone in our house liked music. When they heard it played right, they answered to it from way down inside themselves,” (Creators on Creating, 138). This speaks to a common experience in communion with a deep, individual emotional response. Bechet extends the experience of his family within the house to the city beyond, united by the parades of his childhood, often assembled dollar-by-dollar by the community. He also assumes that you, the reader, “know how it is,” another nod to an empathetic ability to relate to a parade because “it just makes you stop anything you’re doing; you stop working, eating, any damn thing, and you run out” (138). Even the “second liners,” those who cannot afford to enter the parade enjoy it all the same by creating “their own parade with broomsticks, kerchiefs, tin pans, any old damn thing” (139), indicating that everyone is allowed access to the experience. Bechet’s description of the lively pleasure of parades transitions to funeral processions studded with the deeper tempo from large drums, another vivid example of the power of music to assemble those in times of joy as well as sorrow.

The motion of the parades marching through Bechet’s piece climaxes with the “bucking contests,” when two marching bands approach each other until one “just had to give in…and that band was the best that played the best together…That band, it would know its numbers and its foundation and it would know itself,” (140), an emphasis that implies the empathy of collaboration, as well as the consequences of discord. For the other band, “getting scared, knowing it couldn’t go on further, it was finished…it wasn’t a band any more. It was just some excited musicianers…And the people, they just let that band be. They didn’t care to hear it” (143-144). With the internal accord given over to fear, the parade’s audience loses its desire for like-minded harmony. The reader, having marched with the essay, is also left with the winning band, which is all the more poignant when Bechet’s concludes:

…being able to play in that kind of band, it was more than a learning kind of thing. You know, when you learn something, you can go just as far. When you’ve finished that, there’s not much else you can do unless you know how to get hold of something inside you that isn’t learned. It has to be there inside you without any need of learning. (144)

This seems the ultimate message to the artist of any kind who may someday resort to going through the motions of what he or she has learned. With the apt metaphor of the parade, Bechet communicates a critical demand of creativity—the ability to “get ahold of something inside you that isn’t learned”—so that those on the sidelines of the parade, or any creative endeavor, may reach inside themselves for a similar resonance.

In “The Magic of Words,” N. Scott Momaday recalls an experience particular to his upbringing to communicate an empathetic attention to the passing nature of our lives beyond the preservation of “relics and artifacts.” From these experiences, stories arise. As a child, Momaday witnessed the disappearance, over three short years, of migrating covered wagons from the Jemez Pueblo where he lived. “I had seen something that will not be seen again, and I thank God for that. But the loss is less important to me than the spirit which informs the remembrance, the spirit that informs that pageantry across all ages and which persists in the imagination of every man everywhere” (160). Like the “pageantry” of Bechet’s parades, the march of time tells much to the informed observer who, tapping into the very spirit of any fleeting experience, may translate it to the collective imagination. When Momaday next refers to memory in the form of an experience of his father’s that he, too, has absorbed, he distills this phenomenon still further, saying, “This is a profound continuity, something at the very center of the Indian perception of the world. We are talking about immortality, or something very close to it, though the American Indian would not have that name for it” (163). With memories passed from one generation to the next, or perhaps from writer to reader in our class context, the remarkable breadth of empathy extends to “something very close” to immortality.

Thinking further on multicultural points of view applies an interesting veneer to Brian Eno’s discussion of the 1990s piqued interest in “World Music.” He explains History’s existing hierarchy of “High” versus “popular” music and the maintained understanding that “innovation always worked from the top downwards” (166). Eno calls out this delineation at face value, writing: “Distinctions of this kind are interesting because they notify us about the limits of our empathy. If we really have no feeling whatsoever for the music that so deeply moves somebody else, surely this indicates that there is a part of their psyche that is closed to us. How important is that part?” (166). Eno’s critical observation and question can—and should—be applied to literature, art, and experience across cultures. I would respond that “that part,” the one that moves somebody else may not prove to move us deeply, but the awareness and appreciation of it can only make us more understanding individuals and artists.

That this book shares the experiences of “creators” across form, genre, and medium, means that I am feeling on some level Bechet’s music, Momaday’s writing, and, as I’ll next note, Isadora Duncan’s dance. The ultimate outcome of such cross-pollination of inspiration may be the vision Eno has of seeing “societies (and people) who know how to improvise…who can move fluently and easily between different social and personal vocabularies as the situation changes…There is no snobbism in this picture… This kind of improvisational flexibility entails a continuous questioning of boundaries and categories” (167). To leave “snobbism” behind—finally—in the 21st century may be impossible, but it would mean not caring what others think not only of your art, but also of our opinions of art. This leaves a certain kind of criticism behind in favor of extending “the limits of our empathy.” As we asked in class last week, when recognizing our power as rising teachers, who draws the lines? But also, why are the lines drawn in the first place?

Isadora Duncan is an artist who defied the lines surrounding the dance world long before it was popular to do so. She deserves her rightful spot in this reader response for it is a limited reader who doesn’t feel empathy for Duncan when she draws but few words between describing “the softness” of her breasts and the ache “this breast has harbored” over the tragic loss of her children. Here is a dancer, however, who at just 16 and long before this tragedy, had enough empathy to “express my first knowledge of the underlying tragedy in all seemingly joyous manifestation” (207) through her performance. Duncan, dancing life and all its “crushing progress,” makes me question what our creative outputs are, if not visceral, sensory-laden attempts at such communication?

In the briefest of conclusions, empathy seems a vital factor in the ability to communicate at all.