November 30th, 2020 - The Winged Thing

Dear TNY,

Fresh off of last week’s reading debacle (on my part) and you’ve brought me “The Winged Thing”.

So I’m going to hit the cons straight away.  I didn’t like the intro.  This type of writing, which is more abstract in places to be sure, I think it’s hard to start right in to something that doesn’t matter.  But that’s exactly what we did.  I found myself confused about the airport and the mullets and the internet bullshit.  And all that is fine, maybe I’m just having an early morning off a weed & absinthe night (BTW I was watching the Harley Quinn cartoon and loving it; I don’t think it’s Art, per se, but I do think it does a really good job at addressing social agendas without being preachy).  But besides the start of this story, I felt the abstract nature of this piece had more positives than negatives.  I swooned over the brutality of the line:  …something about the way the snow stayed long after it was wanted, like wives.

Speaking of social agendas, I was really afraid this piece was going to keep going down the reproductive rights road it was on.  And I’m definitely not here to debate reproductive rights.  I live in the Dave Chappelle camp on this one in that I might have opinions on these rights, but it’s not my body so I’ll just keep that shit to myself.  But I do have opinions on social issues that overshadow actual characterization in literature, minimizing the ability to create empathy in the reader, which is the most important part about Art.  For instance, if this story would have been hella preachy about it’s abortion business (which it kind of was, but that was also kind of a plot mechanic that was important), and had chosen not to focus on the characters, especially as it did late in the story, how would that ever create an empathetic response in the Senate committees, with faces like closed doors?  That’s the whole point of putting characters over agenda.  If you can get someone to care about the person, they will care about what the person is going through.  Fuck, my son asked me the other day if I thought it was fair or unfair for transgender women to participate in women’s sports.  And I told him that, to my understanding, there is no easy answer.  And we talked about a bunch of different aspects to it.  But what I was able to dial in on and hopefully get him to understand was that I could feel the pain of a girl who, no matter how hard she trained, would never excel to the top spot in, say, her college or high school sport, because of a transgender girl who can do better based on underlying biology (this is certainly a generalization of one way this plays out and does not represent all possible scenarios, obviously).  And I can also feel the pain of a transgender girl not having a place to participate in sports at all, as in “neither group wants me”.  And all that is bad.  So there is no easy answer, as I said to him.  But I’m hoping that the ability to see both sides comes from a hopefully functional empathetic response on my part to try to understand and feel what each group might feel and answer from their standpoint (who knows, though; I am almost always under the impression that I’m a bucket of dogshit).  And Art helps with that empathetic response, if it’s done well.

I’m digressing here.

What I wanted to say was that I commend this piece on steering away from what is a very understandable social agenda and issue with our world today, and instead choosing to focus on the characters in the latter third of the story.  And that focus…it made me cry.

Not the end.  And not this whole piece.  But some of it made me cry.  And I am glad I read it and may read it again in the future.  The one section that got me was this:

Once, when she was reading out loud to the baby, she came to a chapter where a little girl died, and went up to Heaven, and “received all the news of the world from the birds.” It was not in her nature to skip, so she kept going in a tinier and tinier voice, until the sound grew so small that even the birds could not carry it, but the baby never noticed a thing.

That is everything.  That is empathy. That’s our whole fucking story, plain as it gets.  I know there’s the patriarchy and savior complex and all this fucking blah blah blah negative male bullshit.  Fuck all that.  I believe the desire to remove pain in others is human.  And I would do anything to take this woman’s pain away.  BUT, simultaneously, I recognize that not for a second would she want to lose it.  It’s everything to her, because it means she has something.  And had something.  So this paragraph overwhelms me with a sense of empathy.  And the only thing I want to do when I read it is hug her as tightly as I can and repeat her own words back to her:  I know, I know, I know.

Well shit, guys.  Did you get a new employee?  Things are not as fucking abysmal as they once were.  So thanks for this one.  Keep it up, maybe?

Nick