Above All, Survive
I hate war movies, anything about serial killers, doomed characters and endings that turn out the lights on all existing hope. My sister used to make me cry by reading the end of the novel Of Mice and Men with Steinbeck’s bleak vision of a doomed relationship between two men during the depression. She would say, “Look at the rabbits,” and I’d burst into tears. I’m not a fan of Steinbeck. If I know that a story either real or imagined ends in despair, I will probably avoid it. But I love King Lear and other tragedies as proof that human suffering is universal. Novels like Invisible Man, Anna Karenina, and the dark stories of Alice Munro move me with the truth, life can be terrible. Not, life is terrible. Go figure. I don’t find the battle inspired speeches in Henry V or the slaughter in Braveheart anything but awful. When slaughter is the answer there are no more questions.
photo by Molly Moynahan
Last night Parasite won an Oscar for best picture as well as a number of other awards. I found Parasite comic, horrifying, powerful, but ultimately, I hated the film because of the amount of violence that is committed on both the guilty and the innocent, including children. I’m not a fan of killing children. In the eighties and nineties there were certain plots that guaranteed a bestseller, one was a privileged and psychopathic killer, the other was a child dying in the first chapter. Although I am a writer and back then, an editor, I refused to read those books as I knew enough about senseless slaughter growing up during the years of the Vietnam War, the assassinations, the Manson murders and the ritual suicides of Jonestown. I understand how it feels to lose people in violent and unexpected ways. I have never been in a war zone, but I was a victim of domestic violence.
I used to think this was a gender issue. I asked my mother how it was possible to hand a woman who had given birth to a baby a folded flag representing that life lost in war. “Old men send boys to die,” was what she said.
Back then, it was mainly boys although my mother’s mother was a nurse in WWI and many women and children were casualties of war. When I read Saul Bellow, I felt I had found someone who articulated this idea of life as priceless.
”This generation thinks — and this is its thoughts of thoughts — that nothing faithful, vulnerable, fragile can be durable or have any true power. Death waits for these things as a cement floor waits for a dropping light bulb.” –Herzog by Saul Bellow
Bellow’s history included the revelation of the Holocaust. He goes on to say, “We burned them to ashes, we buried them with bulldozers. History is the history of cruelty, not love as soft men think.”
And finally there is this from my mentor, John Gardner. “To write with taste, in the highest sense, is to write [...] so that no one commits suicide, no one despairs; to write [...] so that people understand, sympathize, see the universality of pain, and feel strengthened, if not directly encouraged to live on.”
This soft woman, mother, wife, sister, friend, and survivor prefers dialogue, diplomacy, and an awareness of the complexity of survival.
—Molly Moynahan, author and writing coach