Inspiration and Motivation: Significant Moments and My Daily Struggles

On January 15, 2010 two law enforcement officers from the U.S. Department of Justice interviewed me at my residence. They were concerned about the law enforcement implications of the seeming anger I expressed in the content and tone of my blog, My Daily Struggles. They asked me to explain my motivation in writing the blog. I suppose it's a reflection of my grandiosity, but I took their question as a compliment. How often is a writer questioned by officers of a country's ministry of justice -- under penalties for perjury! -- about his motivation in creating a work of art? Things like that only happen in literature, in Kafka perhaps. I view my blog as an artistic expression, fundamentally. Yes, I talk about my legal battles, my employment problems, public policy issues and a host of other matters. But, as I see it, these issues are discussed through the prism of an artist's eyes.

Is it so unusual for a writer to creatively transform social, legal, political, and psychological issues into a work of art?  The late psychoanalyst Margaret Brenman-Gibson writing about the playwright Clifford Odets has observed: "True to the best in Jewish tradition, the conscious acceptable 'enemy' for Odets would become an impersonal set of unjust and corrupt societal conditions, and the means of battle would be waged largely in words within the controllable arena of social conscience within a work of art." Perhaps if Odets had lived into the 21st century, he would have used a blog as a means of expression.

I suppose my motivation and inspiration for my blog, My Daily Struggles, is the same as that for my book, Significant Moments.

I began writing the book Significant Moments in April 1993, only weeks or days after I saw a broadcast on public television of Anna Deavere Smith's play Fires in the Mirror: a series of monologues excerpted from interviews.  Both the theme of personal identity that pervades Fires in the Mirror as well as the structure of the ground-breaking play inspired and motivated me to forge a creation in which I told my story through the voices of an array of  historical figures with whom I identified.

http://www.archive.org/details/SignificantMoments

Fires in the Mirror chronicles a civic disturbance in the New York neighborhood of Crown Heights in August 1991.  (Coincidentally, in August 1991 I worked at the law firm of Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld, where the themes of racism and anti-Semitism seemed to play important roles in my employment experience--particularly beginning in August 1991 when Robert S. Strauss withdrew from the partnership to assume a political appointment.)

In the racially divided neighborhood of Crown Heights, a car driven by a Jewish man veered onto a sidewalk and killed a 7-year-old Caribbean-American boy who was learning to ride a bicycle. The accident and the response of emergency medical personnel sparked protests during which a Jewish student visiting from Australia was stabbed on the street by a group of black youths. Days of rioting ensued, exposing to national scrutiny the depth of the racial divisions in Crown Heights. The rioting produced 190 injuries, 129 arrests, and an estimated one million dollars in property damage. Smith interviewed leading politicians, writers, musicians, religious leaders, and intellectuals together with residents of Crown Heights and participants in the disturbances to craft the monologues of her play. Through the words of 26 different people, in 29 monologues, Smith explores how and why people signal their identities, how they perceive and respond to people different from themselves, and how barriers between groups can be breached. "My sense is that American character lives not in one place or the other," Smith writes in her introduction to the play, "but in the gaps between the places, and in our struggle to be together in our differences." The title of the play suggests a vision of art as a site of reflection where the passions and fires of a specific (significant?) moment can be examined from a new angle, contemplated, and better understood.

The play is a series of monologues attained from interviews Anna Deavere Smith did with people involved in the Crown Heights crisis. Each one is titled with the person’s name as well as a key phrase from each interview, which tries to sums up what that person was trying to say or an important aspect of their monologue. There are a total of 29 monologues in  Fires in the Mirror and each one focuses on a different character’s opinion and point of view of the events and issues surrounding the crisis. Plot, as defined by David Rush in A Student Guide to Play Analysis, is “the deliberate selection and arrangement of the incidents that the playwright presents." Throughout Fires in the Mirror, every monologue is referring to the same crisis and incidents surrounding, and while they do each have something in common, they are uniquely different. Fires in the Mirror does not follow the typical seven parts of a well made play. The seven parts include: a state of equilibrium, an inciting incident, a point of attack, the rising action, the climax, a resolution, and finally a new state of equilibrium. Instead, Fires in the Mirror is a collection of individual monologues, brought together by Anna Deavere Smith. And while there is no linear plot with developing characters throughout its entirety, there is some logic to how Smith lays out and clumps together the monologues.

Fires in the Mirror is divided into themed sections, encompassing monologues Smith saw fit under each category.  Each section is centered around a different theme. These themes include the ideas of personal identity, differences in physical appearance, differences in race, and the feelings toward the riot incidents. Smith divided Fires in the Mirror into themed sections and she systematically placed monologues into these themes. Each monologue has a heading of its own, and when placed into each section, gives an arc to Fires in the Mirror. It lays a path for the audience to follow the line from broad personal identity issues, to physical identity issues, to issues of race and ethnicity, and finally ending in issues relating to the Crown Heights incident.

In watching Fires in the Mirror I was particularly moved by Smith's portrayal of the writer Letty Cottin Pogrebin and her poignant tale of the "Designated Survivor."  In writing both Significant Moments and My Daily Struggles I see myself as the lone survivor of horrific events who has been designated to tell his tale, to narrate his experiences, and bear witness for those from whom I am now separated by time, space, or death.  See Michael Friedman, "Survivor Guilt and the Pathogenesis of Anorexia Nervosa," Psychiatry (February 1985).  Dr. Friedman discusses the similar psychological conflicts of Holocaust survivors and persons with the eating disorder, anorexia nervosa.  Dr. Friedman proposes that both cohorts experience overwhelming guilt: guilt about depletion of family stores of love or food and guilt about disloyalty to their family of origin. Perhaps it is more than an artistic device that a description of a grand dinner party lies at the heart of Significant Moments.

http://www.archive.org/details/TheDinnerParty_716

Smith, speaking the words of the writer Letty Cottin Pogrebin, tells the following story of Pogrebin's cousin Isaac, who, out of loyalty and duty to his community and people sacrifices his own wife and children in the Holocaust.

I remember especially my mother's cousin who came to New York immediately after the war and lived with us for several months.  Isaac is my connection to dozens of other family members who were murdered in the concentration camps.  Because he was blond and blue eyed he had been chosen as the designated survivor of his town.  That is, the Jewish councils had instructed him to do anything to stay alive and tell the story.  For Isaac, anything turned out to mean this:

The Germans suspected his forged Aryan papers and decided that he would have to prove by his actions that he was not a Jew. They put him on a transport train with the Jews of his town and then gave him the task of herding into the gas chambers everyone in his train load.  After he had fulfilled that assignment with patriotic German efficiency, the Nazis accepted the authenticity of his identity papers and let him go. Among those whom Isaac packed in the gas chambers that day dispassionately as if shoving a few more items into an overstuffed closet were his wife and two children.

The designated survivor arrived in America at about the age 40 (I turned 40 in 1993, the year I started writing Significant Moments) with prematurely white hair and a dead gaze within the sky blue eyes that had helped save his live.  As promised he told his story to dozens of Jewish agencies, community leaders, and to groups of family and friends, which is how I heard the account translated from his Yiddish by my mother.  For months he talked speaking the unspeakable, describing a horror that American Jews had suspected but could not conceive.  A monstrous tale that dwarfed the demonology of legend and gave me the nightmare that I still dream to this day.  And as he talked, Isaac seemed to grow older and older until on night a few months later when he finished telling everything he knew, he died.


 

As for me, I suppose the reason I write  is that I am driven by a zeal, overwhelming in its proportions and infantile in its origins, to do anything to tell my story -- and to get people to listen.

For another, but psychologically related, view of my motivations in writing my story see the following site:

http://dailstrug.blogspot.com/2009/10/self-states-and-their-transformation.html