What do you do if shaken by fear, and by scruples, Writer?
“…Let us meet,
And question this most bloody piece of work,
To know it further.”
Shakespeare Macbeth Act II Scene iii
Fear and scruples shake us
Category: Reason
On the Fire Department
There’s always a reason.
“When talking about this, Brandi felt very ashamed, holding her stomach and almost doubled over with shame. She thought the first fire was ‘just gonna take care of it and forget about it … but it didn’t stop is all.’ She ‘thought she could leave it alone.’ She ‘doesn’t remember when the second one was.’ She connects her setting fires to times when she and Louie would get in arguments. They had a fight when she asked him to help pay her car insurance. She had been doing everything around the house and repairing all his vehicles. He responded ‘Why should I take care of your bills?’ Brandi says that she set fires ‘to get back at him … make the fire department look bad … he was on the fire department 30 years’” (Kinsler and Saxman 2007:91-2).
Seek the reasoning, find the reason, Writer.
Kinsler, P. J and A. Saxman, 2007. ‘Traumatized Offenders’ in Quina and Brown (Eds.) Trauma and Dissociation in Convicted Offenders, pp. 81-95
Quina, K. and L. S. Brown (Eds.) 2007. Trauma and Dissociation in Convicted Offenders. New York: Haworth Medical Press
Non-pecuniary Impacts
“It is trite but true to say that the government should, in all its legal endeavours, be seen to uphold the law.
One of the fundamental ethical duties owed by a lawyer is the avoidance of any compromise to their integrity and professional independence. A lawyer must not act as the mere mouthpiece of their client. The actions of government lawyers take on extra significance because the government is a client which has powers and obligations that far exceed those of the normal citizen” (Holmes 2023:519).
You have obligations, Writer. They matter.
Holmes, Catherine 2023. Royal Commission into the Robodebt Scheme Vol.2 Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia
You are facing a mountain
“Walking shuts down the sporadic soliloquy to whose surface sour rancours, imbecile satisfactions and easy imaginary vengeances rise sluggishly in turn. You are facing a mountain, walking among great trees, and you think: they are just there. They are there, they didn’t expect me, they were always there” (Gros 2015:82).
Want to go for a walk Writer? Your ideas are waiting.
Gros, F. 2015. A Philosophy of Walking. Paperback edition. London: Verso
Write and prove it
On writing The Sisters Rosensweig, Wendy Wasserstein said, “I wanted to … evoke a fondness for plays that I love, including Chekhov. On the day I finished it I thought, This was a lot of effort just to prove to myself what a good writer Chekhov is” (Wasserstein 1997).
What are you proving to yourself, Writer?
Winer, L. 1997. ‘Wendy Wasserstein, The Art of Theater No. 13’, The Paris Review.
Why write?
Anthropologist Clifford Geertz is renowned for writing on the poetics of power, especially on the use of ritual and symbol in political spectacle.
In Negara, The Theatre State in 19th Century Bali, Geertz constructs an ethnographic account using historical descriptions of theatrical sacrifice. He includes an archival description of three sacrificed concubines, kept by a deceased Rajah. As part of a public ritualised spectacle, the women leapt to their deaths, diving into a sea of flames, each holding a small dove which flew upwards as the women fell, symbolising their escaping spirits (p.101).
Geertz says, “It was an argument, made over and over again in the insistent vocabulary of ritual, that worldly status has a cosmic base, that hierarchy is the governing principle of the universe, and that
the arrangements of human life are but approximations, more close or less, to those of the divine” (p.102).
An interesting aspect of Geertz’ argument in this, and his other works, is that political theatre is neither a means to displaying nor gaining power, it is political theatre as an end in itself.
Can you, writer, devote your heart and hours as an end in itself?
Geertz, C. 1981. Negara, The Theatre State in 19th Century Bali, Princeton University Press
Reasons to Keep Writing 