{"id":8315,"date":"2024-08-01T17:16:12","date_gmt":"2024-08-01T21:16:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/grace-paley-on-the-countercultural-courage-of-imagining-other-lives-the-marginalian\/"},"modified":"2024-08-01T17:16:12","modified_gmt":"2024-08-01T21:16:12","slug":"grace-paley-on-the-countercultural-courage-of-imagining-other-lives-the-marginalian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/grace-paley-on-the-countercultural-courage-of-imagining-other-lives-the-marginalian\/","title":{"rendered":"Grace Paley on the Countercultural Courage of Imagining Other Lives \u2013 The Marginalian"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Profit<\/a>
\n<\/p>\n

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\"Grace<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cLove is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real,\u201d Iris Murdoch wrote in her superb investigation of the parallels between art and morality<\/a>. There could be no such realization without imagination, which is our only instrument for fathoming what it is like to be somebody else \u2014 that most difficult triumph of unselfing. It is only through the imagination that we are capable of empathy \u2014 in fact, the modern sense of the word empathy<\/em> came into use<\/a> just over a century ago as a way of describing the imaginative act of projecting oneself into a work of art.<\/p>\n

We are living in a strange time, a time tyrannized by a moral fashion forbidding that vital act of imagining lives radically different from our own, narrowing the permissible locus of creativity and conversation to tighter and tighter self-similarity \u2014 censure that defeats the very project of fathoming otherness in order to, in Audre Lorde\u2019s lovely words<\/a>, \u201cuse each other\u2019s differences in our common battles for a livable future.\u201d<\/p>\n

Three decades ago, at the dawn of this tyrannical regime that continually mistakes self-righteousness for morality and enslaves the soul in servitude to identity, the poet, essayist, teacher, and political activist Grace Paley<\/strong> (December 11, 1922\u2013August 22, 2007) issued a sonorous wakeup call it is not too late to hear.<\/p>\n

<\/a>
Grace Paley<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Addressing other members of the Teachers & Writers Collaborative she had co-founded in the 1960s, Paley \u2014 who believed that \u201cit is the poet\u2019s responsibility to speak truth to power\u201d and \u201cto learn the truth from the powerless\u201d \u2014 offers a sentiment of astonishing relevance to our own cultural moment:<\/p>\n

\n

We need our imaginations to understand what is happening to other people around us, to try to understand the lives of others. I know there\u2019s a certain political view that you musn\u2019t write about anyone except yourself, your own exact people. Of course it\u2019s very hard for anyone to know who their exact people are, anyway. But that\u2019s limiting. The idea of writing from the head or from the view or the experience of other people, of another people, of another life, or even of just the people across the street or next door, is probably one of the most important acts of the imagination that you can try and that can be useful to the world.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Born just after women became citizens, having lived through and taken part in the early Civil Rights movement, having just traveled to Vietnam in her seventies to meet with and learn from Vietnamese writers, she observes:<\/p>\n

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We\u2019re living in a time when the different peoples in this country are being heard from, for the first time. I\u2019m happy to have lived into this period when we hear the voices of Native Americans \u2014 twenty or twenty-five years ago you didn\u2019t even know they were writing, apart from token publication. That was the general condition of American literature at that time. The voices of African-American men and women, the voices of women of all colors, Asian women, Asian men, all these people \u2014 this is our country<\/em> \u2014 and we\u2019re living at a time when we can hear the voices of all these people.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Art from An Almanac of Birds: Divinations for Uncertain Days<\/em><\/a>. (Available as a print<\/a> and as stationery cards<\/a>, benefitting The Audubon Society.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

With an eye to the complaints of \u201cpeople without imagination\u201d who look to these tectonic shifts and \u201csay with that denigrating tone, multiculturalism<\/em> or diversity<\/em> or political correctness<\/em>,\u201d she adds:<\/p>\n

\n

They use those words to try to shut all of us up. This is what the imagination means to me: to know that this multiplicity of voices is a wonderful fact and that we\u2019re lucky, especially the young people, to be living here at this time. My imagination tells me that if we let this present political climate defeat us, my children and my grandchildren will be in terrible trouble.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Complement with James Baldwin on how Shakespeare found poetry in other lives<\/a>, then revisit Grace Paley on the art of getting older<\/a> \u2014 one of the loveliest things I have ever read. <\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

\"Profit<\/a>
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cLove is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real,\u201d Iris Murdoch wrote in her superb investigation of the parallels between art […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8316,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8315","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-purpose"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8315","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8315"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8315\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8316"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8315"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8315"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8315"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}