Wallace Shawn: 6 Sentences from “Night Thoughts”, Diagrammed
You can buy Wallace Shawn’s book “Night Thoughts” here:
https://www.amazon.com/Night-Thoughts-Wallace-Shawn-ebook/
ABOUT WHAT I’M DOING HERE. I’m looking at the style of various writers I admire, using sentence diagramming techniques, to see what their style says about the material they write about.
Wallace Shawn’s attention is always paid to the lies American society tells to maintain its privilege, the life of sleep Americans lead about the dangers of the world, and how the day of reckoning isn’t just inevitable physically, with a dying climate, but politically too.
“But I know, as I read, that I’m not reading as the victim, I’m reading as the murderer.”
Wallace Shawn is always intensely conscious of his position in the privileged class, although he notes that, compared to his father, along with many of his generation, he is ‘downwardly mobile.” He’s aware of his status as a citizen as he reads — not just as a citizen, but as, in some sense, a criminal, an unwilling by utterly complicit member of a criminal state, guilty of the murder of a planet. Being a member of a murderous society, and not being actively complicit in taking up arms against it, makes you, make no mistake, a murderer, as surely as if you had executed the weak yourself. But it’s not only the weak you’re killing: the lucky will be dealt with soon enough.
Wallace Shawn often begins his sentences, and often his independent clauses, with and or but. Notice the implied “not as the victim but as the murderer” in this sentence. He’s correcting us, and himself, determined that he maintain honesty by not letting himself off the hook, and not letting you let him off the hook either.
“When I try to fall asleep, Trump keeps jumping back at me, then he slowly fades out, and I think about myself, the course of my life…”
Wallace Shawn would like to sleep; it would be so much easier, if he could just forget the real state of affairs. There is nothing pleasant about being this conscious about living as a privileged target in a doomed world ripe for the rebellion of the oppressed. But he is too honest, and too awake, and the monstrous image of the criminal President, whose bared teeth and hatred of Democracy are the first honest representation of the Presidency and America in a long time, the steel fist in the velvet glove perhaps in our lifetime, after being effectively disguised by the charisma and rhetoric of a charming President who promised, but did not deliver, change…but notice how the sentence fades as his awareness fades and he is drawn back into thinking about himself. At least, that’s where is ends the sentence, but his thinking of himself will drive him towards other aware moments in his life, and how he first came to question the value of civilization as we have made it.
This is a ‘when this happens, then that happens” sentence. First, he tries to fall asleep, then an image jumps out at him, then fades away. He can’t go back to sleep and his thoughts keep going…notice the speed shift between the image of Trump jumping out at him, then the slow fade of history, as of a decaying photograph, or a memory of an argument already fading…as the Self becomes the object of thought again.
“Luck has given the person with the penis, the people with the guns, a bit more strength, and so they’ve trampled over everyone else.”
Wallace Shawn is aware there is no virtue in being a superior in society, it’s luck: of family, of intelligence, of appearance. The lucky who thinks their good fortune is a result of their superior nature are deluding themselves. If you have strength, the right sex organs, superior size, the right color skin, the right language, an above all, guns, then you can control much of your ‘luck’. The most important thing you can do is to put your foot on the throat of the competition and crush their windpipes.
In this diagram, the concluding clause stands apart from the setup of its antecedent. That last clause is made possible only by the facts listed by the first clause, pillars of control. Change those facts, and change who is in control.
Luck gives strength, and with strength you can take things from other people and have those things all to yourself: money, property, sex partners.
Notice the subtle expansive shift, from the person with the penis, to the people with the guns. There is strength in the numbers of the mad and malign.
“And if the bigger kid gives that candy bar to me, the process by which I received it was wrong, and it’s wrong for me to have it, and it’s wrong for me to eat it.”
The problem of complicity again. That candy bar is so tempting: the sweetness of it, the chocolate delirium it promises, the melting of the cocoa and milk and butter on your tongue. Who cares about morality, compared to the animal reaction to satisfying hunger, to the chemical lift of chocolate and sugar, to the pleasure of unpacking, unwrapping a Product?
Notice the pair of clauses at the end, paired for you: it there was oppression behind the aquisition of that bar, there is no alleviation of your guilt by having it, by eating it. Hiding the candy bar in your gut won’t fool anyone, least of all yourself. Weren’t those the two acts that got Adam removed from the Garden, anyway?
The process was wrong. I received it. I had it. I ate it.
“By the time I had lived long enough to seriously understand what had been explained to me about civilization in that small apartment so many years before, by the time I had seen enough examples of the “story of civilization” — the endlessly repeating story of a strong person holding some squirming weak person’s head under the water — seen it enough to really get the message — the vast machinery of civilization itself seemed to be stretching, weakening, and pulling apart…”
Wallace Shawn is the writer of cozy spaces that tempt us to forget, and he grew up in those cozy spaces, and he heard stories there that had to be decoded and unpackaged as he became an awake adult in the world, a teller of his own stories, an attempt to find out if the stories he heard were true, or lies. The word civilization, that word itself, a fortress supposed to protect us from — what? From the world? From the barbarians who run amuck in that world? He reminds us that civilization involves, in America’s case, literally, holding someone’s head underwater so they can’t breathe, to force them to submit to our will, to control their actions, to rip them apart and get at their secrets. But it only works as long as most of the weak are asleep, have no guns, no way to talk to each other, and now that is no longer the case. The underpinnings of our strength are shaking, crumbling. The machines themselves, of language, of thought, of civil cooperation, the ignorance of the world that is required for capitalism to consume the world without opposition, it all is visibily slowing down as the fire and water and air tear it apart.
He talks about his long life, how things had been explained to him, a narrative about the world. Now he is able to use the examples of human behavior he’s seen in the world to measure the truth of the explanation he was given, and he has come up with alternative definitions for words, definitions that are truer than the ones he was given and focus on the seething battle for control and power underneath the polite and comforting words.
This is a long and complicated sentence, as it walks you along the path he took to finally ‘get the message’ about how the world works. It appalls him but, like all of us, he is wrapped in American comfort.
For now.
“The truth is that once unlucky people come to understand how unlucky they are, it’s too late for the lucky.”
Wallace Shawn loves lucky people and he feels kinship with them, and is afraid of the unlucky, and feels kinship with them too. He is certain that the lucky are as doomed as the rest of us, but the unlucky will probably not sit around and wait for the world to finish them off. If the world is coming to an end, why shouldn’t the unlucky take their revenge?
You can buy Wallace Shawn’s book “Night Thoughts” here:
https://www.amazon.com/Night-Thoughts-Wallace-Shawn-ebook/
Make war no more,
Michael Prenez-Isbell
