The benefit of doubt

The execution of Troy Davis by the state of Georgia came as a shock, though he was sentenced more than twenty years ago. The shock came in part because his execution had been stayed three times before, and in part because doubt had been cast on the case against him. And if he was innocent, he wouldn't be the first innocent man to be put to death by the state. According to the Northwestern University School of Law Center on Wrongful Convictions, at least 39 executions in America have been carried out in the face of evidence of innocence or serious doubt of guilt. More than 100 people sentenced to death have been released from death row, exonerated by new evidence. Though seven of the nine witnesses on whose testimony Davis was convicted later recanted their stories, the last minute appeal to the Supreme Court was denied. Davis was killed at 11:08pm on 21 September.

Among the more shocking things in the Davis case was Ann Coulter's column “Cop-killer is media's latest baby seal,” in which she stated that Davis, like every other prisoner executed in the past sixty years, was “guilty as hell.” Such unshakeable confidence goes beyond a persuasion that capital punishment is a sound legal principle. Coulter asserts, in defiance of doubt, that fallible humans have never once erred in its application. She seems to imply that capital punishment works because it kills a lot of people. (And, strangely, that baby seals somehow represent objects of misplaced compassion.)

I'm reminded of Chesterton, who said “It is not bigotry to be certain we are right; but it is bigotry to be unable to imagine how we might possibly have gone wrong.” Unfortunately, bigotry in this sense is regarded by many on the right as a strength. Imagining that you might be wrong is unAmerican. Having a capacity for doubt, or even for entertaining another point of view, is weakness. It shows a heart not sufficiently whole, and a mind unforgivably muddled.

Not long before Davis died, Texan Governor Rick Perry was asked at a Republican presidential debate whether he'd ever lost sleep over the deaths of people his state has executed (over 200 on his watch). He replied "I've never struggled with that at all." It's hard to know whether this response was honest or calculated, but either way it means Perry's view of strength includes no capacity for doubt, for thinking about what he already thinks he knows. It means that for him justice is about good guys and cop killers, and a moment's hesitation - or a night's - might cost you. It means he hasn't allowed himself to think very much at all (nor, I would hazard, has Coulter) about what it means to kill a human being, especially one that might very well be innocent.

Micro-reviewing

My recent reads include Marilynne Robinson, Jonathan Franzen and Tim Winton. I'd love to dwell on them, but since time's scarce, here are my 140-character reviews:

Cloudstreet is the house where two ramshackle families shack up in a post war pact, on which Lady Luck and the Lord each cast their shadows.

The Corrections puts a modern family whose foibles border on surreal near the heart of a sharp critique of almost everything America now is.

Housekeeping’s reflections on sorrow and transience pool in the hollows of a gentle story of finding and keeping family in the face of loss.

Everything carries me to you

Recently I came across a “ten poems you must read” list, and while I was slightly gobsmacked that nine out of ten were 20th century Americans (hello?), I was pleased to find this Pablo Neruda poem, “If you forget me,” which I'd never read. It's really rather quite perfectly beautiful.

I want you to know
one thing.

You know how this is:
if I look
at the crystal moon, at the red branch
of the slow autumn at my window,
if I touch
near the fire
the impalpable ash
or the wrinkled body of the log,
everything carries me to you,
as if everything that exists,
aromas, light, metals,
were little boats
that sail
toward those isles of yours that wait for me.

Well, now,
if little by little you stop loving me
I shall stop loving you little by little.

If suddenly
you forget me
do not look for me,
for I shall already have forgotten you.

If you think it long and mad,
the wind of banners
that passes through my life,
and you decide
to leave me at the shore
of the heart where I have roots,
remember
that on that day,
at that hour,
I shall lift my arms
and my roots will set off
to seek another land.

But
if each day,
each hour,
you feel that you are destined for me
with implacable sweetness,
if each day a flower
climbs up to your lips to seek me,
ah my love, ah my own,
in me all that fire is repeated,
in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten,
my love feeds on your love, beloved,
and as long as you live it will be in your arms
without leaving mine.

The breath of the author

I liked this article in the New Yorker, but in my experience, hearing writers read their own work is rarely as good as you hope it will be. You expect to hear something rare and golden, sacred even, in a writer breathing life into his own text, giving it the inflections and dynamics it was meant to have, dwelling, crooning, over cherished phrases. But more often than not (living) writers brush quickly, diffidently, across the surface of their creations, careless of the meter and the rhythm you thought were there. The words lose much of the resonance they had in your head.

With writers from the past it's often worse. One of the most simultaneously thrilling and disappointing experiences of my literary career was hearing a recording of Tennyson reading “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” It was extraordinary to hear the voice of a great poet more than a hundred years dead. But his manner of rendering the poem was so removed from our sensibilities it might as well have been another language.

Perhaps this is because as readers our imagination, interpretation, sensibility, and endowment of significance are what constitute most of our enjoyment of a text. I don't agree with everything Roland Barthes thought, but I think in “Death of the Author” he was onto something:

“It is language which speaks, not the author; to write is...to reach that point where only language acts...The Author, when believed in, is always conceived of as the past of his own book: book and author stand automatically on a single line divided into a before and an after. The Author is thought to nourish the book, which is to say that he exists before it, thinks, suffers, lives for it, is in the same relation of antecedence to his work as a father to his child. In complete contrast, the modern scriptor is born simultaneously with the text, is in no way equipped with a being preceding or exceeding the writing, is not the subject with the book as predicate; there is no other time than that of the enunciation and every text is eternally written here and now.”

The books not taken

We went by ship to Tasmania, spent half a week in the northwest and the other half in the southeast. Both were spectacular, and we were blessed with what locals thought uncanny sunshine. Packing Robert Frost was an afterthought, but one I was heartily glad of. I had decided not to take any fiction. Knowing myself, I knew any novel would sap the better part of my attention, and seduce me away from harder reading and from observation. So I took theology, philosophy, criticism - and Frost. By week's end most of the prose was still untouched, but I had read more than a hundred poems; by sunlight in the day, and by torchlight in our tent at night. There was something especially harmonious about reading Frost while living out of doors. There was scant resemblance to Frost's New England, but there was still a resonance in what I saw with what I read of tree and bird and apple blossom, of daybreak and nightfall. I relished Frost's quiet attention to his world. Without requiring too much interpretative labour, Frost's poetry gave me a liturgy for my enjoyment. Where fiction would have led me astray from where we were, his poetry led me to look more closely and see more clearly the road we travelled by. And that has made all the difference.