reading to be seen vs reading to see

or hello hot water...

I slept for three nights in a row. Something about having children will mess with your sleep patterns forever. They don’t tell you this. Not in the antenatal classes, not in the baby books; instead lies of how to get your baby to sleep (if a baby does not want to sleep, it will not, this much I know), but they don’t tell you how to sort your sleep after a decade of babies waking in the night. For three nights, I slept, not like a baby, but like an adult. Or maybe more like a cat. I always envy cats, for the way they can sleep through anything, all of the time. And then, on the fourth night, just as I was getting cocky, just as I thought it might be time to put the 3am project to bed, my mind woke up.

I hate this nocturnal brain of mine sometimes. It’s as if everything I’ve been too busy for in the day arrives smack bang at 3 in the morning. I’m busy with work. Busy might be an understatement. I’ve been doing little else. This means there’s no space or time for extra thoughts. This also means the things I’ve not thought through in the day arrive at 3am. I woke thinking about the phrase ‘feeling seen’, and then couldn’t get back to sleep. Sometimes it’s the grit that gets under your skin that keeps you the most awake. This, was grit.

I hear it more and more now. I felt so seen, people say when they talk about reading a book. Oh, someone gasps, back, me too. I write in my notes, mostly for something I’m working on, all screens are reflective surfaces. This is true, but since when did we need the world to be a mirror? It’s widely held that reading promotes empathy, but this only holds true if the reader is invited to empathise. If the benchmark of what constitutes good is that the reader sees themselves in the text, then how much empathy is at play? It strikes me that this is a dangerous move. All texts have the ability to totalise. This is evident throughout the history of the written word, its primary focus was to manipulate and control, perhaps foolishly, I thought we’d moved beyond that. But this need to be seen loops right back to that, if all we’re expecting from reading is to see ourselves, then the written word becomes only a mirror, reflecting the world back, inviting neither challenge or change.

This isn’t to say there isn’t a place for representation. I wrote a memoir about life inside a cult, this was an act of reportage, with the hope people would understand what life inside is like for people; people here, now. It was and is dystopian. For the general reader, it requires the ability to see beyond anything they’ve experienced. That’s the great power of books, they invite the reader to put themselves and their experiences to one side and to enter the world of the book on the book’s terms. At best a book will leave a reader changed, not seen, but for this to happen, the imagination needs to be deployed.

Of course, I have readers who see themselves represented in The Last Days, this too is necessary for the marginalised. It’s painful to not have your experiences rendered accurately anywhere. This lack also causes behaviour to repeat. I’m thinking here of Gabriel Krauze, whose novel Who They Was is an insight into a London that’s wilfully obscured, he said in an interview that coming out a gang was like returning from war. It’s like that to leave a cult, the only people who understand or who feel safe, are back on the inside. That causes a void, and can create the desire to return. A book can plug that desire, can show that life on the other side is possible. Here a book doubles, can do two things at once, but can only do that if readers are prepared to see, not be seen. Without this happening read becomes not an act of empathy but simple confirmation bias.

I don’t like the word duty. Artist too, feels like a stretch, but if I’m going to use either, then I’ll say this; it’s the duty of the artist to stretch the reader. To take them into worlds that are uncomfortable, to give them moral (I hate that word too) dilemmas so they question their own assumptions and comfort. I think we’re getting worse with discomfort, cancel culture combined with the command to ‘curate your feed’ makes it easy to remove thoughts, statements and people we don’t like. One click, and the discomfort is gone. It’s a putting on the naughty step, it’s a throwing out the room, it’s a closing down, it’s a refusal to listen. I was shunned by my religion, see something once and you see it played out over and over. This is not just the inability to tolerate difference, it is the desire to remove it, the ability to quickly get rid of dissent. It will not end well, unless we read with the desire to see, not ourselves, but something new.