Cautionary Tale

When I was in the fifth grade, my teacher decided that we would dissect bones, donated by the grocery store. Each student had a dissection kit containing a scalpel, a magnifying glass, a ruler, and I-don’t-know-what else. A few plastic utensils supplemented the kit. The rule of the dissection exercise was that any time any one of the 20 (?) students got hurt by one of the tools, out it went. The whole class would cease to use it. By the end of the exercise, we were down to the ruler and the plastic spoon. I don’t remember learning anything about bones or about biology that day.

I think the exercise taught me the perils not of scalpels but of generalized caution. If people categorically abandon tools that can be dangerous, they’ll have little to work with.

Dissecting the world in writing is also dangerous. Sometimes it hurts the writer. Sometimes it hurts the reader. Sometimes it hurts the person being written about. But to not write for fear of getting hurt or to confine oneself to subjects that feel safe is like deciding to dissect a bone with a ruler and a plastic spoon. Just because writing can be dangerous does not mean it will always be that way. The bitter failure of one particular essay is not a reason to abandon the genre.

Looking back on that biology lab, I asked myself why we had dissected bones, of all things. I think our teacher had decided to avoid the risks—squeamish children, animal-rights protestations—that came with dissecting frogs. We instead examined something safer and less interesting. Our dissection was limited even before we started throwing out tools.

Writing about a subject that may be controversial, in the writer’s culture or even just in the writer’s mind, is like dissecting a frog. I’m not saying that a writer has to kill one’s subject, even figuratively, during the act of writing about it, though it sometimes it feels that way. I’m saying that a writer may have to take a risk—of being wrong, of being a hypocrite, of offending someone, of hurting someone, even* —in order to examine something interesting.

There is likely something wrong with my short fable.

* I have decided that hurting someone you care about is not a risk worth taking if you really thinks it’s more likely than not that the person will get hurt. But even in the case of loved ones, a slight risk, some possibility of harm may be inevitable if what the writer cares about are not bones, not frogs, but people.