certainty is the opiate of the people

In recovery when I threw myself into poetry, I was drawn to poems that were certain of nothing, poems that embraced mystery instead of trying to resolve it.

If you write an etiquette column for 10 years, you see that it’s really hard to deal with the fact of other people’s otherness. Every etiquette question could be reduced to that.

Why do you think we have such resistance as humans to acknowledging the commingling of beauty and ugliness?

Binary thinking is a shortcut that bypasses all sorts of complicating factors. It is so much easier to discard a “bad person” or avoid a “bad food” than it is to figure out what has caused the adverse behavior or reaction.

I think purity is such an enticing idea. I think we’re drawn to extremes—we’re interested in the worst of humanity and the best. We want to find the outer edges of things. Where’s the limit? Who was the best person to ever live? Who was the worst? Then, the next logical question is: where do I fall?

The Salem Witch Trials B.E. also re-situates the foreign as familiar, at the price of complexity. If everything was just a big misunderstanding, caused by the Salemites’ scientific illiteracy, then we moderns needn’t contort ourselves into the uncomfortable position of understanding these strange cultish people of the past. Instead we are allowed t