What I could do but do not

on identification with the lowest

A man couldn’t stand what his neighbor was doing to the land behind their homes. Either his neighbor was planting trees he didn’t like or tearing out trees he really did. I can’t fully remember the details his cousin told me after they were all dead. What I know is that they are all dead, because that man, unable to bear his neighbor’s desire, unable to bear his own, took a gun and killed everyone. His neighbor’s family, his own, himself. I came into the picture late on a rainy night in 2013. I stood in the cul-de-sac of the Charlotte suburb and I felt something welling up inside me in and alongside the shadows and false light, as the news vans repositioned their angles outside the crime tape, and other reporters with smartphones and cables and microphones and clipped voices and the glowing adrenaline of another story to add to the eleven o’clock block never mind the twitter feed huddled around and shared a vicious kind of camaraderie. No one was paid well and everyone pretended to play well, and when I saw the sideline guy with his cigarette and his brown coat in a brown shadow, acting like he wasn’t part of the horror somehow, I knew he was the one to interview. He was the cousin of the dead; he had something to say about the way hatred worked in this particular moment, along the hallways of this particular suburb in the 2010s in the United States. The thing is, I can’t even remember what the cousin said, only that the banality of his family’s murder touched a similarly small place inside of me, which made the person I thought I was shrink in recognition. I remember the look and feel of this moment of reckoning. Brown as the wet earth, brown, puff of smoke, sizzle of cigarette, the rain puttering down into brown midnight puddles at the asphalt beneath our feet. His cousin had killed himself, his family, his neighbor and his neighbor’s family over some trees on a berm behind their vinyl-sided McMansions.

If it wasn’t the last straw for me, it was close to it. A therapist later conjectured that my suicide attempt back then had something to do with the senselessness of it all, the inconceivability of killing oneself and beloved or even hated others over what amounted to an argument about landscaping. On the one hand, this was true. I could no longer deal with what my job on the crime desk at the Charlotte Observer required of me: that move to piece together a story that made sense, drawing on reason, history, economics, the logic of the neighborly feud inflamed by the logic of an American culture of debt and can-doism, whiteness, striving. Behind these surfaces, sometimes I’d manage a subconscious flourish of religiosity with the slightest rhetorical allusion to a different kind of truth axis: Zeus and Hades, Dionysus and Apollo, Cain and Abel, Hatfields and McCoys, the way the post-industrial city kept grabbing for something more in the U.S. South, even if that more was just this sad cul-de-sac full of wastewater drains designed to look like country streams. Sometimes I could sneak a streak of gravitas, myth knocking against history, a plea for a different kind of meaning that alternatingly annoyed and inspired my editors, depending. But no. I didn’t try to kill myself because this petty altercation turned homicidal horror seemed senseless. I tried to kill myself because of the part of me for which it made a perfect kind of sense. That was the hardest thing about the crime beat, how it made something explicit about my personality, about my nature, that scared me. I had a talent for identification with the horror, an empathy for the cause of horror, hatred, psychic deadness, evil. I didn’t have to pretend I didn’t understand what it must be like to feel the kind of rage and bitterness and dissociation that draws destruction into the realm of the only-real. The only real thing. I’d spent much of my life (my whole life?) trying to work against or hide from those feelings inside myself. After several years watching people succumb to them, and writing about the destruction that keeps on going after people succumbed and ended up dead or sorry or worse—unable to be dead or sorry—I couldn’t take it anymore. I tried to give up to it, too.

*

Thirteen years later, at the start of 2026, our neighbor started ripping up trees on the foothill behind our home. I got home from an errand one day to find my husband standing in our yard watching the bulldozer destroy the forest we’ve come to love, praise, kneel in, find God and Medusa and many other beings, besides, in. These are the woods that surround the garden we’ve grown, the people we’ve cared for, the months I’ve spent sick and well, the grave we dug for our dog when she died in November. Kiernan is not a crier but his face was wet with tears. His cheeks were red. Something ugly and brown and on fire twisted its way up through that secret part of me. Nothing made sense, except for the twist. I wanted to attack my husband for his grief. I wanted to destroy my neighbor, wish him dead, shove heart attacks and spells for illness under his door. I wanted to fall to my knees and scratch open every scar on my body, or scream, or disappear. Most of all, I wanted the trees to be trees again, to somehow wave my arms and speak magic words—tolle et ambula, magia, logos, hekate, fuck you!!—to fix their jagged bodies and broken trunks, to transform the hillside back into what it had been in my memory: a sacred place, unmarred by human force. Where a thick and chaotic tangle of black walnuts and elms and invasive trees of heaven and wild roses had been there were now steaming engines and years of trash heaps, old cars and parts of cars and rotting seats of cars, visible from the spot in the garden where we’d laid the dog to rest.

In that moment, the part of me that looked upon, wrote about, and sympathized with the devil, in the wake of its footsteps at every crime scene, every burnt-out husk of a mobile home, every body bag in a desecrated wood, every jail cell door marked off with a death the police wouldn’t own or even care to comment on, came flooding back. I could feel the insistence that I couldn’t stand it, that the only measure for reality laid bare was a malevolent one, viciousness for viciousness, despair for despair, the understanding of how easy it would be to take up the cigarette of psychic deadness that was being offered to me, take a puff, destroy some more, pass it on.

What strength has grown in me that I fell to my knees instead? That I let my grief grow into and merge with Kiernan’s grief, and with our neighbor’s grief, that I could see the trash and destruction as part of a unity, the unity of the scream, as the first deluded step in setting the hatred down?

I don’t know. I don’t know. I have no desire to separate myself out from the world as if I am not of this world, as if I am not of the same stuff that allows a man to kill his neighbor, rip up trees, kill his neighbor over ripped-up trees, shoot a man in the back, shoot a woman in the face. I am of them and of you and they and all of you are of me. My identification with the lowest is always in danger of taking me right off the face of this earth. It is the very measure by which I remain here, too, in love, in love, sure of the beauty, in the face of what horror I myself could but do not, did not, and will not unleash.

The Tye River after a recent snow.