In an interview with The Rumpus, Jerry Stahl is asked, “Do you feel that shame drives us to make art?”
Stahl: Well, if you have the luxury of having shame be your problem, then you’re doing all right. I think your rent has to be covered before shame becomes your biggest issue. First you have to put the food on the table and make sure not to die, then once all that’s taken care of, you have time for shame. Once I taught in juvenile hall, and there was this one guy used to say, about stuff like that, “It’s like white people shit.”
Rumpus: It reminds me of the time I was in group therapy and a mechanic in class said, “I keep having heart attacks,” and the leader said “No, those are panic attacks.” He refused to call them panic attacks because he said that’s what white people have.
Stahl: Yeah, and the number of psychological issues a child has is inversely proportional to the amount of money their parents have.
Rumpus: On that note, of suffering, and the range of it, there’s a line in one of your books that compares two kinds of suffering as being akin to comparing “acne to leprosy”—do you think you can compare suffering?
Stahl: Yes, there are different kinds of suffering. I’m not going to sit here and mock anyone’s suffering. The writer Hubert Selby helped me out a lot when he was around, and always used to say, “You can’t compare pain.” He used to tell a story: when he was in the army, he got TB, and this was before penicillin. They gave him this crazy-ass drug that made him mute and blind for a month. He was just laying in bed and completely aware, and he would hear the doctors say to other patients, to make them feel better, “At least you’re not Selby.” It is very fucking true, that it’s hard to have sympathy for white people problems sometimes, but I think if it wasn’t for shame, I wouldn’t have written one book.
Previous Dish on shame and writing here.
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