In “Fog Count,” an essay in The Empathy Exams that spun out of her trip to visit a friend incarcerated in West Virginia, Leslie Jamison describes how she falls, weak-kneed, for the state’s spellbinding beauty:
The land is beautiful, really beautiful—endless lush forests, pristine and unblemished, countless shades of green on hills layered back into drifts of fog. (139)
Knowing that she should know better, but destined to learn the hard way, Jamison twists the letter c more securely onto the word charm, like the crucial lid that will keep it from dispelling into harm:
I start thinking maybe coal mining is just a notion someone had about West Virginia; or something they like to talk about on NPR….Because this place seems phenomenally unscarred, phenomenally pure. Freeway exits promise beautiful, luminous places: Whisper Mountain, Saltlick Creek, Cranberry Glades. (139)
Sure sounds lovely. Later in the essay, Jamison will learn about the region’s increasingly unsustainable strategy of concealing its famous, phenomenal scars and impurities within its famous, phenomenal beauty: “Potemkin Forests!” she will exclaim. “I feel like an idiot” (141)—a frank declaration that is at the heart not only of this particular essay, but also of the whole collection. There is so much to admire about Jamison’s writing in The Empathy Exams, but one of the things I most admire is the way in which she consciously inhabits the mental and emotional space/state between thinking-you-know and knowing-what-you-don’t-know, a state which is much more varied and complex than what we might generally call ignorance.
I blush along with Jamison when she writes “I feel like an idiot,” and I whisper-think me too when she writes “I’m always afraid of saying stupid things” (141). Later, she confesses, “I do everything wrong” (142) and then catalogs a series missteps in her failure to go with the flow, or even discern what the flow is, upon arriving at the prison. These mistakes (heightened by her own self-consciousness but, in actuality, so minor) seem to ripple outward with increasing magnitude, interrupting an otherwise mirror-still sheet of water that holds her reflection. That’s how I feel/see this scene. The Empathy Exams is a sea of these ripples, little waves—crests of awareness and troughs of not-knowing. As I read along, I feel my own own crests and troughs sync up with and amplify Jamison’s. (Please pass the Dramamine. Drama, mine? Is my seasickness a symptom of empathy?)
In “Fog Count,” Jamison figures these ripples and waves in fog—“mythic, West Virginia fog—in vast, billowing ripples, fog so thick a man could ride it to freedom like a wave” (138)—which syncs up with the wave-like mountainous West Virginia landscape. (Whoa. Again, the Dramamine, please.) Jamison affirms that the landscape of humanity is rough; and as a prevailing fog stymies our attempts to connect with one another, we’re bound to say the wrong thing. Open mouth insert foot. In these essays, gymnastic in between the lines, Jamison writes with not just one, but two feet in her mouth—the one that she knows is there (“I’m an idiot”), and the other ghost-foot, fog-foot that she cannot know until it has tripped her, “betrayed” her. These essays are about that second foot. Contorted thusly, Jamison lays herself bare before the reader as our self-aware (un)reliable narrator-guide through the prevailing fog…
[Continued in Part Two.]