#21
One morning you were in a park in Bandra, and saw a man hitting a younger man and scolding him for not working properly. They paused briefly when they saw you—a flash of annoyance on the older man’s face, compact humiliation on the younger one’s face. It scared you, and you fled. Things like this remind you of a story you’d read as a child. Sri Ramakrishna was visiting Kanyakumari, looking out to the sea, when he saw a man being beaten on a boat. He felt the man’s pain so severely that with each lash, red welts started to appear on his own back—a formative lesson in empathy and compassion ingrained in your memory. During a Value Education class in school, they narrated the story of a man who got married to some evil woman and was hence compelled to send his parents off to an old-age home. A very sad song accompanied the story. At one point you started crying so inconsolably that they had to call your teacher and, in fact, almost sent you home. Even now, descriptions of violence and physical injury are unbearable, whether in the newspaper or in made-up scenes in action movies. You’ve been wondering what helps one imagine the suffering of others, and what inures one to it.
In the book Intimacies by Katie Kitamura, the main character is an interpreter for The International Court in The Hague, working in close proximity of a man who has committed brutal war crimes. Kitamura uses the word inured in two distinct contexts in the book. The first is when the protagonist’s friend is talking (loudly, over the sound of sirens) about living in The Hague, and says that it “inures you. It can be easy to forget what being in a real city is like.” Later the protagonist finds herself thinking about this, and says, “its air of courtesy, the preserved buildings and manicured parks, imparted a sense of unease” and that “the docile surface of the city concealed a more complex and contradictory nature,” but upon a closer look she found that “the city’s veneer of civility was constantly giving way, in places it was barely there at all.” As for the second instance, the accused’s defence lawyer tells her that it’s useful to have her in the room because “Your reaction helps us understand what the emotional effect of the evidence and the testimony is likely to be. To some extent we too are inured. […] Your response is a good reminder of how volatile the feelings around a case like this are.” In both cases, it all comes down to theatrics—how easily the eyes gloss over the pain. Auden writes in “Musee des Beaux Arts”,
About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
[...] the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
Elisa Gabbert writes, in this essay about the poem that the old Masters (great artists like Breughel) “knew that even legendary trials and tribulations could look trivial from certain perspectives.” She writes that the crux of the poem lies in the lines “But for him it was not an important failure,” as “disaster’s in the eye of the beholder, and if the eye does not behold, it’s not disaster at all.”
Gabbert quotes Auden’s “Epitaph on a Tyrant”, which describes the accused in Kitamura’s novel perfectly. Kitamura’s protagonist says, “Over the course of those long hours in the booth, I sometimes had the unpleasant sensation that of all the people in the room below, of all the people in the city itself, the former president was the person I knew best […] he became the person whose perspective I occupied.” Towards the end of the trial, the accused says to her, “You sit there, so smug. As if you are beyond reproach. […] But you are no better than me. You think my morals are somehow different to those of you and your kind. And yet there is nothing that separates you from me.” A junior associate who bears witness to this exchange asks her why she let him speak to her this way, and she replies, “Because he didn’t say anything that was untrue.” The associate, she later notes, was “a man who believed himself to be objective. He could not imagine his own complicity, it was not in his nature. But I was different. I wasn’t one of them. I didn’t have it in me.” She finds that she doesn’t have the temperament required for such a task—passing judgment requires firm conviction in one’s own narrative, and what trails throughout the novel is the protagonist’s awareness that “none of us are able to really see the world we are living in”. She remarks on the contradiction between the “banality” (the dogs living their doggy life) and “extremity” (Icarus drowning) in the world, which she says is “something that we see only briefly and then do not see again for a long time, if ever.”
The other day, while looking up different ways to think about William Carlos Williams’ “To a Poor Old Woman” you came across the following comment: ““Can a warm man understand a man who is freezing?” This question […] raises interesting questions about the idea of empathy, perspective, and the role of imagination in human relations.” How does one come to imagine the suffering of another? And then what? A friend once quoted Elena Ferrante in an email: “In life as in novels, we are aware of the pain of others. We feel their suffering only when we learn to love them.” Supplementing this, she wrote, “I think now it's time for me to feel the suffering around me by falling in love with things around me.” This is so much harder to practice than it is to declare. Still, people do it. (They don’t even declare it, they just do it!) Last week, a friend got a splinter in her foot. Her sister picked at the spot with a safety pin for a long time without a moment’s hesitation. She said, “It will hurt, but we have to get it out,” and then she got it out. It is not easy to look at another’s wounds but love can pull the concern out of you.
The unnamed protagonist changes her mind often, and observes minute nuances. It’s been refreshing to watch, and reassuring. She writes, “a narrative becomes persuasive not through complexity but conviction,” and that “every certainty can give way without notice.” She feels super strongly about an experience and then, after a few days, she says, “I wondered if I had imagined it all.” She talks to someone she was sincerely upset with but then she says, “He looked suddenly tired, and I understood that what had happened had been its own thing for him, in the way that these past months had been for me.” There is a kind of grace and openness in this approach, in spite of its unreliability. What we really give each other is attention. You have understood things in the past (by paying attention to them) that you no longer understand (there is distance now.) The line that most definitively strikes you is, “I could understand anything, under the right circumstances and for the right person. It was both a strength and a weakness.” Circumstances, of course, change, as does the rightness of people.
Cannot look away from these paintings by Jordan Casteel: