Monday, July 11, 2005
(2:21 PM) | Brad:
On Tragedy & Perspective
With all due respect to Anthony and Dave, whose posts are both definitely worth reading, even now as they slide further down the page, I am very wary of writing about tragedy.For one, you always leave yourself open to the all-too-easy charge: 'Oh, sure, you get upset about [x ... and yet I don't remember you shedding a tear about [Y].' There is something about the tragedy of Y -- be it that of Columbine, 9/11, or the London bombings -- that hit closer to home for me than the myriad examples of Y that fall outside the purview of domestic news coverage, participation in anything resembling a collective psyche, or personal experience (e.g., Bali, Darfur, Ivory Coast, etc.). Of course, this doesn't make Y any less tragic; and, yes, thinking about them is necessary to putting X into a healthy perspective; but for most of us, even many of us who so readily condemn the complicity of the First world in the evil tendencies of the leadership of the Third, our perspective of protest is one of (at the minimum) unconscious effort. In a sense, we're all protesting a bit too much, insofar as all have perspectives & thus blindspots.
More importantly, though, and apropos the content of this post, I am pretty sure I do not have any sufficient perspective so soon after a tragedy to say anything at all interesting. I might be able to riff on a 'meta'-level, i.e. talk about the various reactions to the tragedy, or even abstractly think about its implications. But the tragedy itself, its horror? I might be able to poetically and thoughtfully frame the tragedy, as tragic, but why am I inclined to do this and not think about, in the words of Kurtz, 'the horror'? Why can I not embrace my initial thoughts regarding a tragedy -- such as, for instance, 'Oh shit!' -- and leave it at that? Why am I so compelled to take the excessiveness of tragedy and mold it into the contours of my perspectival / ideological box?
Is this what we all in our own ways must do in order to be able to deal with it? I understand that often a tragedy must first be repressed, so that it might then be re-formed; but how are we to regard a culture, and ourselves, when the the order is reversed: when the tragic event is almost immediately re-formed, by journalistic talking heads and intellectual insight, or the self-talk of our prayers and journals, into that which must be repressed?
