Saturday, July 09, 2005
(8:01 AM) | Anonymous:
On Violent Times.
Have I grown cold? I will therefore speak not of spirit and flame, as those of some future-perfect, but of gravity and ice, for those who can't see past this present-tense.What was it about the London bombings that didn't affect me? Certainly when Hayley woke me up early after hearing it on the radio it bothered me. Or was that being woken with such news? Was the fact that I had been woken with this news the problem? Either way, I know I was upset by it but not in the same emotional way I am upset when watching footage of Columbine students huddled outside their school, or video of New Yorkers gazing up at two falling towers, or of footage, rarely shown on TV, of any one of the most violent acts committed under the name of bondage and the United States throughout the world. Not even - and this is somewhat less fantastic than those examples - when listening to This American Life re-runs at work, when people I don't know speak of loses I do understand as one who listens.
It is at those times, when I'm in the archive and distant from the pain, that is when I see the violent acts that are made into events with proper names for their complete banality and pitiful infamy. It causes a reaction within me, a physical reaction that my body always feels before I'm conscious of it. I begin to cry the kind that makes you scrunch up your face as it creeps over you, and always before I realize my own grief. I'm always happy to be alone with this happens as it is odd and embarrassing, and if people were around it would be as if bearing my naked body to a room full of scholars for study. Still, you'd think I'd, and further my generation, would know how to weep publicly. I began my scholastic career in Kindergarten watching the Challenger space shuttle explode on live television. I spent my grade school with a step-father in the Gulf helping to both kill and liberate a people. I watched bombs fall on Baghdad in Middle School. I saw rivers filled with blood in Rwanda. I graduated from High School after years of seeing people my own age kill other people our own age in High Schools. We know public, broadcasted grief. Yet, we don't know how to weep like our grandparents and have learned too much from our own parents.
Is this coldness in the face of cruelty from every violence infused group some form of masculine pride? Is this not the same reason that Bush, Blair, Rice, Rumsfeld, and every other man leading some mass of people never show that they weep? Instead of tears we are told that they "think about it" and even that they "think about it every day" as if that means something. It seems to me that this refusal to own up to our own bareness, our finitude in the parlance of the ancién regime of philosophy, is what infuses us with the spirit of gravity. That makes history repeat in the worst sense and limits our imagination. When we gloss over the fact that we will, indeed, die and that we are, indeed, just another species passing over this earth we loss all sense of joy. This seems counter-intuitive to me but also the reality of the situation. For those of us who are stuck in this present-tense, unable to think of a future-perfect, our only recourse is hope; but hope, Spinoza tells us, is just the feeling of lack and thus not a positive and creative passion springing from joy. Still, until those who have joy can help me and others like me find the way to turn towards joy, I will watch British, Iraqi, American, Mexican, and universal human chaos hoping that the future will have been perfect.
