Musing about empathy and how distance often dissolves our capacity to truly feel the pain of others.......
"Death dissolves with distance and the questions asked, more academic at the rim than at the centres blast".....
There need be no apologies for being more affected by suffering within the immediate family than that of others further from us. Yet often there seems an unthinking callousness towards distant events, deaths and disasters.
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| Delivering the bombs |
I have found from participation on various Discussion Forums that in memory, and in the formation of the "national character", in England at least the "spirit of the Blitz" can still, it seems, evoke antipathy towards Germany. Yet what of Dresden? Surely we can open more to all? Move on? Much can deaden the possibility of a common, shared humanity.
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| Rorschach - what is seen? |
Moving on, each moment can be, and in fact is, a Rorschach test, where our choices and judgements become a judgement on ourselves. What "reality" do we see?
Which makes me think of art and particularly of modern art, the search to convey and reveal the human face authentically. Not an inherited "face" bestowed by the past, one that simply needs representational art to be expressed and shared, but one known in the moment, an appropriate statement for that one moment only, the "teachings of a whole lifetime".
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| Non representational art - "Nude Descending a Staircase" Marcel Duchamp |
I was reading some biographical details of the life of the great Japanese artist Hokusai. Once, apparently, he poured some purple paint over a sheet of paper and then enticed a wading bird to walk across it. Upon presenting his finished "painting" observers saw many things. Were they foolish to do so? To see rivers and birds and to know their beauty? But perhaps, just so, we must see the Ten Thousand things that are in and around us, and each "seeing" is in some sense a moment of judgement. (Which is why I need Amida as my judge - infinite compassion, infinite wisdom, infinite potential. Old Nobodaddy simply does not cut it)
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| Wu Jian'an - Ten Thousand Things |
Before the Copernican Revolution displaced our earth from the centre, before mass literacy opened the way to ones own knowledge however inadequate and patchy, before Darwin displaced humanity from a position of eminence over and above nature, much could easily be shared. Well, I assume it could, such things as a Madonna and Child perhaps, a crucifixion scene, a Resurection. Things coming together, being torn asunder, coming back together, around and around. For some at least.
But the old forms are gone for many. Those days of pure technique, of virtual craftsmen, their portraits of the eminent on commission, scenes from Greek myths, of Old Testament stories, Kings and Queens, all the representatives of a shared meaning that minds could give a "yeah" to. Life defined. Inherited. Bestowed. And it seems that one of the most shocking things for some was the subject matter of the modern artists, from the mid 19th century on. Not the Great on horseback, or scenes of antiquity, almost didactic in intent, but just common folk, rural scenes, "mundane" life.
What now can be the "Ground", our Ground? Thomas Merton spoke of the Hidden Ground of Love but once pointed out to a child that there was no path to the door in a picture of a beautiful house that child had drawn. Later he spoke of a path that is revealed to us "without our exactly realising it." The "non-calculation" of Pure Land Buddhism, where things are made to become so of themselves, the work of Reality-as-is, Grace, gift.
There is no one key for everyone. In fact, no key at all. In the East the word sunyata is used, "emptiness", sometimes dismissed as nihilism by those who do seem not to understand, or do not wish to. Nothing at all is brought to the present moment of Now, but one might as well say that everything is brought, Reality-as-is. God.
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| No key |
Thinking again of Finnegans Wake, of the repetitious HCE, a book about "anybody, anywhere, anytime or, as Joyce puts it:- Every those personal place objects....where soevers." Joyce is concerned with the Fall of Man but as I understand him, not as a one off event in the past, but as an ever present on-going reality. As William York Tindall observes in his guide to Joyce's book:- (it is concerned with) "time, process, the fall and rise of man, conflict and its litter, and the creation from litter of children, cities, and books." And H.C.E is both "a faller, like Adam; like Jesus, a riser."
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| Finnegans Wake |
Joyce seemed to have a positive attitude, a sense of humour, and thus perhaps saw us as not "O foenix culprit"! No blame, but a necessary fault that merits "so great a redeemer." "Conflict and its litter" can be experienced as suffering, as senseless, as a reason to deny purpose, significance and meaning. Yet accepted and known in Faith, such can be the catalyst of genuine transformation, of ones own creations.
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| Joyce and wife, Nora |
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