Imagine This

The post I was thinking about all morning will have to wait. Today, death, suffering, and survival are on my mind, and I need to talk about it. As always, feel free to skip this if you’re not in a morbid mood and don’t want to get into one, or if you’re already in a morbid mood and don’t want to go any further down the rabbit-hole.

If I hear “an unimaginable tragedy” or “unimaginable suffering” or “unimaginable loss of life” one more time today, I think I may have to bash in the face of the television with the Christmas tree that’s still hanging out in the lunchroom, just to shut the fuckers up. Getting up and turning it off won’t make the same statement and won’t be nearly as satisfying, although it would certainly keep me from being written up. Or sent to a psych ward.

Is it really unimaginable, or is it that the general population doesn’t want to imagine it? I suspect the latter. And that’s only natural – painful situations of our own are difficult enough without having to create images our heads of the horror suffered by other human beings. But we’re writers, and there are few things that we cannot imagine.

For me, making the mistake of clicking on a picture or watching a video of a person (or animal, for that matter) in terrible pain is only the beginning of the process. Once the picture is there, I can’t help but want to go behind the eyes, to come closer to knowing the victim and touching his or her pain with the hands of my heart and soul, making it my own for long enough to understand, just for a moment, what it might be like to be there.

Recoiling from pain, whether it’s your own, or someone else’s, is usually the first, sensible response a person can make. Unless you’re a writer. This is why I make a point not to read certain types of news stories; I’m plenty obsessed with death, suffering, and the aftermath without feeding the monster, thanks very much.

Sometimes it’s all over the place, though; when an apocalyptic disaster strikes, the world likes to watch – at a distance.

I can’t keep my distance.

When I was growing up, my worst fears were about dangers on a scale that were much larger than I was. A murderous swarm of bees. Nuclear war. Earthquakes, although I doubt anything I saw in the 1980s begins to compare with the Haiti quake in terms of sheer size and damage. Volcanoes – that sort of thing. Now, I’ve learned to love disaster movies – the bigger the better, as far as I’m concerned, and let the good times roll. Yes, despite 9/11, despite the tsunami and Katrina and even this earthquake, I love a good disaster flick, and you know why? Because the shit ain’t real. It’s a story, and it’s not necessary for me to dive in and surround myself with the misery – although it’s happened to me inadvertently in a couple of cases.

What scares me now happens on a smaller, more personal scale. Cells growing too fast in a body, hiding until it’s too late to stop them. The slow progress of starvation. Isolation. Physical pain. Individual grief. Feeling powerless to stop the suffering of one you love. The big stuff doesn’t freak me out like it used to – but show me an x-ray of a lung with a dark patch on it and my legs won’t hold me up.

Here’s the thing, though. When I look at a disaster like the one we’re witnessing in Haiti, or the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, or the Darfur genocide (these are just a few unfolding as we speak, never mind the ones in the past or the ones to come), all it takes is a short leap of imagination to go from my own fear of small things to everyone’s fear – of loss, of pain, of hunger, disconnection, grief, all the things that you can only feel if you’re a survivor. If you don’t feel them, you’re either heavily medicated or you’re dead. Then it becomes a matter of multiplication, to an infinite power – because we’re a gregarious society, and for the most part, we don’t just feel things for ourselves, we feel them for each other, too.

So the newscasters may prattle on endlessly about unimaginable suffering. Let them. It’s safer for them that way, anyway. But we’re writers. And, like children, there is nothing we cannot imagine. Whether we want to or not.

~a.