Standing in their Shoes Changes Everything

While painting tonight, I was caught off guard by a very particular song that came up on my play list, Peter Gabriel’s “Biko”, and with it was struck “full on”, as it were. I’ve spent a lot of hours thinking and writing about this masterpiece by Gabriel, which culminated in a lengthy essay from a few years ago. Truth be told, the proximity of writing that essay is the likely reason why I stopped painting the moment I heard the first few notes…..I simply had to pay my respects.

But that feeling, the notion of  “paying my respects” is a curious thing to consider if you stop to think about it. After all, it’s just a song, a work of pop art that was consumed by the public for a few months in 1980 before dropping off the charts and rarely heard any longer, if ever. So, how does a piece of pop art translate into something of reverence? Well, that can be a deceptive question to ask, because one man’s reverence is another man’s eyeroll. We are all predisposed to respond uniquely to whatever situation confronts us and we each extrapolate varying meanings from those encounters, but if we can agree to the premise that “art imitates life”, then we have a basis for some reverence here.

Gabriel’s incredible song crystalized the fate of Stephen Biko, a South African “political agitator”, as considered by the South African Apartheid government at the time and died while in police custody. His crime? Sedition, which in real terms meant that he was arrested for raising awareness among his fellow countrymen to organize and resist the oppression being imposed by their White rulers, who made up only 13% of the population.

A sharp eyed reader may have noticed that I referred to his death generically by simply stating that he “died” while in police custody, but the reality is far less ambiguous…..he was murdered, plain and simple, beaten to death, dying as a result of a crushed skull at their hands…..and that changes everything, for he knew all too well the dangers he faced and was well aware what the Apartheid security forces did to “traitors of the State”…..but due to his unshakable courage, he held firm to his conviction and continued to organize resistance.

Now before going any further, there is an important principle at play here regarding his particular story, and others like it, and is my explicit purpose here.

Emerson once wrote that we must attempt, as a personal imperative, to read history not as lifeless moments from the distant past, far removed from our own place and time, but by placing ourselves within the context of those events and their lives, to clothe ourselves as fully as possible into their particular moment of history. Reading about it abstractly, decades, or even centuries later will offer very little if we are not able to image ourselves there, ‘in their shoes’. Otherwise, even the most poignant and potentially life-changing stories will skim right off our thick myopic skulls. So, it was Gabriel’s song, together with Emerson’s poignant insight, that brought home the startling injustice of Biko’s death and struck me like a hammer blow tonight.

While recently reading a biography on Walt Whitman, this same theme arose, inviting the same open-eyed consideration. Whitman had volunteered to work in the field hospitals during the Civil War and was present among the countless young men with shattered bodies, so he was intimately aware of our capacity for carnage. About his experience, Whitman wrote the following:

“I was in the midst of it all – saw war where war is worst – no on the battlefields, no – in the hospitals….there I mixed with it: and now I say God damn the wars – all wars: God damn every war: God damn ’em! God damn  ’em!”

When I stand back to consider all of this, in view of Emerson’s imperative, a curious trait of mine finds itself under the knife, as it were. It’s one that I became aware of many years ago and should be mentioned here, precisely within this context….and that is my revulsion to suffering. I realize that will read like a rather pedestrian admission to make, but I would argue that something beyond the norm is at play with me. I first became explicitly aware of it after reading a “True Crime” book some three decades ago, a story that centered on a pair of nine-year-old girls who were sexually assaulted, repeatedly stabbed, and left to die by a psychopathic teenage boy. One of the girls survived and lived to tell the authorities. The story completely shattered me, and in a way that left an emotional crater in its wake. In fact, it was a trauma that lasted for months afterward. I couldn’t get it out of my head and at times had trouble sleeping as it would snarl my mind into emotional knots. I intuitively felt a uniquely vulnerable part of me cowering in the corner from what I had read.

At that point I realized that something inside of me had been wounded, some deep vein of empathy that I wasn’t even aware of that needed to be protected from onslaughts of that kind of wanton malice. This went well beyond simply being upset about their ordeal but rather went straight to that truly deep place inside, the core of my being, if you will, or as Joseph Campbell once beautifully phrased it.

“That still point inside, with a firmly burning flame that is not rippled by any wind”

Well, the story of those young girls effectively sent a typhoon against that flame and the concern I felt for its wellbeing truly concerned me. It is precisely that ‘burning flame’ that cultivates everything I care about and instructs the person I want to be and the life I want to live. My utter surrender to aesthetics, my love of nature and the arts, and the majesty I feel for words and literature are all fueled by that flame.

So, with a new mandate issued from my governing body, an amendment was passed requiring that I never again subject my sense of innocence to gratuitous violence and gore any longer, and certainly not when it comes packaged as “casual” entertainment. From that moment on, I became the gatekeeper to what would be allowed into my mind. I would no longer watch movies that in any way glorified violence, nor ones that treat suffering as an element of entertainment, such as the “Saw” franchise, or even MMA cage fighting for that matter. In fact, I have never watched a Quentin Tarantino movie, with his fetish for splattering blood across the screen. I have never seen “Pulp Fiction”, and likely never will. That uniquely sensitive part of my makeup is far too important to my inner life than to risk any further harm.

But therein lies an inherent dilemma, for over the years I have cultivated a type of ethical authenticity, and to face reality, even harsh ones, with eyes wide open when I feel it’s important. If I am allowed to stretch Emerson’s principle a bit, I felt that his imperative is meant to challenge us by placing ourselves ‘in their shoes.’ But living up to that imperative demands that I cannot simply turn a blind eye to suffering and fill my mind with heartwarming fluff that will not add one ounce of empathetic weight to my world view. Some ugly truths must be dealt with, honestly, without blinking. Author Tom Robbins suggested an interesting observation about this when he wrote:

“…since night balances out the day, so perhaps enlightenment needs to be balanced out with endarkenment.”

Robbin’s suggestion there lends itself to what I believe Emerson originally intended, which is the cultivation of empathy, which can lead to compassion. To help sharpen that point, just imagine the empathetic difference derived from reading Emerson’s own “scholarly” writings against America’s slave trade, for example, or reading raw firsthand accounts of it, such as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” I believe the point is made. Emerson’s imperative is meant as an impassioned call to inhabit, as much as possible, the lives and events from history, including the darkness it can occasionally expose. His hope, I believe, was to foster an emotional foothold into the lives of others and therein establish a broader sense of compassion that could help inoculate us against indifference. To create a vaccine of a sort, against our own solipsistic tendencies.   

Perhaps the most difficult example I can offer personally presented itself when facing the Holocaust. Because of my love for history, I once devoured books on WW II, which necessarily placed the holocaust squarely in my path. With the shortsightedness of youth, I was once able to read books detailing its horrors, but as I have aged, a tendency to avoid further exposure became readily apparent. A clear case in point occurred when Stephen Spielberg announced that he would direct and produce “Schindler’s List”, a movie that would surely depict the horrors of Hitler’s Reich with imagery designed to hit an emotional nerve.

To no surprise, the movie presented quite a dilemma for my “gatekeeper”, for obvious reasons. I wanted to see and experience how a master cinematographer would present the story, but I also knew beyond any doubt that he would produce an accurate depiction of the physical and psychological brutality at play, so I intentionally refused to watch it because I felt it would breach my safe zone.

Yet with my personal desire to maintain a healthy level of intellectual hygiene, I finally worked up the courage to ‘bearing witness’ to that kind of methodical, systematic evil, and although I struggled for years with the choice, the tipping point came when I recognized the holocaust was not gratuitous violence in any respect, but rather a complete breakdown of human rights and dignity, and with that, the movie presented a clear case study into human psychology. In fact, the Holocaust is one of the rare cases in which every adult, regardless of nationality, should feel an obligation to face head on, because unlike wars, and other modes of violence, the Holocaust provides a distinct and necessary lesson for the individual. Let me explain.

From all of my reading on the holocaust, particularly from actual survivors like Viktor Frankl and Jack Eisner, the draconian policies of Hitler and his henchmen in the SS began to recede behind the millions of everyday Germans who compliantly, and often passionately, threw themselves into supporting Hitler’s machinery of hatred. It is precisely those nameless millions who surrendered their minds to Hitler’s propaganda. It is the civil servants, teachers, businessmen, scientists, and housewives who also fall on my sword of blame.

The lesson is an easy one to overlook because the men at the top are the easy targets, but those German citizens were no different than any other citizens from any other country, and yet they somehow became willing pawns to a genocide. And it is there we all must acknowledge that each of us, as individuals, can become complicit to an atrocity if we fail to recognize their weaknesses is also being our own.

I don’t intend to finish this note by ending it with nothing but examples of evil and cruelty. There is, of course, a flip side to all that darkness, moments in history of valor and sacrifice that sliced through the haze of those sufferings. One such moment was illustrated by the above-mentioned Viktor Frankl, who spent four years at various concentration camps. His words below remain the most potent lines (within their true context) that I have ever read.

“We who lived in the concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, (the freedom) to choose one’s own way.”

With that supreme example of compassion, I want to include one last example to my point here, which is the value of thoughtfully wading into these dark murky waters of history and learn from other men and women who held firm to the own inner flames.

I came across this story while listening to Dan Carlin’s “Hardcore History” podcast, in a series titled, “Blueprint to Armageddon”, which covered in detail the horrors of World War I. In one particularly touching moment, Carlin spoke of the Battle of the Somme in 1916, Britain’s worst single day in their long military history when they suffered 60,000 casualties, including 20,000 dead… on a single battlefield. While attempting to ‘step into the shoes’ of those soldiers, Carlin read a letting from a young English soldier name Charles May, who along with his follow troops had just received orders that their offensive would begin at dawn, which meant they would be “going over the top” (pictured below) in order to run through the gauntlet of bombs, barbed wire, and machine gun fire toward the enemy lines….. fully exposed with no cover in sight.

It must be said that the troops fighting on the Western Front, particularly during that first year of the war (1914 and 15), experienced a living hell that no one could have imagined. Because stagnant, unmoving trench warfare was a new phenomenon, army commanders didn’t consider the need for troops rotation, so soldiers were forced to live in open ditches for months at a time, often with daily bombardments to survive. In fact, the term “shell shock” was coined to explained how their experience shattered their minds.

Once again, it’s important to keep Emerson’s imperative firmly in mind here, because tens of thousands of men were being slaughtered every week in the distance that existed between the opposed trenches, accurately dubbed “no man’s land”, which could be as close as a few hundred yards. The dead were often left to rot in the open, since retrieving their bodies meant exposing yourself to enemy machine gun fire. The call of nature, likewise, had to be relieved in the trench where they also lived. If that wasn’t bad enough, soldiers on the front had no shelter from what was dropping from the sky, so the massive bombardments that often lasted for days at a times, involving tens of thousands of shells would often hit the trenches directly. Trenches soon became home to “corpse rats.” Lice and dysentery ran rampant.…. did I mention hell on earth? For an idea what that may have been like, check out this single photo below and place yourself in that trench (or what’s left of it), under a bombardment that could do this to the landscape. Words fail to come within miles of translating the horror.

Getting back to our young soldier, Charles May, with his orders firmly set and the very real expectation that he would likely die in the coming hours, he thoughtfully penned the following letter to his young wife. It may read as a quaint and orderly affair now, a century…. and a civilization later, but the clear-eyed realization of his predicament and the dignity it exposes is a thing of heartrending beauty. When I attempt to place myself in his shoes, as Emerson implored us to do, I find it crippling. My mind turns to black at the thought.

I must not allow myself to dwell on the personal, there is no room for it here. Also, it is demoralizing. But I do not want to die. Not that I mind for myself. If it be that I’m to go, I’m ready, but the thought that I may never see you or our darling baby again turned my bowels to water. I cannot think of it with even the semblance of equanimity.

                My one consolation is the happiness that has been ours. Also, my conscious is clear that I’ve always tried to make life a joy for you. I know at least that if I go, you will not want, that is something. But it is the thought that we may be cute off from one another that is so terrible and that our babe may grow up without my knowing her and without her knowing me. It’s difficult to face. And I know your life without me would be a dull blank, but you must never let it become wholly so for you will be left the greatest charge in all the world, the upbringing of our baby. God bless that child. She is the hope of life to me.

                My darling, goodbye. It may be that you will only have to read these lines as ones of passing interest. On the other hand, they may well be my last message to you. If they are, know that all your life that I loved you and our baby with all my heart and soul and that you two sweet things are just all the world to me. I pray to God that I may do my duty, for I know whatever that may entail, you would not have it otherwise.

******

Charles May was indeed killed and as I’ve tried to make clear in this entry, imagining myself there, in that trench with him writing his letter to the love of his life, feeling it as deeply as I am capable…..well, it changes everything.