When in doubt: stone wall.

July 15, 2015
When in doubt: stonewall. 

A note from Gaspar Stephens:

Re TA –

     The Paul and marriage stuff (click here and here) is stimulating: it invites revisiting empathy – and the degree to which it is possible. There came to my mind an experience you related to me some years ago. [This was back in my activist days, which meant mainly that I was attending a lot of boring meetings, solemn workshops, and sanctimonious speeches.] You were in the Caribbean (Jamaica? Puerto Rico?) for some kind of conference during which one of the natives said there were aspects to the issue of poverty/oppression/governance in the Third World that you white North American white folks would simply not be able to comprehend because you were white North American white folks. And I recall your reflecting that any incomprehension was more about that gentleman's (and any other's, who shared his view on the matter) failure to communicate than about your inability to take it in.

   Did I dream this? Or do you have some recollection of it? Anyway, as I was reading TA, I began to think about the artist’s responsibility to hike empathy over, to percolate empathy through, to transport empathy beyond walls to places otherwise difficult for empathy to get to. I thought: “Maybe Paul didn't read enough Madame Bovary’s or Good Soldier’s to appreciate marriage's complexities. Maybe God wasn’t reading enough either to get into the mind of Adam – the letters of Heloise and Abelard or Portnoy’s Complaint.

One thing’s for sure; stories can wallop walls, ring the bell of even the thickest head.

   This morning, Jack, of Mad Bill Blake’s ’Weeps, called to say that his tech would be running late for the scheduled 8:30 appointment to inspect my fireplaces. In another part of the world, that would've been enough. Conversation over. But this is the South. Thus, Jack had to answer the unasked question, “What’s the story?”

   The tech, T-ball, overslept because he was at the hospital last night later than he'd expected. He was at the hospital in the first place because his son was wounded by a .22 caliber bullet – not aimed at him – at a bar the night before. Emergency surgery; the kid is still recovering. He was there in the second place, because T-ball's wife – who’d been there, at the hospital, the whole time – needed a break to go home, shower, and . . . whatever. I heard “whatever” – the way Jack grumbled it into an implied question – to mean whatever T-ball’s wife, DelMona, might “have to” do when she knew exactly where T-ball was. Anyway, she didn't get back to the hospital until after midnight. So T-ball was running late.

Voilà: empathy! When T-ball finally showed, he was no longer an anonymous ’weep. He was a pitiable victim. And while I didn't delve into his business with him, I found myself fashioning my responses to him so that they might possibly comfort. I've never had a son – much less one wounded by a bullet. And to my knowledge I haven’t been cuckolded by any of my wives. But I thought I had at least some inkling of what I would feel like in such a situation. And I’d want comfort, even from an old white North American white guy.

   Of course, I was assuming Jack’s story was true.

*  *  *  *  *

The book is James Dwight Dana's Manual of Mineralogy and Lithology.

Gaspar did not imagine the incident – or my reaction. It was Puerto Rico, a gathering of the self-righteous, some more than others.

     On the one hand, I don’t want to back off what I said then, put in terms of empathy, that it decidedly depends on how much one wants to understand or be understood by the other. The speaker in Santa Isabel had no real de-
sire to explain, because he didn’t really want “me” to understand. Paul has no real desire to comprehend. Why should he – he would risk giving up his superiority?

   On the other hand, I find myself of two minds about all of this, partly because why should antick nebbishes like me be held to the same standard as the righteous, as God or his Apostle or Prophets or Mystics, the axe-grinders of any revealed religion, or any axe-grinder, anyone that claims to know – physicists, pundits, Supreme Court justices, militant atheists, et al.? These should be able to communicate clearly what they know and want me to know because I ought to know it, too, dammit. But I can't communicate clearly, because I don’t know; and I don't know because the world is marvelous, confusing, opaque. So, I can only wave at the wall, point dumbly to the gaps I can’t see much less get through, the ladder of invisible ink I can’t climb, the magic carpet I don’t know how to fly.