|
|
|
|
|
|
HOME | ABOUT | BIOS | EMAIL |
|
 |
| |
Thursday, December 10, 2009
EASY TO BE HARD
Jennifer Warnes
1969
Available on : Love Lifts Us Up: A Collection, 1968-1983
Raven : 2004
[Buy It]
HEAVEN HELP US ALL
David Ruffin
1969
Available on : David: The Unreleased Album
Hip-O Select : 2004
[Buy It]
When I was first dating my wife, we used to get into fights because she cared about animals. That's a bit of a misrepresention. We got into fights because she cared about, or appeared to care about, animals more than people, and animals who were far away more than animals who were nearby. If a news show had a picture of a bird trapped in oil halfway around the world -- Turkmenistan, say -- she'd be wracked with sobs. "That poor bird," she'd say, eyes red. "Someone should help it." On the other hand, if I cut my foot on glass, she'd narrow her eyes (not red) and tell me to get a paper towel and a band-aid. I used to hate this behavior. I'd stand next to the TV as it showed pictures of birds in oil and say things like "If only there were a situation where you could actually affect the happiness of living beings." I called it Yoko Ono disease: a syndrome in which abstract ideas of pain and suffering eclipse concrete examples of it. The bud shooting up through the concrete, too, is ignored, and it withers.
When my wife acted this way, which was often, I used to think about that song from Hair, "Easy to Be Hard." Three Dog Night had a hit with it as a power ballad; Jennifer Warnes, who was in the Los Angeles cast of the musical, put it on her second album, "See Me, Feel Me, Touch Me, Heal Me," in 1969. It's an unrequited love song about a man who is missing what's right under his nose and instead affecting concern for the broader world via activism and rhetoric. It's a fantastically efficient character sketch, and it argues that World Consciousness can sometimes be a cover for the most fundamental self-absorption. Take the bird in oil. For starters, it's delicious. (That's just a joke, pro-bird, anti-oil types! It's not the kind of oil that makes a bird delicious. (It might be.)) But that bird, the one on the screen, will drown long before any of us can make it over there to pull it out. And while we sit, sobbing, looking at a picture of a circumstance we can't change, we're erecting a monument to our own powerlessness, and that in turn can validate the idea that we have no effect on the real people in our immediate vicinity, and consequently need not try our hardest in the matters that directly concern us. This seems counterintuitive; aren't grief and anger about the injustices of the world a form of protest rather than a form of acceptance? Aren't people who care about the distant corners of the world more likely to engage with and attempt to influence events? Maybe here I am drawing, or should draw, a distinction between activists and activist-rhetoric addicts. I have friends who are activists of one kind of another, and I'm not indicting their interest in far-off places, particularly when they actually get up out of their chairs and travel to the trouble spots that interest or vex them. I won't argue that these people are making the world worse. It seems patently obvious that they are not. But I have other friends who come to value a sedentary form of world-worrying, a highly principled spectatorship in which the fact of fretting about Turkmenistani birds replaces other demands that are closer to home, make more specific demands, and are consequently not as appealing.
So, "Easy to Be Hard." My wife made me think about that song, and then that song made me think about her: vicious cycle, vicious sentiment. Especially people
Who care about strangers
Who care about evil
And social injustice
Do you only
Care about the bleeding crowd?
How about a needing friend?
I need a friend Time passed. The bird drowned. Another one did, too. Over the years, my wife's Yoko Ono disease subsided somewhat -- or maybe it's more accurate to say that my reaction to it changed. The same overwrought (and possibly overweening) sense of world consciousness that used to madden me now has the ability to comfort me, at least for a little while. It's not simply that my wife got better at conceding that local concerns mattered as much as global ones, but also that I have come around to the validity of worrying about the global. Traditionally, I am indifferent to the global. A bird in oil is an unfortunate thing, but I have never considered it my responsibility. Instead, I focus on a tighter circle; I am an aggressive investor, at least mentally, when it comes to people in my life. I expend a great deal of energy on my friends and the choices they are making. I brighten inside if I think the choices are correct ones. I darken if I think the choices are wrong. Some days the lights flicker off and on.
I have rationalized this meddlesome attitude as a means of escaping self-absorption--which can, remember, take the form of either isolation or its purported opposite (but secret twin), bird-in-oil soulfulness. But now, thanks to age, thanks to my wife's evolution, it occurs to me that my ideas about these matters might be wrong. For starters, manufacturing out a series of thoughts, theories, and feelings about your friends and loved ones isn't necessarily a protection again self-absorption. Other people get used as yardsticks; when I think about them, I may well just be thinking about myself. Involvement with friends and acquaintances can't even always guard against powerlessness. Ideas about choices made by those nearby aren't necessarily as futile as ideas about choices made far away, but in a purely instrumental sense, I have roughly the same amount of influence on whether a friend will start drinking again or whether a village in Indonesia will rebuild from tsunami damage. He will drink or not. The village will rebuild or not. The energy expended worrying over the decisions of others is technically squandered in either event. So if the bleeding crowd doesn't need my attention, does a needing friend? Or should I just accept all outcomes and aspire to total equanimity?
This is a false dichotomy, obviously, and even if it wasn't, it's a bad question. I will never be able to holster my weapon when it comes to situations that I care about, and I will always care about situations involving friends and loved ones more than I care about situations involving birds and oil. I am as unchangeable in this trait as an armchair activist is in the opposite respect. But it occurs to me that I might have missed a piece of the puzzle; what I once dismissed out of hand as abstracted self-indulgence might in fact be a more sophisticated method for administering the personal realm. You can't pull the bird out of the oil, and it's fatuous to imagine that you can put yourself in the bird's place, even for purposes of temporary empathy, but you don't have to accept that the division between what is far and what is near is a permanent one. Rather, they are complements. When you consider the world at large, and how small you are in comparison, the matters that are actually causing you pain -- whether your own fears about your job or a creative roadblock or your friend's drinking or your other friend's divorce -- are suspended temporarily , and you can delay dealing with them until you're better equipped, or (more likely) until the crisis has shifted in a manner that better equips you. Then, though, the burden is returned to you, and to the smaller circle inside the global. The problem is not with the bird in oil, or even thinking about the bird in oil. It's what happens when you stop thinking about it. The armchair activists and soulful solipsists who follow thoughts of birds in oil with more thoughts of birds in oil -- those who use it to fetishize their own insignificance or who commend themselves on their sensitivity to all forms of suffering -- are missing the solution, which is to use the situation as a kind of key. Take whatever sadness you feel about the bird's plight, or whatever joy you feel at the prospect of its rescue, and reinvest it in your own life. Understand that the bird's imprisonment in oil has some relevant similarity with your friend's bad job, and that assistance is needed, or that the conditions that caused the oil spill are being echoed, in some metaphorical way, in your own relationship: maybe there's not enough control, and too much poison. I suggest metaphor not because I think the reality of the bird should be erased, but because I think it is more profitably used as fuel. Feel what you want to feel about the global, and feel it as deeply as you wish, so long as you return to the local. To honor that perspective, and to concede the point, I'm going to add a second song, not by Yoko Ono, but by David Ruffin: his majestic cover of Stevie Wonder's bird-in-oil anthem "Heaven Help Us All."Now I lay me down before I go to sleep
In a troubled world I pray the Lord to keep
Keep hatred from the mighty and the mighty from the small
Heaven help us all
NOTE: The art accompanying today's post, by the way, is by Brian Dettmer, who makes skeletons and other sculptures by melting down and shaping old cassette tapes.Labels: ben, birds, soul
posted by Ben
LINK |
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
