On Tuesday, a woman without children told me she knows what it’s like to have children. On Thursday, I overheard another woman, this one seated near me in a doctor’s waiting room, say to a companion, “I know what it must be like to have prostate cancer.” In the name of empathy, both were willing to defy biology. Presenting an appearance of sensitivity, of “sharing and caring,” has become more important, more virtuous, than simple honesty. The late Thom Gunn, the most tender and vicious of poets, nailed this phenomenon for what it is – self-aggrandizement masking as concern for others. The untitled poem is from Boss Cupid, his last book:
“Save the word
empathy, sweetheart,
for your freshman essays.
Doesn’t it make
A rather large claim?
Think you can
syphon yourself
into another human
as, in the movie,
the lively boy-ghosts
pour themselves
down the ear-holes
of pompous older men?
Don’t try it. Only
Jesus could do it and he
probably didn’t exist.
Try `sympathy.’ With that
your isolated self may
split a cloak with a beggar,
slip a pillow under the head
of the arrested man, hold tight
the snag-toothed hustler with red hair.”
My new doctor is a young, briskly friendly Hawaiian woman who treats bodies, not “feelings,” hers or mine. She asked questions about my health and never presumed to know a damned thing about my emotional state, nor inflict hers on me. Quite a good doctor.
2 comments:
Your post today reminds me of this from Auden: "Insofar as poetry, or any of the other arts, can be said to have an ulterior purpose, it is by telling the truth, to disenchant and disintoxicate." So yes -- Thom was a great disenchanter, one of my favorites. And the arts may legitimately preen themselves on their shapely subversiveness. I admire contentiousness in a poet -- the writer who won't give up argument for invention ... But Patrick, you're kind of rough on these passing acquaintances -- "self-aggrandizement" etc. This is the conventional language of conventional emotions. I've spent the last year starting a business that's a social network for family caregivers -- and this is the language they use: to our ears, banalities -- to their ears, deep sincerity. But without it, there's no Thom Gunn in response. Anyway, here's a bit of conventional care: I hope your visit to the doctor was a routine one. Ron
Self-aggrandizement is just as much an assumption about the emotional - or at least inner - state of the other person. Sometimes these conventions result from training, as often in the case of Ron's carers; sometimes from helplessness, as I myself can readily attest to. And conventions are generally understood as such by all parties. Of course, it becomes interesting when they're not, especially for a writer.
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