A Portrait in Two Feelings

  Compassion and callousness form the contrasting colours of our lives. The black charcoal of one creating the background to the textured canvas on which so many modern institutions, be they the free market or a health care system, chalk compassionate exceptions. Each forms the boundary of the other – the point of contrast that holds it in. So we live in a society that traditionally at least valued infinite compassion. And yet of course such compassion is impossible for an individual, and that individual remain alive. We then at some point, by the same logic need to draw back, need to become blind to the outside world. We need then to draw lines, and demark a space to be callous in – to lose sight of voices beyond us, that would otherwise drag us this way or that. Likewise even the most callous of organizations, big banks, and the stock market, that espouse a doctrine where only profit matters, need to edge that doctrine with a language of compassion. The market at each and every place might act in utter self interest, and yet it must always claim that that self interest itself will lead to virtue; the system claims then always to have an alchemy which turns bad into good.

  Compassion and callousness form then the materials with which we paint portraits of the world, and world events. Take the current obvious example, the recent earthquake in Haiti. On the one level there is of course a great groundswell of compassion. We all look on, and are moved to do something; we are told that that something is giving money, and do that, and all of a sudden there is a great amount of money to spend on aid for Haiti, which in a way is utterly wonderful. And yet this chalk of compassions is scrawled on a very dark canvas, where callousness has already created so many lines. First and foremost of these is that Haiti has of course undergone four hurricanes in the last two years, hurricanes that there was not the aid for. This, and the earthquake itself, have stripped the country of the command structure and the infrastructure to actually act decisively. Our own previous callousness, has then created a canvas far too dark to sketch something immediately white, and good upon. We are then left in the portrait where what we want to draw is so clear in our own eye, and yet what we are drawing is so dark, and so confused; little lines of aid, little acts of compassion immediately mix with the dark charcoal and become tricky. We look as if we are all promises to the victims, and as even when we do send aid it will be too late, while we are paralysed with our own inability.

At the same time, and faced with our own inaction, there is a great tendency to start to warp that portrait we are painting. It is already no longer the bright portrait which we thought we were painting, the one of the angel (that resembles us) helping out those whom God appeared to have abandoned. On the contrary we are looking to paint a portrait where the victims will slowly become centre stage as quasi-villains. There have been reports since the very start of the disaster that there were armed gangs and riots. These reports were made in spite of the fact that the journalists on the ground repeatedly denied that such actions were carrying on. The reports were of course no doubt more an expression of ourselves, and our doubts about our ability to help, than they were about what was happening on the ground. I mean if there were riots then it is understandable that people are starving still in spite of our money. It is even to a degree their own fault… What of course is more, is that the story of riots is in itself very much a self-fulfilling prophecy. If we assume that there are riots, if we police or militarize the aid effort, and do it to people who are already desperate, then riots are all too likely.

Onto this canvas, upon which we act to create those eddies of callousness in our representations of the Haitians, another fleck of black is also appearing. We are ‘having reports’ that the Haitians are fleeing back to the countryside, having lost faith in us and our big effort. This is one of those stories – it is reported with an eye to an open future, it is in the process of being sketched out. This story stands then on the cusp of two others. In the one the aid comes in, and this is a story of how the Haitians by their lack of faith made things so much more difficult for the benevolent us. If only they had stayed, then they would have been aided, we can say. Or alternatively if the aid remains increasingly stuck, or militarized or caught in riots, this will be the point at which we turn around the canvas to be a critique of ourselves. We promise much or better, our government promises much, and yet never succeeds in acting. We will trumpet the fact that the main effect of the earthquake is that we need to learn lessons about our ability to aid or to be effective.

  This last point is all very well, and yet those lessons are never really those which one ought to learn; which are those of humanity and humility. The only lesson we learn is to keep the stable door closed next time… On the contrary they become caught up in one of the artistic effects that criss cross this two tone canvas. This effect is one of smudging, and double drawing. One of the supreme effects of callousness is that nothing is in effect simply inscribed the once; but rather the charcoal smudges the chalk, meaning that it has at least two lines. We act then to aid others, and yet in that action we always have an eye on two quite different domestic political stories. In the one, the aid is successful and whichever premier is in power, is seen as being particularly effective in arranging aid and will claim the credit. In the other the aid does not work, or does not work quickly enough, and the suffering of others continues. We then translate that suffering into our own. It becomes a part of another painting, one in which we paint in our political masters. They are being seen (yet again and again) as all words or too bureaucratic or too callous or whatever. The failure then of the effort (or its success) invariably slips into being our story. The story in which our aid, our generosity is channelled by our good rulers or denied.

  This mixing of ourselves with the canvas, ultimately, beyond the smudges of the portrait, pull out to form its horizon line. This horizon line, is draw in the middle of the canvas. Below it are the features of Haiti – but more than that also the features that describe its place in the world. A dark and shifting territory, of a disaster zone where blackness gives away to shadow, and further darkness, and nothing can be clearly seen or thought or felt. But the sky itself is quite another matter. Drawn in clear lines we see the promise of a Caribbean sun, and the bright hopes of the first nation to free itself from Negro slavery in modern times. We see also the world as we would wish it to be. The white upon white that pure compassion would demand or fantasize for itself. We see then at the top of the sky the world as we would have it, the world which we feel our aid or our compassion, ought to lead to. We see ourselves then, as we so clearly and so desperately want to be reflected, in the mirror or pool of light.

  And yet between these two, the dark world of the interior there is a very complex series of lines. At either end there is a point of sharp contrast. The sky is and will remain the bright sky, and the dark shadow plain holds its callous abyssal darkness. But between there is an apparently uniform grey band. And yet if you look at this band it is created, not in the smudge of colour, but rather in the endless eddy of colours, drawn into tight spirals, each moving towards the other, and yet being turned aside. Spirals which catch our attitudes to immigration and genuine social reform. On the bright side there is the feeling that we ought to be fair to the world. We ought to always do it justice and repair, to a degree, its wrongs. We then want to help. And yet as the world (in whatever form) reaches to demand this help, that other element, the callousness, enters in. We start to look at our resources, start to assume that those others are presuming on our good nature, we start to mutter about quotas and being swamped. The chalk is then caught up in an endless eddy, where it keeps what it wants to say, and yet at every point is bounded by the dark callous lines. We then create a labyrinth in which we define our goodness, while ensuring that it never is simply asked to act upon the world. Or perhaps rather, we ensure that its actions are so watered down by the inscribing lines of callousness, that its actions cannot affect ourselves and our own societies. We want to help, and assume that we are doing so, while at the same time, making the help too problematic to be real. Occasionally however these spirals break down. A fleck of real compassion is felt. The trouble of course is that it falls upon a world in which it is unique. The result is then all too often, one of those riots. We try to do the right things, and desperate people attempt to build that kindness very directly into their own world - and that fantasy of being overwhelmed which we, in the rich (and ‘compassionate’) West, have, is confirmed.

  The canvas is very textured. And yet for all that, one feels that the central portrait would be more comfortable if it was painted in more colour. There is something very odd in this demand for only the two colours. This world, where everything is always one thing or the other, and smudged between them lies complexity. It is as if the canvas itself is straining to be colourful. Look at it too long and one sees vivid green, and violent reds, where there is technically only black and white. The canvas genuinely captures the multicoloured world, with all its shades of meaning. It checkmates those shades back to being mere aspirations, held within its dual tone reality; its ‘good or bad’. Perhaps it is this dualizing of difference that actually configures its power. We are all free to paint the colours of the canvas as we choose. We all accept they must be there, that the world must be more complex than this dark and light. And yet perhaps we could never agree on what those colours really are, and with that what the real problems of the world actually are. We are then set free by the dual-tone portrait to imagine our own colours, or set off colours, and so create within the agony our own chromatic utopia.

  And yet this act of creating is caught is a great dilemma. Any artist of the dual tone canvas only has a certain number of strikes. For the horizon line is very much on the move, with its eddies and its swirls. The portrait is then gradually fading in the thousands of little acts and their responses, which the horizon records. The story is fading into grey, into greys of indifference. Its power then is limited. This limit is in a sense more severe the darker the initial colours were. Once we have poured out our money in response to the darkest parts of the canvas, then we tend to demand a rather quick response ourselves. After all we have done our bit, and want the rest of the world (aid agencies or governments or Haitians or the Earth’s crust) to do their bit and co-operate. If they do not there is a great tendency to lose control of the image. The colours immediately fade into each other, and we the public, lose interest. Of perhaps rather we retain the interest of a disappointed ‘punter’. We have paid our money, and yet the show, the show in which our goodness was seen ‘doing things’, and helping folk, failed to materialize. Where were the grateful souls? Where was the happiness we thought we had bought? In the absence of this tale of redemption, all our compassion evaporates into something increasingly approaching indifference. Who needs tales of endless suffering when there are bright things to watch on the television or internet?

  Our very compassion is then a demand (and is therefore framed  by the callousness). It is a demand which says that things ought to be different (and that others ought to acknowledge or be grateful for this difference which we think we have made). If then the world remains the same or remains itself indifferent, we ruin the canvas, or lose interest. It becomes merely a patchwork of smudged grey on which we inscribe another boring portrait of someone else’s failure of the lessons which they never seem to learn, and leave it at that. The suffering of thousand of voices is lost in the callousness we return to.

  The media of course enjoy the picture, perhaps more than most. Here is after all the confirmation of their apparent aim – to report a world in simple enough colours so we can all enjoy it. They are there then, from the start mixing the contrasts, sorting though the whites and blacks, and arranging the forms that are presented to us. They are either smudging away, or drawing lessons (which no one can learn). They are also the ones that really define the point at which the grey canvas takes over, at which the public ‘lose’ interest in it. They paint portraits, each operating as separate artists, many brilliant, many not so, but all fated to paint on the same canvas, with colours only of white or black. All caught then are in the same paradox, that the more they paint, the more the image actually fades. A rhythm into grey, across which a flicker into sometimes vivid contrast or poignant smudge occasionally strays. But the rhythm of this fading is very much the media’s show: They define when the portrait is done, and when we all ought to turn to other affairs. The trouble of course is that there is almost certainly a far darker reality behind this all too smudged image.