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may have heard that the CBS television network is planning a documentary
program about the destruction of the World Trade Center. The program
is scheduled to be shown on March 10th. Controversy is stirring.
The head of an advisory board for the victim's families has written
to CBS, asking that they not show any graphic footage of death and
mayhem.
I don't envy
the producers of that show. Whichever way they go with this, they
will take criticism. There is a case for being graphic, and there
is a case for being discreet. To put the cases in nutshells:
· Graphic
— Let people know the horrible thing that was done to this
nation, to this nation's people, so that they can better understand
why we need to respond to this atrocity with major, sustained force.
Shielding people from the full horror just makes abstract arguments
against this war more digestible. Seeing the full horror will make
people angry; and anger is what we need at this point.
· Discreet
— Adults know that the WTC victims died in horrible ways, and
can imagine the details for themselves if they feel inclined to
do so. Let those who died be left with their dignity intact, and
let those who loved them be left with the memory of whole, living,
smiling human beings. Don't cater to ghouls. If vengeance and punishment
are on the agenda, let them be done with cold determination, not
in the heat of rage.
You can decide
for yourself which way you, personally, want to go on this. I myself
lean towards the graphic representation of those terrible events.
I believe I can justify this attitude on general grounds, but first
I want to tell a story. It's a true story, that happened to me many
years ago, when I was a student in England.
I was exceedingly poor at the time, living in a rented room on the
third floor of an old Victorian house in a seedy district of Liverpool,
which is a port city in the northwest of England. Being a port city,
Liverpool had a lot of immigrants. To make a bit of extra money,
I gave private English lessons to some of these people. That's what
I was doing one Sunday morning, going over irregular verbs with
a Chinese immigrant in my room.
The first floor
of the house was let as an apartment to two male students from the
university. The house also had a basement, an unlit, unheated, smelly
place full of rotting junk and infested with mice. We stored coal
in the basement. The house's only heating was from coal fires in
open fireplaces in the rooms. A coal truck would come by every so
often and tip a load of coal through one of the basement windows.
We'd trek down to the basement with flashlights and buckets and
bring up what coal we needed. I tell you, La bohème
had nothing on my student days.
Well, there
I was slogging through English grammar with Mr. Tsang (for some
reason, I still remember his name), when suddenly there was a terrible
sound from down below. There is no way to describe that sound except
in clichés, for which I apologize. It was like a banshee.
It made my blood run cold. It made the hair stand up on the back
of my neck. And it was coming up the stairs. Poor Mr. Tsang
was even more scared than I was. I can still see his face: a mask
of terror. (I am really sorry about these clichés.)
My busy, structured, ordinary little Sunday morning had turned into
an M. R. James story.
What had happened
was that one of the two lads on the first floor had gone down into
the basement to fetch coal. While he was filling his bucket, he
had happened to glance into a dark alcove off at one side. There
he had seen the other boy, the one he shared the first floor with,
hanging from a pipe against the wall. The poor fellow had committed
suicide during the night.
I was the only
responsible person in the house. The rooms on the second floor were
occupied by a West Indian sailor and his family. The sailor was
at sea, and his wife was consoling herself in his absence with an
assortment of mind-altering drugs, interrupting her stupor occasionally
to scream at her children, who were in process of going feral. The
other rooms were empty, or occupied by people we never saw. The
poor lad doing the banshee noises had headed instinctively up to
my room. I let him in and got the essential details from him. I
went down to the basement with my flashlight. There was poor Jerry
(not his real name), hanging in the darkest corner he could find.
I called the
police. In the fullness of time, two officers arrived. Liverpool
is a rough town, and after a couple of years on the force, a cop
has seen pretty much everything. I took them down to the basement.
They shone their flashlights on poor Jerry. "Well," said
one of the officers, "he wasn't kidding, was he?"
(I didn't get this remark at the time. Someone later explained to
me that attempted suicide, of the "cry for help" variety,
is much more common than actual suicide, and most of the suicide
calls that cops get are only attempts, of various degrees of sincerity.)
Some police
conversations then took place on walkie-talkies. The upshot of them
was, that we should cut Jerry down and lay him on the floor. The
senior policeman produced a large Swiss army knife. "I'll cut
the rope," he said (it was actually the draw-string of a dressing-gown),
"Youse fellas just bring him down nicely and lay him over there."
So myself and the junior officer each took one side of Jerry, brought
him down, and laid him on the filthy floor of the basement. I had
never, up to that point, grasped the full meaning of the word "stiff,"
as applied to corpses. Jerry was as stiff as a plank. Also icy cold
(this was January).
Various things
followed. More police arrived, and a doctor to certify death. The
roommate had fallen asleep in my room, and slept through to evening.
(A peculiar reaction, I have always thought; but in situations like
this, everything is peculiar, all normal rules suspended.)
A van came and took Jerry away. Mr. Tsang, a superstitious man,
refused to come to the house any more, and found someone else to
give him English lessons. The West Indian sailor, when back ashore
a few days later, proved to be even more superstitious. He would
not even enter our street, but sent shipmates round to evacuate
his wife and belongings. There was an inquest at which I gave evidence.
Jerry's parents, horribly smitten with grief, spoke angrily to me,
seeming to feel I should have prevented the suicide somehow. In
fact I had hardly known the boy. I never did find out why he killed
himself. There was no love interest that anyone knew of. He was
a decently good student, and in fact something of a star athlete
on the university track team. Perhaps someone solved the mystery,
but I never did.
Now, here's
the main point. Some time after this, I got dumped by a girl I'd
been seeing, a girl I liked quite desperately. She was in another
town at the time, for reasons not relevant, and dumped me by mail.
She did it as nicely as it can be done; but I'm afraid I did not
take the rejection easily. I was, in fact, spitting furious. I tried
writing back to her — angry, bitter, insulting letters. Sensibly,
I did not send them. At last, having reached some sort of plateau
of rage and self-pity, I sat down and consoled myself with a beer
and a cigarette. (I am an ex-smoker.)
At this point
I somehow got to thinking of Jerry. I remembered how he'd looked
and felt; how his parents had looked at the inquest; how the cops
had reacted, and the many worse things they must have seen. Soon,
with these thoughts, and the beer, and the nicotine, and perhaps
some music I was playing — I don't recall the details —
I slipped into a state of mind I can barely describe, whose main
characteristic was a tremendous, all-encompassing pity. I
saw clearly the smallness and fragility of human life, its brevity
and insignificance, its unity with uncaring Nature, the terrible
loneliness of the human soul, trapped in its little forked bag of
fluids, squawking pitifully into the wind. I thought of the lines
from the burial service: "Man that is born of a woman hath
but a short time to live, and is full of misery. He cometh up, and
is cut down, like a flower..."
I wouldn't
call it a religious experience. I think I'm probably too self-centered
to have a religious experience. Certainly I was aware of myself
and my surroundings the whole time. Still, when I hear people of
deep religious faith talking — when I hear the Dalai Lama,
for example, speaking about "compassion for all sentient beings"
— I understand perfectly what they are talking about. While
the mood was on me, I did the right thing: I wrote a gracious and
friendly letter to the girl, a letter to be proud of, a gentlemanly
letter, wishing her well.
Jerry's
is the only corpse I have ever been up close and intimate with.
Most of us, in this time and place, are well insulated from the
reality of death. This is, taking the historical long view, an unnatural
state of affairs. Our ancestors knew death very well, and saw it
frequently, up close and personal. For most of the long millennia
in which the human personality formed, death was an everyday companion.
It would be hard to argue that people were improved by the experience:
those long ages were full of cruelty and inhumanity. In London well
into the 19th century, and on the American frontier much later,
public executions were a popular spectacle — people took picnic
lunches. Wars were fought with grim ferocity; "compassion for
all sentient beings" was not in noticeably more plentiful supply
in 1802, or 1702, or 1602 than it is in 2002.
And yet I have
no doubt at all that I am a better person for my own short encounter
with death. I often think of Jerry, and the way he looked, and the
way he felt; and when I think those thoughts, they lead me to think
more clearly about human life in general — mine and others.
I believe there is an instinct in all of us to want to acquaint
ourselves with death from time to time, to look it in the face,
to stare it down. A dead body is a disgusting thing, to greater
or lesser degree depending on the circumstances of death, but it
is also, and much more, something else, when you are up close to
it: It is pathetic. We know this in our minds, but we have
an urge to see it, to experience it: that's why we
slow down to check out an accident on the expressway, half-hoping
(come on, admit it) to see something grisly. And when we do see
such a thing, we feel overwhelming pity — one of the
two components of tragic drama, according to Aristotle. (The other
being fear.)
I don't use
the word "ghoul" myself. When people rubberneck at an
accident site, I think they are doing a natural and instinctual
thing, a thing which, if consummated, will improve them in some
measure. I feel sorry for the relatives of the 9/11 victims, and
I understand that the public display of the bodies of those they
once loved is an indignity. I believe, however, that showing the
awful truth of what happened — with, of course, some sensible
editing for the sake of decency — will outweigh that indignity,
and be a general public benefit. Let us know what was done to us,
in more detail than we have so far been shown. Then, when we set
out to do what we need to do to our enemies, let's do it not in
a spirit of whooping blood lust, but coldly and grimly, in full
knowledge, full understanding, of what it means to cut short a human
life, to turn smiles and kisses and laughter into the stiff pale
grimace of death.
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