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Coping in times of suffering
By Bill Maxwell, Associate Professor of Journalism at Stillman College
Taken from the The Tuscaloosa News, September 6, 2005
In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned in life: It goes on.
--Robert Frost
 How to respond to the devastation of Hurricane Katrina?
Our responses are individual and personal. No two of us respond the same, not in that hidden place that we share with no one else -- that well of experiences sustains us through our suffering. No one can legitimately tell another person that his response is good or bad. A person’s response is a manifestation of his worldview.
Many people turn to the Bible for understanding, while some turn to the arts. For still others, the tragedy is too painful, and they tune out altogether, turning off their televisions and radios and avoiding the newspapers.
Indeed, like millions of other Americans, I’m trying to apprehend the meaning of the grim images being televised around the clock from New Orleans and the  other Gulf Coast towns smashed by Katrina. I, too, am looking at the multitudes of dirty, tired, hungry, thirsty and scared evacuees being scattered throughout the nation. Pictures of sick and dying infants are the hardest for me to watch. But I watch anyway. And, of course, I am outraged to see so many black people being portrayed, correctly or not, as marauding animals. From the moment I saw the first pictures of the destruction, especially in New Orleans, I felt profound loss.
As the pictures continued to roll and as evidence of the suffering increased and broadened, I turned to the major source of my weltanschauung: literature and art. Watching scene after scene of desperate victims pleading for help or mourning the loss of a loved one, I saw real life imitating fiction. I thought of the works of Joseph Conrad, “Heart of Darkness," “Lord Jim," “Nigger of the Narcissus," “The Secret Sharer." Conrad’s protagonists and antagonists confront catastrophe after catastrophe, mostly violent storms at sea and the attacks of African tribesmen.
The men, often in isolation, endure so many onslaughts that their universe becomes one of absurdity. Conrad is testing their character under conditions of extreme physical duress and potential annihilation. They face moral dilemmas that lay bare their inner urges.
 Katrina’s victims are real people, of course. But like Conrad’s characters, they have endured extreme conditions to the point of absurdity. Their situation is rendered even more absurd by the 24-7 drone of journalists and the inanity of officials during press conferences.
I also think of Albert Camus, the reluctant existentialist, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1957. In his major works, Camus reveals the absurd. One critic writes that Camus presents “the plight of man and his need for clarity and rationality in confrontation with the unreasonable silence of the universe."
Camus’ vision is reflected in the real-life words of Kathy Bialochowski from Bay St. Louis, Miss. She spoke last Thursday to the Birmingham News as she and relatives bivouacked at the student recreation center at the University of Alabama: “We’ve got no home, no job, no nothing."
In the novel “The Plague," a city is dying of disease. Camus depicts heroic physicians and others doing their futile best in the grips of certain disaster. Recalling scenes from the novel, I think of the real doctor in a New Orleans hospital who said that he and his colleagues must let some terminally ill patients die as they attempt to save others who have a chance to survive.
The five-column photo on the front page of last Friday’s New York Times perfectly illustrates life imitating art. Above the fold, the photo shows a body floating by an overpass in downtown New Orleans. Standing on the trash-strewed overpass, as the body floats by, a woman feeds and waters a pit bull.
 The photo reminded me of Peter Breughel’s painting “Fall of Icarus" and W.H. Auden’s poem “Musee des Beaux Arts," which comments on the work. Icarus, son of Daedalus, is shown plunging into the ocean after he flies too close to the sun and his wax wings melt.
As Icarus drowns, the world around him goes about its business.
About Icarus’ personal tragedy, Auden writes that “everything turns away/Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may/Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,/But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone/As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green/Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen/Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,/had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on."
Again, during times of despair, some of us find comfort and meaning in art. Each of us must find our own way to cope. |
