The Horror of Not Caring
I was in Chicago last weekend for a Comic-Con event promoting Tananarive’s HORROR NOIRE video for the Shudder network (presentation went great, by the way!) and had a chance to go to breakfast with my friend “Mike”. Mike had PM’d me a few weeks ago saying that he had some serious life issues that were kicking his guts in, and I was happy to be a part of his resource circle, reminding him to exhale for sixty seconds every three hours, which breaks the stress circle and aims you back at your resources.
He was definitely doing better, but when discussing the situation still displayed real stress responses in facial tightening, hands gripping the wheel, changes in tones of voice. He was still stewing in his juices, no question.
But as we pulled into the parking lot of the restaurant he saw something I didn’t: a homeless man convulsing and falling to the sidewalk. Mike circled through the lot, parked on the street, and headed over INSTANTLY. He called 911 and ordered an ambulance He’s worked in EMT so he cleared the airway, rolled him onto his side, and supported him with infinite gentleness, bringing him back to the world with soft questions until he started responding. Slowly, slowly…from totally “out of it” to slowly realizing that he had found himself in the hands of people who care.
Other pedestrians headed over. “I’m a nurse!” one man said. “I’m training as a medical tech” said another. We could hear the ambulances in the background, growing closer, and an ambulance, a fire truck, and a police car arrived, taking over and moving us back. With great professionalism strapped him onto an elevator gurney, onto the ambulance, scooped up his bag of meager possessions and flowed away.
This is the way it is supposed to work.
I noticed that during all of this, Mike had been in total control, and despite the terrible circumstances, and despite his personal pain…he was in flow state, focused on another human being’s needs. Someone he did not know. Someone he would never see again. The center of a flash crowd of concerned Chicagoans who came together and then disbursed, momentarily connected by the needs of a homeless man, momentarily become a tribe, then flowing back to their lives, like antibodies or white blood cells converging on a pathogen: the pain, or disease, or injury that had hurt a fellow human being.
And for that time, Mike’s personal problems were forgotten. And as we ate breakfast I saw how relaxed he was, how centered. THIS was my friend, the huge, dangerous, gentle man I knew. I reminded him of how he had been out on the street. WHO he had been for those moments.
“THAT is who you are, Mike,” I said, so proud of him. That is who WE are when we take our attention off our squabbles and trials, and remember that we are part of a social fabric.
There is nothing wrong with selfishness. We are all selfish. The only difference is that some people define “self” as ending at their skin, and some do not. Some extend it to at least one other human being, others to their family or community, some to the human world, some to all life, and some to the planet itself.
One soul, looking out through many eyes.
When we get this right, life is wonderful. Get it wrong…and you have the origin of most of the human horrors in the news, or celebrated in creep shows like “US.” Want to create horror? Break this empathy between individuals, or groups, and watch the pathology spread. How many horror films or books would exist if the characters:
- Loved themselves
- Extended their humanity to others.
Ummm…almost none? HORROR NOIRE is about the horror that arose from the African diaspora, its history and children. As such, it has a social flavor, even if not concerned directly with racism, it deals with the core questions of humanity and the “who am !?”, and what happens when others control your existential identity for their own benefit. Horror. It is redefining “self’ to reclaim the soul…and the consequences of being corrupted within your own mind…or in your capacity to love, or share, or grow, or learn. Damage the root, and the tree cannot grow straight.
When Tananarive taught her Black Horror class at UCLA, what she was really doing was drilling down into how one community, one slice of the human pie has been depicted in cinema, and how they have reacted over the 20th Century to dehumanization, tracing the actual healing and growing. The implications grew FAR beyond that single community, because the trials and tribulations of human beings are universal, even if they vary in intensity and emphasis. This is why we created the online version of the course (www.sunkenplaceclass.com) so that our pain and the ways we’ve learned to cope with it and express it becomes part of the human tapestry.
We are at our best, our very best, when we care about each other. We lose ourselves when we forget we are all connected. This is the value of art: the “craft” is just mastering the language of the discipline. The “art” is having the courage to let your soul shine through. Remove fear, and all that remains is love.
Namaste
Steve