Why Everything Turns Away
We happened to catch a sobering episode of Poetry in America on PBS this weekend. This one was titled after W.H. Auden’s poem “Musée des Beaux Arts,” which the website describes as a “World War II-era reflection on suffering.” The title derives from the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique in Brussels, which houses, among other Early Netherlandish masterpieces, paintings by Peter Bruegel. One of these is the Landscape with the Fall of Icarus shown here.
In the hour discussion, former UN ambassador Samantha Powers, journalist David Brooks, and poet Peter Sacks examine the poem, the painting, and “how ordinary people regard, and respond to, suffering they have not caused.” They conclude, as Auden had, that “everything [and most people] turns away…from the disaster.” As you can see in the painting, Icarus has flown too close to the sun, tumbled from the heavens, and now sinks beneath the waves with just his flailing legs visible. Auden describes the reactions of those nearby when the tragedy occurred. The ploughman “may have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, but for him it was not an important failure.” And “the expensive delicate ship…must have seen something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky” but “had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.”
Auden, Powers, Brooks, and Sacks all mention how tragic events that happen far from us (Syria, Yemen, Myanmar, North Korea, the US/Mexico border, you pick one) may evoke sympathy and empathy for a moment, but it fades quickly and life goes on. As Auden damningly captures it, “the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse scratches its innocent behind on a tree.” The commentators also understand that this, for most, is not callousness but a defense mechanism. That we distance or insulate ourselves emotionally from such events to keep them from overwhelming us with feelings of helplessness and hopelessness.
Psychology Today depicts this defense visually with a cartoon of an ostrich and a man side by side with their heads stuck in the sand. The attendant article, titled “The Essential Guide to Defense Mechanisms,” lists nine ways we shield ourselves from feelings like anxiety, guilt, and shame: denial, repression, regression, displacement, projection, reaction formation, intellectualization, rationalization, and sublimation. The author, Susan Krauss Whitbourne, describes the characteristics of each one succinctly. In short form, these are all types of “self-deception.” She advises that “people who use these defense mechanisms more often than the others tend to experience better family relationships and work lives.” Well, that’s some comfort, I guess. The alternative is to turn off the news, shut down our social media, throw our smartphones away, and go live in a cave in Tibet somewhere.
Auden is not as forgiving as Whitbourne. In his view, to quote the full line, “everything turns away quite leisurely from the disaster” [emphasis mine]. In my experience, that isn’t usually the case. Let’s hope it doesn’t become so.
(Published originally on RatBlurt™, July 3, 2018.)
