I’ve been watching the coverage of the Chilean miners being rescued and it’s made me ponder something. I don’t think I’m the only person who has felt torn while watching this. I’m very glad to know they are being rescued. I’m glad that in 2010, 33 men’s lives matter enough to bring together the funding, engineering and global concern that this disaster has engendered.
However, I watched footage of the 6th miner being hauled up. The close-up of his wife, scared into stone, not breathing, waiting, their reunion, and I thought…. fuck, where is our shame? This is private emotion. Her stricken face shouldn’t be beamed all over the world for our entertainment / vicarious thrill / schadenfreude. What she is feeling is private, and no visualised mediation of it is going to come close to communicating the reality of her experience.
But more than that, that footage tricks us, as humans, into feeling we are sharing something with that woman. It short-circuits our natural ability to imagine how she feels. We don’t have to exercise that integral part of real compassion – imagining yourself in someone else’s shoes – because we’re seeing the PICTURES LIVE AS IT OCCURS.
Our ability to be empathetic and compassionate is directly linked to our ability to imagine not just image, or sound, or taste or touch, but deeply felt emotion. I think – I fear – that this sort of exploitative coverage actually stunts those imagination muscles. I think it’s damaging us.
And you’re probably rolling your eyes and thinking: what the hell has this to do with erotic fiction? Well, it’s actually pretty simple. I believe that words alone force us to use our imagination muscle more. And I think that not writing EVERYTHING is also important. We are feeling, empathetic beings. Writers need to keep that in mind when they write and not over-write. To take a chance and over-estimate your reader’s ability to get it.
Yup. That’s my thought for the day. Now I’m going to take away my little imagination and imagine what that first night in bed with a wife you haven’t seen in 2 months feels like.
Leave a Reply