CDL education. Part two.
- achromiec11
- Mar 22
- 10 min read
It happens
Along with unlimited access to the world via the global web and media, we have also been given an unlimited subscription to all its flashpoints, disasters, tragedies. We've seen snapshots of makeshift shelters, field hospitals and the rapid thrum of the militias of each new war. From a distance, many times so that we have them printed on retinas. All that's left to do is to wring our hands and ask ourselves the fundamental question - "where is this world going?" so that we can then calmly return to unpacking the dishwasher and planning the next day. After all, it's that simple, isn't it?
Humanitarian volunteers break out of this pattern in part by being that group which, far more often than not, comes close to human harm, less often viewing it from the safe distance of a screen. We stand between the apocalyptic narrative of the media, the vision of tables and facts that seem to contradict it, and our own experience, which may tell us that there is no point in deciding which view is closer to the truth, because each, individual case of harm is a tragedy. Sometimes we need to find a way to reconcile these horizons, perhaps to bring them closer together and find something in between. And along the way not to lose faith in what we are doing....
***
During the planning of this part of the column the character of Bill Pilgrim, almost forgotten by me now, appeared and disappeared between ideas. But it's hardly surprising to see such a tendency; after all, we're talking about someone who had the ability to 'fall out of time'.Pilgrim
This year will mark the fifty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Number Five. It's a novel that for many years featured on the American Library s infamous list of challenged itemsAssociation', which is most often indicative of the novel's high quality interior and at least decent form (see the censorship history of Lord of the Flies). About the plot, in a telegraphic nutshell: it depicts the fate of an American infantry regiment soldier, Bill Pilgrim, who, taken prisoner after the Ardennes landings, becomes a witness to the bombing of Dresden. The experience of the Great War takes its toll on his later life, parts of which, despite his strenuous attempts, always fall apart in silent defiance and reveal their darkest face. Through coincidence and chance acquaintance, however, discovers a passage to a magical realm - Pilgrim Tralfalmadoria - where creatures live who are able to look at their lives outside of time, in any order, selecting only the most interesting bits. In time, Bill discovers that he too has possessed a similar ability and begins to fall outside , escaping intoof time the warmest of memories, strenuously skipping the time of war. And all this to cope with trauma, the pain of loss and remorse.
Probably the most famous quote from this novel is the phrase 'It happens', repeated like a major motif in Ravel's Bolero. In this hilarious and somewhat ironic way, Pilgrim comments on most of the tragic events he has to watch while operating in Europe, or witnessing the slow disintegration of his life after the end of the war. Vonnegut draws before us a picture of a soldier who stops to rebel against reality. When he is taken prisoner - it happens. When a friend is wounded - it happens. When he sees a city in flames and a crowd running around like ants - no big deal, these things happen too, after all.
Tales of tragedies from distant worlds, outside our neighbourhood. We know these quite well, don't we? We participate in them ourselves.
I am sometimes reminded of 'Slaughterhouse' when I peruse the news services in my spare time. It is hard to shake the impression that the apocalypse narrative has become a permanent part of the language of journalism. It is even harder to blame anyone for this. Following another association, and using excerpts from , we can conclude that appealing to the primal survival instinct by picking up threats from the environment is a good tactic to get the reader's attention. You can marvel at a beautiful sunset, but what you need to notice in order to see the next sunrise too is a venomous snake in your path. Playing on a sense of threat is a method that is simple, works flawlessly and doesn't age despite the passage of years.Hans 'Roslings Factfulness
The relentless wave of catastrophes that lightly waterlogs us every time we try to find out what's going on beyond the wicket of our plot is the culprit behind another menacing phenomenon. I think it can be workingly termed 'harm fatigue' and probably everyone, (nomen omen) intuitively will know what we are talking about. We listen anxiously to reports of potential epidemic waves in distant countries. We may pause for a moment when, on the television screen, great water begins to engulf more houses. Hurricanes, Polish firefighters sent to help burning forests in one of those countries whose name we know better than the geographical location. "That's terrible" - thoughts fly through our head, and the mind only spits out this one, not very meaningful sentence. Immediately afterwards, fingers slide across the display to reveal more layers of human misery, with a new batch of in betweenmemes. Everyday life.
Have we become immune to excess? Caparros, in his almanac on famine[i] and its consequences, described the passivity of the wider 'West' to tragedies as 'a collective madness in which we all participate and acquiesce'. Perhaps the author is much right, or perhaps our indifference is just a pathological form of adaptation to the way problems are presented to us?
When we are surrounded by too much evil, our senses start to dull. We become deaf and see a little less. We become limp within ourselves. This is one of the fairly well-researched effects of the global experiment in which we are all participating. The miniaturisation of technology and forms of expression has also been followed by a miniaturisation of the ability to focus. In order to break down the barrier and make us pay attention, problems must grow in proportion to the thickness of the shield with which we separate ourselves from ubiquitous excess. The balloon is inflating, and the question is where the limit of our endurance lies, beyond which we reach for an escape into comfortable helplessness. Because suffering doesn't ennoble at all, and as one of the most famous rock bands from central sangPoland , "Through suffering you don't become as beautiful as you would like, you become bitter and happy less."[ii] How do we try to cope and drown out the conscience that tells us that something has to be done, that we can't leave it at that? Escape.
Sometimes we ask ourselves - Wouldn't it sometimes be easier for us to "get beyond this terrible time"? Sometimes we run away.
Can we be blamed for this, since such cowardice represents an attempt to save our own peace and happiness? We are more and more willing to reach for the emergency exit, because how can we change the world for the better when small and large screens are boiling over with problems so that the foam is already pouring out from under the pot lid? Humour, sarcasm, cool indifference and mockery - that's pretty good protection. O! Another war. Maybe these things just happen?
The world descends into tears
According to the critics of Slaughterhouse Number Five, it was not visions of an alien Tralfalmadoria or time travel that proved most unrealistic in the novel, but the description of the bombing of Dresden. This event, widely discussed by historians, was relegated to the realm of fantasy in the text, which was pointed out to Vonnegut as an attempt to distort history from the perspective of an American writer. The horror of the wall of fire and the careful leaning over the sea of corpses was missing. Instead, the novel reads: "[...] there is a silence that is broken only by birds. And what do the birds say? What can be said about the massacre. 'It-it?'" [iii]
I read the criticisms contained in excerpts from old interviews and imagine the moody hair on the heads of people who know by heart the sound of bombs falling in the neighbourhood. Up close.
So much? Just that much, Mr Vonnegut? We expected something more from someone who was a prisoner of war held in Dresden in 1945 and saw Allied bombers. After all, you saw, you hid in an old slaughterhouse temporarily making a syrup depot and felt the heat of the burning city.
'It-it'
It is hard to shake off the impression that the man himself deliberately did not comment on these accusations, considering that his critics simply did not understand "Slaughterhouse". Yes, the story is ludicrous at times and is a caricatured tale, at times sparingly described. In the words of the author, who seems to paraphrase what he wanted to put in the song of his paper birds - "a short and messed-up book, because it is impossible to say anything intelligent about a massacre".
We, however, like to make sense almost as much as we like tragedies to be talked about in monumental terms. The descriptions are meant to terrify, the numbers to support the enormity, the headlines to shock, and the whole to build a mood of menace. At this point it is worth returning to the aforementioned Factfulness, in which Rosling shows the truth about the mechanisms of creating contemporary mass media. In chapter five, she focuses on the pillars on which the practical use of our fear instincts and tendency to exaggerate is based. She gives examples. There is a good chance that the headline '4.2 million dead children' will catch our attention (What a monstrous number! And on top of that, children!). Very well, if this is the case, it may indicate that we are not yet crazy. However, Rosling points out the flaws and negligence of a media that uses such language, and cites the facts as a light at the end of the tunnel that can help us be optimistic about the future. Because the facts are these... The number of children who die before reaching the age of one is declining exponentially (with each subsequent year proving to be a record low [1950 - 14.4 million, 2014 - 4.5million, 2016 - 4.2million]. The numbers of victims of terrorist attacks worldwide, deaths in land transport accidents, epidemics, people living in extreme poverty (see: people under the $1 a day limit), or victims of warfare are also statistically decreasing.[iv] Does this affect the amount of dramatic news we encounter? One might venture to say yes, although the trend is rather inversely proportional.
My pain is the same as yours
One has to agree with Rosling, he has irrefutable data to support his theories. I must admit that after reading his book I felt better for a moment. I was able to look with a more sober eye at the picture of the world drawn before me by the media and newspapers, and perhaps I gained a substitute for the legendary 'objectivity'. Numbers gave it to me. After all, it was the author himself who promised to reveal "Why is the world better than I think?" and with the help of numbers, appealing to the tighter part of my mind, he actually succeeded. I thought about this for a long time until I stumbled upon the 1972 film adaptation of Slaughterhouse and Bill with RoslingPilgrim once again 'dropped into my time, the year 2024'. Through his behaviour, expressions and memories, Vonnegut shows us that there is no way to compare small and large tragedy, and that the reaction to the burning down of the whole of Dresden and the death of a friend must be the same, otherwise it would only constitute a false representation. Perhaps we have a hard time coming to terms with this, we have something of the "Madness of Cataloguing" that Eco wrote about, we need to gradate so as not to go crazy, and above all we feel the need to give everything a sense, a sequence and a purpose. This, by the way, is noted in a rather hilarious way by Vonnegut himself, through his strangers, the Tralfamadorians. One of them repeats: "Earthlings are great specialists in explanation. [...] And Earth is the only planet where something like free will is mentioned."[v]
It is very difficult for us to accept that in the best of all possible worlds there are still Dresden, pandemics, and car explosions with volunteers inside. Casparros can rightly reproach us for our indifference to hunger, and in spite of the white letters from Westerplatte [vi]war we have in abundance. Because sure, we can say that things are getting better, but sometimes that is not enough. There are still no answers as to why it is not good and when it will finally be. As I write these words, a lost photo from the past flashes before my eyes, with a mural whose content read more or less - "It's supposed to be great, from Monday at the latest".
We all want this - yet it will not happen. Because 4.2 million is a lot, and the severalfold decrease in the number of victims of epidemics and warfare since the middle of the last century still does not obviate the need to create and maintain humanitarian organisations. A world of declining numbers of deaths of women in childbirth and victims of natural disasters needs NGO funding and, above all, volunteers who can understand suffering and try to cope with it.
What can be done to 'make things better at last', please? Because it probably hasn't been this bad before.
I don't know.
I think the wisest thing to do is to refrain from giving any advice. Advice on how to explain to ourselves that volunteering is necessary, that suffering will arise and flood us, and that we must not drown in indifference. Any attempt to philosophise on the subject seems to fall into ridiculousness, because, after all, it is hard to say anything intelligent about the existence of human harm. Let us leave long arguments and strong words to the media, and let Dresden meanwhile bask in silence. Maybe, just maybe, let's try to keep calm and "not fall out of time somewhere", not lose our sensitivity in trying to grapple with this somewhat blacker face of the world. Because I guess that's what happened to poor Bill Pilgrim before he left Earth for good?
And how did Kurt Vonnegut's story end? He is one good example of the type of artist I am workingly calling FLLF (Forgotten living, living forever). He considered himself an underrated writer and was probably, in part, right. "Slaughterhouse" or "Cat's Cradle" were noticed very late, and it was only after his death that they lived to see reprints, interest from a mass readership. Perhaps it was destiny's will? ...
In the last years of his life, Vonnegut did not shy away from alcohol and fell increasingly into nihilism. During one of his walks with his dog on the streets of New York, he accidentally became entangled in the leash, lost his balance and hit his head on the pavement.
It-it?
An unpleasant, completely unnecessary accident that could easily have been prevented. Some mischievous person might say: 'It happens'. The media would probably write about the great tragedy the next day. I will simply leave this information alone here, without further comment.
[i][i] "Hunger" by Martin Caparros, published by Wydawnictwo Literackie
[ii] Source: song "Will to exist", performer: "Coma", album "Hypertrophy" 2008
[iii] Source: 'Slaughterhouse Number Five', published by Zysk i S-ka, Poznań 2018; transl. Lech Jęczmyk
[iv] For exact data and statistical sources, I refer you to 'Factfulness', Hans Rosling, published by Media Rodzina 2018
[v] Source: 'Slaughterhouse Number Five', published by Zysk i S-ka, Poznań 2018; transl. Lech Jęczmyk
[vi] See the "No more war" memorial from Westerplatte
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