<underfire> KARUNA, Compassion/Com-passion/Sarah and Negar

[Sangita Gopal]

Thank you Sarah for raising a number of remarkable questions with
regard to compassion/com-passion - you are absolutely right - one can
never "feel" what it is like to be under attack when one is safe. The
related question that interests me is do two people in the same
situation - both of whose homes are under attack - feel for each
other? Is that "feeling for" - arising from a shared experience of
oppression - the basis of their collective identity or is it rather a
need for justice that unites them?


Given that justice always addresses a unitary subject - will the very
process of getting justice again individuate these two homeless
people, break apart that collectivity which issued the call for
justice? Justice tends to treat the collective as "one" - "the Iraqi
people" for eg. - thereby fixing permanently the contingent experience
that created the collective - the homes under attack - and that fixing
of identity that ensues from the vantage of those who enter the field
of justice evades and erases all other aspects of being - one may be
homeless NOW but one is far from destitute - it is the violence of
this erasure - whereby the totality of the being is forgotten in the
face of the single act of suffering - that I think Sarah alerts us to.

Sarah reminds us that feeling compassion for another creature because
it suffers might be absolutely the wrong way to approach the issue of
compassion - it only confirms privilege and evokes guilt. I think
Sarah's point about "photographed" images of suffering goes to Negar's
keen meditation on the limits of realism in capturing what it means to
live underfire - images of suffering that are "less real" (than
photographs) might block the operation of compassion and reduce the
space that opens up between the looker and the one looked at/the
feeler and the one felt for. What, I wonder, is the aesthetic register
of compassion. 

I will close by offering another articulation of compassion that I
found in Amitav Ghosh's novel "The Glass Palace" that goes to our
discussion. It is on page 210-11 in the Ravi Dayal edition.

Here Dolly has been nursing her very sick child Dinu. One night as she
steps away from his hospital bed, she sees the shrouded corpse of a
child - a boy of her son's age and not unlike him in build. She breaks
down and crys hysterically - overwhelmed by guilt and relief. 

"Again that night, she had not been able to sleep. She'd thought of
the child's body; she'd thought of what her life would would be like
in Dinu's absence; she'd thought of the dead boy's mother. She'd begun
to cry - it was as though her voice had merged with that of the
unknown woman; as though an invisible link had arisen between them all
- her, Dinu, the dead child, his mother. ......

She remembered a word he's often used - KARUNA - one of the Buddhas'
words, Pali for compassion, for the immanence of all living things in
each other, for the ATTRACTION of life for its likeness."

(capitalization not in original)

Sangita