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Tag: empathy

On Seeing and Paint Peeling

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A few months ago while applying makeup in front of a curved mirror in my family’s home, I noticed a cloudy spot on my right cornea. My usual hazel-green beneath had morphed to milky, and in my usual medical panic, I searched for answers: had I punctured it with my fingernail when wiping sleep from my eyes? Was it evidence of a more serious condition? Had it always been there, and I’d not noticed it until now? The scope of possibilities—of imaginative possibilities—loomed. I saw an opthamologist, who told me it was “benign as it could be,” even if it was evidence of early macular degeneration. Until then, I lived in the space of stories I’d spun for myself. Each narrative was self-controlled: I told them, and I listened in turn.

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The cover image of anthropologist and writer Ruth Behar’s book The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology that Breaks Your Heart is a photograph of a mural on Miami’s Calle Ocho. The image is perfect for the book, she explained earlier this week in a lecture at the Center for Documentary Studies. It is of a face, perhaps that of a woman, and half of it—the paint, but also the flesh—is peeling. The scrape ranges from the corner of the mouth to the eyeball above. It almost encroaches on the pupil.

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Ruth Behar’s The Vulnerable Observer. Image courtesy of Amazon.

It made sense for Behar to reference her book—indeed, the talk (“Ruth Behar and The Vulnerable Observer: After Twenty Years, What Next?”) was specifically about her book, and its evolution in the cultural imaginary since its publication 20 years ago. How does her discourse in Vulnerable Observer—which blends personal essay and ethnography to advocate for a more humanistic anthropology—apply now, given the changing nature of the academy, of the media, of storytelling? Does ethnography still matter? What do we do with the ubiquity of documentation? What do we do with the archives we’re overproducing through our apps, our phones, our computers?

Behar did answer, or tilt toward answering, each of these questions. But perhaps, at one point, before she wrote this lecture, these questions bewildered her—as they bewilder me. Maybe these questions thrummed when her vision field became sprinkled with bright lights during a recent drive. This episode was woven into her lecture. The episode reminded her of her youth—of experiencing migraines vis-à-vis visual “auras.”

So she, like me, went to the doctor. Her current state of bright blinking was diagnosed as retina detachment. It made her anxious. She visited Florida, where she slept by the sea, and suddenly the vastness of the ocean terrified her. She visited an aunt with late-stage macular degeneration. Their ailments found and fondled each other. Behar’s aunt recognized Behar’s pain as she recognized her own—stories openly and evenly told, and received.

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Stories—or the blanket concept of story—feels very much in vogue right now. Podcast popularity is suddenly reeling; live storytelling series, such as The Moth and The Monti, are well-attended; new multimedia templates unfold online each week, advertising their features as additive, even formative, bits for our brewing narratives. Just this week, the Franklin Humanities Institute unveiled Story Lab. Stories are sexy, or maybe the feeling they evoke is—in other words, it is now enough to shout “story!” and people will listen.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, if people will truly listen. Listening is the ugly work: it feels invisible; it’s highly personal; it requires the investment of (deep) time and (deep) energy. As Leslie Jamison writes, It’s made of exertion—that dowdier cousin of impulse. Can we imagine a “Listening Lab” at Duke? Perhaps— though I think it would shroud itself in other language, dilute its visibility, become something else.

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Ruth Behar at CDS this past week. The image onscreen was drawn by a friend in reference to Behar’s ethnographic work in Mexico (Behar is pictured on the right).

And maybe this, too, is not a bad thing. But how do those “something elses” connect? How can we make listening, as empathetic stance, more visible? Can, and should, it be branded? Can its diverse models be celebrated without being prescribed?

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In introducing Ruth Behar, Alex Harris—CDS co-founder, professor, and photographer—described Behar’s ethnographic stance as a paradigm for how to become someone we want to tell stories to. I scribbled this down in my notebook, and underneath it I wrote: How do we become.

When we adjourned to Behar’s reception, I fell in step with an older woman. We walked upstairs into the pre-storm humid breeze, and she remarked that she’d seen me nodding often during the lecture. “Yes,” I said. “I’m trying to become both a writer and a scholar. I haven’t read Behar’s work, but this talk was very affirming for me.”

I wish I had gone on to ask her what she thought of the lecture, but I was caught up in the warm buffer of Behar’s words and the promise of cheese cubes and cauliflower. I left that talk feeling like I could do anything and be anyone. I ate alone and walked off into the dark, conjuring my future story, imagining the permission I would give myself to live it.

When, in the practice of everyday living, these permissions—small, large, sometimes tentative, sometimes exuberant—are given regularly. They must be handled with care, for they are the giving and receiving of stories; they are acts of entrustment; they are, as Behar said, part of “a history of our shared mortality.”

How do we become someone others want to tell stories to? We demonstrate our capacity for listening. We sharpen our ability to see beyond our typical line of vision. We exercise presence even as the paint is peeling.

—MD

“Empathic Unsettlement”

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This week I’m thinking back to the Insider interview with Kari Barclay and Erin Leyson, two undergraduate students involved in last year’s multimedia art project #Migrations (led by Kenan’s first Graduate Arts Fellow, Caitlin Margaret Kelly). The piece they created brought together different live Twitter feeds clustered around terms—both ‘neutral’ and non—related to migration and immigration. I asked the two students to articulate their thinking about the relationship between art and policy in light of their work on #Migrations.

EL: I think the point with our project is that we weren’t really making a point. We’re giving everyone the tools they need to make their own point. That’s difficult for me, coming from a public policy background where everything is very pointed. We could easily push an agenda, [but] we don’t really want to do that. We want people to be able to come into the space, look at things, and think about it…

KB: Some things exist outside the realm of the political or the realm of what policy can affect or change. The language that we use around migration is very much an everyday occurrence. It’s not something you really can legislate. Policy is more informal and it comes through experiences.

We want people to be able to come into the space, look at things, and think about it. Last week, Kenan hosted author Leslie Jamison, who writes gymnastically about empathy. Two days ago I sat it on the final group meeting for the Humanities Writ Large/Bass Connections project “The Language of Genocide and Human Rights.” Nora Nunn, a first-year doctoral student in the English department, gave a presentation that situated trauma in post-genocide Rwandan cinema. Last night I screened the 2006 musical film Once, about an Irish singer-songwriter and Czech pianist who meet, make music, and fall in love in Dublin. My first thought when enumerating this series of events is, when will I next hold a position that enables me to come in contact with such a swath of people, materials, and ideas? My next thought, a two-pronged one, is, do, and how do, these different things connect? This is a question I imagine is on people’s minds when they ask me what I do in my position at Kenan, as they did as I bobbed between bar tables at the reception following Jamison’s public reading last week.

Much of Nora’s presentation revolved around the idea of “empathic unsettlement,” discussed by historian Dominick LaCapra in Writing History, Writing Trauma. Empathic unsettlement, LaCapra writes, “poses a barrier to closure in discourse…from which we attempt to derive reassurance or a benefit.” Nora applied empathic unsettlement to different examples of films about genocide, highlighting the dominance of ‘harmonizing narratives’—often Western-produced, unambiguously hopeful stories of spiritual uplift following a violent or traumatic event. In either smoothing over such events or focusing on singular stories of traditional ‘success’ or overcoming, these narratives exclude all else. They negate space for questions, confusion, and alternative stories. Nora’s research was more interested in works, such as the films Matiere Gris (Grey Matter) and Munyurangabo, that compose narrative through conflicting narratives—flashbacks, fragmented dream-sequences, documentary realism—and thus give us, as viewers, something more complex to wrap our heads around.

Importantly, this complexity doesn’t come in policy-memo form, assuring us that genocide won’t happen again. This complexity—like the complexity of empathy—is taken instead, as Kari alludes, as everyday, as a natural occurrence, which we must in turn work to excavate.

I was faced with a challenge to perform such excavation on Tuesday, as I composed opening remarks for the screening of Once. I felt I needed to justify the film’s inclusion in a series related to music, ethics, and identity; since Once is a musical film, and a romance at that, it carries an air of immunity to critique or analysis. Yet its plot and style refuse easy categorization or unequivocal uplift; its two central characters, who meet and make art together, make difficult choices in order to honor their obligations to others. They are grounded in a realism, and a reality, of Ireland in the mid-aughts: one teetering between the demise of the Celtic Tiger and the imminent economic collapse that coincided with the global Great Recession. They are immigrants and nationals, and carry those complicated ties, and choose to make art—to make, in effect, an ethics of “making it” in the first place. This is the space they forge and the infrastructure for the points they make. This is the space which we enter, as viewers, singing along but asking our own questions along the way.

—MD

#JamisonDuke

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The Leslie Jamison Do Lunch.

Author Leslie Jamison’s visit to Duke as the second Kenan-CDS Visiting Writer in Ethics, Society, and Documentary Art was a two-day whirlwind that engaged undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, staff, and Triangle community members. Taken on face value, this description would suit just about any campus residency involving a high-profile practitioner, artist, or scholar. But this one felt singular, in a way; as a professor and mentor of mine said, Jamison’s visit, which centered on her much-awarded, lauded, and widely read essay collection The Empathy Exams, “touche[d] so many needs and nerves across campus.” I think this was due, in part, to the issue at the heart of her work—empathy—which prompts (and prompted) such wide-ranging micro and macro reverberations.

A Team Kenan Do Lunch on Wednesday brought Jamison and 20+ students together to explore questions surrounding the anxiety of expertise in storytelling, gender and writing, and the challenges of crafting a healthy relationship between creative work and everyday living. Staff book club, which convened on Thursday morning with Kenan and Center for Documentary Studies staff members, prompted a lively conversation about the metrics of empathy—When do we give? How do we position ourselves in terms of the needs of others?

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Jamison at the public reading.

Jamison’s panel discussion at the Forum for Scholars and Publics on Thursday, for which she was joined by Jehanne Gheith (Associate Professor of Slavic and Eurasian Studies and MSW), and Lauren Henschel (Duke senior and documentary photographer), was, in one audience member’s words, “awesome, moving, powerful, transformative.” The panel, entitled “Ghost Pain: Caregiving, Documentary, and Radical Empathy,” allowed the trio to share their experiences encountering pain and engendering empathy in their respective practices. Another audience member praised the discussion’s “grounded personal moments of vulnerability.” Their reflections on each others’ work felt electric and connective (and they said as much afterward).

At her public reading on Wednesday night, Jamison read “The Broken Heart of James Agee,” a short essay from a small collection of essays—”Pain Tours II”—within The Empathy Exams (a version of “Agee” was published in The Believer in 2012). About Agee’s infamous Let us Now Praise Famous Men, a 400+-page genre-bending, hulking textual thing that attempts to write about sharecroppers in the Deep South but instead writes about how hard it is to write about, and therefore document, anything, Jamison writes:

Empathy is contagion. Agee wants his words to stay in us as “deepest and most iron anguish and guilt.” They have stayed; they do stay; they catch as splinters, still, in the open, supplicating palms of this essay. If it were possible, Agee claims, he wouldn’t have used words at all: “If I could do it, I’d do no writing at all here.” In this way, we are prepared for the four hundred pages of writing that follow. “A piece of the body torn out by the roots,” he continues, “might be more to the point.”

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Jamison, Gheith, and Henschel after the FSP panel.

Jamison’s visit was about writing, but it was also, and fundamentally, about so much more. It was about presence: it was about different folks coming out to one or more of her events, and connecting with each other—I had no idea I’d see you here!—and connecting with Jamison in turn (she wrote personal notes in the books of attendees, and they signed her copy of The Empathy Exams). It created a space where global health students met English students; where scholarship became public and personal; where Triangle community members mingled in academic building, talking about what they do, where they work, and how they encountered Jamison’s work. This visit, much like Eula Biss’s in the fall, had a pulse, and that pulse had—has—indentations. Those indentations will live on in our shared conversation, in our shared air—the latter of which, as Jamison said, is as ubiquitous as instances of, and possibilities for, empathy.

—MD

A Taste of Empathy (Exams)

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It’s no coincidence that the person who initially introduced me to the work of Leslie Jamison is now the one with whom I’ve conspired to bring the author to campus next week. About a year and a half ago, thanks to my former professor Duncan Murrell, who directs the writing program at the Center for Documentary Studies, I began seeing mentions of something called The Empathy Exams. I was curious, but wary; it felt as though there’d been a slew of mainstream media reportage of late that broached the topic of empathy, usually producing absolute conclusions—whether to say that “rich people just care less” or “reading literary fiction improves empathy.” The latter take was, and is, especially popular (and especially controversial, insofar as such a topic may be deemed controversial). Around this time, I was very kindly sent an article with a headline reaffirming literature’s empathy-inducing qualities. Next to it I annotated, with a healthy dose of snark, “breaking news!”—both to signal my agreement that, yes, I think reading literature can allow us to better visualize, understand, and therefore care about the lives of others; but also that the undercurrent of so many writings on empathy seemed to prefer, and promise, shortcuts over what we surely must understand by now as the messiness and nuance of human experience. The subjective spaces where we try, and fail, to empathize. The spaces where we promulgate the merits of empathy but cannot give our full attention to another.

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The poster for Jamison’s upcoming visit on March 18 and 19.

And then I read an excerpt, in The Believer, from this forthcoming something called The Empathy Exams, and immediately I knew I felt something different. Here was a writer writing against herself, against her minute actions and her macro-histories. The essay, also called “The Empathy Exams,” is about Jamison’s experience as a medical actor. She writes about getting paid to act out symptoms for medical students to diagnose. She also writes about herself, as Leslie Jamison, about her pregnancy and subsequent abortion at age twenty-five, about her drinking, her boyfriend, her ailments, her loves. About her ability and inability to minister care, and about her expectations to receive it, and frustrations in not receiving it. She interweaves the instructions for her “standardized patient” with an imagined set, for “Leslie Jamison.” She concludes with the latter. An excerpt:

You wake up from another round of anesthesia and they tell you all their burning didn’t burn away the part of your heart that was broken. You come back and find you aren’t alone. You weren’t alone when you were cramping through the night and you’re not alone now. Dave spends every night in the hospital. You want to tell him how disgusting your body feels: your unwashed skin and greasy hair. You want him to listen, for hours if necessary, and feel everything exactly as you feel it—your pair of hearts in such synchronized rhythm any monitor would show it; your pair of hearts playing two crippled bunnies doing whatever they can. There is no end to this fantasy of closeness. Who else is gonna bring you a broken arrow? You want him to break with you. You want him to hurt in a womb he doesn’t have; you want him to admit he can’t hurt that way.

I read these essays one by one in Dublin last summer, upon returning each night to my living space from long interviews with a lot of people I’d never met before. I would catch up on food I hadn’t had time to eat earlier, lie down, and open the book. The combination of these practices just fit. In one of her essays, Jamison visits Texas to attend a gathering of people claiming to suffer from an elusive condition called Morgellons Disease. In another, to support her runner sibling, she attends the Barkley Marathons, an almost unbelievable constellation of treacherous runs through the woods near Wartburg, Tennesse. She travels to Mexicali and consorts with radical poets; she gets punched in the face in Nicaragua; she slips into a “gang tour” in Los Angeles; she writes about stereotypes of “wounded women.” In these essays Jamison doesn’t prescribe or moralize; her voice undulates across the circumstances in which she both plants herself and finds herself. She creates space by exposing the connections between events, texts, relationships, assaults, proclamations of guilt and innocence. This is the writing of someone who moves through the motions by refusing to move forward until she works out why and how she enters these motions in the first place. In her own words:

Empathy isn’t just something that happens to us—a meteor shower of synapses firing across the brain—it’s also a choice we make: to pay attention, to extend ourselves. It’s made of exertion, that dowdier cousin of impulse. Sometimes we care for another because we know we should, or because it’s asked for, but this doesn’t make our caring hollow. The act of choosing simply means we’ve committed ourselves to a set of behaviors greater than the sum of our individual inclinations: I will listen to his sadness, even when I’m deep in my own. To say “going through the motions”—this isn’t reduction so much as acknowledgment of the effort—the labor, the motions, the dance—of getting inside another person’s state of heart or mind.

Jamison visits Duke on March 18 and 19 (she will give a public reading on Wednesday, the 18). It’s funny—this post began as a mechanism to link to some samples of her work for those who might be interested (speaking of, you can find lots more here, here, and a nice interview here). It evolved into my own re-reading of some of her work, and an emotional weightiness, and charge, in feeling myself identify. And that feeling—or my moving through the motions of it—gave rise to more questions. This is, I think, the bare motion prompted by experiencing material—be it artistic, scientific, spiritual, or perhaps all three—that is powerful, worthwhile, and unique.

—MD