[Soundtrack for this post: Tom Waits’s Alice]
[Beer for this post: Southern Tier IPA]
Anne and I both get a huge amount of mail from people who want our money. Some of them are nonprofits asking for donations. I assume we get these because we often give money away (sorry, Neal). We get so many of them that I don’t usually feel bad when I toss them in the trash without much more than a quick glance at the return address. But I’ve been hanging on to one that haunts me every time I look at it. It’s from a charity called Smile Train, a nonprofit charity that repairs cleft lips and palates (sometimes called, inappropriately in my opinion, a “harelip”).
I initially kept the Smile Train request for money because the envelope says “Make one gift now and we’ll never ask for another donation again!” I’ve tossed Smile Train pleas before, but that one sentence got me to hang on to it this time (fundraisers take note). And it’s the hanging on to it that has allowed the envelope to work its checkbook loosening magic. For you see, they have pictures of afflicted children on the envelope.
On the front of the envelope, which is right next to me as I write this, is a picture of an infant boy with a unilateral cleft lip and palate. His head is cocked slightly to the right, his eyes are glassy, as if wet with tears, and his expression pleads with you to help him, please for the love of all that is holy help him. It is utterly heartbreaking. I’m tempted to scan it and post the picture here so you can see it and experience the agony that I do every time I look at that poor child, but I won’t because I don’t want to crush your soul and faith in whatever you have faith in. The picture is simply too powerful and might cause you to die of grief, unless you’re a stonehearted monster.
On the back there are three more children, but each has a “before and after” set of photos. You get to see the good work they do there at Smile Train. And that series, after nearly having my heart ripped in half by the image of the dear boy on the front, makes me want to give Smile Train every dollar I have--it makes me want to take out a dozen loans and max out my credit cards so I can give them even more than I have. But after I stanch my tears I get to wondering why. Why them and not most of the other countless charities that want my money?
That’s a good question. I’m not even sure whether there are any benefits to repairing cleft lips and palates other than the cosmetic. It may be that fixing them reduces infections, or speech problems, or whatever, but I don’t know. So part of me thinks, why am I so worried about what may just be a cosmetic problem when there are other charities that feed the starving, inoculate those that need it most, et cetera, et cetera? Is it my own vanity? My own American obsession with physical appearance? I don’t know, but I don’t think it's something so shallow. I do recognize that I assume it will lead to social difficulties, and the extent of those that I imagine may indeed be affected by my American sensibilities, but I think the biggest thing is that it looks like a wound, and I cannot stomach children suffering.
I’d like to think that I always found the suffering of children to be a horror, but I have never been as sensitive to it as I am now that I have my own child. Now whenever I hear stories of a child being kidnapped, abducted and raped, tortured, or whatever, I suffer physical pain. The mere thought of it is almost unbearable.
There was a woman a while back who forgot her infant daughter and left her in the car to, essentially, bake. She was on Oprah talking about the incident years later. All I could think was that if I did that to Carver, I would kill myself immediately. The idea that I killed my son, the thought of how he cried in vain and suffered alone because of my stupidity, I would not be able to take. I’d off myself, guaranteed, by any means. The same goes if he were kidnapped (and kidnapping at an age where the child can’t identify himself or remember his name totally freaks me out even more). I would, seriously, go completely mad.
I was watching a South Park the other day and the boys convinced Butters to fake his death so he could pretend to be a new girl in school and infiltrate the girls’ inner sanctum. They made a life-sized Butters doll and loaded it with pig guts and bacon and such. They placed the doll at the edge of a building and, as his parents were watching, pleading with “him” not to jump, the boys shoved it off and the whole thing exploded in a mess of blood and guts right in front of Butters’s parents. There was a time when I might have been amused, but now all I could think of was Butters’s poor parents and how incredibly messed up the whole thing was.
This issue makes me think about God, or rather whether one or more gods exist.
I’ve never been a religious person. My parents baptized me to please my paternal grandmother, but we never went to church. I’ve pretty much always been either an agnostic or a borderline atheist, and one of the things that serves as a serious hurdle to me ever thinking otherwise is Dostoevsky’s The Brother’s Karamazov. Dostoevsky was a Christian, and the Brothers was not meant to have the effect that it did on me, but I have a hard time shaking free of Ivan’s skepticism in the chapter typically titled Rebellion. I don’t know if I can believe in a Christian god that allows people to be born with cleft lips and palates and other deformities, but I can easily understand and curse a nature that produces them. That may sound crazy to you, but I've felt that way for a long time, and having a child has only reinforced my position.
“But I've still better things about children. I've collected a great, great deal about Russian children, Alyosha. There was a little girl of five who was hated by her father and mother, ‘most worthy and respectable people, of good education and breeding.’ You see, I must repeat again, it is a peculiar characteristic of many people, this love of torturing children, and children only. To all other types of humanity these torturers behave mildly and benevolently, like cultivated and humane Europeans; but they are very fond of tormenting children, even fond of children themselves in that sense. It’s just their defencelessness that tempts the tormentor, just the angelic confidence of the child who has no refuge and no appeal, that sets his vile blood on fire. In every man, of course, a demon lies hidden- the demon of rage, the demon of lustful heat at the screams of the tortured victim, the demon of lawlessness let off the chain, the demon of diseases that follow on vice, gout, kidney disease, and so on.
“This poor child of five was subjected to every possible torture by those cultivated parents. They beat her, thrashed her, kicked her for no reason till her body was one bruise. Then, they went to greater refinements of cruelty- shut her up all night in the cold and frost in a privy, and because she didn’t ask to be taken up at night (as though a child of five sleeping its angelic, sound sleep could be trained to wake and ask), they smeared her face and filled her mouth with excrement, and it was her mother, her mother did this. And that mother could sleep, hearing the poor child’s groans! Can you understand why a little creature, who can’t even understand what’s done to her, should beat her little aching heart with her tiny fist in the dark and the cold, and weep her meek unresentful tears to dear, kind God to protect her? Do you understand that, friend and brother, you pious and humble novice? Do you understand why this infamy must be and is permitted? Without it, I am told, man could not have existed on earth, for he could not have known good and evil. Why should he know that diabolical good and evil when it costs so much? Why, the whole world of knowledge is not worth that child’s prayer to dear, kind God’! I say nothing of the sufferings of grown-up people, they have eaten the apple, damn them, and the devil take them all! But these little ones! . . .
. . . .
Ivan for a minute was silent, his face became all at once very sad.
“Listen! I took the case of children only to make my case clearer. Of the other tears of humanity with which the earth is soaked from its crust to its centre, I will say nothing. I have narrowed my subject on purpose. I am a bug, and I recognise in all humility that I cannot understand why the world is arranged as it is. Men are themselves to blame, I suppose; they were given paradise, they wanted freedom, and stole fire from heaven, though they knew they would become unhappy, so there is no need to pity them. With my pitiful, earthly, Euclidian understanding, all I know is that there is suffering and that there are none guilty; that cause follows effect, simply and directly; that everything flows and finds its level- but that’s only Euclidian nonsense, I know that, and I can’t consent to live by it! What comfort is it to me that there are none guilty and that cause follows effect simply and directly, and that I know it?- I must have justice, or I will destroy myself. And not justice in some remote infinite time and space, but here on earth, and that I could see myself. I have believed in it. I want to see it, and if I am dead by then, let me rise again, for if it all happens without me, it will be too unfair. Surely I haven’t suffered simply that I, my crimes and my sufferings, may manure the soil of the future harmony for somebody else. I want to see with my own eyes the hind lie down with the lion and the victim rise up and embrace his murderer. I want to be there when everyone suddenly understands what it has all been for. All the religions of the world are built on this longing, and I am a believer. But then there are the children, and what am I to do about them? That’s a question I can’t answer. For the hundredth time I repeat, there are numbers of questions, but I’ve only taken the children, because in their case what I mean is so unanswerably clear. Listen! If all must suffer to pay for the eternal harmony, what have children to do with it, tell me, please? It’s beyond all comprehension why they should suffer, and why they should pay for the harmony. Why should they, too, furnish material to enrich the soil for the harmony of the future? I understand solidarity in sin among men. I understand solidarity in retribution, too; but there can be no such solidarity with children. And if it is really true that they must share responsibility for all their fathers’ crimes, such a truth is not of this world and is beyond my comprehension. Some jester will say, perhaps, that the child would have grown up and have sinned, but you see he didn’t grow up, he was torn to pieces by the dogs, at eight years old. Oh, Alyosha, I am not blaspheming! I understand, of course, what an upheaval of the universe it will be when everything in heaven and earth blends in one hymn of praise and everything that lives and has lived cries aloud: ‘Thou art just, O Lord, for Thy ways are revealed.’ When the mother embraces the fiend who threw her child to the dogs, and all three cry aloud with tears, ‘Thou art just, O Lord!’ then, of course, the crown of knowledge will be reached and all will be made clear. But what pulls me up here is that I can’t accept that harmony. And while I am on earth, I make haste to take my own measures. You see, Alyosha, perhaps it really may happen that if I live to that moment, or rise again to see it, I, too, perhaps, may cry aloud with the rest, looking at the mother embracing the child’s torturer, ‘Thou art just, O Lord!’ but I don’t want to cry aloud then. While there is still time, I hasten to protect myself, and so I renounce the higher harmony altogether. It’s not worth the tears of that one tortured child who beat itself on the breast with its little fist and prayed in its stinking outhouse, with its unexpiated tears to ‘dear, kind God’! It’s not worth it, because those tears are unatoned for. They must be atoned for, or there can be no harmony. But how? How are you going to atone for them? Is it possible? By their being avenged? But what do I care for avenging them? What do I care for a hell for oppressors? What good can hell do, since those children have already been tortured? And what becomes of harmony, if there is hell? I want to forgive. I want to embrace. I don’t want more suffering. And if the sufferings of children go to swell the sum of sufferings which was necessary to pay for truth, then I protest that the truth is not worth such a price. I don’t want the mother to embrace the oppressor who threw her son to the dogs! She dare not forgive him! Let her forgive him for herself, if she will, let her forgive the torturer for the immeasurable suffering of her mother’s heart. But the sufferings of her tortured child she has no right to forgive; she dare not forgive the torturer, even if the child were to forgive him! And if that is so, if they dare not forgive, what becomes of harmony? Is there in the whole world a being who would have the right to forgive and could forgive? I don’t want harmony. From love for humanity I don’t want it. I would rather be left with the unavenged suffering. I would rather remain with my unavenged suffering and unsatisfied indignation, even if I were wrong. Besides, too high a price is asked for harmony; it’s beyond our means to pay so much to enter on it. And so I hasten to give back my entrance ticket, and if I am an honest man I am bound to give it back as soon as possible. And that I am doing. It’s not God that I don’t accept, Alyosha, only I most respectfully return him the ticket.”
“That’s rebellion,” murmured Alyosha, looking down.
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