Some days there are few people you would rather be than yourself and that is not because I am constantly overjoyed. It is more that you read the newspaper, a weekly magazine, look at reports and shudder. Or loved ones, family, friends who – oh, everything, you sympathize, you live in, but not too much, not too much.
You can also not empathize with everyone or in all situations. What it should be like to live in Gaza – no idea. Yes, words like ‘terrible’ and ‘horrible’ you say full of conviction and I am often almost nauseous with aversion and powerlessness, but that is something else than empathizing. The situation there is so different from everything you know here, the feelings must take place at such a different level in what is really a completely different world, you would not know how to ’empathize’.
You don’t even need it. What I wish is that the situation there improves by on-MID and that nobody talks about ‘more research’ and see, you shoot the anger and the indignation and you are looking for a horn and a protest board; Anger and indignation are so much better to handle than dismay.
Is empathy possible at all? A little maybe. In any case, it is desirable to imagine the situation of someone else, although of course it is always your presentation of their situation. I realized that I mainly immerse myself in the despair that people should feel in all kinds of situations. For example, I read in The green About people in tight social housing in Amsterdam-West, with mold on the walls, people who are kept in uncertainty about whether and when such a home is being renovated. And if that happens, then they should only find replacement living space themselves, and the house is even smaller afterwards due to the insulation on the inside. On the other hand, it has become more expensive. I can make a performance of such a situation, the small rooms, the difficult contacts with the housing association that, that is government policy, actually has few opportunities to do it differently.
Living in the Groningen earthquake zone, I can also really empathize with the frustrating thing about all that uncertainty and that wait; The big difference is that Groningen has the attention that there are compensations and regulations, even though they do not all out so well. But those people in Amsterdam-West are simply forgotten.
You live in much less often in other people’s joy. Although – I opened a collection of poems, Hare From Hanneke van Eijken and there I saw AH! Delicious! Immediately a quote from the American poet Mary Oliver who would like to be a starling: ‘Improbable Beautiful and Afraid of Nothing’. In the first poem of the bundle, Van Eijken goes on that desire, she is talking about ‘the animal in us’ and cherishes ‘the desire to be a swarm’. What a nice bundle it is, light in tone, not too explicit, not too dark, a bundle in which things are touched, spans stretched in which you can spend a while and then you have other possibilities of thinking and seeing and being.
And sometimes of joy for existence, it is strange that you keep access to it, no matter how much rottenness there is in the world. You walk in and out of other lives in your mind. Sometimes you understand by emphasizing that you have to do something, sometimes you can actually mean something to someone. That’s pretty much. We are not a swarm.