“Love is not a state, a feeling, a disposition, but an exchange, uneven, fraught with history, with ghosts, with longings that are more or less legible to those who try to see one another with their own faulty vision.”

(by Judith Butler)

Mirrors

The atmosphere and the air transpire a profound sensation of sadness at Sachensenhausen.  The emotions are so strong that overload the capacity of understanding, the body perceives the heavy suffering, and the mind goes crazy asking itself how such atrocities could have happened, how reactions took so long in stopping the evilness, and why similar realities have been repeating around the globe.

The experience revolves everything inside in a bitter complexity of anger, sorrow, indignation, compassion, shame.  But, at the same time, it pushed my spirit to question my reality and my humanity, bringing a different look towards the past, who I am and could become.  I could not help fathoming about the capacity of human beings of generating pain, how sometimes our perspectives on reality can make ourselves alienate in mental and emotional cages that silence and disarm the empathy for others, how our weakness makes us believe that we know what we can do. Yes, my reality may be far away different from the possibility of being part of the atrocities of a concentration camp; however, do those situations reflect the potential of my human capabilities in my small world? Do I cluster my view, consciousness, and empathy making these believe that pain and anger are only products of the perceptions of the other, reassuring the soul that I am not capable of generating pain?

“We are not responsible for what the other person can feel; we are only responsible for our own feelings” is a common statement around our culture.  At Sachensenhausen, those words rumbled my mind and only added insult to the experience.  Such clichés merely color self-improvement, unlink from sensitivity, and respond to trends that do not permit genuine questioning about our own vulnerability and our capacity of change. They numb the ability to understand that our knowledge and actions may not possess absolute truth or righteousness, and that our creeds and beliefs may not be privileging humanity. Does the Other disappear in our constructed worlds? Do we respond to what we are called to do without acknowledging that in front of us there is a human with needs, desires, and life? Do our standards precede the capacity of empathy?

It is a tremendous difficult task. Our growth goes hand-in-hand with the other, and pain comes in many forms. If the potential capacity to touch humanity for good and also for bad is not acknowledged, abuses and injustices do not have a place for challenge or improvement.  At more personal level, the possibility of experimenting the delicious feeling of connecting by empathy is lost in the intent to be right instead of happy.

Casablanca writer Muriel Barbery in her wonderful book L'Élégance du hérisson  says “we never see beyond our certainties, and what it is even worse, we have renounced to know people, we just know ourselves without recognizing  ourselves in those permanent mirrors. If we knew it, if we took consciousness of the fact that we do not look at ourselves but on the other, and if we were alone in the desert, we would go mad.”

Inés