Sherry Chandler

There is much that you should see on the blog called No Caption Needed, including this post called Joy and Grief in Kenya. Not fair of me to steal the photos. Go look at them. But it is not only the photos but also the commentary¹ that clutch at my heart with a cold fist:

Instead of the usual backdrop of the demonstration along an otherwise busy city street, here we see real wreakage amidst what otherwise was already a slum. And instead of the stock characters of earnest citizens and bullying cops, or outraged citizens and cautious cops, or mob frenzy and state terror, or any other political scenario, here we see a man exulting in the sheer ecstasy of destruction. An obscene truth is being revealed: what is violence and burning and horror to some is for others an experience of raw freedom as it can be perversely but powerfully known only through violent revenge and ruin. The sound track should be the Ode to Joy.

We’re not supposed to see that truth, and many others appear once that Pandora’s box is opened. Violence persists not only because so many are denied so much by so few, but also because it remains the best shot some have at feeling powerful.

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The joy in the first photo comes from hate. Hate is something harder, deeper, less changeable, and far more dangerous than other emotions. It also has no place in politics. Hate is in fact one border of the political: You can struggle to live with others, even to dominate them, or you can hate and kill them. Likewise, hate is felt toward groups, while anger is felt toward individuals (see Aristotle’s Rhetoric, 1382a). By seeing the senseless loss created by an individual laying dead on the street, the second photo returns us to a world of persons who deserve justice or protection but not violence.

Grief may be a deeply political emotion. Even though no one can reach the depths of pain felt by the individual stricken with grief, it calls forth empathy and can move us all to cross the borders of our estrangement from one another. It was grief, not killing or victory or glory that finally brought Achilles out of his rage against the Trojans to a moment of decency. Perhaps the recognition of grief can remind us that violence is not just another means for political expression. It is how we end up dancing in Hell.

We really must find ways to get around the big media, the packaged messages, the political campaigns, and to look directly at what is happening to our brothers in the world. We must find grief, even anger, but not blind hatred.

See also Kissing War and Tasting Victory, the slideshow Artists Against the War, and also the slideshow On the Road.

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¹Pictures are not necessarily worth a thousand words and can be manipulated and manipulative, perhaps because they hit us at a pre-verbal level. See this No-Caption-Needed comment from one who calls himself farmer :

The whole idea of “No Caption Needed” is a lie.
Barthes, to Sontag, to Virilio… before and beyond.
All images conjure words and vice versa… whether we want it or not.
Interpretation is all too cheap and easy…
Rather it is the reflexive production of production…
read: Cameras are guns.
But then, what the hell do I know?

In Europe life retreats out of the cold, and exquisite fireside myths have resulted—Balder, Persephone—but [in India] the retreat is from the source of life, the treacherous sun, and no poetry adorns it because disillusionment cannot be beautiful. Men yearn for poetry though they may not confess it; they desire that joy shall be graceful and sorrow august and infinity have a form, and India fails to accommodate them.

— E. M. Forster, A Passage to India (Harcourt, Brace, and World, Inc., 1922)