After Sandy Hook, Our Hour of Lead

After great pain, a formal feeling comes—
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs—
The stiff Heart questions was it He, that bore,
And Yesterday, or Centuries before?

The Feet, mechanical, go round—
Of Ground, or Air, or Ought—
A Wooden way
Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone—

This is the hour of Lead—
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow—
First—Chill—the Stupor—then the letting go—
Emily Dickinson

I first learned of yesterday's attack at Sandy Hook from Facebook, where I had gone to hide from a piece of writing I was making no progress on. Every post on every wall was an anguished response to the killing; very quickly I knew something dreadful had happened, but not exactly what. Google's newsfeed supplied the headlines, and then the video on the evening news, bringing in the numb, sickening sadness. I let loose a cry of uncomprehending grief and listened to the darkness.

I didn't go back to Facebook. While absorbing the first rough contours of the tragedy there, I had had to hurdle several posts whose first thought was a call for gun control. I endorse this position, but was not prepared to leap over our hour of lead to indulge social commentary or political outrage. This was a moment for horror, for sorrow, for weeping, for compassion. Our ancient viper brain seeks something to strike at, but aggression, even in the form of righteous outrage, denies us the full measure of our pain. Only by fully allowing our own sense of shock and suffering can we share the suffering of those who lost loved ones, and perhaps even experience a flicker of mercy for whatever distress drove a tormented young man to brutally murder twenty children and seven teachers.

President Obama exemplified the compassion of pain fully felt in his brief address Friday afternoon. "[O]ur hearts are broken today, for the parents and grandparents, sisters and brothers of these little children, and for the families of the adults who were lost," he said. "Our hearts are broken for the parents of the survivors as well, for as blessed as they are to have their children home tonight, they know that their children’s innocence has been torn away from them too early, and there are no words that will ease their pain." With bowed head and barely staunched tears, the President expressed genuinely moving sadness for those directly touched by the shooting, and for the country as a whole, which groans under a madness of rage, hatred, and pitiless violence.

President Obama made a passing allusion to the political action required to address the ever-more frequent incidence of firearms violence, but let us not fool ourselves into believing gun control is the curative we seek. Few countries have stricter gun laws than Norway, where a similar attack on young people took place last year.  That attack reminded us no place is immune, but Norway showed us something to hold up as well—a national character that healed its trauma through charity and collective reflection. As one Norwegian girl expressed it, "If one man can show so much hate, think how much love we could show, standing together."

"This evening, Michelle and I will do what I know every parent in America will do,'' the President said, "which is hug our children a little tighter and we’ll tell them that we love them, and we’ll remind each other how deeply we love one another." We must endure our hour of pain, listen to it, then outlive it and transmute it into love. 

I do not believe in a homeopathy of outrage, where hate cures hate. Love alone can heal the pain that feeds our violence.



Try to Praise the Mutilated World

Try to praise the mutilated world.
Remember June's long days,
and wild strawberries, drops of wine, the dew.
The nettles that methodically overgrow
the abandoned homesteads of exiles.
You must praise the mutilated world.
You watched the stylish yachts and ships;
one of them had a long trip ahead of it,
while salty oblivion awaited others.
You've seen the refugees heading nowhere,
you've heard the executioners sing joyfully.
You should praise the mutilated world.
Remember the moments when we were together
in a white room and the curtain fluttered.
Return in thought to the concert where music flared.
You gathered acorns in the park in autumn
and leaves eddied over the earth's scars.
Praise the mutilated world
and the gray feather a thrush lost,
and the gentle light that strays and vanishes
and returns.

Adam Zagajewski
Translated by Clare Cavanagh



Photo by Evan Vucci/AP, edited

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