Title: THE QUESTION OF EMPATHY: SEARCHING FOR THE ESSENCE OF HUMANITY
Author: Carol Jeffers
Publisher: Koehler Books
Pages: 209
Genre: Creative Nonfiction/Speculative Nonfiction
Author: Carol Jeffers
Publisher: Koehler Books
Pages: 209
Genre: Creative Nonfiction/Speculative Nonfiction
What if we all had a power to connect with others, to understand what
they are feeling, what they are thinking? What if such a power was
flighty, unreliable, open to true understanding or total confusion?
Would that make us better human beings? In The Question of Empathy, Carol Jeffers explores a power that exists today within each of us and its ability to connect and to delude.
Have you ever wondered about empathy, what it is and why it matters? What makes us human and capable of incredible caring, total savagery, or worse, complete indifference toward each other? Are you looking for ways to better understand yourself, the people around you and across the world? The Question of Empathy entreats you to explore this hard-wired capacity, not through rose colored glasses, but with an honest look at human nature. Philosophy and psychology, neuroscience and art lead the way along a journey of discovery into what makes us who we are and how we connect to others. It isn’t always easy, but then neither is real life. The Question of Empathy offers a roadmap.
Have you ever wondered about empathy, what it is and why it matters? What makes us human and capable of incredible caring, total savagery, or worse, complete indifference toward each other? Are you looking for ways to better understand yourself, the people around you and across the world? The Question of Empathy entreats you to explore this hard-wired capacity, not through rose colored glasses, but with an honest look at human nature. Philosophy and psychology, neuroscience and art lead the way along a journey of discovery into what makes us who we are and how we connect to others. It isn’t always easy, but then neither is real life. The Question of Empathy offers a roadmap.
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Chapter I
In the Rhizome
1.
Strolling
among the dunes and driftwood, and the mock heather and yarrow of Moonstone
Beach on California’s Central Coast, you are likely to come across a humble
wooden bench made remarkable by what it declares, by the empathy it stirs, and
by the stories it invites us to share. Rough and weatherworn, the bench is
evocative of the salt air and wild daisies, the restless tides reshaping the
continent’s rocky edge, and the wide sunset views it is meant to afford. But it
has become legendary and invokes much more than a simple seascape. From its
niche in the coastal ecosystem, this bench triumphs in returning us to the
cultural sphere, to the human hands that created and mounted a small plaque to
the backrest, and to the soul forever inhabiting the carved letters
proclaiming: “I shall always love a purple iris.” Like the bench itself, the
thought is at once simple and elegant, forthright and mysterious—a paradox, to
be sure, but also a metaphor for that innate capacity enabling us to wonder, to
imagine, and thus, to empathize.
If the plaque captures your imagination, as it has mine and others
(judging by Internet postings), then you may wonder whose words these are. Full
of whimsy, or poignancy, or both, they resonate, inscribe themselves upon our
hearts. Who is it that we have to thank for this unexpected delight, and for
the images it inspires, the stories it prompts? What is the meaning, symbolic
or otherwise, of the flower we imagine, springing from its rhizomic underground
network to be capped off by its distinctive beard, caterpillar-like and golden
in the April sun? Or maybe we envision a couple who once shared the bench. Is
she gone now, his purple iris? What was her story, or his? Theirs? What is ours,
we might also ask, as each of us takes a small part in creating this larger
narrative, one echoing beyond the beach itself? And where might that narrative
take us?
Each time I return to Moonstone, the bench reminds me of the story
always unfolding even as it retells itself, an ever-expanding narrative that
begins with our shared curiosity and appreciative smiles and builds to the
empathic response that connects us all to the spirit of the plaque and the
mystery of its maker. I watch as others pause to read the line, then turn from
it slowly, thoughtfully, before continuing on to the observation point where
the best views of the otters and seals are to be had. And I wonder what images,
what stories the bench—our shared touchstone—conjures up in them.
Perhaps there are those weekenders who, like me, envision a loved one—an
uncle, in my case—who cherished their iris beds, tended them faithfully through
the summer and fall, and patiently awaited the blossoms, lavender and lovely,
in the spring. Or perhaps they think of their children who, like my own, found
the quivering petals fascinating, and delighted in stroking the fuzzy beards. I
wonder, too, if, upon their return to the routines of the work week, these
weekenders might Google the bench’s poetic proclamation and come across the
image of two purple irises, one pinned on each side of the plaque. If they do,
perhaps they, too, will savor the moment and its mystery, even as they wonder
about this online tribute and the new connections and stories it encourages.
Like the iris rhizome itself, these connections are bound to crisscross,
to entangle and create an unruly latticework of horizontal stems, with their
all-important nodes sending out new roots and shoots that allow for more
connections still. And like those in the botanical sphere, connections of the
cultural kind are often random, sometimes serendipitous, and always meant to
replenish the rhizome, if not to expand its reach. As a professor of art
education, I find that my stories and images of the Moonstone bench are tightly
intertwined with Van Gogh’s Irises (1889), which, in turn, overlap with
former students’ experiences of the painting. I envision the canvas at the
Getty Center in Los Angeles—its stunning blues, violets, electric aqua, a
splash of white—leaping from the museum wall. In the perpetual crowd gathered
before it, I imagine my students over the years, so many resonating with the
artist’s work and poignant life story. They read the wall text and learn that
Vincent began the painting upon his arrival at the asylum in Saint-Rémy in
May, 1889, and they almost always agree with brother Theo’s assessment that the
composition, bursting with more than two dozen purple irises, a solitary white
one among them, is “filled with air and light.”
In another instant, I am whisked off to the South of France where I
follow Van Gogh’s path, hiking the trail that led him and the pain he carried
from the center of Saint-Remy past a mulberry tree still young in his day, past
the stone farmhouses, old even then, past the dark green cypress trees and pale
gold wheat fields rising up to meet the asylum on top of the ridge. I stand in
Vincent’s meager cubicle of a room—or one very much like his—and look out the
window at the garden below. The lavender beckons now, but I imagine the irises
that bloomed a month or two earlier, and try to get a sense of what he saw, a
feel for his world in Provence in what turned out to be the last year of his
life.
In still another image, I am back in the classroom, drawn into one of my
student’s assignments. Christina, a twenty-something prospective elementary
teacher, is explaining to the class why she has chosen Van Gogh’s Irises
to serve as her personal metaphor. While growing up, the wistful Christina
tells us, she had always felt different from everyone else, a painful,
sometimes humiliating, and always lonely experience for her. But now that she
is older, she sees herself as the white iris: unique, but not alone, a part of
the iris garden’s beautiful air and light. Holding up her reproduction of the
painting, she smiles and says she is proud of her individuality, her identity,
just as she is proud to be a contributing member of the group. Her classmates
smile back, an affirmation welcoming her into their purple midst, and I am
convinced that Christina will always love a white iris.
What is this wonder that allows us to connect across time and space, or
to connect at all? What allows us—compels us, even—to snatch these existential
moments from afar, from across the room and hold them close? They are as random
as they are resonant, and somehow these empathic tangles twist within our
corporeal and spiritual beings, knotting the two together.
If the answer lies matted in the rhizome,
then we must also acknowledge that bamboo and crabgrass are part of this
metaphor, their crisscrossing roots and shoots bound to complicate the question
of empathy. Are we meant to see ourselves, backs bent, brows sweating, chopping
back the bamboo’s unruly growth? Must we remember the knuckles bloodied again
and again clawing at the stubborn crabgrass, or are there other metaphors to
raise us from our knees, free us from the paradox that gives the bench’s purple
iris both its certainty and uncertainty? Perhaps we could tell different
stories—tales of wizards and incantations, say—that cast us into a land beyond
the rhizome. Or we might share different images, of miners digging into the
depths, detectives searching for clues, all intent upon unearthing the wonders
of human connection.
We might understand our connections as
demonstrations of empathy’s work, outward manifestations of an inner capacity
and will to survive as a group-living species. Connections may be obvious, the
critical nodes in the human rhizome that permit us to feel rooted, secure
enough in our own situations even as we send out shoots seeking to explore, and
finally, to understand the situations of others. But we might also know that
empathy can be as elusive as the breeze in a bamboo forest, whispering
cryptically, sometimes stirring us, but often leaving us to fall silent,
exasperated and alone.
Through her writing, Carol Jeffers blends narrative nonfiction and
fiction to more fully explore the human condition. She is the author of
works both in short- and long-form. Her forthcoming book, The Question of Empathy,
was named a semi-finalist in the 2017 Pirates’ Alley William Faulkner
Writing Competition (Walter Isaacson, judge). A Professor Emeritus of
Art Education, her interest in empathic listening began in the classroom
years ago when she and her university students explored works of art
that served as personal metaphors. These experiences and related
interactions with art, self, and others were the subjects of Carol’s
academic writing published in refereed journals, edited volumes and a
single-author book (Spheres of Possibility: Linking Service-Learning and the Visual Arts) during her university career.
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