Let the Grief In

On war, empathy, and the cost of distance

We build anyway, knowing the tide will come.

The new commute

I got lost again on the way to work. New job, new commute. Let's say I'm learning new ways not to get to work.

People at work, I gave my best “good morning” to everyone and received glances but no response. Funny how we get socialised out of that. I felt like a tryhard.

Does a hello from a cashier or barista start our day right?

Time’s debris

Beneath the cranes, the river remembers.

One thing I noted about Docklands was how new it was.

There were cranes, but the buildings were only 30 to 40 years old.

I thought about how it was all flattened once.

How it was a river with natural banks long before that.

I couldn't tell you what feeds into the Thames. In a book I've started, Light Perpetual by Francis Spufford,¹ the children in 1949 sang an old-timey song about the Thames, and its tributaries.

This book begins in 1944 with a bomb exploding in a South London branch of Woolworth's, then describes the futures that might have been experienced by four children.

With astonishing detail about the physics of explosives, Spufford begins the book describing how in a fraction of a second, dozens of people no longer exist, are vaporised, reduced to dust.

Bombs near and far

What packed an additional emotional punch for me was its relevance, with bombs in the news in Ukraine in Gaza. How the most recent war my city was bombed in was 80 years ago, and how it had shaped a solidarity, how close that was yet how distant the war feels.

Maybe the constant reporting on wars makes them feel less real. The first Iraq war was the first live reported war. This artificial proximity creates an unreal sense. French philosopher Baudrillard controversially declared the war didn't happen.²

The lives that could have been

And yet every war leaves scars. Physically we see them - I was a property guardian in a small row of houses built in 1954 in a row of 1890s terraces. Clearly a bomb.

Light Perpetual is emotionally powerful because the children have a ghostlike existence though through familiar history, history we've heard from our parents or seen anthologized on television.

When bombs take lives, they don't just rob us of a life. They take away the whole life they had ahead of them. Every contribution they would make.

The USA and the UK benefited from great Jewish minds fleeing Nazi, Germany. What might we gain from Ukrainian or Palestinian refugees?

Bridging the empathy gap

My paternal grandfather left the capital during the war with his mother. They moved from Mitcham, South London, to the safety of a farm in Scotland.³

What I'm teasing out here progressively is the empathy gap between our own and the other. How, even without racism, we place arbitrary limits on what Peter Singer named our ‘circle of moral concern’⁴ based on distance, nationality, and all kinds of subtle biases.

In my own secular confession, I recognise the intense inadequacy of my own response to these wars.

Does a bomb warrant a reply? Its brutality is somehow beyond words.

The silence after the blast

On the one hand, empathy fatigue means for self-preservation, we detach.

But a wounds on humanity is a wound on each of us.

This line of thinking feels embarrassingly Christian for a twenty-five-or-more-year atheist.

It can all feel unreal, in Baudrillard’s sense.

The sandcastle and the moat

What is challenging, in the end, is grief. Grief like the waves lapping the shore.

Most of us remember building a sandcastle on holiday as children.