This Lent, I’ve given up celery. I kid you not.
Have you tried celery? Tastes pretty rubbish, doesn’t it? Both watery and overly crunchy. Gets stuck in the teeth, too. It also, apparently, uses up more of your energy in the eating of it than it gifts you in return – an entirely vampiric vegetable. Now, I’m not sure if that’s entirely true, but, regardless, there’s no smoke without fire; I’m not giving celery the benefit of the doubt. It can, however, taste okay in a salad, as long as there’s lots of other stuff chopped up with it (preferably nuts). But being passable in a salad is no true badge of worth (Mark 1:21).
No, I am confident that, like last year, and the year before that, and so on back to the first twitchings of the embryo, I can make it through this Lent without a single wedge of celery – not in a curry, not in a casserole, not even in a salad; not anywhere. Watch me.
But then, I’m missing the point, aren’t I? I’m supposed to give up something good, something whose absence will condemn me to long evenings of spiritual torpor and slow-burning psychosis. A crap watery vegetable doesn’t quite cut it, somehow.
I’ve mulled over alternatives: cheese perhaps, or white bread, or maybe oven chips (I eat a lot of oven chips, sadly). But why this preoccupation with food? Even if you do believe in the Last Judgement, it’s unlikely the big man’s going to haul out your accumulated Tesco receipts for divine scrutiny, before sending you downstairs for an overabundance of cheddar. No, the powers above probably don’t much care about what’s in your fridge. So I got thinking of other fields of possibility: the immaterial, the transcendent, the non-digestible, that sort of thing. I landed upon some strange, one might say eerie, thoughts. Dare I share them?
For instance, compassion – the empathic glue which pastes humanity together, and manifests itself chiefly in the emotion of ‘pity’. Despite its benign disposition and general eagerness to please, pity is not as innocent as it seems; it is very much worth giving up for Lent. I shall quote Graham Greene, the filthiest Catholic around, for a sober view on the matter: ‘Pity is cruel. Pity destroys. Love isn’t safe when pity’s prowling around.’
Pity, compassion, however you wish to term it, is too often considered the handmaiden of moral action. But is there anything more dehumanising, demoralising, cruel even? No one wishes to be the object of pity; better by far to be hated, envied, even ignored – anything but pitied. Knocking down the spindly crutches of dignity, its value travels in reverse of its intention: it is the spectator, the giver of pity, who benefits. Their conscience is assuaged, their intolerable burden of feeling is lightened. The object of pity is robbed to satisfy the moral feeling of the spectator. Pity is moral exploitation.
So: compassion = cruelty = something to consider giving up for Lent. I’m glad Graham was at hand to clear this up for me. (He’s always been there for me, Graham.) It can destroy others, but it can also be self-destructive. Take Friedrich Nietzsche: pity drove that German philosopher insane. His mental breakdown was heralded, in Turin in January 1889, by a desperate gesture of animal compassion. On witnessing a horse being beaten by a coachman in the Piazza Carlo Alberto, he lunged forwards and embraced the horse, weeping and gibbering till he was dragged away. He spent the next eleven years of his life in a shadow realm, half dead to the world. To conclude, our sanity depends upon not giving a shit about a whole lot of things. Think about it.
In our present day society, the medium of compassion is the reproduced image; it is the very currency of our media culture. All across our newspapers and magazines are little pictorial fishhooks, poised to ensnare our compassion. Dead babies, crying women, the burning shells of houses – such are the archetypes ceaselessly regurgitated, lest news stories lose their empathetic force. But compassion, like any other form of capital, is a finite stock; once depleted, banality rushes in to fill the void.
Susan Sontag has these wise words to offer: ‘The vast photographic catalogue of misery and injustice throughout the world has given everyone a certain familiarity with atrocity, making the horrible seem more ordinary – making it appear familiar, remote (“it’s only a photograph”), inevitable.’ There are simply too many fishhooks.
Today, compassion is abused, whored-out and emaciated, like a bulimic teenage model at Milan Fashion Week. Now and again it needs a rest – enter Lent, a period of convalescence, sanctioned by the world’s most popular religion. Come Easter, I’ll be a new man, ready to cry at every dead baby I see in newsprint. A bloodied seal cub may even elicit my pity.
But then, that would be inconvenient in the extreme. Say what you like about our postmodern condition of resigned cynicism and overindulged lethargy, but at least it respects our nerves and sense of composure. The life of a sheep is, after all, an enviable one.
So I decided to stick with celery. No celery for forty days. I am frankly above celery.
Have you tried celery? Tastes pretty rubbish, doesn’t it? Both watery and overly crunchy. Gets stuck in the teeth, too. It also, apparently, uses up more of your energy in the eating of it than it gifts you in return – an entirely vampiric vegetable. Now, I’m not sure if that’s entirely true, but, regardless, there’s no smoke without fire; I’m not giving celery the benefit of the doubt. It can, however, taste okay in a salad, as long as there’s lots of other stuff chopped up with it (preferably nuts). But being passable in a salad is no true badge of worth (Mark 1:21).
No, I am confident that, like last year, and the year before that, and so on back to the first twitchings of the embryo, I can make it through this Lent without a single wedge of celery – not in a curry, not in a casserole, not even in a salad; not anywhere. Watch me.
But then, I’m missing the point, aren’t I? I’m supposed to give up something good, something whose absence will condemn me to long evenings of spiritual torpor and slow-burning psychosis. A crap watery vegetable doesn’t quite cut it, somehow.
I’ve mulled over alternatives: cheese perhaps, or white bread, or maybe oven chips (I eat a lot of oven chips, sadly). But why this preoccupation with food? Even if you do believe in the Last Judgement, it’s unlikely the big man’s going to haul out your accumulated Tesco receipts for divine scrutiny, before sending you downstairs for an overabundance of cheddar. No, the powers above probably don’t much care about what’s in your fridge. So I got thinking of other fields of possibility: the immaterial, the transcendent, the non-digestible, that sort of thing. I landed upon some strange, one might say eerie, thoughts. Dare I share them?
For instance, compassion – the empathic glue which pastes humanity together, and manifests itself chiefly in the emotion of ‘pity’. Despite its benign disposition and general eagerness to please, pity is not as innocent as it seems; it is very much worth giving up for Lent. I shall quote Graham Greene, the filthiest Catholic around, for a sober view on the matter: ‘Pity is cruel. Pity destroys. Love isn’t safe when pity’s prowling around.’
Pity, compassion, however you wish to term it, is too often considered the handmaiden of moral action. But is there anything more dehumanising, demoralising, cruel even? No one wishes to be the object of pity; better by far to be hated, envied, even ignored – anything but pitied. Knocking down the spindly crutches of dignity, its value travels in reverse of its intention: it is the spectator, the giver of pity, who benefits. Their conscience is assuaged, their intolerable burden of feeling is lightened. The object of pity is robbed to satisfy the moral feeling of the spectator. Pity is moral exploitation.
So: compassion = cruelty = something to consider giving up for Lent. I’m glad Graham was at hand to clear this up for me. (He’s always been there for me, Graham.) It can destroy others, but it can also be self-destructive. Take Friedrich Nietzsche: pity drove that German philosopher insane. His mental breakdown was heralded, in Turin in January 1889, by a desperate gesture of animal compassion. On witnessing a horse being beaten by a coachman in the Piazza Carlo Alberto, he lunged forwards and embraced the horse, weeping and gibbering till he was dragged away. He spent the next eleven years of his life in a shadow realm, half dead to the world. To conclude, our sanity depends upon not giving a shit about a whole lot of things. Think about it.
In our present day society, the medium of compassion is the reproduced image; it is the very currency of our media culture. All across our newspapers and magazines are little pictorial fishhooks, poised to ensnare our compassion. Dead babies, crying women, the burning shells of houses – such are the archetypes ceaselessly regurgitated, lest news stories lose their empathetic force. But compassion, like any other form of capital, is a finite stock; once depleted, banality rushes in to fill the void.
Susan Sontag has these wise words to offer: ‘The vast photographic catalogue of misery and injustice throughout the world has given everyone a certain familiarity with atrocity, making the horrible seem more ordinary – making it appear familiar, remote (“it’s only a photograph”), inevitable.’ There are simply too many fishhooks.
Today, compassion is abused, whored-out and emaciated, like a bulimic teenage model at Milan Fashion Week. Now and again it needs a rest – enter Lent, a period of convalescence, sanctioned by the world’s most popular religion. Come Easter, I’ll be a new man, ready to cry at every dead baby I see in newsprint. A bloodied seal cub may even elicit my pity.
But then, that would be inconvenient in the extreme. Say what you like about our postmodern condition of resigned cynicism and overindulged lethargy, but at least it respects our nerves and sense of composure. The life of a sheep is, after all, an enviable one.
So I decided to stick with celery. No celery for forty days. I am frankly above celery.
I HAD given up laughing for Lent....
ReplyDeleteVery sharp. What about a hymn to broccoli, or the sprout?
ReplyDelete