Peace, Love...

Empathy is a powerful faculty (and by far my favourite of the pathos derivatives), but it does not come effortlessly to a lot of people. Indeed, the effort involved in empathising with another human being, or even animal - depending on its perceived cognitive aptitude - is often considered too great for the masses, unless a catastrophe manages to take up enough newspaper columns to force the required levels of consideration (and, failing or in addition to that, guilt).

We certainly do not have the time or perhaps even the emotional capacity to shed a tear for every life ruined or unfairly taken, but the West has often been accused of attaching more value to the lives of its own citizens than it attaches to the inhabitants of war-torn or third-world countries. I can hardly agree more with this view, and while stories continue to be published of scores of Iraqis killed every day in bombings, gun-battles and abductions, the real headline-grabbers seem to be of the lone British soldiers killed in action. I am deliberately discounting the ulterior political motives newspapers have for prioritising their stories, for example as an emotive condemnation of war (and therefore the government), because this would only seem to strengthen my argument: people are more moved by the death of Corporal John Smith, son of Mr. and Mrs. Smith from A-small-town-near-you, than the 28-or-so Iraqi unknowns killed in a car-bomb in a suburb of Baghdad.

I was looking only recently at the BBC's obituaries to those killed in the 7/7 bombings, and was quite moved. Why? Because it was easy to imagine myself in many of the victims' situations: I live in central London, I regularly use the public transport system, and, had things have been very slightly different, I, like many others, could have been on one of those trains. I cried a little when I read some of the obituaries, partly because of the things I seemed to have in common with some of the victims. Again, the tears were not hard to muster...

Surely empathy should transcend that which is so easily imaginable? Surely the desire and intellectual capacity to put ourselves in the shoes of somebody so far-removed from our own sickening, affluent lifestyles in order to understand what it must be like for them to have lost something they cherished is not beyond us?

Our commonalities as a species (and beyond) are far more important than our commonalities as a race, religion, nationality, or culture: do we not all laugh, cry, love, grieve and envy? It is only a disparity in our emotional triggers that differentiates us according to those societal subsections.

Without empathy, we are lost in a lonely world...

Meme-Lag

Yeah, so about seven years ago Ambrose meme-tagged me. This means I have to tell you what music I am listening to at the moment, which gets a little difficult as I have recently joined the masses and imported my digital music collection into iTunes, where I have it permanently set to shuffle. I'll try though:

"List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they're not any good, but they must be songs you're really enjoying now. Post these instructions in your blog along with your 7 songs. Then tag 6 other people to see what they're listening to."

In no particular order then, with a brief and uncalled-for commentary:

1. Dorothy at Forty - Cursive
I share Ambrose's initial disappointment with the new Cursive album, Happy Hollow - Tim Kasher's lyrics are usually so original, but this album seems to be littered with the kind of tired pseudo-existential angst I would have thought him to be beyond. This is one of the highlights though.
2. Beautiful World - Colin Hay
Heard this on an episode of Scrubs. Liked it.
3. Fucker - The Brian Jonestown Massacre
A friend introduced me to The BJM, through their Tepid Peppermint Wonderland album and the film/ documentary, Dig!, both of which are worth experiencing.
4. Leif Erikson - Interpol
Great finishing song to a great album, Turn on the Bright Lights (I don't care what they say about Joy Division having already done it better).
5. On Any Given Night - 36 Crazyfists
I'm going to see 'Crazyfists in concert tomorrow night. Very good Scremo (I think - I've never been too good with genres). New album not as good as the last, which is highly recommended (A Snow-Capped Romance).
6. Lying Through Your Teeth - Head Automatica
Shameless pop song from that Daryl Palumbo dude from Glassjaw and that Dan Nakamura dude from... everything (Gorillaz, Handsome Boy Modelling School etc.), but a lot of fun.
7. Wings for Marie (Part 1)/ 10,000 Days (Wings Part 2) - Tool
Mind-blowing - all seventeen-plus minutes of it. According to Wikipedia, "Marie" is the middle name of [frontman Maynard James] Keenan's deceased mother, Judith Marie Garrison. As Keenan explains in his commentary on A Perfect Circle's aMOTION DVD, Judith suffered a stroke that left her partially paralyzed and wheelchair-bound. The two-part song, "Wings for Marie", is an opus dedicated to her. The length of time between the paralysis and her death was 27 years, or approximately 10,000 days. Great new album too (10,000 Days), much more accessible than the last one.

That's it. Unfortunately, I don't know any other untagged bloggers in order to meme-tag them...

It's That Time Again

One year since I started this. Just thought I'd mention that - I have no introspective "How have I changed?"/ "What have I achieved?" dialogues planned, just the fact alone. A while ago I thought of revisiting my New Year's Resolutions on here for a public evaluation of my integrity, but decided against it due to the fact that to do so seems rather formulaic and predictable. Suffice it to say that, even as my own most spiteful and damaging critic, I am confident that I have followed up on most of the list, save eating less meat and not picking my nose in public. Oh, slap my wrists...

I've been thinking a little too much recently about how (I imagine) other people perceive me, particularly in comparison to the way I perceive myself. When I think like this, I am reminded of a scene in Godard's Le Petit Soldat (I watched this film as a part of my French course at University, though regrettably I didn't pay much attention to it, aside from this particular scene of course), in which the protagonist looks at himself in the mirror for an extended period of time, periodically covering his eyes, then uncovering them, then recovering them. He is assessing, not without a sense of bewilderment, the gulf of difference between how he looks and how he feels.

I guess people do this kind of thing all the time, most notably when they are scrolling through photographs and linger on the ones in which they feature. This isn't necessarily narcissism: true, it is a fascination with how we appear, or even sometimes the fact that we appear at all, but this is because we are not accustomed to a third-person perspective of oursleves.

There's a fine line between insecurity and vanity: let my accusors think what they like, but I need this to make me feel good.