To heal…or to deal with?—from a personal method of dealing with friends in trouble and being there for them is to listen to them, be there physically, and take the load off their shoulders. Not necessarily putting it on your own shoulders, but giving them the favor of being a wall to bounce their ideas off of. Maybe they need the echo. They need to say things out loud, as much as you would love to say things out loud. Verbally giving them shape, a body, a physical state—a shape you can then burn, discard, or look at and see that it’s not that towering boulder you need to carry atop the mountain. It’s a small pebble or even a speck of dust. Not everything needs to be solved. Sometimes staying with the trouble is the way to go. Realizing you can’t fix everything, you can’t stop wars, you can’t change people’s way of thinking, you can’t change how your parents view the world, and you can’t change how they view you. Donna Haraway speaks about living with uncertainty rather than seeking resolution: “Staying with the trouble means learning to be truly present, not as a vanishing pivot between then and now, but as mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, meanings.”
So, what’s wrong with working around it? Surrender to this sea of troubles, and instead of taking arms against it and by opposing end them—this wont be my last Hamlet reference—use the current as fuel for your creative process.
Realize that the way you view the world is valid and share that with others. And through doing that, others will feel empowered because they’ve been heard, seen, and represented and respected. Someone else is going through the same. Someone else sees things the way I do. Someone else is going through the same doubts, feeling the same feelings, and maybe I’m not alone after all. Donna Haraway in Staying with the Trouble suggests that healing is found in collective action and connection: “Making kin is an enduring, necessary, and difficult practice of staying with the trouble.”
In Guilty Landscapes, a work by Verhoeven, In a room, you enter alone. You’re faced with a full-wall projection of what initially appears to be a pre-recorded video of a distressed place in the world, but it turns out to be a live video feed. A resident of the location appears to be looking back at his viewer, who is walking around in the museum room. Without visible moral judgment, the protagonist mirrors the behavior of the museum visitor. The people in the projection seem unaffected or barely affected by the supposed suffering. They qualify their own victimhood. The work does not so much address the specific problems of the place shown, but shifts the attention to the viewing experience. It questions the viewer’s gaze on “the pain of others,” the assumptions and implicit power relations that lie hidden in that gaze. Again, the screen is more than an image on the wall or a recording of what already happened. It’s a mirror into our inner selves, our view of the world, our relation to the other. It questions the morality of our empathy or lack thereof. A window into other worlds and a frame for a moment in time shared across the globe between two human beings.A striking, confrontational reminder of our shared human likeness.
The work doesn’t aim to solve the problem but puts you face to face with it, puts you inside of it so that you think and reflect, know and acknowledge that it is there. See the lives of people and see how we’re more alike than different.
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