It’s not just that violence happens here—intentional, casual, accidental, incidental—it’s that the prospect and the aftermath of violence are constantly crowding you from all sides: men with machine guns on the Avenida Revolución, growling dogs leaping into SUVs to sniff for drugs, a drunk passed out in front of the panaderia, a driver so tired or tweaking he barrels his semi into a cliff.

“….. the possibility of fetishizing pain is no reason to stop representing it. Pain that gets performed is still pain.”

Blog #9

Empathy is always perched precariously between gift and invasion. Empathy isn't just remembering how to say "that must be really hard"--it's figuring out how to bring difficulty into the light so it can be seen at all. Empathy isn't just listening, it's asking the questions whose answers need to be listened to. Empathy requires inquiry as much as imagination. Empathy requires knowing you know nothing. Empathy means acknowledging a horizon of context that extends perpetually beyond what you can see. A 1983 study titled "The Structure of Empathy" found a correlation between empathy and four major personality clusters: sensitivity, nonconformity, even temperedness, and social self-confidence. I like the word "structure." It suggests empathy is an edifice we build like a home or office--with architecture and design, scaffolding and electricity. The Chinese character for "listen" is built like this, a structure of many parts: the characters for ears and eyes, a horizontal line that signifies undivided attention, the swoop and teardrops of heart. Rating high for the study's "sensitivity" cluster feels intuitive. It means agreeing with statements like "I have at one time or another tried my hand at writing poetry" or "I have seen some things so sad they almost made me feel like crying" and disagreeing with statements like: "I really don't care whether people like me or dislike me." This last one seems to suggest that empathy might be, at root, a barter, a bid for others' affection: "I care about your pain" is another way to say "I care if you like me." We care in order to be cared for. We care because we are porous. The feelings of others matter, they are like matter: they carry weight, exert gravitational pull. ...We should empathize from courage, is the point--and it makes me think about how much of my empathy comes from fear. I'm afraid other people's problems will happen to me, or else I'm afraid other people will stop loving me if I don't adopt their problems as my own.