There Comes A Time For Empathy…

Posted on October 26, 2006 by Varg

There is a time when empathy becomes too much. When, for one’s on good, they can’t take on any more of their friend’s and neighbor’s subtle suffering. Sometime, you have to stop feeling it all.

The bodies were everywhere. And not only during the storm. Even before. In a city like this, the bodies just pile up. Sure, the removal service comes and hauls them away. Bring out your dead. Bring out your dead. But they don’t haul away their memory. This one flipped her minivan here and that one was shot in the head there. Reports are printed in black and white 100,000 times and read by thousands and felt; mired in the goo of collective conciousness. Then the thousands drive or walk past the spot and think to themselves, “this is where it happened.” Maybe they mention it to their out of town guests or maybe, out of respect for the city or perhaps for their visitor’s nice vacation, they don’t mention it anywhere but in their head. And it stays there.

And now, in the grip of this “mental health crisis,” those with empathy are the ones ailing. Those who are taking it all inward. Empathy is the killer that drives a woman out into the lake or a man off the side of a bridge. Those that replay the suffering over and over again are psycho-trauma victims. They may not think so but they are. A mind has many ways to react to the horrors but none of them are good. Perhaps they will emerge as hypertension, cancer or panic attacks. That’s our little way of coping with it. All the insanity and ruinous behavior. The constant threats from criminals, pollution or high water.

The forces will align against us in the name of honest debate but it’s really a display of their own arrogance. They think a lack of empathy makes them strong. Perhaps it does but it also makes them ignorant. The time will come when no one wants to help them either.

For a person with empathy, for a humane human, dessertion is not an option.

2 thoughts on “There Comes A Time For Empathy…”

Edie says:

August 24, 2021 at 2:13 pm

You could post this same post again today, Aug 24, 2021 and it is exactly relevant as it was in 2006. How little our country has learned. Will it ever?
Varg says:

August 25, 2021 at 3:26 pm

Just read it again and, yup!

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Rejoice!

I say that a lot. I sign many pieces with it. I do this because I believe our lives are a true happenstance. A brilliant occurence from nothingness. We are so rare. We are so unlikely. And simply being born isn’t enough. From there we must survive, endure. So each morning, after our Sun departs and is reborn again. Please, for the sake of your ancestors and the Universe in general, hoist that cup of joe up and say, “Rejoice.”

Ours is a soulful existence. No matter how many McMansions, polyester fabrics, auto-tunes, modified foods and social networks we surround ourselves with, we are all still native, passionate beings made of ancient matter. We are organic and we have soul.

Wood also has a warm, soulful quality. Wood has a memory. It retains smells, traumas, events. It even has a calendar. This is why I have chosen it as my medium, for its old soul. I like to think the wood in my work is in its third incarnation. First a tree, then a home and now art. If you have a room that needs a little soul, get a piece. A room can never have enough soul.

My inspiration and subject matter comes from many sources, among them: Humanism, old ballads, trickster tales, flora and fauna, science, myths and folklore, stringed instruments, brass bands, amber spirits, lady vocalists, general relativity and quantum mechanics. Some of my pieces are there just to make a short, simple statement about what’s important in life. Some are more diffuse and abstract in meaning. A personal drama, an enduring line from a poem or novel, a poignant song lyric, the legacy of an important person, a fleeting thought … these are the subjects of my art.

I use hearts often because they are a very abstract way of depicting the human soul without also employing the very subjective human form. The symbolic heart is an apt representation for a person’s experience and essence. A body can immediatly conjure happiness, sorrow, youth, age, anger, bliss. These emotions can get in the way. Sometimes it’s simply about the experience.

I am the son of a sailor and a social worker, the grandson of a gypsy, a dancer and a nurse. I spent my youth moving from port city to port city, watching a lot of road go by and reading World Book Encyclopedia. After my parents settled down on the Gulf Coast, I was a miscreant youth, destroying cars and taking the wrongs things too seriously and the right things not serious enough. Eventually I began replacing my imagination with experience.

I will use any salvaged wood but prefer swamp cypress and longleaf heartwood pine.

I despise waste. Particularly the waste of organic matter. Trees are magnificent. They were here before we arrived and they’ll be around after we are gone. I’m making an effort to save as much wood as possible. Creating art is fun too. But beyond communicating with folks, but beyond making money ad providing for myself, beyond rescuing flooded parts, beyond reveling in the ethereal aroma of heartpine that hasn’t seen the light of day in 400 years, beyond all that, I am trying to make a simple comment on waste.