July 19, 2003

• From 'When Compassion Becomes Dissent' by David James Duncan: (Please go read the whole thing...)
  
  

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  THERE IS A SUPERSTITION -- fed most savagely these days by politicians and news media -- holding that what we hear firsthand is "true" or "real" and that what we merely imagine is "untrue" or "unreal." News reports, for instance, are real, while the works of Tolstoy are not. This is nonsense. Insofar as literature enlivens imaginations, firms our grasp of reality, or strengthens our regard for fellow humans, it serves the world. And insofar as the president-character speaks scripts that deny life-threatening facts or erode the careful distinctions that sustain civil discourse and international goodwill, the "real" news report merely disseminates propaganda.
  
  Reportage can, and daily does, lie. Even first-hand experience can lie. And "mere" imaginary experience can open us to truths that would remain inaccessible forever if we had to wait for reportage or experience to teach us the same truth. One of the greatest of human traits, for example, is compassion , which means, literally, "to suffer with another." But this high art is seldom born in an instant thanks to "news" or to first-hand experiences. More often its seed is sown via a preliminary magic known as empathy. And empathy begins with a fictive act.
  
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  To be a Christian, a Buddhist, a Muslim, is to immerse oneself daily in unstinting fiction-making. Christ's words "Love thy neighbor as thyself," to cite a famously ignored example, demand an arduous imaginative act. This deceptively simple line orders me, as I look at you, to imagine that I am not seeing you, but me, and then to treat this imaginative you as if you are me. And for how long? Till the day I die! Christ orders anyone who's serious about him to commit this "Neighbor = Me" fiction until they forget for good which of the two of themselves to cheat in a business deal or abandon in a crisis or smart-bomb in a war -- at which point their imaginative act, their fiction-making, will have turned his words into reality and they'll be saying with Mother Teresa, "I see Christ in every woman and man."
  
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