Tragedies and statistics.
On the strangeness of deaths near and far. (THE BODY IS THE SOUL #5)
1.
In light of the earthquake in Turkey, and the violent demise of nearly 20,000 people who just a few days ago were going about their lives as usual, I went searching for the famous Stalin quote—”The death of one man is a tragedy; the death of millions is a statistic”—in order to semi-refute it.
We are bad at picturing big numbers so we default to envisioning large manmade structures. Twenty thousand is about the maximum number who can fit in Madison Square Garden. Imagine a sold-out New York Knicks game or Billy Joel concert; imagine all those people alive one moment and not alive the next. Against the infamous quote, I think it is possible to feel, at the very least, genuine grief or at least melancholy in the face of such an enormity of human lives gone in an instant (or, far more terrible to contemplate, over hours and days of crushed isolation under toppled buildings). It’s different than personal grief—maybe it needs its own word? maybe the German language or another less smooothed-over tongue than English has an appropriate term?—but I do think it is possible to feel something grieflike for the death of total strangers, although it’s admittedly an abstract sensation in comparison to the body-blow of firsthand loss.
Instead of the source of the Stalin quote, I found this debunking in the Christian Science Monitor archives:
There's no proof that Stalin ever said this, but even if he did, he would likely have been quoting a 1932 essay on French humor by the German journalist, satirist, and pacifist Kurt Tucholsky.
Much like Rousseau did with his "great princess," Tucholsky quotes a fictional diplomat from the French Ministry of Foreign affairs, speaking on the horrors of war.
"The war?" says Tucholsky's diplomat, "I cannot find it to be so bad! The death of one man: this is a catastrophe. Hundreds of thousands of deaths: that is a statistic!"1
The notion that mass mortality is somehow less emotionally challenging than individual deaths feels like a proper subject for a satirist: a pointed exaggeration rather than an earnest truth. I’m reminded of a startling Annie Dillard essay in the January 1998 issue of Harper’s Magazine called “The Wreck of Time: Taking Our Century’s Measure,” which begins as follows: “Ted Bundy, the serial killer, after his arrest, could not fathom the fuss. What was the big deal? David Von Drehle quotes an exasperated Bundy in Among the Lowest of the Dead: I mean, there are so many people."2
The essayist goes on to ruminate on some of the big numbers that define human existence in the broadest terms: it’s possible that up to 100 million people have lived and died before us; 2 million children die each year of diarrhea; Stalin starved 7 million Ukrainians in one year; the early 20th-century flu epidemic took up to 21 million lives….
“Do we blink?” Dillard asks.
It’s an essay made of big numbers and impossible questions. A bit later on in the piece, Dillard wonders,
If sanctioning the death of strangers could save my daughter's life, would I do it? Probably. How many others' lives would I be willing to sacrifice? Three?Three hundred million?
She does not provide an answer, because how could she possibly? We are sometimes moved to care about strangers, it’s true. But they remain, more or less, abstractions. They have to. How could we go about our days if the deaths of countless strangers slowed us down for anything more than a few minutes? If we allowed such knowledge to sink in, we’d never get out of bed in the morning.
2.
Here’s how I first started formulating this set of words—”the body is the soul”—as a kind of thematic resonator, not so much a positivistic thesis in search of scientific evidence but an intentional commitment to a priori secularism. It’s similar to the theme of my first major term paper as a Columbia philosophy major, written about 40 years ago for the inestimable Arthur Danto, in which I argued that “god doesn’t matter.” I was 18 years old, still reeling from a childhood that featured aspects of religious abuse, and I felt called (ha) to analyze St. Anselm’s so-called mathematical proof of divine existence, aka the ontological argument, which the Encyclopedia Brittanica glosses in this manner:
Anselm began with the concept of God as that than which nothing greater can be conceived. To think of such a being as existing only in thought and not also in reality involves a contradiction, since a being that lacks real existence is not a being than which none greater can be conceived. A yet greater being would be one with the further attribute of existence. Thus the unsurpassably perfect being must exist; otherwise it would not be unsurpassably perfect.
I can’t remember exactly how I argued against this, but the gist was: well, if that’s all that “god” is, such a rarified rationalist concept can’t possibly be connected to an actively powerful being with a personality and authority who intervenes in human affairs. Such a bloodless mathemetical divinity is the equivalent of pencil marks on a page, eliciting a big shrug. I mean—this is freshman or sophomore level cogitation, real late-teen-years stuff, I suppose, and yet it’s still the kernel of my thinking in some ways. What I meant then and what I mean now is this. I don’t rightly care one way or another if there is a metaphysical realm of any sort. It seems to me that the experiences of our living bodies here on this planet already provide enough contemplative fodder for our most inward, self-examining questions and our most outward ethical concerns. From the perspective of our living, suffering bodies equipped with mirror neurons and imagination, we don’t need to believe in transcendant souls in order to feel moved by the other people’s deaths.
Several years ago, a neighborhood child was killed on Christmas day in a highway car crash. He was 5 years old at the time. I didn’t know him except by name and sight. I wouldn’t call his parents friends, really. They are casual acquaintances in a fairly tight-knit and interconnected city community, not people with whom there’s any real emotional bond.
Yet my ex-husband and I, and even my son within his capacity at age 7, were genuine mourners. It hit us hard, just as it hit many of our local friends and neighbors. I remember thinking it was the mere physical familiarity that made me feel this child’s death so profoundly. These people and their lost son lived on the other edge of our park, in a house cattycorner on the cross-street. We could see their front door from our front door. Our son was an occasional sports teammate of the boy, not an actual friend. But he had spent his five years living right there, in that house right over there. I knew nothing of this child’s personality, his individuality, or what might be called, colloquially, his soul. I knew the people to whom he belonged, I knew which house he lived in, and I vaguely knew his body and face. He bore some of the features passed down by his Asian-American mother. In our majority white neighborhood, this made him easier to identify than the many tow-headed sports-playing boys belonging to fair-haired neighbors.
I felt then, and still feel now, that the death of this almost stranger hit me as hard as if he’d been a nephew or the child of a close friend—and this response surprised me. Of course, some of it was merely the resonance and relatability of having a son nearly the same age. But I began to muse about whether the mere presence of a person nearby was at the heart of anything we might call an emotional connection, whether “love” might turn out to be simply “the thing that happens when someone’s body is near your body a lot of the time.” And thus whether “loss” really just boils down to…this person was right here near me and now they are not.
I suppose all this is very obvious, but for some reason, at that time it felt like an under-reported or under-described aspect of what life feels like. I still think we have a tendency to discount the experiences of our bodies moving through space in favor of abstractions filling our minds and our mouths. We identify with our thoughts until those moments when suddenly life forces us to remember our bodies. Usually via pain.
If writers can be accused of having something in common with sociopaths, here’s a bit of evidence. I have on rare occasions forced myself to think the unthinkable: the possibility that I might live longer than my own child. I try to imagine what that would feel like, despite the fact that it is unimaginable. I am not superstitious at all. I do not believe that I’m tempting fate by making myself wonder how or even if I’d survive such a terrible thing. I don’t mean suicide, I mean, not knowing how my body could possibly force itself to take another breath if it lost its favorite person in the whole world. I’ve actually observed a neighborhood mother and father go through this very worst thing imaginable and somehow remain alive. It is still beyond my comprehension.
We’re so fragile, we’re such easily punctured or battered structures, and at the same time, we’re stubborn vessels. It’s apparently not that easy for a body to die, even from grief or existential exhaustion, even from enough is enough. My mother—what’s left of her in that 86-year-old, still laboring soma lying in a hospital bed in a nursing facility in Yucaipa CA—is a case in point. Less than a year ago she lost her last most important person, the one living nearest to her, her longtime companion Edward. He was a few years younger and she had always assumed she would die first. I am pretty certain that if she had a choice to flip a switch and go lights-out in an instant, she would do so right now. But of course, she is one of the lucky ones. She has lived beyond the threshold of tragedy. Her death, whether it’s today or tomorrow or weeks from now, will merely be the last fact of her life. Neither a catastrophe nor a statistic.
3.
You can never quite predict how you’re going to feel about people when they die. The other day my sister and I talked about the early death of one of our uncles when he was in his fifties, my sister was in college, and I was in my early 20s. He was, we agreed, the only genuinely nice, seemingly trustworthy one among any of our uncles, maternal or paternal, and yet somehow neither of us really mourned him when he was felled by a heart attack. We were both so alienated from our family of origin, even a potentially close connection had been rendered meaningless.
My very first high school love, my first sexual partner, died a few years ago, either suicide or OD, I’m not sure, and when I heard the news I felt absolutely nothing. Any nostalgia or residual affection had been killed off once I realized that he had been a controlling, abusive, cocaine-addled asshole, and thus just a terrible reflection of my poor emotional training at home and my unfamiliarity with better choices. Long before he’d died, he’d become merely a character in an unpleasant old story, a symptom of a dark time in my life, out of which I’d grown dramatically.
It’s strange, our rotations into and out of people’s lives and theirs into and out of ours. We are abstractions to each other until we are not, and then we might very well be everything to each other, but the possibility of returning to distance and forgetting and abstraction is always there. A person means everything to you at 17 or 25 or 55 but nothing at all a few years or decades later or by the time you’re on your deathbed. A person hovers on the edge of your Facebook profile for years, becomes your primary love interest for a short while, and then a source of agonizing heartbreak and an entirely lost person whose memory still haunts you, while they’ve pretty much forgotten all about you. In some other person’s life, the roles are reversed and you are the unintentional source of fantasy and hope, later of heartbreak and loss, and you will linger for a long time in their sadness and regrets—even though you barely ever think about them at all.
I barely ever think about my father. My own father! But he was always something of a stranger to me. I’ve thought more about my mother than any grownup should be required to, especially since I’ve spent very little actual time with her over the course of my life. Yet somehow now that she is safely living out her last days among professional caretakers, I find myself not thinking about her at all as a still-alive person. She is already somewhat in the past tense, an object of necessary rumination and writing. A character. (Writers are in fact a little bit sociopathic this way, reducing humans to marks on a page if it serves a good story.) But it’s okay. It’s easier for me to construct a balanced view of her as a flawed human being, and remember her good qualities, without her almost-always-vexing immediate presence.
4.
I’m not sure if this bit fits here, but it’s aggravating me very much today so I’ll let it arrive on the page: This morning I read an article in Vanity Fair by author Jeff Sharlett entitled, “Is a Second Civil War Underway in Rural America?”3 Sharlett spends time with a number of extremists in various parts of the heartland, including a militia leader named Rob Brunn who claims to have over six or seven thousand troops under his “command.”
I don’t even know how to summarize this person’s thought processes, so I’ll just quote the piece at length.
When Rob thought about abortion, he started with guns. The question for him was not whether abortion is right or wrong. The question was: When will China invade? The question was: Can we afford to spare potential infantry? “If you make the top 10 of things that keep your country running, abortion is not in the top 500. But 10 years down the road, if I have a war and I’m a leader, and you and the Black population have aborted 40% of their babies for the past 30 years, I’m running out of foot soldiers. Abortions are bodies that never make it to my front line.” (It’s true that a higher percentage of Black pregnancies end in abortion than white ones. Rob’s even right about the number 40. But not the percent: It’s 40 out of 1,000, according to the American Journal of Public Health. That is 4%.)
Rob called himself “pro-choice,” but that term means something different in his vernacular. He meant the choice of whether or not to murder a baby is up to you. “If you choose to do something that’s medically possible, I’m going to leave it between you and God, until it affects me in the state of readiness of my defense.” Readiness. It requires panopticon paranoia, looking for threats down every sight line. Rob looked at falling birth rates. He looked at what he considered Mexico’s invasion. He looked at what he suspected would be civil war according to a rural/urban divide—in which, even though he lived in town, he would side with the land he held outside of it. He looked at China, he noted they ended their population control program in 2021, he contemplated 1.4 billion Red Chinese divided by half and then by some factor again to account for age and thinks of hundreds of millions of Chinese wombs churning out multiple Chinese babies (in fact, the Chinese birth rate is falling) and he thought, “they’re getting ready.” For the future war. “You start prepping several generations ahead to have bodies when you lose so many bodies that you need a level of fresh bodies you never dreamed you’d have to dig into.”
So, in other words, this man believes that more people need to be born in order for more people to be available to die in a future war of his imagining. Abortion is a problem not because it “murders babies” but because several generations from now we will need more living American bodies (black ones in particular?) in order to have enough dead American soldier bodies so that mission-driven militia leaders like Rob Brunn can make sure this land isn’t overrun with Chinese and Mexican bodies.
Did I catch that right?
Okay.
Okay.
Whatever.
Let’s move on.
5.
A while back there was a certain life-altering incident I haven’t discussed much except with close friends. I have some lingering shame around the circumstances, but the shame is about things I thought and felt, far more than anything I did or even said. Since I don’t believe in mind-crimes, I can’t quite label myself a wrongdoer—even if events proved me to be something of an ordinary fool. The producer of my last record and I became close friends, arguably too close, but that depends on who’s making the argument and why. It’s a thing that happens. These collaborations require a form of intimacy, an easy compatibility, and a shared sense of fun. It feels like a mutual crush because it is a mutual crush. Discovering shared tastes, developing a battery of in-jokes, bonding through personal disclosures—it’s all fair game. The producer-artist collaboration entails holding nothing back, at least within the bounds of propriety. The studio has to be a perfectly safe space, and perfect safety is a form of love.
But also, you know, sometimes there’s just a certain chemistry between two people. It’s not a call to action unless someone decides to act, which, in this case, would have made someone a bad actor. Despite depths of mutual admiration that all of our friends and hired musicians on the project could plainly see, there was never any flirtation or inappropriate conversation between him and me. I know things can happen, but I do not believe there was the risk of an actual affair in this case—in part because he clearly loves his wife and in part because I know I’m not a reckless person. Just a big-dreamer-plus-executive type, visionary and wonky in the same instant. (That’s exactly how records get made and by whom.)
Even when my marriage was unraveling and my emotions were in turmoil, even when I found myself leaning on this friendship and this musical project itself to provide some light and happiness in an otherwise distraught period of my home life, even when the producer and I were spending several hours at a time, three to five days per week in his basement studio, for months on end—working, talking, laughing, listening to music, making decisions about instrumentation and personnel and tempos, all of which necessitated getting inside each other’s heads—I trusted that neither of us was reckless, neither of us a bad actor.
Over the years his wife had also become a friend, although one who’d always made me uncomfortable. Highly neurotic and almost comically insecure, she reminded me of my mother and of the several other damaged, volatile women I’ve had in my life, usually not for very long. In friendships as much as romance, we who experienced traumatic childhoods tend to attract what’s toxically familiar even if it’s bound to get us in trouble. In the first summer of the pandemic, she glommed onto me hard in the manner of a new best friend as well as my number one music fan, texting and calling nearly every day, making early plans to host a CD release party for me when my project was ready. I want to support you and be a part of this! she’d say. She glommed onto me in much the same way as I had glommed onto my producer. (Ugh. We damaged children and our resplendent neediness. We generate patterns, mirrorings, and ironies like a roomful of clever TV writers.)
I empathized with both of them. I knew her troubled backstory as well as I knew his. They were obviously very much in love with each other but somehow I’d gotten myself stuck between them, receiving megadoses of both his need to serve and her need to adulate. A semi-professional photographer and a visual artist, she lobbied fairly aggressively for us to do a certain creative collaboration of our own. I warily agreed. As we began working together, I found her alternately controlling and hapless, domineering and weepy, exuberant with a nonstop flood of ideas to try yet technically incompetent, and unwilling to bear down and finish one concept at a time. Oy vey! I of all people should have seen the signs. I’ve worked with many professional photographers and this was amateur hour/unsupervised group therapy in comparison. I was patient for a while, but after logistical arguments and creative conflicts, we ended the project. It was a tense but seemingly mutual decision. I figured we’d let things cool off and eventually be friends again.
Instead, a few weeks later I was in effect banished from her life in an abrupt and theatrical manner. For several months while the producer and I managed the mix and mastering process on the CD, we stayed in touch by phone and Zoom, but something had changed, and I was eventually, pointedly kicked out of his life, too. (One day I might describe what happened, but oh-the-drama will take too long to detail here.) Later it became clear that the woman was telling people I’d fallen in love with her husband. But the timing tells me a different story, and I doubt she ever believed I was a real threat to her marriage—only to her ego.
And I should have seen all this coming! My mother and my grandmother were models for this kind of stereotypically narcissistic behavior: splitting the world into beloveds versus enemies, insiders versus scapegoats, angels versus demons. Truth be told, I’d behaved this way with a few women friends in my youth, too. (Damaged children, patterns, mirrorings, etc etc.) Overnight I’d been shifted from the former category to the latter. The Oxford English Dictionary tells me that there’s a rare usage of the word stranger that feels apt here: “a non-member of society.” I was rendered a stranger in a place where I was once a valued citizen.
In the two years since then, I’ve had so many other emotional storms to navigate, I barely ever think about that terrible alienation. I was forced to move on, so I moved on. But every once in a while, I get a message from someone in the larger local musical community who has very nice things to say about my album—because my former producer has just played it for them in his house. That’s right. My music still gets played and even honored in a home in which I am no longer a welcome person. Presumably, this listening happens in my producer’s basement studio—where I once spent many, many hours working in a state of sheer joy and creative exhilaration—and out of his wife’s earshot. I understand why he does it. It’s my best musical work to date but it was one of his proudest professional achievements, too.
This third-party notification has happened on more than one occasion in the past few years, but for some reason only yesterday did I decide to do something about it. I sent a handwritten note to my ex-producer requesting that he stop playing my record for people. I told him I thought it was both unfair and unethical for him to keep celebrating it with other listeners. I’m not sure why I said unethical. It felt like the right word at the moment, although I’d be hard-pressed to explain exactly why. I wrote: It was a moment in time, it was a great project, we celebrated it, and then I was forced to move on. You should, too. I said some other things, including This should be obvious—even though, obviously, it has not been obvious to him. I tried to be plain and direct in my language and tone, because at this point I’m not angry, not even in pain anymore, just exasperated. Maybe all I should have written was: I’M NOT DEAD YET, ASSHOLE, SO STOP MEMORIALIZING ME VIA MY SONGS.
6.
Meanwhile, buildings fall down and entire cities crumble and populations get crushed. We have people in our lives, we lose people, we forget people, we love them and then hate them or more likely grow indifferent to them. Wars get imagined, wars get threatened, wars get started, and then soldiers and noncombatants die in great numbers. So it goes. The world has billions, it loses tens, hundreds, thousands of millions. There have been an estimated 300 human generations. By some accounts, we have at most four generations left before the effects of climate catastrophe render the earth uninhabitable for our kind. The planet will be bathed in sunlight until some far-off and unimaginable day our star burns itself out. There will be nobody here to mourn.
It’s very strange, the way our pain attaches to some terrible things, but not at all to others.
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The online image of Dillard’s essay is officially only available to Harper’s subscribers through its archives, so I’d rather not defy the publisher and link it here. But if you’d like to read it, get in touch with me at <sandy(dot)asirvatham(at)gmail(dot)com> and I’ll share a PDF copy of it with you individually.
Regarding 1 person vs millions of people, for a very long time I've called this "the ignorance of large numbers." As a NASA engineer I came to this conclusion talking to people who really have no clue about sizes and distances in space. Or conversely, just how small tiny things really can be. Think atomic level. But in the age of PowerBall and MegaMillions, this ignorance certainly apples to people who think that it's worth spending $10, $20, $100 on tickets for these lotteries. "Somebody's gotta win. It could be ME!" Well, actually, no, somebody doesn't need to win. And the idea of the odds being something like 300,000,000 to 1 is utterly meaningless to the majority of people who play. They'd be better off playing the scratch-offs that have odds of 100 to 1. But because the payoff for a scratch-off is in the realm of their understanding, it's not enough. They want millions! Billions! So, similarly with the death of one person vs the death of tens or hundreds of thousands. Those numbers are just too big for most people to comprehend. So it's easy to feel sadness, but it's not a tragedy. The tragedy is the boy who dies kitty corner whom you recognized. I think distance also plays a role. Across the street vs around the world. The deaths of 20,000 Turkish people is real to me because Audi Field in DC, where friends and I have season tickets to DC United soccer, holds 20,000 people. But it's still a lot of people and they're a long way away. I feel sad for the dead and injured in Turkey; my life won't change because of it. I feel more loss for the friends' who lost their 2-year-old grandson to a heart defect. I never met the grandson but I know how it has affected the family.
I'm sure that can somehow be related to the infiniteness of someone's god.
Regarding the Vanity Fair article, because I subscribe to the magazine, I looked it up. In the magazine, the title of the article is "Death Tripping" starting on page 80 of the Feb 23 edition. I haven't read it yet. This weekend. It looks very interesting. And frightening. And it looks like you're right, Rob wants expendable bodies for his army to fight the Chinese when they invade. Oy vey.