Blood: The Stuff of Life (CBC Massey Lecture) by Lawrence Hill

Author:Lawrence Hill [Hill, Lawrence]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781770893238
Amazon: 1770893237
Publisher: House of Anansi Press
Published: 2013-10-26T04:00:00+00:00

FOUR

FROM HUMANS TO COCKROACHES:

BLOOD IN THE VEINS OF POWER AND SPECTACLE

WHEN I WAS A PRESCHOOL CHILD, I found it hard to imagine that strangers travelling in cars really, truly had lives of their own. I would be in the back seat of the family Volkswagen Beetle, or perched in the tiny luggage compartment behind the back seat, peering out the windows as my mother or father drove. Who were all those other people in those cars? Did they have places to go to? Their own houses? Their own lives, separate from mine? It seemed inconceivable that such a mass of humanity could exist with no relation to me. I couldn’t hear, or touch, or come to know the strangers in those cars, so instead of forcing myself to ponder the ubiquity of mankind, I found it easier to imagine that others who didn’t know me didn’t really have independent lives at all.

This outlook carried over into my reaction to human suffering. As I began to watch television and movies, I discovered that there were two types of violence on the screen: the kind that I could watch, and the kind that I could not watch. Here was the sort of violence that I could manage, without blinking an eye: Wile E. Coyote gets repeatedly flattened while pursuing his prey, Road Runner, only to rise for yet another indignity a few minutes later. Or, when I was a bit older, the James Bond movie For Your Eyes Only, in which an enemy pursuing Our Hero on skis falls into a snow-spraying machine and comes out the other end as bloody snow. Or, even later, action films depicting good guys mowing down dozens of bad guys with gunfire. These scenes did not trouble me, because the victims — perhaps like the strangers I saw travelling in cars when I was very young — remained faceless. They had no humanity. It didn’t bother me to see them die.

However, there was another sort of violence that I have never tolerated well. It is when somebody suffers and bleeds up close. To behold their agony while blood flows was, and still is, shocking to me. Before I learned the hard way how viscerally these scenes affected me, I made a fool of myself by fainting once or twice in movie theatres. I went down and out, as if I had been bludgeoned on the head. I fainted watching Cool Hand Luke, when the prisoner played by Paul Newman is repeatedly punched in the face by a bigger, stronger inmate. When you follow that scene, you find yourself waiting for the punch that will finally draw blood and end the fight. But the fight does not end with the first bloodshed. It goes on and on. I found myself growing ill as Paul Newman (“Luke”) got up and up and up for his repeated beatings. Finally, as he kept getting up, I went down and out.

I had a protected, privileged middle-class childhood with little exposure to real (as opposed to on-screen) abuse and violence in my day-to-day life.

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