I just watched the first Decalogue, and as with substantially every other one, I cried. What pain. I had put off watching these, because I knew this would happen. Still, I think this is how one gathers wealth, of the sort that matters.
In dealing with fear, one cannot neglect the fear of grief and loss. And dealing with fear, dealing with grief and loss, are acquired skills, I suppose. They are amenable to practice, and I suppose that is what this art does. I have not lost anything. Everything is well with me. And no one actually lost anything in the film. It was all make believe. But of course, for a time, for an hour, we have long since learned to live a fictional world, which some part of our minds cannot separate easily from the real one.
There is a lesson here. The Greeks were onto something with tragedy: it is a way of helping us all learn to make peace with the inevitability of death, decay, sorrow and loss. It is practice. I have never thought of it that way.
And obviously one can practice avoiding these things. One can practice superficiality. The most obvious way is violence. Grief easily becomes rage, making rage an often-substitute for more real underlying feelings. Perhaps the violence in our media is structurally necessary because we have forgotten how to mourn, how to share our pain.
I have proposed before, and forgotten until now, that the movie “Because of Winn-Dixie” would become a Christmas classic, if the world were emotionally rational.
But of course it isn’t, not generally. I guess the best we can aspire to is to create islands of comfort and understanding in an unreasoning, and storm tossed endless sea.
I dreamed of how one would comfort this father. There are no words, but there is a spirit.