How Kindness Gives Way to Cruelty

That's gotta hurt! 

 

 

I. Man and Mutt

 

One of the most harrowing scenes in D. H. Lawrence's work appears not in his fiction, but in 'Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine' ...

In this extraordinary essay, Lawrence tells of how one day a "big, bushy, rather handsome sandy-red dog" wandered on to his New Mexican ranch, clearly in distress, having had an encounter with a porcupine: "his whole muzzle set round with white spines, like some ghastly growth; like an unnatural beard".

 

Lawrence continues:

 

"He waited while I went up to him, wagging his tail and whimpering, and ducking his head, and dancing. He daren't rub his nose with his paws anymore: it hurt too much. I patted his head and looked at his nose, and he whimpered loudly. 

      He must have had thirty quills, or more, sticking out of his nose, all the way round: the white, ugly ends of the quills protruding an inch, sometimes more, sometimes less, from his already swollen, blood-puffed muzzle. 

    [...] Then the fun began. I got him in the yard: and he drank up the whole half-gallon of the chicken's sour milk. Then I started pulling out the quills. He was a big, bushy, handsome dog, but his nerve was gone, and every time I got a quill out, he gave a yelp. Some long quills were fairly easy. But the shorter ones, near his lips, were deep in, and hard to get hold of, and hard to pull out when you did get hold of them. And with every one that came out, came a little spurt of blood and another yelp and writhe.

      The dog wanted the quills out: but his nerve was gone. Every time he saw my hand coming to his nose, he jerked his head away. I quieted him, and stealthily managed to jerk out another quill, with the blood all over my fingers. But with every one that came out, he grew more tiresome. I tried and tried and tried to get hold of another quill, and he jerked and jerked, and writhed and whimpered, and ran under the porch floor."

 

As one might imagine, it was "a curiously unpleasant, nerve-trying job", with the dog whimpering and jerking his head this way and that. And so, after struggling for a couple of hours and extracting some twenty quills, Lawrence gave up: 

 

"It was impossible to quiet the creature, and I had had enough. His nose on the top was clear: a punctured, puffy blood-darkened mess; and his lips were clear. But just on his round little chin [...] was still a bunch of white quills, eight or nine deep in.

      We let him go, and he dived under the porch, and there he lay invisible: save for the end of his bushy, foxy tail, which moved when we came near. Towards noon he emerged, ate up the chicken food, and stood with that doggish look of dejection, and fear, and friendliness, and greediness, wagging his tail.

      But I had had enough.

      'Go home!' I said. 'Go home! Go home to your master, and let him finish for you.'"

      

Unfortunately, the dog doesn't want to go - and it's at this point kindness is superseded by cruelty:

"He was not going to leave the place. 

      And I! I simply did not want him.

      And so I picked up a stone. He dropped his tail, and swerved towards the house. I knew what he was going to do. He was going to dive under the porch, and there stick, haunting the place.

      I dropped my stone, and found a good stick under the cedar tree. [...] 

      I could not bear to have that dog around any more. Going quietly to him, I suddenly gave him one hard hit with the stick, crying  'Go home!' He turned quickly, and the end of the stick caught him on his sore nose. With a fierce yelp, he went off like a wolf, downhill, like a flash, gone. And I stood in the field full of pangs of regret, at having hit him, unintentionally, on his sore nose."

        

 

II. Mann und Mutter

 

I thought of this scene the other morning when attending to my mother, for whom I care. 

 

Admittedly, she's not a big bushy dog and has never required my assistance in removing a face full of porcupine quills. But she is 94 and in the advanced stages of Alzheimer's, thus fully dependent upon my help. And she is now inarticulate, like an animal, only able to offer a continuous series of moans and groans and shout out gibberish. 

 

And whilst her nerve hasn't gone, her mind has, making it impossible for me to reason with her, when, for example, trying to wash her, or feed her, or change her dressings and - like the poor creature Lawrence writes of - she won't shut the fuck up and she won't stay still, constantly babbling and twisting this way and that, turning the provision of care into a curiously unpleasant, nerve-trying job ...

 

And there are times when, like Lawrence, I feel I have reached the end of my tether and can't bear to be around my mother; times, even, when I too feel like picking up a large stone or a good stick ...  

 

And that, whilst a terrible confession, is an important realisation: in the end, kindness will always give way to cruelty - which is why abuse is rife within care homes, hospitals, and other institutions in which vulnerable individuals are housed. The suffering of others can trigger violence as a kind of defence mechanism and, ironically, the most inhumane acts are often a sign that one is too sensitive, not that one lacks compassion. 

 

 

See: D. H. Lawrence, 'Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 350-52.   

Spare the Wasps

Generally speaking, people don't think of wasps with the same degree of affection as they do bees, even though both can sting. It might simply be a public relations issue, but I suspect there's something more to our collective spheksophobia on the one hand and our melissophilia on the other. 

Trying to explain her fear of wasps and fondness for bees, my friend Deborah insisted the latter were kind and hardworking: "They never wilfully hurt anyone, they pollinate the flowers and they make honey - what's not to love?" 

In contrast, she said, wasps were vicious and unproductive: "They sting you for no reason and they don't do anything except make a pest of themselves whenever you're sitting outside having something to eat."  

And thus: "If you came across a bee in distress, you would instinctively want to help. But a normal person only ever wants to swat a wasp!" 

It's undoubtedly this kind of attitude that sanctifies the wanton destruction of wasp nests whenever people find them in their gardens or houses. One recalls, for example, the widely reported case from 2014 of a giant nest housing some 5000 creatures, built atop a bed in a Winchester woman's rarely used spare room, the wasps having entered through an open window and chewed through the mattress and pillows.

Even the pest controller who was called in, couldn't help but admire the amazingly beautiful nest that the insects had taken at least three months to construct. But this didn't, alas, deter him from destroying it and exterminating the entire colony with his poison spray, at the woman's request.

One also recalls the cruelty of George Orwell, who confessed to once cutting a wasp in half as it enjoyed some jam on the side of his breakfast plate; watching with gleeful fascination as a tiny stream of jam trickled out of its severed oesophagus and laughing when the insect tried to fly away and at that point realising the dreadful thing that had befallen it.

Whilst the exterminator was simply doing his job - not that this morally excuses his actions - I can't see any justification for Orwell's juvenile sadism. His intellectual point about modern man's obliviousness to having had his soul cut away, doesn't make one forget the heartless brutality that gave rise to the analogy.        

Thankfully, there are those in the world, such as Thom Bonneville, Director of the Animal Interfaith Alliance (AIA), who call upon us to spare the wasps and show care, concern and compassion for all living creatures, regardless of their size or whether they benefit us in any way.


Note: readers who wish to know more about the AIA can visit their website by clicking here.

     

Dandelion: D. H. Lawrence and the Question of Care

Dandelion: photo by Greg Hume (2006)

As much as Lawrence may wish to sit like a dandelion on his own stem and concern himself exclusively with those objects existing within his immediate physical environment - refusing to care about abstract issues, faraway places, or unknown peoples - he’s conscious of the fact that such insouciance can lead to parochialism and might easily be mistaken for indifference on his part; something he’d very much regret.

For Lawrence is very keen to sharply differentiate between insouciance and indifference. The former, he says, is a refusal to be made anxious by abstractions, or swept off to into the empty desert spaces inhabited by idealists gripped by a compulsion to care about everything under the sun. The latter, however, Lawrence defines as an inability to care resulting from a certain instinctive-intuitive numbness or nihilism, which, like Nietzsche, he posits as the great malady of the modern age; a consequence of having cared too much about the wrong thing in the immediate past.

The apathetic or indifferent individual, the nihilist, is essentially an exhausted idealist; they have none of the carefree gayness of the insouciant man or woman and do not know how to live on the spot and in the nowness of the actual moment.

That said - and as indicated - insouciance can itself become problematic and serve to isolate the individual, cutting them off from the wider world and from history. We can’t be entirely self-sufficient and concerned only with our own musings and sense impressions. Nor can we only be concerned only about those with whom we have a direct relationship; our immediate family and friends, or kith and kin.

Ultimately, as Lawrence was reluctantly obliged to concede, feeling a sense of solidarity with all mankind isn’t entirely fraudulent and the love of humanity stands for something real and vital; "that feeling of being at one with the struggling soul, or spirit or whatever it is, of our fellow men". Lawrence continues:

"This caring about the wrongs of unseen people has been rather undone. Nevertheless ... still, away in some depth of us, we know that we are connected vitally, if remotely ... [and] we dimly realise that mankind is one, almost one flesh. It is an abstraction, but it is also a physical fact. In some way or other, the cotton workers of Carolina, or the rice-growers of China are connected with me and, to a faint yet real degree, part of me. The vibration of life which they give off reaches me, touches me, and affects me unknown to me. For we are all more or less connected, all more or less in touch: all humanity."

What’s interesting about this passage is that not only does it demonstrate that Lawrence was not an individualist as many critics mistakenly believe, but it also shows that his love of humanity was born not of some transcendental attempt to develop a conceited cosmic consciousness, but out of a sense of class consciousness; it’s the workers and the peasants of the world that Lawrence primarily feels connected to and sympathetic with.

Those who cultivate indifference to the point that they lose any compassion for others are mistaken. Lawrence understands their frank egoism, but refuses to share it - worried by the effect it has on the individual who refuses to care. Their intellectual honesty is fine and it’s good to cast off all spurious sympathy and false emotion, but not if this entails the death of all feeling and one becomes empty inside (believing in nothing, standing for nothing, caring for nobody).

Lawrence admits, however, that some can find perverse pleasure in precisely this becoming-void and take "real pride and satisfaction in pure negation". These he calls the perfect nihilists: those whose shallowness is mistaken for depth; whose false calm is mistaken for strength; whose indifference is mistaken for insouciance. Nietzsche termed them the last men; those who sit grinning furtively in the triumph of their own emptiness.

See: D. H. Lawrence, ‘Insouciance’, and ‘Nobody Loves Me’, in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004). The lines quoted are from the latter text.