Stella
Sanford, in her book ‘How to Read Beauvoir,’ contends that one of the
main themes of Simone De Beauvoir’s ‘The Blood of Others’ is the
relation between the free individual and ‘the historically unfolding
world of brute facts and other men and women.’ Deirdre Bair, in a
biography of the French existentialist, published in 1990, argues that
Beauvoir’s intention was to express the paradox of freedom experienced
by an individual and the ways in which others, perceived by the
individual as objects, were affected by his actions and decisions.
So
there are brute facts unfolding before our eyes, as we write, as we get
from A to be, as we go about our business, as we love and hate, and so
on. There are others in that ‘unfolding world.’ Men and women, children
too, whose names we may or may not know. We act. There are consequences.
Sometimes it’s a ripple or less, sometimes a wave and then, at times,
it is a tornado or worse that we unleash, knowingly or unknowingly.
A word would do. A some, ‘hardly even noticed,’ act would do. Look-away is good enough. Silence too. There are consequences.
But
what if those consequences are tragic? What if something said or done
or ignored precipitates tragedies or has the potential to push things in
such directions? Someone might say, ‘look what you've done!’ Someone
might ask, ‘are you happy now?’
Well, there are countless ways
of brushing it off. One can even do so philosophically, ‘if it’s good to
do, what’s wrong in talking about it?’ We have heard the Sinhala
equivalent often enough: ‘karanna honda nam kiwwahama moko?’
Self righteousness helps. All kinds of arguments can be made.
It’s
for the larger good, so others will think twice. It’s just so that the
relevant entities will be forced to inquire and, if wrongdoing is
established, will punish perpetrators and better still put in place
preventive mechanisms. For the social good, then.
A voice in the
head might mumble, ‘hmm….really?’ but voices in heads can be easily,
happily and conveniently ignored. If not, they can be drowned by simply
increasing the volume of the assertions.
But why bother? Why be
worried about voices in the head, the prick of conscience etc when, in
the end, it’s someone else who has to deal with consequences that are
less about whatever that person has done than about what the philosopher
said about it. Blood of others. Not ours. Their problem, not ours.
Somewhere,
beyond the arc of eye and mind, there are lives that are wrecked.
Somewhere a child is seeing her world come apart. Somewhere a household
has been turned into a torture chamber where the instruments of
inflicting pain and suffering are words, silences and abandonment.
Somewhere there’s a garden full of flowers that eyes will no longer
notice. There’s food that cannot excite taste buds.
There may be
a father, perhaps retired or ill, who is crushed to the point of
shedding tears for the first time in many decades. A mother may be
signing, trembling uncontrollably. Things that never happened to them
had indeed come to pass, let’s say. A child is confused and perturbed by
the uproar that has intruded on a world made of known, predictable and
mostly happy things. One day he or she will know. One day he or she will
be told.
Consequences. They often materialise far away.
Sometimes they don’t materialise for they lacerate the mind. There’s no
bleeding. No blood. No sign of wound or hurt. Therefore it can even be
assumed that there were no consequences at all.
But ‘far away’
is a safe bet. So far away you just can’t see. All the better, for you
can assume there’s nothing to see anyway. You could, moreover, argue
that thinking about possible consequences is an exercise without an end.
It can make you numb. It can cripple. Correct. And yet, there are
times, there are moments, there are incidents, there are things in this
world of ever-unfolding brute facts and unfathomable miseries when it
doesn’t take much to see that A will most likely precipitate B and B
will snowball into C and so on until an F down the line will be so
tragic and so ugly that you may want to close your eyes.
Guilt.
It can be wished away. Most times. Not always. Blood stains of the mind,
so to speak, are invisible. The mind that generated word or action
which in turn caused blood to ‘spill’ will itself be stained.
It is not a weight light enough to live with.
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