Is it possible to empathize with those who have made choices that inflict pain on themselves and those around them?
© Sardaka with CCLicense
These three poems, Fractures, were written in 2012 for an operatic recital called The Other Woman. They were also part of the inspiration for an earlier blog post called Of Mud and Poetry Contests and are linked to synkroniciti even though they predate her founding. It was during the time that they were written and performed that I began to have the ideas that would become synkroniciti.
Triangles, magdalen, and Homecoming served as linking material between musical pieces arranged to reveal a desperate love triangle. To me, these poems are like tortured postcards from people who are falling apart. The difficulty was to make them stark and descriptive without being sentimental and avoiding either judgment or excuse. Words skip across the page as if they were cut from a magazine and pasted together, enhancing the feeling that the fabric of human thought has been destroyed and communication lines are fractured. All that is left are snippets of feelings, almost too painful to endure, and lifeless memories.
It has often struck me that those who develop relationships outside of proscribed limits are judged as harshly as murderers and rapists, sometimes even more so. If they inflict pain and damage on themselves and those around them, isn’t that enough without observers adding their disapproval? Some might argue that this disapproval is necessary to keep others from such behavior, but I wonder if it doesn’t just serve to make it more attractive to those who are desperate to rebel. The greatest reason to avoid any risky type of behavior should not be a fear of punishment, but a fear of inflicting pain.
These poems are an attempt to empathize with both the betrayed and the betrayer, realizing that we all carry within us our own breaking point. Perhaps this is the reason for our harshness.
