The Soul of Another

“The soul of another is a dark forest, as the Russians say ...,” a line I came across in Saul Bellow’s Ravelstein a couple of nights ago. The next afternoon on national television a live demonstration of waterboarding, one of the technician’s holding the victim’s mouth open while another poured water through a black cloth placed over his mouth. My mirror neurons kicked in and I got to share in the fun: being drowned, suffocated unto death, but not really of course, and just the tiniest echo of the real thing as I gazed at the Magnavox in my living-room. But it was awful enough.

Then I forced my attention onto the technicians administering the torture and I wondered what it must be like to be them---particularly the one with his fingers (protected by the black cloth through which the water was poured) inserted in the victim’s mouth, holding it open. His body language communicated a calm efficiency, neither enjoyment nor aversion, just doing his job. I tried to imagine myself in the dark forest of his soul as he watched the splash of water hitting the cloth and going on through into the gaping mouth of what was, after all, a human being strapped down there and shackled. Actually, I’m not sure whether it was easy or impossible to imagine being such a person. Empathy for the pain or suffering of others is an evolutionary given in humans according to biologists, but it’s obviously a fragile one. And what are enemies for, if not to be dehumanized---which allows us to over-ride whatever empathy we’re actually capable of quite easily, including the signals of those annoying mirror neurons evidently.

Clearly, some of us are better than others at seeing to it that a feeling for others doesn’t intrude when it’s simply not called for. How many of us could jam our fingers into someone’s mouth---even when those fingers are gloved and further shielded by a soaking black cloth---and not intimately sense that other soul, no matter how dark and desolate we fear it might be?