On Heroes and Fatal Flaws
Everything will change
"At the end of the 1980s, after I had already created decades of work about violence between people—not only rape but child abuse and domestic violence, violence between men, and animals victimized by people, always trying to understand the link between human behavior and environmental disaster—I heard a sociologist on the radio say, “It is amazing how much pain you can inflict if you don’t feel your own.” Perpetrators of rape or ecocide might be people who have disassociated from the ecotones of their own vulnerability and dependency on others, human or not—people afraid to feel either empathy or their own pain and choosing to inflict pain instead. The perpetrator might be as much a captive of helplessness as the person victimized. If we are ever to end cycles of destruction, one of the tasks ahead is to normalize greater mercy."
"Divining Chaos, The Autobiography Of An Idea" p. 94 pub. 2022 New Village Press
This will be the first of a series of blog posts based on excerpts from my book. The book was written in 2021, and I have had time to reconsider some of my views, for example, about individuals who commit ecocide, the destruction of entire habitats and whether it's true that normalizing greater mercy might affect better planetary stewardship.
When I wrote the passage above, I already knew I was going to create an opera about the tragedy of ecocide, which seemed to recapitulate all the other forms of abuse I knew and thought about. My entire book, for example might be construed as a primarily a meditation on rape. In my quote, there is an implication I accepted, that those willing to inflict pain are self-centered emotional cowards and explicitly concluded that mercy can be taught by the normalization of another model. But I have come to consider that in many cases, the drivers of ecocide are far less dramatic, much more pathetic, and arguably far less malleable than the drama of rape, even though the consequences are equally traumatic.
Most people perpetrate ecocide out of default. It is not only those in power and the powerless, although the latter certainly suffer the most consequences. It is true that some people in positions of power are either indifferent to causing pain or believe the pain of others is always self-inflicted and therefore not their concern, nor, sometimes, do they feel any incentive to change, regardless of collateral damage. However, in the case of ecocide, arguably unlike many cases of rape, the pain will always boomerang back to the perpetrator because none of us can escape the consequences of what is being done to our entire planet. And yet for most people, it is only one cast-off mask, one detergent bottle at a time, which will accumulate to drown us all in the global detritus of our common life-styles.
Therefore, I now conclude, that in most cases, even at the highest echelons of power, our great tragedy, as Hannah Arendt pointed out in the early sixties, is in the simple banality of carelessness and thoughtlessness. Ecocide is a general failure of or an indifference to comprehension amongst key human agents, except when it's deliberate. We know, for example that the great oil corporations knew many decades ago, what the consequences of global warming caused by fossil fuel use would be. They made conscious decisions to make the entire planet collateral damage for pursuing their personal greed. It is that indifference and the impunity of the choice that I find unfathomable. It is why I think the consequences for ecocide must be established internationally. Even now, almost 50 years after Arthur Galston identified the crime of ecocide, despite warnings from every sector of science and art that we may be facing the collapse of human civilization and systems that support life as know it, we have made little progress with that task. My only personal progress with the question of how to contain ecocide has been to contain and direct my own anguish over the implications of that global failure in artmaking. I retain the conviction that all answers can be found in art.
Opera is one more way for art to search for these answers. The basis for my opera's libretto was going to be the transcript from the 2018 mock trial of The Blued Trees Symphony, which ended in an injunction against a natural gas pipeline company. I had created The Blued Trees Symphony on private property at the invitation of landowners who wanted to preserve their trees, in the paths where the corporation had planned to install pipelines. The project was to paint the trunks of designated trees in an aerial pattern that corresponded to a musical score, with a sine wave sigil from roots to canopy. The adjudication to an injunction, a stay of construction was on the basis of the importance of the work (the "standing") in current art discourse. But the legal theory to be granted that stay, was based on the relationship between copyright and eminent domain law (the taking of private land for public use), which required me establish the permanence of that work on private land and my spiritual (rather than activist) intent for the artwork. The former was established scientifically because the work was integral to the habitat, including rocks, aquifer, and trees. The latter was established by the quantity of evidence of attention from an art press in the form of a stack of articles and interviews presented in the courtroom to the lawyers and the judge to exact an injunctive verdict with policy implications.
However, as the librettist Susan Yankowitz warned me, it isn't enough to have a theme or a polemical argument to make an opera. There must be a compelling personal drama and in opera, that generally means a grand tragedy. The audience, as in any story, will care about that tragedy because we care about how the personalities emerge in the limited space of time of a performance. Can we care about a person who willfully destroys all life on Earth?
In classical Greek tragedy, the pathos is that despite the presence of a figure with heroic charismatic characteristic qualities, there is always a fatal flaw in the hero's makeup that determines a grand catastrophe. I wanted to establish that the catastrophic tragedy of ecocide wasn't only to the hero or the artwork of Blued Trees or even over any personal risk to me from dark money, but rather to residents of the communities where the habitat is threatened, that is, the individual implications of ecocide with those who have no agency in the matter, human and non-human alike. In this case, the fatal flaw of incomprehension and deception must drive audience members to exclaim during the production, "don't you see? Can't you care?"
It took a while to find the right tragic story of catastrophic loss amongst the original defendants who lost the mock trial, to identify their fatal flaw and choose the right librettist, to tell that story (Catherine Filloux) and someone to find the music (Julia Schwartz, the composer) to mine the tragedy. Now there is a team in place with the filmmakers and projectionists Lauren Petty and Shaun Irons and we are zeroing in on a first venue for our pilot in New York City for August. The pilot will focus on just one brief dramatic encounter in the story and we have agreed on whom will be the hero.
Before we got to the hero’s fatal flaw, I needed to not only find the hero in the trial but identify the answer to the riddle of specifically what the hero’s fatal flaw was that ended in ecocide for the whole planet and would be manifested in one small community at a time.
But this post isn't about finding either the hero or the flaw. Arendt identified the familiar ease of evil in great crimes: how routine it is. But that doesn’t make compelling drama. Who are the people who make these decisions?
In order to identify the opera's core drama, I had to better understand my perpetrator. Ecocide is a legal term for criminal behavior based on how the impacts of Agent Orange in Vietnam were comparable to genocide. In any criminal case, motive, and understanding are crucial to adjudicating consequences. We decided that a fossil fuel executive would be my main character. Could any fossil fuel executives be more than cardboard cut-outs of evil?
To answer that question, I traveled to Versoix, a suburb of Geneva, Switzerland to attend the 60th reunion of my year at an international boarding school for the children of movers and shakers in the global arena, people who arguably grew up to be the very adults who active participants in ecocide are. I knew some had gone into the fossil fuel business. I had also decided that the real answer wouldn't be found in them, it would be found in their educators and how those educators taught or failed to teach empathy and accountability.
The spring of 1962 I was sixteen and standing in the vestibule outside the director's office. June 2023, I returned. As a student, I had witnessed an incident of tragic helplessness and victimization between the boarding students and the administration that I imagined held a clue about the central character of my opera.
Do details matter? I recalled several disturbing incidents. The one that nags me most was the sadistic bullying of Patrice Lumumba's young children by a white South African teenager, who mercilessly harried them with impunity a year before their father was murdered. I blamed the school directors and arrived at the reunion fully prepared to confront the directors over their failure to intervene and establish appropriate boundaries. My memory identified clear perpetrators and victims.
I was convinced that if I stood in the vestibule again where I had witnessed the abuse. I would come away with a key insight about indifference and impunity, entitlement, and generosity to understand the story at the heart of my opera. At the end of my weekend, I hoped to go with that insight.
As it turned out, the school had expanded enormously and on-going construction on that original building made it impossible to fulfill my intention. Instead, I began casually interviewing my fellow alumnae over wine and coffee, about their memories of the founding directors, now in their nineties. With two exceptions, my friends reported a blissful experience with kind people. I was baffled. The two exceptions were from my own cohort, a year after the school opened. The picture that finally emerged was of two idealistic but incompetent directors, too young and inexperienced to wisely manage their charges’ traumas, but whom did learn and grow to become good caretakers. It seemed Had I come so far at great expense to learn nothing new of any relevance to the hero's story I sought or identifying the fatal flaw?
What I knew, was that the school was intended to prepare young people for international careers, that is, lives of service and power. What I heard from my cohort, was that the bullying I had witnessed was typical of all boarding schools, some far more extreme than what I had witnessed. Cruelty was often the status quo of experience, and that experience was routinely hidden and tolerated. Recently, we learned more about the extremes of that reality in boarding schools for Indigenous youngsters, often administered by churches, where murder, or at least extreme neglect with lethal consequences, was not unusual. In the case of Indigenous children, parents had no recourse to protect their children. In other cases, when wealthy parents board their offspring into a knowingly cruel system, the adults are as indifferent to abuse as the perpetrators. In those cases, as the British motto goes, the watchword is to learn to keep a stiff upper lip, no matter what. So what was my lesson? Just how lethal it is to tolerate cruelty and how easy to become indifferent to mercy? Perhaps what I learned was just that people can learn and grow? Not that mistakes condemn people forever but that there is redemption from even the worst mistakes?
Perhaps it is very simple: the power in our dominant culture which ends in ecocide, is not only banal, wilful, and ubiquitous but also requires a blind eye to the moral and personal consequences of accepting cruelty in all its forms. And yet, change is possible. Lumumba rescued his children before he was assassinated. The children survived. I cannot know what pain they suffered because of someone's else cruelty. I know their father was cruelly murdered. I know I will never forget the scene in that school so many years ago. I know pain is visited on almost everyone, the famous and the obscure. Mistakes bring collateral damage of varying scales. The drama is always individual, personal and unknowable. Ecocide is already visiting pain. It will bring pain to each of us in escalating numbers and degrees and each visitation is its own drama. I will take that to my opera: Lumumba's children live everywhere.