Hostage of Dolour

A young man here took his own life by hanging himself from a road bridge.  These days unfortunately that’s too common a tragedy to merit much attention further than the relatives and friends left behind in the wake of sorrow and questioning and self-analysis, though awareness is relentlessly being raised by laudable and noble local campaigners as well as myriad others working tirelessly on the national level.  But the story now is that of one of the local newspapers publishing a picture of the suicide scene before the body had been lifted down from the underside of the bridge.  There has been significant condemnation of the editorial decision to do so.  The point I want to draw from this is that many of us – even those of us repulsed not only by the audacity of the paper, but of the gruesomeness of the image – would seek it out to satisfy some unwritten curiosity of the morbid.  I think there is a voyeuristic enclave residing in each of us which may be piqued by such incidents.

I had an odd incident many years ago when travelling home from school with a friend on the bus.  Initially [and quite deliberately] paying no mind to a clutch of elderly ladies venting their horror and affectations of concern at passing a well-viewed, blue-lit road traffic accident, my own curiosity coerced a quick turn of the head… A blue Transit van, overturned, a little brown 80s hatchback accordianed like a Coke can.. my dad’s car.  Ambulances.  Hang on… My dad’s car?  Holy sh**!

I think there’s a part of us that in some way needs these incidents [provided we're not directly involved or impacted].  For me, the sight of my dad as a spectacle filled me, and still does fill me, with horror.  How much more for the poor family of the young man that ended his own life to have his image broadcast around the country?  But still, for the rest of the world, we want to know.  We want to see, or at least that noisome little voyeurist within us wants to see. 

And so, my point in all this is that I see these rather unpleasant-to-confront tendencies in each of us as being symptomatic of a certain repression; a repression of our true animal natures.  I think each of us carries within us, the “Animal of Man“, if you will.  But this entity is almost wholly constrained within us, were it not so, society would be chaotic and unmanagable.  Nonetheless, through our various controls, be they religion, law, moral and ethical codes, we are a suppressed race.  This is the essence of what I mean by being the “Hostage of Dolour“.  Humanity is suppressed and while I think these trifling voyeuristic traits are one of the many negative aspects of repressing the Animal of Man, I do believe there are an equal number of positive traits that we’ve not nearly begun to explore.