Sunday, July 15, 2007

the limits of emotion

O yes, i see them .. the images of starving children, and the blood and guts of accidental casualties of war.

So, why am i so upset by the death of a DOG?

Curious, really.

8 comments:

Vincent said...

One is real and the other are images presented to you on a screen etc by someone with an axe to grind.

Real is what happens in your own life.

Davoh said...

Yer, thanks Ian .. am not sure whether I want to cope with "real life" at this particular point in time.

Link said...

Dogs are innocent. People, well ones' over the age two--not so.

Davoh said...

Am not sure whether "innocence"has much to do with it, Link. Emotions are strange things. We seem to feel more "attached" to something that we have, or have had, some sort of direct relationship, or tactile experience with.

I haven't seen that dog for more than 7 years, and yet it still affected me, as if a small part of me somehow went missing. Curious, really.

Ann ODyne said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
GreenSmile said...

I am somewhat of the same mind as Davo and Vincent on this one. If the first and only time you ever know of some poor soul is their unnamed and shattered bodies flashed on a news program then it is hard to have the loss, obvious though it would logically seem to be, soak in. If you know the person or the dog and have any recollection at all of how they have played postively in your life someone elses, then the loss hits home.

I don't know if we could bear being acutely aware of all the wonder, love, striving and hope that vanish every time a bomb goes off. Its clear enough the insurgent setting the bomb or the airman letting one go at a target 10000 feet below have pretty well numbed themselves. Our own numbness seems to me in some ways to abet the intentional killers.

Davoh said...

Anne O'Dyne writes
oh Davo I am so sorry.

I am impervious to every bit of vile stuff in the media, and did not let my own mother's sudden death interrupt my lunch, but every neglected pet, injured wild thing, or panicked livestock, upsets me terribly
(Link knows this - sometimes I cannot read her blog)

and I am still grief stricken over the death of my dog last August
(define 'grief stricken' ? -
I cut my hair to the scalp with scissors,
I gave my perfectly good car away; I sleep in my clothes, sometimes for 3 days straight. I don't care.)

Anne O'Dyne .. apologies for this, I may be slightly too paranoid, but I clicked on the link in your original comment, and my computer went haywire so had to reboot and run some "cleaning" programs to get it running again. May well have been an incidental coincidence, but thought it best to remove the link.

Davoh said...

And yes, HB, apart from the computer glitch, took me a little while to figure out whether I needed an anodyne or not .. heh.