Falling to Ground

 

      Read one newspaper daily (the morning edition

           is the best

       for by evening you know that you at least

       have lived through another day)

     and let the disasters, the unbelievable

     yet approved decisions,

    soak in. 

 

  I don’t need to name the countries,

  ours among them.*

 

 What keeps us from falling down, our faces

 to the ground, ashamed, ashamed?

-       Mary Oliver: The Morning Paper (2012)

 

Here is shame—or rather the refusal to feel it—again, continuing yesterday’s theme. 

 

So let’s think about shame. I’m not a big fan and was grateful to sidestep the Catholic version of Original Sin. And yet though it can be toxic in large doses, it seems, an essential emotion if we are to take morality and responsibility seriously. Here’s a dictionary definition:

 

Shame: a painful feeling of humiliation or distress caused by the consciousness of wrong or foolish behavior.

 

I can get behind that! I certainly can think of things I’ve done or thought that deserve a proper measure of shame and I’m sure you can too. Without that sense of shame, the wrong and foolish behavior is implicitly condoned and thus, will continue without apology. That habitual denial, that inability to feel or express such shame is a mechanism to protect a fragile psyche that ends up damaging that psyche—and the world— further. 

 

In that marvelous collection of poems The Rag & Bone Shop of the Heart, the editors have grouped some poems under the heading Making a Hole in Denial. Introducing the section, Robert Bly writes:

 

“The health of any nation’s soul depends on the capacity of adults to face the harsh facts of the time. But covering up of painful emotions inside us and the blocking out of fearful images coming from the outside have become in our country the national and private style. We have established, with awesome verve, the animal of denial as the guiding beast of the nation’s life.”

 

Written in 1992, we can see that everything was already in motion to arrive at where we are today. That mild head cold of denial back then now a Stage 4 cancer eating away both at our individual souls and our collective democracy. Our refusal to feel shame is not a temporary forgetting, but the logical result of our national style and getting worse by the day. 

 

No shame is toxic to our emotional diet. Yet so is too much shame. The dictionary definitions continue:

 

Shame: a painful self-conscious emotion that arises from a perceived failure to meet personal or social standards, leading to feelings of worthlessness, inadequacy, self-disgust and a desire to hide or withdraw.

 

That’s where it crosses the line. If we are beaten down by shame, wallowing in self-loathing, seeking to withdraw from the world, it becomes just another kind of denial that excuses us from taking action. A small amount of shame reveals that the things we should feel ashamed of, both personally and collectively, that deserve our attention and call to us to turn them around. If we don’t fall to the ground, we cannot learn how to get back up and walk more uprightly and in the right direction.

 

So shame on us for not feeling sufficient shame! 

 

* If I were granted the artistic freedom and right to do so, I would change this line to “ours chief among them.”