34.

When I teach nature poetry, like that of William Wordsworth (in whose former house, in Racedown, an elderly Hardy once recalled Brown’s hanging), I emphasize distance. If a poet is too close to the scene he’s describing, then obviously he won’t be able to see clearly the textures, contours, color. All he’ll perceive is a blur—just as you will, right now, if you press this page right up against your nose. Likewise, when a poet is too far from his landscape, he’ll lack clarity of vision as well—such as you will, if you walk several feet from this page. You won’t be able to read a word.

Lucid perception, as any nature poet or landscape painter knows, requires the middle distance, a perspective that can attend to the parts—a whorl in bark, the leaf’s serrations—without losing a sense of the whole, and can conceive of the whole—the oak’s trunk and the cirrus clouds—without being ignorant of parts. In this perceptual median, understanding thrives: the disparate portions make sense as integral units of a harmonious ensemble, and this ensemble’s complexity comes to light in the portions.

You know all this right now, as you (hopefully) move back and forth smoothly—almost imperceptibly—between the marks on the page and the meanings they compose. This effortless vacillation is successful reading. Perusal fails when one side or the other overwhelms: when you struggle simply to grasp definitions or syntactical relationships, or when you are so consumed by one idea that you skim the pages that don’t address it.

Witnessing Nicholas Berg’s beheading, Jonathan Hayes found himself, conceptually speaking, too close to the macabre—the gruesome event was too particular, confusing, indecipherable—and the proximity traumatized him. He lacked a sufficient buffer, the imaginative distance that would have enabled him to connect the raw fact to larger meanings.

This is the result when imagination, as the ability to create significant mental structures, falters: all is a bewildering blur. But what about imagination becoming too robust, excessive, imperious? Then one swings to a position opposite to that of Hayes. The witness becomes overly confident of his ability to understand an event, morbid or otherwise. He brings a prefabricated idea to a disturbing experience, with the smug confidence that this notion will allow him to comprehend the event, sort it out once and for all, connect it to this meaning and this only. But he’s deluded, insensitive; his conceptual arrogance actually alienates him from the episode, puts him at too great a distance. He can’t see the trees because he’s too engrossed in the forest.

To focus on forest and trees equally, comprehension and complexity, idea and individual: this is the golden mean of successful imagination. Hardy achieved this median when he elevated his vexed experience of a hanging into a powerful, capacious meditation on suffering. Someone beholding the sublime—maybe Burke or Kant—reaches this middle ground as well, getting close enough to a catastrophe to sense its potency but staying far enough away to be free of harm and able to glean meaning.

But to confront the morbid without imagination or with too much, too close or too far: blankness results. We forgive the former situation—who hasn’t had his mind shut down in the face of a beheading or a hurricane? We usually condemn the latter, however, because it is often the product of prejudice. We find this reductive thinking (obviously) in the egotist, the racist, the fundamentalist, but also in the hard-core Marxist, or feminist, or capitalist—in anyone who flattens phenomena to a preconceived idea and thus turns individuals into ciphers of a system: allegorical figures that point to an abstraction. (In Joyce Carol Oates’s mind, I was oversimplifying in just this way in my thinking about serial killers and society, and I hope her criticism has saved me from being too blindly rigid.)

Morbid eruptions invite this sort of dehumanizing. Exposed to terror—the hurricane or the decapitation—we often rush to a well-worn, uncomplicated worldview that makes the situation seem familiar, and so assuages our fears. But this defense mechanism, even if its presence is quite understandable, divorces us from reality. It encloses us in the shell of our idea. Wherever we look, we see ourselves only.

This cognitive narcissism, often unwitting, is at work whenever we exploit the suffering of another for our own pleasure, turn a person’s hurting into a commodity we consume for our pleasure. This dehumanization, unredeemed by proper imagination, has been vividly on display in a recent cultural development: the rise of the fight club.