Measuring Compassion with a Decimal System
A presentation at Cut Paw Paw, Melbourne.
A person is walking along an otherwise deserted street. The person turns a corner and sees that a second person has tripped, fallen, and is on the ground and in pain. The first person crosses over the road and lends the assistance that he or she can. It is an act of compassion and humanity so obvious that one might expect that almost anyone – me, you, a businessperson, a brick-layer, maybe even a Burmese soldier – would act in a similar manner. In fact, it seems almost instinctual to try to help when a person is suffering in front of you and there is no one else around.
Change the scenario and have someone fall over on a more crowded street, or fall over a street away, or two streets away, or in the next suburb, or even in a different country, and any expectation as to how people will respond is not so clear. But the strange thing is that the essential elements of the original scenario have not changed – the person’s pain is no greater and no less, the need for help is the same, and, one would think, so too is our own potential for compassion; it would be strange indeed if the measure of human compassion was a decimal system of centimetres, metres, and kilometres. But nonetheless our responses change and maybe as far as compassion is concerned, out of sight is out of mind. Never are we more aware of suffering than when it happens right there in front of us but as we are distanced from that point, as our perception and awareness becomes less immediate, then compassion finds itself having to compete with the myriad other thoughts and feelings that are part of the hubbub of daily life.
In this context, the question then becomes, how to try to recreate this awareness?
It is the beginning of the rainy season in Burma and a time for mango picking in a town called Pyay located almost half way between Rangoon and Mandalay. Burma has good mangos but the people in Pyay believe that theirs are the best. And now they are ripe. July is also the time, after the daily rains have fallen, that the crickets crawl from the cracks in the pavements, buildings and drains and outside Pyay they crawl also from the cracks in a 900 year old bell shaped pagoda. As they emerge, thousands of them, street people grab at them and thrust them into plastic bags, catching them as they scurry across the ground. Distasteful to some, a free dinner to others.
At this time it is also a time when martial law is being strongly imposed in Burma. The military is ever present and at night the streets are almost deserted except for the soldiers that patrol them: dark, threatening posses wearing helmets, carrying automatic weapons and batons, sometimes walking in boots, sometimes walking bare foot. It is an uneasy time and the tension is palpable.
Walking back from a restaurant late one night through these back streets, there is a child sitting hunched under a single fluorescent bulb. Behind him are a pair of faded green barn-like doors upon which is spray painted the slogan ‘Y2K’ and beside this is a spray painted picture of a clown. The scene is reflected in wading pool-sized puddles, left behind on the road by the most recent downpour. It looks surreal and I sit in the darkness on the opposite side of the road and film, broad shots to start with and then close ups. When filming the latter I see that the boy has a pained look on his face, his knees shake, and he sobs uncontrollably. I don’t know why he is sitting by himself in a backstreet late at night under a fluorescent light bulb and I do not know why he is crying. Even today, as I look at these particular images, the wretchedness of the child can be overwhelming.
In the production of the documentary ‘Burmese Dreaming’ I later use this footage to characterise the pain endured by the Burmese people as they continue to live under military rule.
In another scene, this time in Rangoon, I am filming at Kodawgyi Lake and the surrounding park. It is a place I have nicknamed ‘Lovers’ Park’ because it seems to me that a disproportionate number of its patrons are indeed this, young Burmese lovers who are trying to find some privacy, away from parental eyes, ears, and homes, where they can engage in romantic intimacy. But privacy is relative and these lovers bring their audiences.
On the opposite side of the lake to myself, one couple are sitting under a huge tree. The wind is blowing and a shower of leaves float down and into the lake. As the couple cuddle, a young monk hides behind the tree, steeling furtive glances around the trunk to see if anything particularly interesting is happening on the other side. He continues to do this until the couple disengage themselves, stand up, readjust their clothing and leave.
Sitting not far from this couple are a second couple on a bench and there an amusingly familiar script is played out. The young lady in her traditional longii (sarong) is sitting on the man’s knee and she talks and runs her hands through his hair and he laughs in all the right places, perhaps a little too hard, a little too keen to make the right impression. I can see his face and I can see that he is thinking about other things. He is a young man and he has an attractive young lady sitting on his knee. It is all a question of when and how.
Seated near me is a man watching this couple through a pair of binoculars. Sitting in front of the couple, only six metres away, is a man who seems to be fascinated by the activities of the fish that are flopping about in the lake. But when the couple are otherwise engaged, he finds them much more interesting than the fish. And three metres away another man, a little more discreet (but not from where I am sitting) is on all fours peering through the leaves of a bush. It is an attentive audience.
 
After fifteen minutes, taking advantage of what is a particularly funny joke, the man’s hand slips almost accidentally … oops, is that my hand … but obviously not accidentally at all, under the young lady’s blouse. She glances round and then moves her handbag onto her knee so that proceedings are not so obvious. And after a few more minutes, oops, the man’s hand accidentally slips again, this time down a different item of clothing.
This is Burma, it is a different culture, it is predominantly Buddhist, it is a country governed by an oppressive military regime. But as this scene unfolds I smile, even laugh and when I laugh I am laughing not just at the man and the obviousness of what he is trying to achieve, but I am laughing also at my own teenage one-track bumbling comical attempts (so serious at the time) in trying to achieve the same end. Oops, is that my hand? And just as I can associate with the thoughts running through the young Burmese man’s mind, so too do I think many women would smile in recognition of the thoughts that would almost certainly be going through the young lady’s mind, smiling because they too have had them. People, cultures, and existences a thousand kilometres apart but empathy and understanding in the games that young lovers might play.
A different scene takes place in the early morning in the fields of Shan State, North Eastern Burma. It is a very simple scene of a family at work in a field that is on the crest of a small rise. Silhouetted on the crest is a bamboo hut and a large dead tree, skeletal boughs pointing at the hazy blue mountains that form a back drop to the scene.
The father of the family is using a wooden plough and water buffalo to till the soil. He comes down the field, turns back up the hill, disappears over the crest and then returns over the crest a few minutes later. Two sons are at the edge of the fields searching through the long grass, sticks at the ready, looking for creatures to torment. Finding none, they take to throwing clods of soil at the water buffalo tethered in a neighbouring field. The mother of the family is in the foreground hoeing a trench in the already tilled soil. Behind her, her daughter is scattering seed and kicking soil back into the trench. The final member of the family is a baby that has been left up next to the hut, sleeping in a small bamboo frame with a piece of material suspended in it.
After about an hour, the mother lays down the hoe, walks up the rise, picks up the baby, and breastfeeds it. The daughter continues to cast seed into the trench, the father continues his ploughing, and the boys continue to terrorise whatever living creatures they can find. Then the mother finishes her task, puts the baby back in the crib, walks back down to the hoe, picks it up, and continues to dig the trench.
I do not think it is hard to appreciate the beauty and the simplicity and the peace and the dignity and the hardship of life for this family and I think in particular women who have had babies would feel an affinity for the mother. And again, I do not think that cultural, economic, or political differences preclude such an appreciation. And this, I think, is an essential element when it comes to considering a concept such as awareness.
If I am to talk personally of what motivates my work on Burma I will not speak first of the grimness of the plight of Burma’s people and the circumstances under which they live. Instead I will talk about the relationships that I have shared with people from Burma, sitting around and getting drunk with villagers whilst making jokes in rudimentary Burmese, stopping myself from crying when an old man and good friend took a small Buddha from the family shrine and gave it to me as a farewell gift, playing chin lon (a game involving keeping a wicker ball in the air) with Burmese workers, sharing time despite language barriers and coming from countries a thousand kilometres apart. Hanging out. It was not the pain of the country that led me to do the work that I do. First was an appreciation of humanity and beauty and then on top of this was an increasing awareness of the situation in Burma.
Undoubtedly, when it comes to creating awareness, there is a need to see the emaciated figures of famine victims, there is a need to see the wailing grief of the mother of a bomb blast victim, and there is a need to see a wretched child sobbing late at night, after curfew, under a fluorescent light in a back street in a provincial Burma. However this is not a life with which many of us can identify. It is not something we know. In fact, these scenes can be so far removed from the realities of our own existences that sometimes they only serve to increase distance, like watching a different species or aliens who have a life so unlike ours. And when I think about this, I think that for us to have a better awareness of the suffering of these people, perhaps even an awareness which might approach that which we have when the suffering is directly in front of us on a street, maybe first we need to have a greater understanding of common humanity. And to understand common humanity is as simple as knowing that young men the world over will try, ‘accidentally’, to sneak their hands under young women’s dresses. And when we know that people are people, when we really know this, then people’s suffering becomes far less tolerable no matter whether it is in front of us, in the next street, or a thousand kilometres away. Compassion is not something that can, or should be measured by measured by a metric system, it is always there, and it is a matter of whether it has the opportunity to express itself. Obviously, the more opportunity it has the better for all of us.