Compassionate Interpretation

‘Compassionate interpretation’ is a term to describe a process of attending to the concerns that emerge when the facts are, indeed, all there, but the narratives formed are taken for granted as self-evident. It is a re/framing of Susan Sontag’s essay ‘Against Interpretation’ to address the conflicting opinions formed by contradictory interpretations. As a term, it directs attention to the mix of intuitive, learned, and gathered perspectives and feelings behind the expression of interpretation. As a method, interpreting compassionately approaches the tension and conflict that occurs when earlier narratives and explanations do not fully attend to what is presented in the current world. This approach emerged from witnessing exchanges of an/others interpretation that is dismissed as ‘ideology,’ ‘dogma,’ or an otherwise harmful metanarrative. The concern is that a practice of dismissal establishes an acceptable pattern and precedent that applies logic to override somatic expressions of affective response. In turn, individuals no longer have the agency and capacity to recognise and attend to what and how bodily sensations inform and shape the opinions and reactions to the subjects and narratives the external world presents to us.

“What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more … Our task is to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all.”¹Susan Sontag, ‘Against Interpretation’, in Against Interpretation: And Other Essays (Evergreen Review, 1964; New York: The Noonday Press, 1966), 14.

Walking with a variety of FLINTA ways of knowing and being is a means to recognise discrepancies that emerge when we pursue equivalence in another phenomenon – in other words, when we look for explanation and meaning by imposing one experience on top of another. Longer-durational walks involve shifting atmospheres and physical tensions, which challenge the suitability of equivalence in identifying desires that underpin a viable life. Although walking has a reputation for ‘discovering oneself’ in the landscape, mid-Cornwall lends itself to address the kind of discrepancies haunting sexual difference and senses of belonging. The combination of estates and suburbs, open moorland and rugged coastline, retail parks and dense forest draws attention to the diverse conditions that bring place together. Though Daphne du Maurier’s writing and personality looms, as do as various goddess and witchcraft honouring communities, their presence can go overlooked when focus is turned to the gendered lives of smugglers, saints, miners, kings and knights, farmers, fishers, and estate owners and managers. These small discrepancies are compounded by the evident economic disparities, social stratification, and access to necessities such as housing and medical services throughout Cornwall. Walking in mid-Cornwall raises the usual questions about who-belongs-where; walking with Daphne du Maurier, Virginia Woolf, Ithell Colquinn, and Clare Vyvan – who were all economically independent, alongside contemporary authors who struggle with making a viable life confronts these questions of belonging as each write themselves into the landscape. Walking allows interactors to experience these differences in ways that have yet to be thought of or, ideally, sit with the discomfort that emerges when the experience of an/Others’ one, just adjacent, is against or conflicting with your own.

Benjamin recognised that repetition reaches for the desire to bring things ‘closer ’spatially, an implication of a desire for encounters that enrich, comfort, and overcome strangeness.⁴Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, 230. Yet, Benjamin also warns that these manoeuvres indicate a perception that there is a ‘universal equality of things’ that centres human creativity on its capacity for reproducibility. In Benjamin and Sontag, we find that imposing existing forms on newly created content diffuses the sensibilities that transform creativity from an act of imagination and ritual to an act that devises an economy of shared values – in other words, institutional politics. Interpretation and repetition are married in their shared desires to affirm what is already known and understood. What Sontag encourages is interpretation that shows how it is what it is, descriptive and loving, erotics over hermeneutics. Interpretation, as she wished it to be in 1964 New York, should not search for the true meaning but instead expose the operations of human consciousness at an adaptable and emotionally enriching level. She asks for continuity through sustained curiosity and affection rather than evolutionary value. Benjamin asks, in his European world destroyed by a struggle between economies of shared values, for a consciousness and vocabulary that recognises how repetition produces a hegemonic politic.

Sontag recognises that finding universal human forms drawn from subject/content is reductive to the overall experience of human creative exchange. She cites Benjamin as criticism that has successfully contextualised the work in the desire schema of the artist.⁵Sontag, ‘Against Interpretation’, 13; Walter Benjamin, ‘The Story-Teller: Reflections on the Works of Nicolai Leskov’, trans. Harry Zohn, Chicago Review 16, no. 1 (1963): 80–101. Accuracy of description is an act of love – setting analytical (meaning-behind-the-meaning) interpretation, something not to dissimilar to the effectiveness of giving unsolicited advice to someone who is simply trying to express their feelings. Compassionate is the closest term to describe the exchange desired. The postcard is an interpretation without disclosure that does little to encourage the kindness and generosity being called for. A compassionate postcard, one that reflects the intention of the text, would at the least be accurate to the quote. Or even would reflect the intended message:

“Valuable would be works of criticism which would supply a really accurate, sharp, loving description of the appearance of a work of art … in place of hermeneutics we need an erotics of art⁶Sontag, ‘Against Interpretation’, 13..”

A Compassionate Interpretation is mindful of the effects of separating the artistic subject from its original form and context. A compassionate interpretation does not take for granted the political implications of allegorising contemporary phenomena into universal tropes through the application of literary theory and cultural studies vocabularies – what Benjamin referred to as the aestheticization of politics⁷Benjamin stated that this process ‘culmintes in one thing: War’. Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, 241. While compassion, as a technology of transformation, does play a role in a neoliberal ethics of privilege and justice,⁸Lauren Berlant, Compassion: The Culture and Politics of an Emotion (Routledge, 2014), 1. the term also gestures to a lack of curiosity and warmth when ‘critical’ and ‘value’ are presumed central to interpretation’s operations. Compassion assists the reader in responding with curiosity and nonviolence – readers are prompted to be present to the possibilities of this work, this person, this effort in expression’ Compassionate interpretation echo’s Audre Lorde’s emphasis on the erotic as spiritual and expressive resource for unrecognised feeling but does so without the emphasis on need, power, and oppression.⁹Audre Lorde, ‘Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power’, in Sister Outsider (Out & Out Books, 1978; Milton Keynes: Penguin Classics, 2019), 43–49. I am not trying to obfuscate political realities that affect the necessities to sustain the biological functions of human life and wellbeing, but I am trying something that might offer the energy for change Lorde aspires to:

When I speak of the erotic, then, I speak of it as an assertion of the lifeforce of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives.¹⁰Lorde, ‘Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power’.

Compassionate interpretation is a procedure that centres self-expression that draws from a vocabulary native to the subject rather than vocabulary imposed on it. Walking-with a queer-feminist vocabulary that is neither native to Cornwall nor addresses the subjects one finds there tests how and where ‘our’ way of being appears when it has (or has not) for others. This experiment has created a paradox that reveals the nuances and tensions between what is understood, uttered, and believed, and how it is felt and experienced in that specific place and time. Walking, when done mindfully, can be a compassionate act of interpretation, bringing a ‘lifeforce’ that reveals how it is what it is.