So, What Is It Like to Be a Dwarf?

Today, Sontag looks at me from the portrait. When I was painting her, I expected to see a heroine fighting with intellect, but a spirit appeared, who told me a story about an unfulfilled longing for a void existing beyond words. Solnit, in A Book of Migrations, evokes Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others and Woolf’s essay Street Haunting: A London Adventure. Both texts intersect around war and the question of whether it can be prevented by propagating images of suffering. Sontag criticizes Woolf for her utopianism in thinking about ways to prevent further wars with photos of their victims. Indeed, from a distance, the idea seems naive.

One might say that Woolf did not succeed in the "photos as a warning: anti-war propaganda" department, but did Sontag’s moralizing tone succeed here, where she simultaneously "calls for entering the darkness, accepting the unknown, calls for not allowing the overwhelming torrent of images to convince us that we understand," and passes through her eyes further images of suffering, assessing the morally dubious reasons for which they were created? Perhaps she even saw the bestiality of the pioneers of photography, who perfected the choreography of bodies on the battlefield to make them look better in the photo.

Solnit evokes the concept of "negative capability," which John Keats describes as a moment when "man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason." Sontag cannot withstand this uncertainty and succumbs to further cases, examples, seeks justice, argues, judges, remains in a state of internal conflict, but seeks a solution outside. She is on the battlefield with soldiers, those who carry out sentences, and reporters. Evoking specific cases, and images, she drowns in facts and moves away from finding answers to the questions that trouble her, and as she herself admits, "photos arouse compassion, but also dull it."

Woolf, on the other hand, swam in "negative capability" like a fish in water and practiced what Sontag only called for. As a moon-gazing she-wolf, she could sense that the essence lies beyond the moral evaluation of attitudes towards images of suffering, both that caused by war and internal experiences. The effect of the image of suffering goes beyond the jurisdiction of moral evaluation. It can evoke indifference, and excitement—this aspect was vividly explored by Georges Bataille.

It can also deeply move, reminding us that it is empathy for suffering that defines humanity. Neither the author of the photo nor the one who describes it has any influence on the reactions of the recipients. This cannot be controlled. Woolf, thanks to "negative capability," immerses herself in a world insignificant in terms of historical events, abandoning the epic images of suffering that so engage Sontag, describing the torment of a ribbon farmer in the space of a window frame and her death in the essay The Death of the Moth.

In Street Haunting: A London Adventure, thanks to immersing herself in uncommitted everyday life and insignificant events, she manages to transcend the paradigm of reality and thus go beyond the framework of the world of male narration, using spells from the space of "negative capability." Such a spell is the question of how the dwarf fitting shoes in a London shoe store feels when seen by her. The two women accompanying her looked like giants next to her, so how could she feel next to them? This question introduces relativism and takes us to another realm of reality, which was important to Woolf and is important to me, although it was insignificant to the then paradigm of reality.

Nick Cave’s poetry is an emanation of "negative capability." It gained even greater power after the death of his 15-year-old son, who in 2015 fell off a cliff under the influence of LSD. A year later, Cave recorded the album Skeleton Tree. The song Jesus Alone is a beautiful and deep illustration of "negative capability" and the experience of personal suffering. Cave turns into a healer who leads me to the underworld of experience. I melt with him in this blackness and immerse myself in its regenerative power. There is no need to be afraid of it.

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Jesus Alone, 2016

You fell from the sky
Crash landed in a field
Near the river Adur
Flowers spring from the ground
Lambs burst from the wombs of their mothers
In a hole beneath the bridge
She convalesce, she fashioned masks of clay and twigs
You cried beneath the dripping trees
Ghost song lodged in the throat of a mermaid

With my voice
I am calling you

You’re a young man waking
Covered in blood that is not yours
You’re a woman in a yellow dress
Surrounded by a charm of hummingbirds
You’re a young girl full of forbidden energy
Flickering in the gloom
You’re a drug addict lying on your back
In a Tijuana hotel room

With my voice
I am calling you

You’re an African doctor harvesting tear ducts
You believe in God, but you get no special dispensation for this belief now
You’re an old man sitting by a fire, hear the mist rolling off the sea
You’re a distant memory in the mind of your creator, don’t you see?

With my voice
I am calling you

Let us sit together until the moment comes
With my voice
I am calling you
Let us sit together in the dark until the moment comes