There’s a video on YouTube called “Kiwi!” that is devastatingly sad to me. Someone sent me a link to it a little earlier today asking if I had seen it. I had, but I wondered if I would still find it as moving as I did before. Just a few seconds in, I panicked and stopped the video. I remember how hard I cried the first time I saw it.
But I write about painful things all the time, things that are ground into my memory like dirt into a skinned knee. I can write about it. I can read other people’s poetry about the most heartbreaking events. I can. I do.
But I can’t watch an animated video about a determined kiwi.
Why? Am I just inured to my own brain’s awful images? Is there really a distance of words? Why are poems so often cathartic for me, but fiction isn’t?
Is it just the complexity of the poem, the density, the difficulty, the brevity, that makes it bearable, makes it activate almost a problem-solving portion of my brain rather than a purely experiential portion? Sad poetry is beautiful and healing. Sad movies just make me feel ill and depressed.
Am I alone?
It’s probably not much of a comfort, but no you’re not.
Seeing someone suffer or triumph on a movie screen is a lot closer to “being there” than reading it is. Even if it is “just” an animated Kiwi. I confess, a couple of scenes in Finding Nemo hit me the same way (Dory swimming worried in circles trying to “remember” why she was upset and what she’d done wrong just killed me).
However–I’ve cried over books and poetry on occasion too. A poem on Critical Poet caught me like that a few years ago. It was about a man who’d gone out to feed the birds as his deceased wife had always done and he talked about how even they seemed to miss her. I’m remembering it as one that Howard wrote, but I wouldn’t swear to that. It was very well written.