a tale of idiot compassion
life rx 15 jul 24
the queen of cups, and a passage from Helen deWitt’s The Last Samurai:
“I was outside the house today when a taxi pulled up. They all came out and put suitcases in the taxi and his family got in and he said: Have a wonderful time.
The wife said: I wish you were coming too
And he said: Well, I may join you
And the taxi drove off.
It's now or never.”
the aleatory
One winter day in 2016, I was walking into my apartment deep in the East End of Pittsburgh, and I saw two figures walking in the alleyway. The woman, pregnant, was slipping all over the cobblestones. It was icy, early December—all-day rain with temperatures dropping and the sun going down. The man saw me seeing the woman slip and asked if I could give them a quick ride somewhere. They needed to get to a church where their cousin, who was a pastor, was meeting them.
I was deeply depressed by the recent presidential election, and fairly hysterical. I had started carrying a big black sharpie everywhere I went because I was convinced that I was about to see swastikas tagged on bus shelters. The evilness of the world seemed self-evident to me. Everything was ending. I would have thrown myself on a pyre if someone told me it would set the world right. I participated in a great deal of online activism of the most overheated kind—primarily, lambasting myself for my privilege and demanding that anyone more privileged than I do the same.
And so I said yes, I would give them a ride. I agreed before asking where they were going, which was the first (and not the last) stupid thing that I did.
The strangers blessed me with gratitude upon gratitude. They needed to go to Monroeville, about ten miles away on the highway. This was not exactly what I had in mind. It was more of an ask than I thought “a quick ride” implied, but I had already said yes, so we got in my car.
Along the way, the man told me strange stories. His accent seemed to shift. He said that they were from Texas, and when I said that I had lived in Texas, too, for six years actually, he said that really they had come from Las Vegas and were just living in Texas recently. He told me that he was a blackjack dealer. The pregnant woman sat in the back, asking me if I had a bottle of water for her.
I felt more and more uncomfortable. They told me that I was a truly kind person—so rare in the world. There was a long, nonsensical tale of how they had ended up in an alley off of Penwood Avenue, one which involved several betrayals and several failures of kindness. The sky was blue-gray and getting darker. The roads were icing up. But we were close to the church in Monroeville, and so I reasoned that I would be at the end of my idiocy soon.
When we arrived at the church, they didn’t get out of the car.
I could see into the church’s community room. There were dozens of people inside, getting ready for a potluck or something. “Well,” I said. (This is Midwestern for “get the fuck out of my car.”) But they stayed in the car. The man craned his head to see into the church from where we were parked. “He’s not in there,” he said. “How can you tell?” I asked him. Suddenly the man had a cell phone, and he claimed that his cousin had just texted him, had just left without them, and now they needed $120 to get on a train. Maybe I could loan it to them.
I said that I could either leave them there, in front of the church their cousin was not at, or I could take them back to where I had found them. A compromise—he said I could leave them at the house of another cousin, one who lived not too far from my apartment.
The story changed a few more times on the drive back. This sudden cousin I was taking them to—they couldn’t remember his address. They would tell me how to get there turn by turn. We passed a gas station. “You can stop there,” the man said. “They definitely have an ATM in there.”
Writing this all out now, my heart is pounding. I said that I couldn’t do that because I had someplace to be. People were expecting me. It was true—I was going to my regular Saturday evening AA meeting, and I almost always helped set up the chairs. I didn’t have time to stop at an ATM.
Somehow we arrived at the compromise that I would drop them off at the house of this sudden cousin, but I would get the money later that evening and give it to them. I gave them my phone number so we could arrange for me to hand it over. They directed me to a street of dark rowhouses, none of which seemed inhabited. On a dead end—miraculously—they got out of the car. I drove away. My hands were shaking. I could only become aware of how terrifying it had been once it was over.
I—of course—shared about this at the AA meeting. I felt so stupid, and so furious with myself for being so stupid. A friend told me that it had only happened to me because I had a good heart. Another friend said that the exact same thing had happened to him a few weeks before. We were good people in a world that marked it a weakness, etc. etc. It did not really make me feel less ashamed. I did not like this reasoning. It felt too self-congratulatory. The issue wasn’t that I had let these utter strangers in my car, it was that the strangers were bad.
But it was not over, because later that night, my phone rang. It was the man—or someone who pretended to be him. His voice didn’t sound the same to me, but his voice had changed several times during the drive. I told him I couldn’t get their money after all.
After that, my phone wouldn’t stop ringing. I got harrassing calls one after the other. As soon as I blocked one number, another rang. I think it was 10 numbers all together. For weeks after, I would get a harrassing phone call from another strange number. I still have all of them blocked. I don’t know why I gave the man my actual phone number. Maybe it was the best piece of collateral that I had to offer. Maybe it was evident from my tone of voice that this was my real number, which made it worth their while to let me go.
A few weeks on after that, I was setting up the chairs at that same Saturday night AA meeting. It was about to start. All the people who had been smoking on the front steps filed in. And in the back of the group, I saw him. The man who had been with the pregnant woman. He saw me see him, and he ran.
I realized what must have happened—the guy had gone to this AA meeting before, and possibly followed me home. (The other friend of mine from that group who had been scammed in a similar way also lived in the neighborhood and frequently walked to the meeting.) He had realized that AA members made great marks. Eager to do good deeds, told that being of service was our only salvation, and quick to overlook something sketchy about a situation, having engineered plenty of sticky situations of our own. And, most crucially, being told that we could not trust our first thought, that our minds were uncategorically selfish and self-centered, and we could not trust their instruction.
“Idiot compassion” is what they call it when your demonstration of empathy is fueled not by the pureness of heart but by the vanity of ego. It is not true giving—it is too obsessed with itself. Typically, I think people understand this vanity to be of the humble brag variety.
But when I think about this story now, I see my vanity in my certainty that the world was ending and my desperation to fix it. I believed that times were bad, and bad times called for extraordinary measures. Vanity is being obsessed with an image of the self—not necessarily to be obsessed with its positive qualities. I was wallowing in negative vanity. I was sure that nothing I could ever do would absolve the sins of being a white middle class girl from Western Pennsylvania.
The queen of cups is the master of compassion. But mastering compassion does not mean giving it indiscriminately. It means to come from the depths of what is true. To feel from there and act from there, even if it means you may no longer appear to be good and holy in the minds of those who would judge you.
the assignment
Judge not.
writing prompt
Learn how to count cards at blackjack.
a chune
“Skulls” by Misfits
If you want to listen to “Skulls” at the Squirrel Cage on Murray Avenue in Pittsburgh, it’s #2244 on the jukebox. It is, to me, an almost perfect love song. I think I resisted that assessment for the longest time because obviously … it’s kind of fucked up. For a number of years—obviously, many of them the years described above—I revised my tastes away from things that had such clear elements of fucked-up-ness to them. I also read a lot of books I didn’t like and listened to a bunch of records that did nothing for me, and whenever I spoke to anyone else about these books and records and movies, there was sometimes a nervous frisson in the air, after which we both ventured the risk of saying that actually, we hated the book and its moral certainty, and the movie was just like … wtf. I want my art to be a place for shadows. Whenever I see a Misfits hoodie in the wild, I rejoice because it means there is still room for darkness in the world.
credits: small spells tarot deck by Rachel Howe
The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt
“Skulls” by Misfits
dear diary, I have been trying to be on Twitter for the sake of my career. But I’m realizing that there is an overwhelming psychological temperature of simmering rage on Twitter, and it seems to be so entrenched that it comes out of me even though I don’t particularly want to move that way. I have found myself reading it more and more, scorning the self-congratulatory response to this and that literary news, and scorning especially the predominance of the point of view that the world is irreparably damaged, the end is here, this is the worst timeline, blah blah blah. Many times I have wanted to say: Your despair is vanity. Your despair is pointless. You’re addicted to your own misery. I hold myself back because it seems that my own bile is just a version of the same despair which I hate so much. It doesn’t feel like the answer. But maybe it is, and my vanity is keeping me from just saying it. Just expressing it. Idk. Maybe I’ll go say that right now and delete it in 20 minutes. XS