The Best Australian Essays 2015 Read Free Page A

slaughter of twenty small children and six staff members at Sandy Hook Elementary, the routine, virtually random executions that take place in our inner cities daily, or – more dismally breaking news – the eye-rubbingly futile murders that took place at a satirical newspaper in Paris on Wednesday.
    When words do flow, they tend to be uncomfortably heavy, or weirdly abstract. We say ‘evil’, because what else could it be? We use ‘tragedy’ and ‘nightmare’ because – well-trained in empathy – we reflexively see things from the point of view of the victims and their inconsolable loved ones, and imagine that suffering and anguish on this scale must have a commensurate cause.
    But usually the cause is not commensurate, nor is the effect, and there are other words that in many ways feel more accurate. Senseless. Idiotic. Pathetic. Grotesque. Feebleminded beyond belief. These are the words that I think Goya might have used, had he been interested in words.
    He was not, of course – or not particularly. He had, instead, a genius for images. Look at his ‘Disasters of War’ etchings, some of which are in the MFA show, and you see this genius in action. It is a genius that combines stunning virtuosity with a freewheeling, almost manic quality that is unlike anything in art, before or since.
    Wild-eyed men are cut down at close range by soldiers with rifles. Women are yanked from their babies and raped. They retaliate with spears and stones, and spur on their menfolk to wilder, more brutish acts. ‘What courage,’ writes Goya in one of his sardonic titles, and you know he is also thinking, ‘What madness.’
    A man retches over a pile of corpses in ‘This is what you were born for’. Men steal clothes from the recently slaughtered in ‘They avail themselves’. A man and woman cover their mouths and noses over terrain strewn with naked corpses in ‘Bury them and keep quiet’.
    Other images of base murder and its aftermath have telltale titles such as ‘All this and more’ and ‘One cannot look at this’. Naked bodies are thrown in a hole in the ground: the image is called ‘Charity’. In ‘Rabble’, a body, naked from the waist down (is it even alive?), is about to have a long stick shoved up its rear end.
    Infamous etchings of clumsy, unceremonious lynchings, dismemberments and impalings have such titles as ‘This is too much!’, ‘Nobody knows why’, ‘What more can one do?’, ‘This is worse’ and simply ‘Why?’
    Why, indeed. There is no reason. Reason is conspicuous only by its absence. Instead, Goya impresses on us, we are dealing with sheer derangement. Monstrous folly.
    Our Age of Reason inheritance tells us that violence – even of the most egregious, vile, unconscionable kind – has causes, and that we would do well to study and come to terms with those causes. I am not ready to let go of this idea. I see its value. But Goya makes me realise that it is an idea of limited efficacy.
    As his images of senseless violence accumulate, a deeper apprehension sets in – one that goes beyond diagnostics. It is a visceral registration of that which is most putrid and pitiful about humans. And that recognition triggers in turn a dangerous idea: the possibility that the most helpful response to these depredations may be not so much to shine the light of reason on them, the better to understand and digest them, but rather to swear never to come to terms with them, never to tolerate them.
    Instead, we might be better off cultivating the art of intolerance, and doing so in the same spirit in which Goya produced the ‘Disasters of War’ and ‘Caprichos’ etchings. Bear witness, Goya was saying. Do not close your eyes, do not let things slide. But have no truck with catastrophic stupidity. Declare it for what it is.
    In the meantime, love reason and