The Collegiate Laws of Life Essay Contest asked Penn State students to explore ethical values and intercultural issues, and their talent for expressing their views in writing.
Joseph Nakpil, ’15, Paterno Fellow and Schreyer Scholar, Comparative Literature and Russian, won Honorable Mention for his essay, below, responding to this prompt:
On November 13, 2015, there were terrorist attacks in both Beirut and Paris of similar magnitude, but they had very dissimilar media coverage. What are the ethics of reporting death and tragedy in the media?
No Last Line: A Poet Looks at Tragedy
Given the recent attacks all over the world, both near and far, we are well aware of the disparate coverage by much of our media. News coverage has been either too obsessive (such as with the Paris attacks) or has glossed over things without as much as a nod (as in the case of the attacks in Beirut). By nature, media thrives on extremes of too much or too little, too broad or too narrow. As such, the ideal for media cannot be found within media. One must turn to poetry, a different form of observation which, unlike news media, can work on suggestion rather than description. The works of the Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska in particular transcend both ethnic and state boundaries. For such transcendence, Szymborska is considered one of the greatest observers in the last two centuries. Her grace, everyday elegance, and insightful, user-friendly philosophy make her a universal writer, but even so, she was a writer not spared from the touch of history. Having survived World War II, communist Poland, and the Soldarity protests of the 1980s, Szymborska did not shy away from addressing, in her own way, contemporary world tragedies through attention to detail. One poem from Szymborska’s 2002 collection Moment is exemplary of such attention as she turns her poetic eye away from her native Poland to an event that shook this country, as well as the whole world.
The poem is titled “Photograph from September 11.” Though only a modest 19 lines long, the poem radiates with subtle gravities and stayed emotion of a helpless but fearless observer. The speaker of the poem (presumably Szymborska herself) stares intently at a famous image from that chaotic day: people falling face forward down the sides of the burning tower, having jumped to their deaths. The speaker gives a child-like wonder to the image of the jumpers, how there was still enough time for items to fall out of their pockets, how they were each still whole and unbloodied, and how the photograph eternally suspends them “above the earth toward the earth.”
The last three lines contain the speaker’s most personal statement:
“I can do only two things for them—/describe this flight/and not add a last line.”
One would think that the speaker’s avoidance of either an outpouring of grief or the inevitable end of the jumpers shows timidity and squeamishness. In fact, the two things promised by the speaker attest to her control and sensitivity toward her subject. If we take a moment of our own observation, we can learn from Szymborska’s 19 line example as to the ethics of news coverage. News and poetry can intersect in one way: the bravery to fight against emotion. Szymborska herself said that if a poem were pure emotion, a mere “I love you!” or “O my poor homeland!” would do the trick. As such, a good poem is one that has an emotional heart, but a clear-sighted voice. Szymborska may not provide the end of the jumpers’ flight, but she knows where and when to stop her description. She does more than present the cold, indifferent facts while keeping within the limitations of her photograph. She lifts the dead up by letting them remain in the stark memory of the single moment captured on a camera.
I cannot offer a solution to the tactics of media just as Szymborska doesn’t offer a last line. I will, however, speak for the care and dignity needed when describing a human tragedy. Like Szymborska, we must dare to look into the face of fear, of violence, of heartbreak, and reach out to our hurting fellow humans with gentle details and without thought of further harm. May media take its example from this shy, humble, Polish poetess who ventured into an immediate horror that knew no borders with an everyday elegance that knows when the pain requires few words and no last line to land the flight.
Cavanagh, Clare, and Stanislaw Baranczak, trans., 2015.