The Agony of Defeat

Commentary by Wanda

Many of you may remember a familiar line from the narration of ABC’s Wide World of Sports, “...the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat.” My brother who was and still is a sports fanatic, watched it every Saturday afternoon and if I wasn’t locked in my room reading books, practicing piano or practicing my landing from an imaginary vault just like Mary Lou Retton, I was sitting on the couch watching this show. (Yes, I’ve been a nerd my entire life) This week the tragic news from Blacksburg, VA has been enough to make even the most jovial person slide into depression. I think that we must always make the best out of the hand that is dealt us, but those lives can never be replaced… they’re lost. I have watched the school’s response to the tragic events and I’m all for school spirit (“Go Hokies!”), but honestly this has nothing to do with school spirit. Their ability to overcome this tragedy, outside of all the measures they will take to change policies and procedures, will be the way they understand and handle pain.

We are a part of culture that wants to always excel, overachieve, win by a landslide, and beat the world’s record. But that’s not realistic. We don’t always win. Everything can’t be explained away by scripture or religion. Sometimes we get trampled on by life and that’s that. Sometimes just say “life sucks” and there is no easy way to rationalize it. I do believe that “earth has no sorrow that heaven can’t heal”; we do have to experience the sorrow and the lost. In the case of the VA Tech shooting, we lost not only 32 lives but also the life of the shooter. We lost because a young troubled man took the lives of others and finally himself because he was deeply tormented. We lost because 32 promising lives are no longer with us; what they had to contribute to this world will never be realized.

Those who will have to recover from this tragedy have to face the inevitable – the gut wrenching pain of loss. To be human is to experience pain as much as it to experience love. This world is not always loving and kind, but is many times evil. However, love is evil’s strongest opponent. And as those who choose to act in love know, that agony and pain are a part of what makes our expressions of love possible, necessary and powerful

Response by Cantice

I empathize with Wanda’s stance toward pain and remembering the tragedy at Virginia Tech. She well said that the potential of those 32 lives will never be realized. For that I have and will mourn with those that mourn. And like so many others I’ve spent time thinking through ways to prevent a similar tragedy from happening again. I concur with people who wished that students would have arisen courageously to confront and overpower the offender before so many lives were taken. But I also believe that universities can collectively arise to respond to this human tragedy by reaffirming their commitment to value human experience in the classroom.

My experience teaching English to college students for the past seven years gives me another perspective of the resistance to pain as normalcy that Wanda mentions. One of my areas of interest in the intersections of English, Composition, and Women’s Studies is therapeutic writing. Students and practitioners of therapeutic writing understand that writing may facilitate, speed, or complete healing from traumatic events. No one is sure how this works. Some say that writing gives the victim power to reframe the event and take control of it; others believe that just breaking silence allows healthy human functioning to resume. Whatever the mechanism at work, we all agree that there is something therapeutic about writing.

In the university, however, some administrators express discomfort and antagonism toward plans to teach theories and practices that deal with writing about trauma or affective categories to first year or lower division students. Their reservations are understandable. Shouldn’t talk of feelings be relegated to the counseling center, or the dorm bedroom? What place does affective demeanor and response have in our performance-driven classrooms and boardrooms? To that I have an answer. Before a person reaches “the breaking point” they exhibit signs that many of us ignore. I’m as guilty as anybody. And I know I won’t change unless caring is put on my agenda.

In universities, in the humanities division, and in the English department specifically, we do ourselves a favor by paying attention to “the writing cure.” Research in the social sciences (led by studies by James Pennebaker) has pointed for years to writing’s efficacy as a healing agent in both mental and physical dis-ease. But I am not suggesting we perform these experiments on students in the English department. In the English department, where writing is the medium, I am suggesting that administrators allow professors to give due time and space to the affective dimension of writing, to value writing that allows the author to be in the center of the experience and articulate feelings of pain, joy or dissatisfaction.

Going forward universities can reclaim the affective dimension as something that is good for their bottom line (emotionally healthy people perform better and longer). But, just as tenuous as the concession to allow students to write about their pain is the argument over how best to respond to these students. I don’t pretend to know the best way to do this. But I think that acknowledging the pain in the writing prevents the pain from boiling, like a pot on the stove that goes unaddressed until all the water is gone and something gets burned. That is what happened in Virginia last week and in the preceding months.