`Grief is a lonely angry emotion, unbearable but for the kindness of others."
These instructive words were addressed to me not long ago by a bereaved friend. Dumbness, I had suggested, might be the proper response to the kind of devastation he had experienced: anything that I could say would be inadequate. But no, that was not right, and with the authority of sorrow he rebuked me precisely. What is spoken, he said, may not altogether assuage loss, but it mirrors it and, while this may not be immediately helpful, it is appropriate.
Everybody in Ireland, North and South, felt this need to do something appropriate in order to answer what happened in Omagh last Saturday, not only the death-dealing but also the scarifying of so many among the living. The blood-dimmed tide was loosed, pity and terror were uncontrollable, yet even in these circumstances, conventional wisdom about the usefulness of the funeral rite was proved true. The huge turn-outs, the silent crowds, the immense commonality of the sorrow must have helped to mirror the loss the families of the dead are feeling and will be feeling for ever. Never has the meaning of the word sympathy been more deeply plumbed: people in their own bewildered way did suffer along with the bereaved and ached to express their solidarity at the moment of pain.
But perhaps solidarity is not the right word. Solidarity carries a political charge which is for once inappropriate. In the past, there have been terrible happenings, bombings of restaurants and bars and streets, massacres and assassinations, blood on the doorstep, on the roadside and even in the house of worship. We heard the news items, we were shocked, distressed and enraged, but somehow we did not adequately register what Shakespeare called "the rent in nature".
People on the scene, next of kin, police and ambulance workers, nurses and doctors: until recent days, these were the ones who had the strongest sense of affront to human life; the majority of people continued to calibrate even the most harrowing events politically. Who had done what to whom and to what end? Who would respond and how? There was, as often as not, an edge of grievance in the grief. For everyone stricken by violence in the past, there were others who - helplessly, unconsciously - were worked up by it more than they were worn down.
In the aftermath of Omagh, things have changed. There is a sense of implosion. No doubt in the unionist community the anger is still directed against the IRA, and there is resentment anyhow at the disruption of the old order in Ulster by the whole political effort of the minority since the late 1960s; nevertheless, this time there is an added sense of trauma, a sense that the crime is anthropological, that its impact and import exceed politics. What was brutally and incomprehensibly an act of destruction has attained the status of a great divide. It has marked time. It may even be said to have marked the soul in that it has left everybody chastened, more tender, even a little afraid. Afraid for rather than afraid of - afraid for our society, for fundamental human bonds.
I think what most people now curse is not primarily the political motivation of those who planted the bomb but their callousness. What is shared by both communities in the North is awe at the enormity of the killers' indifference to human life, their imperviousness to simple affection. All week I kept thinking of Wilfred Owen's poem Insensibility where he speaks as somebody at the Western Front, aware of what each wound and each death means, and where his hatred is not for the Germans in the trenches opposite but for the armchair patriots on the home front, hardliners shooting their mouths off with impunity. The German soldier is at least a secret sharer of the sorrows of the English war, he has been humanised by exposure to the worst. But, says Owen, "cursed be dullards whom no cannon stuns". And cursed be those who are not susceptible to "whatever mourns in man, whatever shares/The eternal reciprocity of tears".
Could it be that we have finally moved beyond "the politics of the last atrocity"? Could it be that we now perceive the enemy in "dullards", in "insensibility" itself? Could it be that tears have finally shown what the "totality of relationships" boils down to, namely, a care for each other as creatures of the species, creatures who need safety and shelter and grounds for trust among ourselves? As realists, we know that such a trust will be constantly disappointed and that the atrocious will always be a threat; but as mourners, we have reason also to believe that we have reached some tragic conclusion, and that the whimper of exhausted grief just might turn into the cry of something vulnerable and new.
Today, all over the country, the ceremonies of mourning and the observances of silence will prove that Owen's lovely moral phrase, "the eternal reciprocity of tears", is more than just a consoling formulation. It does carry actual psychic and civic weight. But for the new life promised by the Good Friday agreement to flourish, each individual will have to face the future with the bleakest of resolution. The danger from the dullards is real. Their banality is as big a threat as their brutality, and the ruin they visit upon the rest of us drives possibility backward rather than forward. But democrats and democracy must hold the line, no matter how endless and thankless the task.
There will be no warm glow of emotion in the weeks and years to come. Those who have lost dear ones in Omagh and in all the sites of destruction that preceded it will be set apart in their grief, what my friend called their lonely, angry emotion. Their heartbreak will darken their understanding of the world, although it will not necessarily lessen their desire for a better future. But even they will be subject to a command to which the rest of us must be even more responsive, a command spoken with visionary challenge in this short poem by William Blake:
The Angel that presided o'er my birth Said "Little creature, form'd of Joy and Mirth, Go love without the help of any Thing on Earth."