The Importance of Understanding

Visiting Cardiff for the first time at the weekend, I arrived at the airport to realise how little I knew about the city. It was a first visit and landing at Cardiff airport, which is much smaller than Edinburgh, I realised that much I was assuming about the place was mediated by living in another capital city, of a similar-sized country, and from watching rugby internationals on television at the Arms Park. A similar experience occurred a few years ago on arriving in Berlin and realising my knowledge of Germany was almost completely dominated by the myths of two world wars, as well as the Cold War. Everything was propagated by films, newspapers, novels and histories taught and read. The knowledge I brought to each place and people turned out to be stereotypical; cardboard when confronted with real people and real places. Flimsy and shallow, it proved less robust than the stage settings of the operas I had gone to see in both cities. This is not an isolated experience or an uncommon one of taking with us and transferring into situations understandings we have inherited and acquired along the way. In Cardiff, as in Berlin, it was relatively easy to begin to look, see and describe what was there in terms of similarities and difference to other experiences. That, however, is not always the case. In opera and drama, as in life, situations are presented that make up the human drama, highlighting the choices that we make and the various pressures that surround us. These are often more crucial going to the core of our existence, at the heart of which is how we get on with others. Eric Fromm highlighted that, too often, the question here is who will love us? Not who will we love and how? Answering these later questions is the work of a lifetime, with our answers heavily dependent on where we started in life, but it starts with understanding and the understanding of ourselves through others. In this respect, without sentimentalising motherhood or making Raoul Moat’s mother responsible for her son’s beliefs and actions, I’m fairly sure that wishing her son dead indicates a lack of understanding. And lack of understanding is fatal, as this case shows; without it there is no possibility of love and relationships, and without love and relationships we would all be dead.