THREEDOM! (#8) M L Clark's Monthly Miscellanies
Preamble
Hello dear ones! Hello kind supporters, kind donators, kind readers, and benevolent critics all. I start April with a few projects in the bag (including a soon-to-be self-published collection of translated short stories—more on that in a couple of days), and an intention to make April a month for new fiction. While adjusting to my posting schedule at OnlySky, and the attendant comment-thread lifestyle, I had fallen more into a routine of revisions and new-writing-adjacent work for stories. No more!
Partially, though, the war in Eastern Europe, and the online community’s strange, dissociative responses to it, along with all the local heartaches caused by new legislative power-grabs in the U.S., had set a deep unease upon my heart. What new stories, for me, are possible in times such as these? I chewed over that question these past few weeks (along with the usual, knife’s-edge feelings of futility about my personal situation entirely), but as I note in this newsletter, I also came upon some works of film and literature that helped me better understand this moment for myself, and to craft a better way of moving through it.
I will be letting these lessons pour out in the coming prose. And I look forward to seeing where they take me—but not as much as I look forward to being able to share fruits of the process, at the very least, with all of you.
Are you weary-hearted, too? I have no rousing cheer to share. I don’t think this is the moment for it, though I’m glad enough for those have the stuff—and do. What I have on offer is solidarity. Solidarity in uncertainty, solidarity in dread, and solidarity in a quiet pragmatism that more days than not replaces hope.
We are none of us alone in thinking that the bloom is off the rose.
And yet, so what?
What matters is that we can still stump for the value of existence even in its deepest winters—even when all this dagblasted shrub of life ever produces, it seems, is thorn.
So. A fire sale on solidarity it is! Take it! It’s yours! And whatever hard paths to renewal, resurrection, and rebirth you’ll be reflecting on this month? May they also serve you and yours—and all your own stories—well.
M
Table of Contents
Three international films
The Turin Horse (IF1)
A Screaming Man (IF2)
Drive My Car (IF3)
Three articles of note
“The New Neurasthenia,” by Charlie Tyson (A1)
“The Cancellation of Russian Culture,” by Gary Saul Morson (A2)
“Colombia’s Fossil Fuel Industry Is Freaking Out About Presidential Front-Runner Gustavo Petro,” by Kate Aronoff (A3)
Three miscellaneous items
A quotation (M1)
A local history: Betsabé Espinal (M2)
A poem (M3)
Three lessons from the month’s writing
Evergreen urgency (L1)
The difficulty of “third positions” (L2)
Consistency and (over)confidence (L3)
Three books
Too Like the Lightning, by Ada Palmer (B1)
The Arsonists’ City, by Hala Alyan (B2)
War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy (B3)
M1. A quotation
"Defenceless under the night Our world in stupor lies; Yet, dotted everywhere, Ironic points of light Flash out wherever the Just Exchange their messages: May I, composed like them Of Eros and of dust, Beleaguered by the same Negation and despair, Show an affirming flame.”
—W. H. Auden, from “September 1, 1939”
A1. “The New Neurasthenia,” by Charlie Tyson
I’m going through one of my routine phases of irritation with the incurious way that language is often used on social media. I know, I know: it's pure folly to get upset with social media discourse. I understand the authority-game that people are really playing when they propose that [X] phenomenon is unique to people with [Y] condition. I understand, too, that because this authority-game works on social media, there’s only ever more incentive to keep making claims that don’t simply discuss your personal truth, but also make wildly unfounded claims about others.
Still, sometimes the rhetoric gets on my nerves. This time, what tweaked me is the people using “neurodiverse” in a way that imagines the opposite, “neurotypical,” as a ridiculous straw-man: a magical, smooth-brained human impervious to trauma and lacking in variation in response. I’m technically on the neurodiverse side of things (diagnosed bipolar, and if I were tested in North America today I’d probably meet the current parameters for autism and ADHD), but I find it counterproductive for “neurodiverse” advocacy to play into the idea that there even is a “standard” brain.
For example, in a recent thread, someone tried to claim as a “neurodiverse” phenomenon the desire for one’s utterance of an injustice to be enough to fix it. Apparently “neurotypicals” only ever want advice or to vent in resignation?
Except that what the poster was describing is 100% in line with prayer practice for a wide range of religious human beings, and 100% in line with every “come on, come on!” ever uttered while trying to get the car to start on a winter’s day, or a line to move faster in the grocery store, or a game of chance to play out in one’s favour. It is normative for humans to speak aloud things that they then expect to come to pass.
And I wouldn’t mind it so much, I suppose, if people weren’t leaping to grand assertions from personal anecdote when there’s a much more interesting story to be told about ourselves, when we stop assuming that our experiences are exceptional. What if it isn’t just me who experiences X? What if I’m not special in feeling Y? What might be learned from recognizing how many others have felt and experienced the same, even if they have different language and mythologies for it?
Enter this joy of an article on another selectively employed term: burnout. In “The New Neurasthenia,” Charlie Tyson, writing for The Baffler, reviews Jonathan Malesic’s The End of Burnout: Why Work Drains Us and How to Build Better Lives, an academic read out of University of California Press. Malesic earns high praise from Tyson for identifying “burnout” as a prestige term that allows people to signify their abiding commitment to a body of Western work-ethic ideals increasingly disconnected from attainability or real-world value. Burnout resonates with an earlier “rarefied malady,” neurasthenia, which was diagnosed in the late 19th century for the highly educated, better-situated worker. Malesic’s book identifies burnout’s symptoms, its history, and its religious roots, and also offers a religious corrective: the invocation of rest, through religious rest days, as valuable, too.
But as Tyson notes, Malesic has still made one telling oversight. Despite his attention to gender and race in his analysis of this term, he’s notably overlooked the profound class component underpinning the arrival of burnout as a prestige term:
For all the care with which he recovers burnout’s clinical history, indicts our work ideals, and suggests new ways of organizing our lives, the political valence of his central term remains less than clear. Is burnout a weapon of the weak, a way of pushing back against an unjust work regime? Or is it the latest affectation of a self-absorbed and neurotic elite that traffics in victimhood claims while at a safe remove from the “deaths of despair” ravaging blue-collar America and the “dirty work” of slaughterhouses, prisons, and the like?
Malesic is attentive to the workplace pressures that push women and racial minorities to burn out, and his discussion of how disability can lead us to rethink our governing fictions about work—drawing on the disabled artist Sunny Taylor’s superb essay “The Right Not To Work”—is stimulating. But class hardly enters his analysis, beyond a brief discussion of how blue-collar jobs now demand a “white-collar service ethic” (no longer allowing for disengagement), and an interview with an avid cyclist who lost a finger working at a tire manufacturer. He does not say how prevalent burnout is among working-class people; the burnouts in this book are mostly doctors and college professors.
And this oversight, so maddeningly predictable in North American discourse even when the topic before us expressly relates to work itself, has real consequences. Just as in my neurodivergence example, here we have yet another realm in which human beings have followed a line of inquiry far enough to be curious about themselves and to find names for what they, as individuals are experiencing. But absent any deeper empathetic leap, a level of curiosity that should drive us to seek out common cause with others, what greater activism for meaningful change can we possible attain?
Or maybe we don’t empathize because we’re not actually interested in those bigger goals? As Tyson observes, “Burnout isn’t going to create alliances between knowledge workers and the working classes if the latter are consistently excluded from the metric or think about their exploitation in a different way.” It’s dishearteningly possible that the exclusion is intentional. Are we ready to address the source of our suffering, if it means risking the source of our distinction from the “common masses,” too?
L1. Evergreen urgency
With a couple of months at OnlySky now in the bag, I’m in a better position to reflect on what’s already changed in my approach to writing there—and where I suspect that these changes will take me next. But one principle I try to take into my nonfiction work is also the most challenging to maintain: the principle of “evergreen” content. That, on a news-media website, is no walk in the park to uphold.
Like the name suggests, evergreen content should hold as true as possible tomorrow as it does today. Obviously, some statistics will be outdated no matter what, but in a world of hot-takes and clickbait, I always ask myself if the position I’m taking today is one I can stand by tomorrow, as being the best possible argument I could have made with the data then at hand.
What’s the opposite approach? Oh, the usual reactive posts, of course. Articles written in the heat of the moment, in response to trending topics. Good for getting eyeballs on the page. Good for raising tempers, too! And inspiring fervent responses, which leads to even greater post-engagement! But is any of that useful for cultivating more thoughtful discourse? Or developing consistent longterm positions? Not even close.
The only problem with evergreen content is that it can sometimes come off as too detached from the moment. If I speak too broadly, too vaguely, am I really saying anything worth standing by in the future at all? Lately, then, I’ve been writing more consistently about immediate real-world issues, while expressly tackling the need for coherent humanist positioning across the lot. And the “evergreen” part of me is still, there—still always asking if I’m being contradictory or hypocritical.
And… that’s been interesting. When I threw myself into trans discourse for OnlySky, I knew I was wading into some of the worst parts of the secular world: the ones so rigidly trained up in certain kinds of rationalist and empirical debate that they’ve shuttered whole fields of scientific inquiry out of sight, out of mind. Biology says that this is what a female is and this is what a male is, they argue, and therefore everything we as a culture write into law should adhere to chromosomal make-up alone. Getting some secular folk to think deeper about the real-world impact of specific policies (e.g., civilian policing of public participation based on very rigid notions of who “looks” like they belong) is really difficult. Once someone’s latched on to “but it’s the principle of the thing!” they’ve slipped out of empiricism’s realm without even realizing it.
So, the work of advancing evergreen urgency is tough, because even as I wade deeper into the most heated issues of the day, I have to make sure I’m not forming my own views reactively, out of mere body-horror or disgust at someone else’s life path.
Will I mess up? Oh, probably. (I’m already reaching my limit with a few men who are very upset about articles that suggest their knee-jerk revulsion of trans people is not the soundest basis for setting public policy.) But I suppose I just have to accept that the risk of failure, when writing about human beings and our crises, is evergreen, too.
B1. Too Like the Lightning, by Ada Palmer
I put off reading Ada Palmer’s Too Like the Lightning for quite some time, having missed the boat when this first in a series came out in 2016. It was recommended to me many times as I wrote my “Brothers K in space” novel, and it still serves as a comp title (a point of market reference) as my novel is pitched to publishers. Why? Because Too Like the Lightning is also a sci-fi mystery written in a far-flung future, using an older literary style. Whereas my piece draws from Dostoevsky’s narrative voice, Palmer’s is reminiscent of Renaissance-era literature (think Sterne and Voltaire), and invokes that era’s European aesthetics in its exploration of 25th-century utopia.
Now, I’m not in the superstitious camp when it comes to reading similar stories while finishing my own. Some writers worry that the practice will muddy their own creative process, but I knew full well what I wanted my book to sound like and to achieve. I think I was more worried that I wouldn’t like Palmer’s universe, or that reading Palmer’s piece would illustrate why my own book would fail on market.
And I do think that I read this piece more clinically that I might have otherwise. It’s hard not to, though. Ada Palmer is an historian and a professor, with a focus on the Church in Renaissance Europe, and that wealth of academic knowledge suffuses Too Like the Lightning. I too am a student of literary history, so I’ve read quite a few of the source texts and histories that inform this book’s style and world. Even if I hadn’t, though, the chosen narrative style also inherently slows down reading—so it’s hard not to dwell on the book’s construction, and reflect on the coherence of its ideas.
Palmer’s tale depicts a future where nations have been supplanted by Hives, an outgrowth of today’s corporations and coalitions into public-confidence-based allegiances. (Essentially “Houses” on a world stage.) Public religion is banned, so a whole new job description, that of sensayer, has cropped up to help people think about existential questions. Convicts can be released into servitor programs, where they wander the world living on the good graces of people whose asks of their labour are not to be refused. Family units have been replaced by bashes, which are populated by one or two dozen people of similar interests, and raise up youngsters collectively until they can choose their own. Fashion is everything: sashes and jewelry indicate nationality, Hive, consent to various rule-sets, and more. And even though most of the story is set around the mystery of who’s tampered with a ranking list key to global economics, there’s a miracle afoot, too. A child with the ability to bring objects to life.
Yes, there is… a lot to the world-building. It’s a highly creative and ambitious affair.
But what struck me most, upon finally reading TLTL, was how much it isn’t like my own novel, because it uses literary history in a completely different way. Which is fine! There are many ways to incorporate the past into present visions of the future—and many reasons to choose one path over another.
When I chose to reimagine The Brothers Karamazov as a far-flung space opera, my reasoning was straightfoward: this brilliant text, which contains so much of human struggle, is shaped around the Christianity of Dostoevsky’s context; and for this reason, many aspects conclude in ways unsatisfactory to this secular humanist. So I rewrote the core story—the struggle of four “children,” each representing a facet of human nature, to endure under a difficult “parent” whose death will come at one of their hands—to bring the essence of Dostoevsky’s philosophical questions into a different context. A more secular (though by no means religiously bereft) era.
And although there are plenty of story elements that a reader of Dostoevsky might recognize, my book is its own beast, with its own literary canon that readers experience firsthand over the course of the larger tale. It was not my interest to construct a book that leaves readers feeling left out for not having read the source material first. My use of history is in service to the imagined social needs of the present, best addressed through the narrative safety of a far-flung future context.
Conversely, at some point while reading TLTL, I had to give up on all suspension of disbelief and just embrace that Palmer wasn’t trying to write a credible 25th century, so much as graft 18th-century Europe onto our future. Which is fine! The choice offered an excellent opportunity to seed the text with Easter eggs related to Palmer’s research, and to play with the wealth of knowledge that Palmer has about the politics and literature of that earlier period.
But does it further enlighten its readers (sorry, bad pun, I’ll stop) to imagine what the 18th century would look like if played out anew in the 25th?
That part’s debatable. For one, this is a suffocating world. The sheer rigidity of this Eurocentric culture, the pomp and circumstance and necessity of a classically educated populace to be able to navigate its courts of power, is far from utopic. And the fact that one hacking device for the world’s universal tracker system could destroy everything? Precarious beyond all measure. (It actually puts me in mind of the administrative nightmare of a pre-life envisioned in Disney’s Soul.) And the theories of human behaviour that we’re compelled to replay when scientific inquiry is hobbled to provide a larger stage for 18th-century moral philosophy? Positively reductive.
Then there’s the problem of the miracle child. He’s already a bit of a narrative nuisance, because he doesn’t speak or act like the thirteen-year-old he supposedly is. Talking more as a child half his age of course allows for fuller, more naive and passive conversations about Life, the Universe, and Everything—while also keeping him on the cusp of adulthood, and its improvements to personal agency. So, I understand the hedge. I just don’t think it made for a strong character.
I also can’t say that I liked the impact his storyline has on the overall text. Everything about this element of the story, after all, runs against the broader claim the book seems to be making by imposing the 18th century on the 25th. There’s a metaphysical dimension, after all, to the philosophical, literary, and historical discourse sprinkled liberally throughout… and yet, all of this argumentation originally took place in a world with the same physics as our own. What’s the relevance of introducing 18th-century metaphysics, if we’re only meant to employ it in a world that’s gone magical?
It’s a little like imagining a world where Isaac Newton follows up his mechanical-universe-confirming Principia with deep studies in alchemy (which he did, to try to illustrate that a mutative divine force can still be seen in Creation)… and this time succeeds. This time, actually manages to transmute one material into an entirely different material. That would indeed be a game-changer! But since it’s not what happened—since Newton eventually abandoned alchemy mid-line, and turned his attentions to esoteric apocalyptic prophecy—what would the fantastical what-if version of this history actually teach us about our own world?
And yes, yes, you’re about to say, “But ML, it’s a book! It doesn’t need to be instructive!” And I somewhat agree with you—but it also bears noting that 18th-century literature didn’t see didacticism as a failure of prose. And that’s really my point: in TLTL, the employment of literary history makes for a terrifically ambitious experiment, heavy on learnéd referencing… but I’m still scratching my head over whether Palmer’s use of the 18th century is simply a bit good costuming. Is there any deeper philosophical insight to be drawn from an 18th century superimposed on a 25th-century world with fantasy elements unlike our own?
Mind you, I appreciate the folks who suggested I read this book. Its use of history differs from my own, but that’s better than okay. I’m actually a touch relieved, because I think my Dostoevskyean space opera is far more accessible than similar works in the genre. (And I really hope that one day, publishers willing, I’ll be able to let you be the judge of that, too!)
IF1. The Turin Horse
Half of my readers are going to think I’ve lost my darned mind when I say that my favourite experience this past month was watching a 2.5-hour black-and-white Hungarian film about a father, a daughter, a horse, and the end of the world. But the other half of my readers will know that The Turin Horse (2011), by Béla Tarr and Ágnes Hranitzky, is right up my alley.
The piece is pure atmosphere, thirty long takes that follow the repetitive actions of a humble rural pair from different vantage points as their desolate world comes to an end over six days. The film starts with an anecdote involving Nietzsche, given to us by a voice-over narrator who returns later to deepen the story’s fabulism. On January 3, 1889, Nietzsche apparently witnessed a man whipping his workhorse, and in horror Nietzsche fell upon the horse to protect it, then burst into tears and collapsed. This was the beginning of the end for the famed 19th-century philosopher; his health deteriorated and he spent subsequent years institutionalized and in a catatonic state.
We cut to a horse, driven harshly by an older man, partially paralyzed by a stroke and lurching precariously atop his wooden cart, in an equally bitter landscape of pressing winds and mist on an unforgiving steppe. (There is animal cruelty in this film, alas.) Is it the same horse? Some summaries suggest as much—but more as an indication of their own linear thinking, because direct comparison misses the point. If a random man had been involved in that historical anecdote, it wouldn’t have had an impact. It’s specifically Nietzsche’s active presence that invites reading the incident as something loftier: an extension of philosophical argument, for surely his was a deeper praxis than that of those around him!
But therein lies the same classist dissociation I mentioned in A1, around an article on the prestige of “burnout.” Nietzsche’s life gave him the means to choose when to react with moral outrage; his livelihood was not on the line, as it was for the worker who whipped the very creature on which his industry depended.
This is the disconnect in which The Turin Horse resides: the immateriality of philosophy in survival’s realm. Father and daughter live in a remote, run-down cottage with a meagre supply of potatoes, which they eat one apiece at the end of days that start with shots of brandy. It may wrench at the viewer to see the workhorse, an old and poorly creature who resists working on Day 2 and thereafter ceases to eat and drink, locked up and so lacking for tenderness in the stable. But the father and daughter can hardly be accused of hypocrisy here, for they have no tenderness either for themselves, and speak only when utterance is absolutely necessary. There’s simply no room for more in their meagre lives.
Day 1 brings beleaguered father and horse home to the cottage, and establishes the household’s shared routine. (I will never look at eating a potato the same way, thanks to an exceptional performance by János Derzsi.) Day 2 shows us the routine of clothes, rest, chores, and food from his vantage point, and Day 3 from hers. The above screencap depicts the closest thing to entertainment in their lives: an opportunity, while waiting on a chore or resting after the daily meal, to sit by the cottage window and watch the world framed by it. That, for them, is philosophy.
And yet, while there is plenty to study in the different cinematographic choices applied to the same routines, the film offers potent disruptions, too. On Day 2, a neighbour arrives to barter for brandy, and claims that the town has been destroyed by wind, with degeneracy on the rise. On Day 3, “gypsies” (more mythic element than real people) drive through and take water from the well. An old man then gives the daughter an anti-Bible, which she can only read from with painstaking effort. These are small fabulist acts in the middle of the quotidian, but they pay off tremendously in Day 4, when the well dries up. Then, the father grows decisive—they can’t stay here—and with the house packed up and the horse tied to the back of the cart, the daughter (played with resigned dutifulness by Erika Bók) takes up the pack-animal’s role. This leaves us to watch, from within that cottage-window frame, as the cart reaches the crest of a nearby hill, and disappears beyond the lone tree there. And then to watch as the cart returns, crests the hill, and finds its way back at the house again.
It’s a perfect moment, because nothing needs to be said about what has transpired. They struck out for the town, and by virtue of their return, the neighbour’s words gain truth: the town must not be there anymore. There must be nothing left, beyond the hill. And so, the world collapses around them, a little more every day. On Day 5, even the oil in their lamps won’t light, and embers lose their glow. They go to bed—the narrator returning to fill in some of the curious feelings in that new and deeper dark. The next day, in a surreal illumination, they sit at the table and attempt to eat their cold potatoes. But the inertia of struggle has left the daughter, too, just as it had the horse. The father is the last to relent, and fade into sad repose.
I keep thinking about this film, and I think the reason it lingers is precisely because the death it addresses isn’t really the death of the world, so much as the death of philosophy and meaning. The complete collapse of cause and effect. I keep dwelling on this last film by Tarr (most famous for his seven-hour picture, Sántántangó [1994], another piece that makes intensely good use of long shots of sparse and weather-beaten landscape) precisely because it refuses to make an argument of itself.
Rather, The Turnin Horse has all the moral character of a documentary about a man who has “strut[ted] and fret[ted] his hour upon the stage,” and at the end simply… stops, and without so much as offering a goodbye speech slowly descends the stairs one last time, and walks away. The urge to mythologize this piece is so strong, but when you reach for the usual vocabulary, its usefulness falls away.
All of what we do as artists, as creators, as benders of our words into eloquent affairs of argument and law, is artifice. And there’s no slight intended in my use of that term. It is what it is, and it can delight and enlighten as it is. But when we become more enamoured with the artifice than the people it is meant to serve, either through the construction of a more just society or through the entertainment of a well-turned text or image, then we forget the most common cause for humanity of all:
That we who live will die.
That we who live are dying now.
What would our artifice achieve, if we remembered and centred this in all?
L2. The difficulty of “third positions”
Another striking takeaway from my first few months at OnlySky is just how much people are ill-prepared to hear alternative positions in dearly held binary disputes. These third positions are tricky to pull off at the best of times, mind you, because you have to avoid middle-ground fallacy in the process. Just because your view might fall somewhere between two existing positions does not make it inherently superior. And then there’s a flavour of “tone policing” that can come into play if one comes off as measured and calm in a way that feels weaponized: an argument unto itself.
But on top of this, I’ve encountered my fair share of people who genuinely seem to struggle to recognize when someone holds a third position. I’ve seen this when conversing with men about trans advocacy, conservative vs. liberal politics, COVID-19, climate-change… In ever so many realms, an incredibly familiar human tribalism rears its head, that simply wants to know if you’re X or Y, friend or foe, ally or enemy.
Mind you, I’ve been surprisingly successful, in these last two months, in using direct, calm, and steady engagement with… let’s call them “agitators”… until they’ve argued themselves into corners, and have no recourse but to ghost the conversation to save face. I’m quite good at this kind of conversation, and I know that it can be useful to have these conversations for the lurkers watching all unfold—but it’s also not the best use of my time, because there will always be someone wrong on the internet.
The question is, how do I do a better job of cultivating space for third—and fourth, and fifth—positions to normalize? Is there a place for that kind of writing? Especially in news media that ultimately needs clicks and page-engagement to survive?
Even in looking for a quick and easy answer to this last question, though, I recognize the same sort of binary thinking in myself. “Yes or no?! I have to know now, so I can decide whether or not this is a waste of my time!” But… do I have to decide all at once? Or can simply allow that I’m in the middle of a real-time natural experiment, and give it time to play itself out? Binaries are safe, but sometimes we need to stretch into discomfort, and learn to linger longterm there, if ever we are to grow.
M2. A local history: Betsabé Espinal
In A1, I wrote about my frequent bouts of frustration with what constitutes activism in so much of our digital discourse. Sometimes this frustration stems from a fixation on labels, and sometimes from the ahistoricity of our discourse. In our thrill at being the “first” to do something, we often lose sight of the immense strength and transformative power of aligning oneself with long histories of resistance come before.
For instance, while wandering through my neighbourhood a few weeks ago, on a holiday Monday that left the streets empty enough for me to take photos without looking like a tourist, I came across a series of murals honouring the dead, the kidnapped, the tortured, the displaced, and the downtrodden in local history. One name stood out—Betsabé Espinal, in the photo above. A strong, resolute portrait of a woman connected with a labour protest in 1920? I was keen to learn more.
Espinal was a textile worker, for the first large textile company in the country, Compañía Antioqueña de Tejidos, which had machinery imported all the way from England. She worked at the textile factory in Bello, the town that crowns the north of Medellín—and like many women workers of the 1910s and 1920s, in England as in Colombia, she and her coworkers were horribly mistreated. Not only were the women paid less than the men, and expected to work gruelling hours while also somehow sustaining their households, but the foremen often forced sexual acts upon them. It was unbearable.
And so, Espinal refused to bear it. She organized a walk-out, and with her initial contingent of fellow strikers, blocked the doors to the factory and proclaimed to all who were around to hear it all the abuses done to the women in that factory. And the rallying cry was heard. By day three, newspapers and government officials were reporting the claims of abuse, and the number of fellow protestors swelled over three weeks. Meanwhile, the owner of the factory, Emilio Restrepo, initially resisted the protest, citing all the supposed “dangers” that would arise if the movement persisted.
…Nevertheless, they persisted! Espinal and other women-workers held the line, and the community as a whole supported their fight against this new corporate presence. Yes, it brought jobs to the community. But at what cost?
Impressively, too, it wasn’t just business sense that ultimately changed Restrepo’s mind. Apparently, when it sunk in to Restrepo just how poorly the women were being treated, he came to the negotiations fully prepared to change the work culture in those factories. He conceded to all of Espinal’s demands, which included an immediate 40% raise to all the women, a 10-hour cap on shift-length, and… the removal of all the foremen and administrators who’d assaulted women on the line.
I just.
Hot dog, is that both a beautiful and a frustrating thing to read.
After all, one of the hardest things about the #MeToo movement, for me, was how low the bar for progress had been set. You’d think it was like pulling teeth to call for even a bit of accountability in our contemporary world. But ahistoricity has a lot to do with this state affairs. Our willingness to assume that we’re still doing better than those who came before us invites us to think, “Well, it might not be much, but it’s a start!”
Oh, honey, no. We have been starting and stopping, starting and stopping, time and again in post-industrial societies. And quite a few of our entrenched systems might even be making it harder to start today than it was before.
Consider, for instance, that while Emilio Restrepo was in charge of a company, the company was not yet so much a boss of him. Shareholders, lobbyists, and other third-party organizations (government or otherwise) have since tightened their legal in elaborate legislation and litigation games. But he was genuinely able to be met and moved as a human being, and to act when he realized the failings of his actions.
Espinal was a heck of a force for change at 24 years old in Bello, Antioquia, Colombia.
And she was fighting for change at a time when it was easier for courageous individuals to shift whole worker-class fortunes.
Her history illustrates both that we can do better—and also, that we’ve built a corporate system that makes doing better harder, at times, than in eras come before.
A2. “The Cancellation of Russian Culture,” by Gary Saul Morson
I think we’ve all seen troubling responses to the Russian war in Ukraine this past month. I know I cautioned early and often against glorifying the actions of everyday Ukrainians fighting for their homes, because it’s unwise to align one’s advocacy with anecdotes of righteous action. (It can backfire, massively, when reports emerge of unpleasant and cruel actions also taken by everyday Ukrainians—everything from Islamaphobia in certain fighting contingents, to roving neo-Nazi gangs exploiting the country’s chaos, to recent reports of cruelty toward Russian POWs.)
We’ve also seen people online and in the media gamify the war, glory in the violence, exult in the worst sort of chauvinistic propaganda, and otherwise treat everything like an unfolding movie script.
Gary Saul Morson’s “The Cancellation of Russian Culture”, at First Things, speaks to another absurd response to Putin’s actions: the express targeting of “Russianness” in art, as in cuisine, as in life. Yes, we’ve seen this all before. Canada is haunted by the concentration camps it created in World War I and World War II, for people who shared national histories with countries on the other side of national combat. (And mostly, as a kind of land- and resource-grab from the people imprisoned.)
In my lifetime, too, I remember how empty all the Arabic-signed pizza stores, grocers, and chickenshacks were in my Toronto neighbourhood on September 12, 2001. We all then had to endure the nonsense of “freedom fries,” when Republican propaganda targeted France for its refusal to support the U.S. war (of opportunity) in Iraq. And brown and Black Arabic and Muslim peoples continue to pay a terrible price in North America for the actions of a distinct and minuscule few.
As Morson notes, the claim now being made is that Russia’s actions have lent “moral clarity” to the West, which it is enacting through a series of retaliatory actions targeting any sign of Russianness in communities closer to home. And the consequences of this “moral clarity”? This elision of a country’s government with anything meaningful that might be said about people connected to the nation-state?
“You have Putin’s Russia and Pushkin’s Russia,” Krielaars observed. To blame a whole culture, past and present, for a current political action implies that everything about that culture contributed to that action. If Germany succumbed to the Nazis, don’t listen to Beethoven; because of Mussolini, cancel Dante and Raphael; if you reject American actions in Vietnam, the Middle East, or anywhere else, no more Thoreau or Emily Dickinson. Could there be a better way to encourage national hatred than to treat a whole culture and its history as a unified whole, carrying, as if genetically, a hideous quality?
This last line especially sings to me, because what we’re seeing is a rather backwards approach to activism. If the imperialist tendencies of certain nation-states is indeed the problem, why are we giving those nation-states what they want, by accepting their premise that national identity is something totalizing? Something that must be considered first and foremost in any moral assessment of policy toward human beings?
It’s a common misstep. We’ve made it many times before. We’re making it again.
But we can recognize when we do badly, and cease to move further in that direction.
We can refuse war’s great prize of glorified and totalizing nation-states.
We can lean into our shared humanity instead.
IF2. A Screaming Man
In many ways, A Screaming Man (2010) is a “small” film. It has a straightforward plot and trajectory, with familiar beats that allow its regional distinctions (set in Chad) to stand out and delight. The depiction of our protagonist’s wife—the tender way that Mariam serves Adam watermelon, and they make a deeper meal of feeding each other; the way she answers her neighbours, and reproves her husband and son, Abdel, when they show disrespect—are highlights in the backdrop of the film’s central action.
But the film’s central action is a worthy site of reflection, too, precisely because of its superficial smallness. We’re given a fifty-five-year-old man with a fairly easy and pleasant life. A former swimming champion, he now works as a pool attendant for an established hotel, and… that’s it! He works alongside his son, and goes home to a loving wife. But at the outset of the film, the hotel has been sold to a Chinese woman (a detail drawing upon regional anxieties about Asian encroachment) who decides to change up the staff. His old friend, a cook fond of a local stray dog, is replaced by a big man who hates strays. And so, Adam loses his life by the pool to his son—but not his livelihood. He simply replaces another once-friend at the front gate.
Small but potent changes, no?
Except that, in the background, there’s also a war on against dissident groups. And Adam is being pressured by the neighbourhood association to offer up his share of donations for the national cause. When he claims not to have money, it’s suggested that he give his son to the army—the same as other fathers have done.
And, hey… with his son gone, who else would mind the pool?
The rest of the film follows predictably from here. With Abdel gone to war, a secret part of his life reveals itself, in the form of a very pregnant girlfriend, whom Miriam immediately takes in, and who immediately stirs in Adam great regret. (Adam eventually admits that he’s the one who gave Abdel away, and forcefully smothers the girlfriend’s agonized cry—a difficult thing to watch, but very much in keeping with a theme of silence and discretion in this neighbourhood.) And so, Adam tries to atone when injury places Abdel within distance, at a military hospital—but he arrives far, far too late to repair the damage done.
And yet, for all the “quiet” elements in this film, narrative and cultural alike—that single, horrific choice hangs a dread weight at story’s centre.
Could a father who has not lost much at all—who has had a good and comfortable life; who still has his wife; who still has a job even amid wartime lockdown and terror, and ways to connect to his old friends—really send his own son into mortal peril simply to reclaim his old existence by the pool? Really?
Really.
What makes A Screaming Man work so well is that everything is quotidian, including this small, selfish act with such ruinous consequences. There is no great wrestling with symbolic evil, no larger-than-life depiction of handwringing over the decision. Like so much of what we do that has terrible consequences, it happens as effortlessly as putting water on to boil. For so many of us, unfortunately, it is only after the moment’s choice, as we look back and start to narrativize the sequence of actions that have constituted our lives, do we start to realize the full weight of their impact.
And this film was precisely what I needed to see as I reckoned with human reactions to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, just as we’ve been reckoning with reactions to COVID-19 for the last two years. In this realm, too, we have a clear background of trauma—and against it, a great many small, selfish acts that persist in individual lives.
I don’t know what I’m longing for, exactly, from my fellow human beings. A world where cutting remarks to our loved ones die more often on the tongue—because a war is on? A world where we measure our response to insult a little more judiciously—because a war is on? A world where, even if we’re safe from the worst human trespass, we go out of our way to ease other suffering where we can—because a war is on?
Adam in A Screaming Man is no sociopath. He’s simply never been put to the moral test before. Never had to weigh self-interest against what was best for others, too. And so, we might well say that obviously he should have known better, and done better, but the more pressing and terrifying question is this:
Have we prepared ourselves well enough for our own, fresh tests of daily conscience? Have we swum long and well enough in discomfort’s waters to know how to face its hidden currents without willing others around us, too, to drown?
B2. The Arsonists’ City, by Hala Alyan
Hala Alyan’s The Arsonists’ City renewed me. I hadn’t expected it to—I hadn’t even come across it on my own. It was a recommendation by a friend who knows that I would appreciate stories of displacement, diaspora, intergenerational trauma, and complex notions of home—and also, that my studies in Arabic are strongly informing an interest in learning more about intersecting cultures.
But this world-travelling saga, which follows a U.S. family of immigrants that has since scattered into individual lives, secrets, setbacks, and fragilities, is shamefully reduced when talked about around the “immigrant book” tags. Yes, the family comes together—reluctantly, complexly—around a threat to a sense of ancestral identity that had lain dormant, taken almost for granted, in the background of their lives. Yes, this is in many ways a “love letter to Beirut.” Yes, it gets into a wealth of cultural nuance.
But what gripped me from the start, and what stayed with me all throughout, is Alyan’s voice—and what it doesn’t fall prey to, that so many others often do. Alyan doesn’t present any of her characters as if she’s writing for a white or otherwise outsider audience. There isn’t even a hint of self-consciousness here—no attempt to grapple with stereotype and refute it, or to couch complex aspects of these cultural contexts in some kind of reassuring gloss for a reader that might be horrified.
Alyan does exactly what we as writers are called upon to do: she writes people. Each of her characters is a fully formed being who represents nothing beyond him or herself. The matriarch who underpins much of this story, as she and the children struggle with their father’s desire to sell the family home back in Lebanon (after many, many decades in the U.S.), is never just one thing, one person. Mazna carries the messy weight of living between more than just countries—also, wholly different notions of her life’s trajectory.
Meanwhile, the daughter Naj, who lives in Beirut, is a local pop star (and judiciously “out” lesbian) whose circles keep her in the thick of artistic and sociopolitical debates routinely left out of Western understandings of Lebanon’s slipstream identity. And the other siblings, Ava and Mimi, are differently Westernized: Mimi, as cynically indifferent a millennial as any of us, living his most self-absorbed life in Austin; Ava, analyzing to self-destructive distraction the possibility of trouble in her marriage to a white man. And the patriarch, Idris? His decision to sell the family estate is both impulsive and also moored in the same momentum, the same overconfident charm, that first helped him guide his family into and through immigration for a better life.
I haven’t been so fully convinced of the humanity of a full cast of characters for a while, nor as delighted to feel like a fly on the wall near rich, nuanced, and storied conversations not written for or catering to me at all.
I definitely owe whatever I write in April to the renewed confidence in fiction’s power that Hala Alyan The Arsonists’ City has inspired. (I just hope it measures up!)
A3. “Colombia’s Fossil Fuel Industry Is Freaking Out About Presidential Front-Runner Gustavo Petro,” by Kate Aronoff
Okay, this last article is a bit of a cheat, because I’d actually like to call your attention to two articles by Kate Aronoff, writing for The New Republic.
The first is in the title, “Colombia’s Fossil Fuel Industry Is Freaking Out About Presidential Front-Runner Gustavo Petro.” It’s a splendidly comprehensive deep-dive for The New Republic, about how local industry is responding to the possibility of a left-wing president. Aronoff is also nothing if not compassionate about the youth movements that have rallied around Petro to make him a stand-out in the first presidential run-off, which happened this past month. Although a solid third of the country thinks that Petro might as well be a communist intent on making Colombia the next Venezuela, there is indeed a possibility of Colombia turning the most left its ever been in a month’s time. Why? Well, as Aronoff explains,
Petro’s success in these elections, recount notwithstanding, follows a series of extended protests in Colombia that have helped fracture the right. Mass student strikes in 2018 bled into a larger mobilization of 1.5 million Colombians in November 2019 against neoliberal fiscal reforms, environmental destruction, and persistent state-sanctioned violence against social movement leaders. A general strike was only halted because of the pandemic. Last spring—amid mounting frustrations over the government’s handling of the pandemic, and worsening inequality—an estimated 10 percent of the population across rural and urban areas participated in an uprising calling on Duque to step down. Feminist movements have been a potent force in Colombian politics, as well, and won a historic victory to decriminalize abortion in February.
I also just want to hug Aronoff for correctly identifying the strikes in November 2019 as relating to “neoliberal fiscal reforms.” There’s a writer on Colombia for The Guardian who gets on my nerves something fierce for how often he turns everything back to FARC, the peace deal, and the 50-year civil war. When he wrote on that series of protests, he just couldn’t help himself—he went for the same exotic explanations again, attributing these youth movements to fallout from the peace. Meanwhile, what was happening in Colombia absolutely deserved to be read in light of what’s happening most everywhere: a middle-class squeeze that not only made it harder for existing middle-class families to keep up with rising prices and delayed pension payouts, but also severely diminished market opportunities for students in the middle of university programs, doing everything “right” to make themselves viable for middle-class industries collapsing around them.
We have so much common cause on a class-based front with communities all the world over. And yet, so many of us choose to reinforce distancing rhetoric instead—as if a shrinking middle class could only ever be a white-Western problem? One condition for me and “my” tribe; one entirely other condition for everybody else.
And yet, you might have noticed that the headline for Aronoff’s March 22 article was a little… sided, no? Why should we be anthropomorphizing and building empathy for the fossil fuel industry? Authors don’t always get to choose their headlines, though, so it’s especially interesting that, two days later, Aronoff filed another article on this theme—sort of. “Reducing Our Reliance on Oil Will Increase Our Quality of Life” walks us through how much of an improvement we could tangibly see in our lifetimes, if we were to implement oil-reducing public policies, to transform how we move through our worlds. Carless Sundays, for one. Reduced speed limits, for another. Investing more in public transit, bike trails, and E.V. chargers.
As Aronoff notes in this earlier piece, we have an opportunity, amid the current war in Europe, to mobilize for a less oil-reliant world. We can indeed “demand destruction” on a level that might not have seemed feasible before global political interests shifted to reducing our energy reliance on Russia. However, just because this war has built up substantial political capital doesn’t mean that oil-reduction should be seen as merely a war-time issue. As she writes:
Instituting these measures and the shifts the IEA recommends, though, is less a matter of stiff-lipped patriotic wartime sacrifice than making the U.S. a more livable country. Fossil fuel dependence is an obvious security risk, but it also makes most U.S. cities—by global standards—uniquely unnavigable. … The U.S. fares poorly across walkability metrics. New York City—among this country’s most walkable cities—ranked fiftieth on closeness to schools and health care after high-scorers like Kathmandu and Athens. It’s not just wealthy European capitals that the U.S. is lagging behind. Small city blocks, the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy finds, make it much easier to get around on foot. The leaders on that front are Khartoum, Bogotá, Lima, Karachi, and Tokyo.
Even without taking climate risks into account, business as usual in transportation is outrageously dangerous. Between 17,000 and 20,000 people die a year from the air pollution from the U.S. transportation sector—a figure that’s decreased dramatically as a result of new regulations and subsequent changes at automakers. Cars are killing ever-higher numbers of pedestrians, with projections showing that deaths jumped by 21 percent in 2020. According to the Governors Highway Safety Association, crashes that kill pedestrians have climbed by 46 percent over the last decade. That cars keep getting bigger isn’t helping matters: Roughly three-quarters of new cars are trucks, vans, and SUVs. If SUVs were a country, the IEA has found that it’d be the sixth-largest-emitting country on the planet.
The proliferation of private car transit, the Austrian philosopher André Gorz noted in 1973, was one of the oil industry’s most ingenious innovations
…
Years later, the problem has gotten worse—especially in the U.S. The same corporations that have pushed the myth of American energy independence since the 1970s are the ones that have made daily life here utterly dependent on a volatile global commodity, tying the cost someone pays to get to work in Omaha to whether Russia cuts off a pipeline transiting crude oil from Kazakhstan to the Black Sea. Enough!
And that last word says it all, doesn’t it? (Though I’m also chuffed to see Bogotá listed in a list of walkable cities. I talked about similar on an episode of Global Humanist Shoptalk, re: what we can learn about our societies by thinking about our sidewalks.)
Kate Aronoff’s reporting across these two articles has impressed me enough that I’ll be looking out for her future work. But I’m also simply heartened to see what is possible, in the realm of proactive journalism, when we do think comprehensively about the world, and when we seek common cause wherever possible.
(Another winner for me this month was Kendra Pierre-Louis, who featured on an episode of Jon Stewart’s The Problem podcast, and 100% held firm and factual against his broad-strokes cynicism about climate policy possibilities.)
Aronoff’s big-picture thinking is something I’d love to see permeate wider swaths of public discourse—but that it exists at all, with solid platforming, is hope to build on.
L3. Consistency and (over)confidence
Underpinning my reflections in L1 and L2, on what I’ve learned from a few months of writing for OnlySky, is a bigger question about my own “burnout” (see: A1). Can I keep engaging consistently enough to build the kind of platform I want, with the kind of measured writing I prefer? A recent comment on a piece about solarpunk humanism, shared by someone who had answered the call of my more thoughtful comment threads, was heartening. He wrote, at the end of a long message sharing more key sources around the article’s theme, “MLC, I like very much what you are trying to do here. I suspect I'll be back here often. Thank you.”
Likewise, that piece was spread to solarpunk circles, and as a lurker I took some pride in reading about their satisfaction not just with the main content, but also the conversation generated in the comments from it.
I know that, if I’m going to have the energy I need to weather the uncertain mid-term and reap any longer-term rewards, I have to lean into these positives wherever I see them. I also need to get a lot better at not letting trollish behaviour get me down. But boy howdy are there ever days when I just want a mass coronal ejection event to take the whole darned apparatus down.
Another important attitude that I need to maintain as I continue to be branded as the informed and informative, humanist-forward empirical thinker on the site? Skepticism for myself, ever and always. It’s something I currently build into all that I do (for instance, an upcoming piece where I publicly interrogate my kneejerk biases around the role of indigenous methodologies in contemporary anthropology), but when I look at many a writer in my vicinity, I also get nervous. I see so many people unable to accept criticism, and even more crucially, to accept error.
I’m going to be firm, and confident, and consistent about the views that I hold (testing, all the while, that they’re as internally consistent and reflective of real-world data as possible)—but I cannot ever allow the resoluteness of my beliefs serve as sufficent argument for their validity. And I have to make sure that I’m always cultivating a healthy community around me: one filled with people who feel comfortable offering counterpoint, friendly dissent, and the occasional call-in.
When “agitators” show up in my threads with straw-man arguments and a desire to argue with someone they see as claiming a monopoly on truth, I have to remember, too, that their unwillingness to engage in more sincere debate is not always a sign of my failure to argue or “human” well enough. There’s a much broader digital world to consider, filled with charismatic speakers on outsized platforms, who will do anything in their power to hold their position—anything, that is, except embody the fact that wisdom is process, not outcome. What should abide, in the long run, is not the positions we hold, exactly, but the way in which we held them.
Held them—not “wielded” them.
I hope I can help lessen the idea that public discourse need be treated as a war.
IF3. Drive My Car
As a reader of Haruki Murakami and Anton Chekhov, I cannot tell you how divided I was in my anticipation of Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car (2021), a three-hour film inspired by a Murakami story, “Drive My Car,” and shaped around Uncle Vanya, one of Chekhov’s most memorable plays. This is a common weakness of mine with film. When I know the source material too well, I struggle at times to allow an adaptation to go its own way. But here I was especially curious as to which aesthetic would win out: Would this piece draw more from the philosophy of Murakami, or of Chekhov?
Murakami is known for two things in his prose. The first is material, an almost sacred use of recurring tokens of Western-informed middle-class life—such as classical music, jazz, and literature, the cooking of pasta and other refined dishes, antiques, and pets. (No, really, there’s a whole bingo card about his tropes.) The second is thematic, and relates to the many vanishings and reappearings in his stories, the sudden slips between the quotidian, the gently supernatural, and the brutality of suppressed history. His main characters—male, heterosexual, routinely studying without ever seeing the women in their lives—grapple with the deepest existential question of them all: knowability. When a person they thought they knew behaves atypically, is this a betrayal of some private, nigh-on sacred belief in the possibility of mutual understanding? When the atypical actor is themself, is the betrayal worse?
Contrast this aesthetic with Chekhov’s plays, which are also richly structured around the trappings of classist existence—but in which, inevitably, profound precarities and insecurities more explosively play out. Uncle Vanya has managed to build a life for himself as caretaker of the estate his sister brought into their lives by marrying a professor. When she died, that professor married anew. While his daughter and Vanya maintain the estate, the professor and his young second bride enjoy the delights of urban high society. Their visit to the estate generates deep sorrows and impossible loves—especially when the professor proposes to sell the estate to improve his and wife’s extravagant lifestyle. (An act that will, in the process, take from Vanya the core pillar of his life.) But the emotional key to this piece lies precisely in the reverse of what Murakami explores in his writing: whereas Murakami’s characters have to confront the chasm of unknowability in themselves and others, Vanya’s challenge—like so many of Chekhov’s characters—is to face himself, to see himself as he really is, and still to choose not to kill himself when the reflection proves unbearable.
Drive My Car is structurally influenced by Murakami’s writings—right down to the way that the first 40 minutes serve as a sort of “short story” that precedes the ensuing novel (The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles was written the same way, with a short story converted into a first chapter.) In that “short story,” we explore a theatre director’s relationship with his wife, a TV-writer with whom he shares an intimate narrative bond—literally—through the acts they perform for and with each other. When his loving wife does something he had not expected, Kafuku is left to sit not only with his sense of estrangement from her, but also from himself, in his reaction to the discovery. No resolution for this rift emerges between the two of them. It never can.
But the intimacy yet persists, in the form of tapes his wife recorded with all the other lines in Uncle Vanya—all the other parts save Vanya’s, since Kafuku has been playing the role for years. So when he travels to Hiroshima to direct a version of the classical play that enhances our fundamental disconnect from one another by using actors speaking in different languages (including Korean Sign Language), our protagonist is still playing out that unfinished conversation with her. Still trying to find closure for it, that terrible question about everything he never knew about his wife, and what his ignorance of this gap says about everything he still doesn’t know about himself.
However, in Hiroshima, he gets a driver, mandated under contract, and soon she too listens in on this years-long conversation that Kafuku (which sounds like Kafka on purpose when said aloud—oh, Murakami!) has been playing out without peace.
The film centres, ultimately, on how the living are left to try to fill the gaps in their own and each other’s narratives. Secrets are revealed. Transgressions are accepted, even if forgiveness is not possible. And in this way, Kafuku’s story dovetails neatly into Vanya’s: both Murakami’s man and Chekhov’s character called upon, in the end, to bear up to what they do know about themselves… and then to have patience, or mercy, with themselves for all the rest.
A difficult lesson, but an important one to apply.
P.S. I’m not one to watch films for romance, but Drive My Car also has the best “wife guy” I’ve seen in cinema in years. Jin Dae-yeon plays the ever-affable Kon Yoon-su, Kafuku’s facilitator throughout the theatre production process—but he especially shines during a dinner scene in his home, when he and his wife explain their relationship history to their guests. Just—pure, adoring, everyday contentment radiates from his every gesture in this tender moment. So wholesome! This was his first film, and I hope to see him in others down the line.
B3. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
This entry is a bit of a cheat because I’m still in the middle of re-reading War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy. The first time I read it, I was sixteen and fresh from the thrill of Anna Karenina—though when I say “thrill” it’s not for the usual reason. I’m possibly the only feminized person you know who didn’t give much of a hoot for Anna’s ill-fated affair with Vronsky, but was right there with Levin’s half of the tale: an existential crisis to find some transcendent moment amid all the usual life events that were supposed to provide a sense of meaning and fulfillment, but never did.
(Then again, I am well known to be an odd duck on this and other accords, so maybe this partiality will not surprise you at all.)
My first translation of War and Peace was by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volonkhonsky, and if you’d asked me at the time, I would have precociously told you there were no better translators of Russian literature. Why? Because I thoroughly enjoyed how much they sustained the original rhythms and dialects of various authors. I felt I was learning far more about Russian culture through the way they preserved key terms and concepts, even though the syntax was denser for it.
This time… well, I’m not sure how much the difference in translator has helped, and how much can be attributed to the reader’s maturity, but I’ve found the Aylmer and Louise Maude translation to be a far speedier and more accessible read. I guess it also helps that, having read the book before, I do remember most of the key plot points and central characters. Still, I think this would be the version I’d recommend to new readers—which brings me to my main topic: why one might read War and Peace, an over-1,200-page book with a character count of 559; and why on earth one might re-read it, if they’ve already gone through the ordeal once!
I’m being a touch glib with these questions, of course, because a book’s length and character count aren’t really the most important considerations. More often, it’s the subject matter that tends to give people pause. War and Peace is, at its topical core, a thoroughly researched historical fiction, covering a period of Napoleonic warfare spanning 1805 to 1815, and centring on his ill-fated Russian invasion of June 1812. Not everyone wants to read about military campaigns!
But it does a real disserve to the heart of Tolstoy’s classic to suggest that War and Peace is “about” war, any more than a book set between 2001 and 2021 in the U.S. could also be said to be “about” war. Yes, there are battalion and battlefield scenes, and courts of power where strategies of warfare are arranged. There is a fixation on Napoleon as a figure to be glorified and despised. There is suffering, and imprisonment, and death.
And yet, the heart of this book lies far less with the times in which its characters are living, and more with the characters who are living in these times. The human beings in this text, that is, struggle over all these years, and in all these unstable contexts, to make sense of personal destiny, duty, and any commitments made to themselves as much as to others. Pierre’s journey is the perhaps the most tumultuous—a bastard child shifted into a seat of authority, he wavers between visions of purpose throughout the war—but even Andrei, having early on attempted the only escape made possible to him after marrying too young (to the army he goes!), only finds that life is filled with calls to know when to walk away. And Nikolai is perhaps the most sentimental of the core trio (though there are plenty of women who struggle with commitments—if they don’t die in childbirth first). His journey stems from a reluctance to abandon his earliest sincere promise to another, even though time weathers and transforms us all.
I can see full well, then, why I’d be so drawn to re-reading War and Peace at this juncture in my life, as well as in the world’s. As I look back on statements I have made, commitments I have attempted, and hopes I have sincerely held, it is indeed a comfort to return to a text wise enough to know that none of these moments of sincere feeling, of a desire to be loyal and true to something that will stand the test of (mortal) time, is the lesser for being transitory.
Life, like the cadence of war and peace, has its seasons of intensity.
One after another after another.
And rare is the life where they ever look quite the same.
M3. A poem
I drew upon W. H. Auden for the opening quotation because his piece has been on my mind this last month—as the poem below, written a couple of weeks ago in a local café, also attests to. “September 1, 1939” is an immensely well-known “war” poem, written on a day when Auden, like so many, realized that the spread of war could no longer be staunched. That, within a few dozen hours, all of Europe would be “sided” in a new and terrible world war. And it has some truly excellent, potent lines in it—including one I reference in my own tribute to the work, below—but also…
It’s also not the strongest poem, structurally. It has an underwhelming start, a set of lines that feel like the kind of grounding exercise a person is supposed to do when having a panic attack. Name where you are. Embody your place. Remember that you are here, right now, and life carries on.
I think my fondness for the piece, then, draws less upon the more theatrical lines in its closing strophes, and what can be learned from the quotidian and middling at its outset. How many people throughout history, feeling some similar sick dread as helpless Auden while looking at what their world is about to do, have reached for the materials on hand, and attempted to make connection with others through art? To speak some sort of profound utterance that could be enough to name and bend the world a new and better way?
I don’t pray. I’m not religious, so that would be quite unusual if I did. But I think that human beings of theistic and atheistic persuasions alike share the same brain structures that give us to believe—overconfidently, perhaps—in the power of our agency. Even when we know that the forces shaping our world, and driving it so often into greater suffering, are well beyond our individual reach, still we reach.
And what an extraordinary gift it is that we do.
Until May 1, my lovelies—keep reaching, and keep being kind to yourselves, and above all else… keep seeking justice where you can.
M
And the International Wrong
I sit in one of the cafes
where I've worked to be known
as a friend to my neighbours
though stranger, always, in my home
and hesitate around a name
my baristas will not known,
nor the date that he engraved
on a grief poem of his own.
But even Auden, on his eve of war,
gave to old Thucydides his due:
a watcher who knew his watchers
and the limits of their watching, too.
Famous, as much as fame can be
ascribed to academic kinds
for wavering on one damned word,
"We must love one another and/or die."
How many write now in the shadow
of this, and other lines unknown,
the dread-sorrow of their own moments
which feel at once so old
and wonder at how the little things
can carry heedless on -- even now,
as I try to write the international wrong,
cups clatter, tables fill, phones
burst with video, and behind
the counter, the wait-staff are in song.
Cacophony, cacophon-ah --
the flame, unbidden, burning on.