Truth and Beauty

Walking composition

“Where’s the glory in making mothers weep?” — “Hey I Don’t Know,” Kongos

Last week I was listening to a podcast episode on green energy—I listened to a few back to back and they kind of blended in together; I can’t remember which one this was and I didn’t really like any of them anyway—that reminded me of People of a Feather, a Canadian documentary I wrote about on here almost exactly two years ago, a musing on the tension inherent in being a consumer of the world (that is, being alive), and being an exploiter of it:

“The residents of the community at the center of the film have lived in balance with ice, seal, eider ducks, and the sea for countless years. But as massive Canadian hydropower projects pump fresh water into the ocean at the wrong times of year, responding to southern neighbors’ needs to heat their homes, the resulting imbalance in ocean salinity puts the entire ecosystem at risk.”

Large-scale green energy projects are generally accepted as part of a necessary transition to a future that might evade climate collapse. What bugged me about all these podcast episodes, though, is also what brought me back to that documentary: What is sacrificed for what others deem necessary, and who is being asked to do the sacrificing?

When people are making decisions about what is considered necessary or right, for whatever reason and at whatever scale, what would change if the first questions we asked were 1) who has to suffer for this to become a reality, and 2) do they have a choice?

---

Before returning to Russia and her son and grandchildren, my stepmother said to me, “You know, Nia, we cannot fall apart. We have to be strong. It’s how we survived. It’s how we survived in Soviet times, it’s how we survived all these things.” How many times over how many centuries in how many lands have people had to tell one another, tell themselves, tell their children and grandchildren, the same?

A few years ago my stepmother was able to retrieve the Soviet-era records on her family—her grandmother in particular, a poet who spent well over a decade in labor camps—the hard evidence of show trials and exile to prison camps that Putin has worked so hard to suppress, to deny even the memory of. I met her grandmother several times before she died, when we lived in the Soviet Union, and since she could no longer speak English she asked me to read her own poetry in English back to her; it’s one of the most vivid memories of my time there.

Part of poetry’s power, it sometimes seems, is that it’s asked to serve far more purposes than any other writing, articulating both the pains and joys of human existence, of possibility, with precision and depth that defy even the language it relies on.

Pregnant with her second child, who would later die of starvation, my stepmother’s great-aunt (a more famous poet than her sister, the grandmother) wrote a poem that always confuses me with its combination of sorrow throughout with an uplifting prospect that carries the weight in its final lines, which read:

"In the dark midnight, under the ancient trees' shroud
We gave you sons as perfect as night, sons
As poor as the night . . .

We never stopped you, companions for marvelous hours
Poverty's passions, the impoverished meals we shared
The fierce bonfire's glow
And there, on the carpet below,   
Fell stars. . ."

Like so much of Russian literature and music, the poem wraps its love in grief, or its grief in love, encompasses its fears in a seeking for the beauty of the world that never fails us. The poetry that weeps but also caresses.

---

It’s easy to speak of war in terms of strategic maneuvers and capabilities, but in the end the same questions get buried: Who has to suffer for what someone thinks is necessary, and do they have a choice?

“Like tyrants everywhere and all times,” wrote Timothy Snyder recently of Putin, “he has made a fatal mistake, and so his last act will be to make sure that it is fatal for his own people.” Tracking almost exactly with the kinds of pretense democracy described in Spin Dictators, which my father recently had me read, Snyder writes of the upcoming “referendums” in some Ukrainian regions that,

“It is beside the point to say that such numbers are implausible, because they will just be invented. . . . the fictions provided in the media exercise will be implausible. And deliberately so. The way Russian electoral propaganda works is to tell a lie that everyone knows is a lie, and then to show by force that there is no alternative to living as though the lie were true.”

What truths do we tell ourselves about what we think the world needs, society needs, we need? Putin needs the lie of his war to be true. But it’s not the only perceived need in the world that requires the suffering and sacrifice of others who have no choice.

Maybe poetry and love and the beauty of the world are the only truths, or even the only choices, we really have.

---

Some stuff to read, listen to, or watch:

• In Machines We Trust podcast on the AI used to monitor underage student content—its claimed benefits for suicide prevention, and its pitfalls with regards not just to privacy, but to interpersonal trust.

• Cyber-security expert Nicole Perlroth on the Your Undivided Attention podcast on a number of cyber-security issues, including how woefully behind the U.S. is on cyber-security awareness and preparation: “I have seen Russian hackers probe our nuclear plants, and they are not there for intellectual property theft. They are probing these plants for bugs in the software that touches these critical systems, just like Stuxnet did.”

• Along with People of a Feather, the short Canadian documentary Angry Inuk is a compelling look at what sustainable consumption within a global market might actually look like.

• Clive Thompson writing in Medium on “rewilding” our attention: “They’re not wrong about us; but they’re woefully incomplete. This is why I always get a slightly flattened feeling when I behold my feed. . . . It’s like checking my reflection in the mirror and seeing stock-photo imagery.”

• In Aeon, graphic designer Jeremy Shuback with a 7-minute video on the Tabula Peutingeriana, a 22-foot-wide, 1-foot-tall 13th-century copy of a 4th-century Roman map that looks to be a transit map but is actually a map demonstrating the extent of the empire’s power: “How [innacuracies] shape up show how the benefactors of the map wish for the world to be seen. In shaping how someone sees the world, you shape how they see their role in it, how they see themselves.”

• Nikita Arora writing (also in Aeon) on the wonders of moss and the deceptions of touch: “This, then, is the first lesson that moss taught me: you can touch Time. Not our human time, not even mammal time, but Earth Time. . . . It is a species that cohabits our cities and apartments, a witness to human time and its catastrophic speed. If only touching moss were enough to live at Moss Time.” (This is a delight of an essay if you give yourself the time for it. I loved Arora’s comments on Maurice Merleau-Ponty, whose writings on embodiment have been so influential for me and many others: “Touch reorients us to the fundamental condition of being – to the inevitability of others, both human and nonhuman. In touching, we are most vulnerable because we are always also being touched back.”)