We are both things

our map of the present, and the individual projected into it

As for us, we live within that language above an abyss, most of us with the steadiness of blind men. But when we regain our sight, we or our descendants, shall we not fall into that abyss?¹

I’d like to start by saying I know my words are naïve. Writing and sharing what I was feeling in early November was difficult precisely because I’d decided to disclose a privileged sadness and equally privileged moral disgust. I did so only because I knew that I was not alone in feeling this way. My post had no pretense of having any policy or political vision. In fact, I think it’s important that it not have any, and that pretending to have one not be a prerequisite for forming thoughts about one’s emotional state, especially if it’s shared by many people, each engaged in their own search for direction, relevant action, and legitimate meaning. 

The onlooker’s moral purity is a fiction: there is no objective position; everyone is complicit. But the naïve position is all the more necessary because it must be constructed, defended, and upheld. We must be allowed to weep without having to justify our tears with roadmaps and 10-point accords. We will even build solidarity in this sadness and this horror and this anger, and it will be this well of sincerity that will source each person’s will to act. I say sincerity because this naïve emotion is too quickly discarded as a kind of liberal hypocrisy (which exists as well) that congratulates itself for its tears alone. I acknowledge the need for action, for vision, and for precision; I am also defending the role of those who try to sound out the present and the personal with no pretense of writing the future. 

We need a coherent structure of feeling, one to which we can fasten collective belief in goodness, legitimacy, and value. It is a mistake to subsume this search for shared emotional resonance into concrete political action. It’s also, inversely, a mistake to imagine that if everyone felt what I do, then everything would be ok. The inclination to make this mistake is why revolutionary language so often robes itself in mystic fervor. You need messianic pride to imagine that a tide of universal feeling will overthrow the order of things. We need both the practical and the personal, and it’s important for every person to understand for which they write. 

Otherwise, even giants puddle around in platitudes. Tolstoy was at the height of his fame and artistic powers when he was struck by an existential crisis that brought him to the brink of suicide. As told by Stephan Zweig in his biography of the Russian writer, Tolstoy swapped novels for screeds, in which the State became synonymous with Satan; its offsprings War and Property were the twin cardinal sins. The wealthy count and revered author preached a nonviolent “spontaneous renouncing”² to… all of it. His moral attack on the social order would inspire leaders as distinct as Lenin and Gandhi. But as soon as Tolstoy turned to outlining concrete action, “his concepts become completely nebulous, his thoughts confused…” Denouncing violence of any kind, be it state or revolutionary, his only prescription is for “the ruling classes to rid themselves voluntarily of all their privileges and demand less from life.” He died dejected and ashamed of his inability to follow his own example. You might say he refused the proudly naïve acceptance of an impossible position.

I also think of Simone Weil, the Jewish Marxist thinker who pushed her theoretic work so far that it turned her into a Christian mystic. She renounced academia, worked in an auto-plant, fled Europe before WWII, and perhaps literally died of guilt. In 1934, as she was swapping class room for assembly line, she wrote Reflections Concerning the Causes of Liberty and Social Oppression, a series of essays criticizing, among other things, the religious undercurrents of Marxism, and the false hope of contemporary leftist movements. 

“Not in the regime born of the October revolution, nor in the two Internationals, nor in the independent socialist or communist parties, nor in the little youth groups that have recently sprouted in such great numbers, can we find any sign whatsoever of vigor, of health, of purity.”³

It’s funny to think that what she took from Marx, in the end, was the religion. Her flight towards purity, itself a kind of sacred naïvety, led her to collapse all visions of external, social transformation into herself: soon, only a personal relationship with God, via grace, held any promise. She traded critical writing for aphorisms, writing in 1940: 

“Do not judge. All faults are equal. There is only one fault: not having the capacity to nourish oneself from light alone. This capacity having been abolished, all other faults are admissible.”⁴ 

The naïve position is seductive because it is all-powerful. With a shake of the head it dissolves the world. “The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make,” wrote David Graeber, “and could just as easily make differently.”⁵ Again, there are two separate acts at stake: truth-telling, and world-making. Graeber, who showed all of us a different way to think about debt and the nature of money, applied himself to the former in order to help others better undertake the latter. 

All this to say that pointing out obvious ills eating away at the Zionist project since its conception does not oblige me to administer any medicine. Similarly, there is a profound difference between understanding someone’s position and justifying their acts. Because you understand how a kid growing up in Gaza might want to avenge his martyred siblings does not mean you condone any and all vengeance. Our privileged rejection, as onlookers, is not stunted by the fact that it hasn’t evolved into a state of practical (military) legibility. We witness the biblical saga of victim become monster: genocide hides in its own name. I don’t need to list the horrors. Hope shrinks, takes refuge inside an acorn, the inevitability of spring. 

The most dangerous thing, for all of us far from the smog of power or its heel, is disbelief. I cry the thousands dead and millions mourning knowing I can do only so little. But I cannot allow myself to desecrate this lone sadness, by hollowing it out into an act of pure, cleansing, performance. If it is that, it is also the expression of solidarity, and the proof that imagination is not fiction’s plaything but a requisite for the fullest understanding of reality. 

My quiet, lone mourning and my quiet, small carving of joys into each day are not indulgent, are not congratulatory or masturbatory. I refuse to look away just as I refuse to succumb.

So: how to live with complicity, through guilt, in touch with horrors that seem only more unavoidable, more repulsively innate, more cartoonishly fated, with every crime? 

Or: how do we continue living out our little lives without eviscerating our loved ones and our selves for simply carrying on, without turning mundane and vital joys into a carnage of hypocrisy?

I ask my friend Polo: “Does it make us selfish or wise, this obstinate search for small pleasure?” “Neither,” he says, “we’re just biological blobs going about our lives.” 

There’s the long-shot perspective: salvation via evolution. If we just survive long enough to stumble into collective illumination, it will all have been worth it; every tiny joy left on the path of humanity’s genocidal march towards salvation is a justifiable salve. 

On the other hand, if we bomb, scorch, and gas mammal life from the known universe, then perhaps the powerless, the kind, the humbly joyful, the banal, the poor, the mourning many, can applaud themselves for playing a minor role: all ambition is suspect, all success a sin. 

The first answer is a hopeful cop-out; the second is a vindication of inaction. More importantly: the future is being sapped by a gorged, grotesque present: we cannot turn to it for answers. The paradox of walking the earth today is having to create meaning without future, which has been plundered of even its ability to hold dreams. 

(Perhaps this feeling is every generation’s inheritance. In 1934, Weil wrote: “We live in an era that has been denied a future. The wait for what comes next is no longer a hope, but an anxiety.”⁶ Or perhaps, more pessimistically given what did in fact “come next,” this feeling is a phase in a multigenerational cycle, one which we’re visiting again.)

So, the present. As spacetime compresses into a screen, our present swells with occurrences around the globe. A chaos of information impedes any distillation of cause, effect, and continuity. (How far the victims in Morocco and Libya today?) 

“Yet the notion of a uniform time,” as John Berger⁷ so succinctly put it, “within which all events can be temporally related, depends on the synthesizing capacity of a mind.”⁸

Each of us carries our own replica of the world in our heads; these replicas constitute our individual present, and collectively form the reality we are bound to. As our imaginary present expands, our sense of presence is diminished – because we feel small, and because we’re busy worrying about things a world away (the world is away). 

A conjecture: when information was bound to matter and mechanical transport, the present was defined in both time and space. “Elsewhere” resided in a past and future as distant as the time it took to get there. Atrocities occurred in the past. People could forgive themselves if their present was detached from distant horrors: there was more overlap between the expanse of the imagined present and a person’s capacity to act. Every innovation in transportation on the path towards simultaneity accompanied an inverse shrinking of the self. 

The trouble is, we are both things: our map of the present, and the individual projected into it. We are the mask and its silent observer, witness to our diminishing. We are the holders of our present and the captives of our imagined realms. 

Cutting the news, artificially shrinking the present back to your presence works for some. It’s probably done best in community. My friends practicing this conscientious retreat are, I find, brave, resourceful, and often happy. But for all those who would rather not isolate or ignore: how to establish a practiced, reliable distance between yourself and the bubbling chaos known as world, without creating a schism? Without callousness, without apathy, oversaturation, cynicism, detachment? Or, on the opposite end, without lunging, like Weil and Tolstoy, into a self-flagellating mysticism that swallows and obliterates any present beyond the self?

I’m trying to give stability and scale to an unruly immaterial apparatus. 

Perhaps deities are always those beings whose capacity to act covers the entire sphere of their imagined present. Those entities for whom there is no distance between the self’s realm and the world’s. Perhaps we need deities today, in order to allow ourselves our rituals, our magic, our offerings; in order to mend and stitch our way back into the bloated, monstrous, distant world. Aren’t theory and conspiracy, which each allow for their own tensile projections (Q-Anon’s New World Order a freakish reflection of the left’s Neoliberalism), deities in their own right?

Magic, to paraphrase Alan Moore, is the process by which information is converted into interpretation. All thinking is magical. Our imaginary presents – those model worlds on fire in our heads – are the products of their own magic, subject to information as well as deformation. It’s irrational to not give the unknown its fair say.

Another way to frame this thought: let’s allow the unknown back in. Rather than artificially shrink the present or bloat ourselves like messiahs, let’s realize how tiny our maps and models of reality are when placed above the massive, uncharted unknown. Who’s to say that our prayer and our lone sorrow, our words and our conscious, practiced joy don’t trot off on strands of their own to alter the world beyond our sight? Let mystery puncture the reign of your morbid, plastifying cartographies. 

Perhaps everything we think we know about the world is a marvelous sham articulated by mischievous onlookers. Perhaps expectations mold findings. Perhaps we’re all skimming on the surface of a single shared dream. Perhaps desire is the fruit of intuition. Perhaps others’ minds are parallel universes. Perhaps we’ll laugh to think we once imagined that the present was as flat and homogenous as the surface of the globe. 

I want to end with a letter by the scholar of Jewish mysticism Gershom Scholem, written to his friend Franz Rosenzweig in 1926. He was writing from Jerusalem with doubts about the nascent state. Delphine Horvilleur quotes portions of this letter in her treatise on death, and I’m including it here because it is a lucid, prophetic illustration of language’s matter-of-fact magic. Magic not as a fuzzy New-Age token, but magic as the brute, undeniable force that molds the imagination. It’s also a bone-chilling text when paired with Netanyahu’s invocation of Amalek. 

This country is a volcano, and language is lodged within it. People here talk of many things that may lead to our ruin, and more than ever of the Arabs. But there is another danger, much more uncanny than the Arab nation, and it is a necessary result of the Zionist enterprise: what of the "actualization" of the Hebrew language? That sacred language on which we nurture our children, is it not an abyss that must open up one day? The people certainly don't know what they are doing. They think they have secularized the Hebrew language, have done away with its apocalyptic point. But that, of course, is not true: the secularization of the language is no more than a manner of speaking, a ready-made expression. It is impossible to empty the words so bursting with meaning, unless one sacrifices the language itself. The phantasmagoric Volapük spoken in our streets precisely defines the expressionless linguistic space which alone has permitted the "secularization" of language. But if we transmit the language to our children as it was transmitted to us, if we, a generation of transition, revive the language of the ancient books for them, that it may reveal itself anew through them, shall not the religious power of that language explode one day? And when that explosion occurs, what kind of a generation will experience it? As for us, we live within that language above an abyss, most of us with the steadiness of blind men. But when we regain our sight, we or our descendants, shall we not fall into that abyss? And we cannot know if the sacrifice of those who will perish in that fall will be enough to close it again.

The initiators of the Hebrew language renaissance believed blindly, almost fanatically, in the miraculous power of language, and that was their good fortune. Because if they had been clairvoyant, they never would have had the demonic courage to resuscitate a language destined to become an Esperanto. Even today, they continue to walk along, enchanted, above an abyss from which no sound rises; and they pass on the ancient names and signs to our youth. As for us, we are seized with fear when, amidst the thoughtless discourse of a speaker, a religious term suddenly makes us shudder, though it may even have been meant to console. This Hebrew is heavy with impending catastrophe. It cannot and will not remain in its present state: our children have no other language left, and it is truly they alone who will pay the price for that meeting we have arranged for them, without ever having asked them, without asking even ourselves. The day will come when the language will turn against those who speak it. There are already moments in our own life when this happens, unforgettable, stigmatizing moments, when all the presumptuousness of our enterprise is suddenly revealed. When that day comes, will there be a young generation able to withstand the revolt of a sacred tongue? 

The full letter, translated from German by Ora Wiskind, is available here as a PDF. 

1. Gershom Scholem, letter to Franz Rosenzweig

2. Stefan Zweig, Tolstoï (translated from a French translation of the original German)

3. Simone Weil, Réflexions sur les causes de la liberté et de l’oppression sociale (translation mine)

4. Simone Weil, La pesanteur et la grace (translation mine)

5. David Graeber, Utopia of Rules

6. Weil, Réflexions sur les causes de la liberté et de l’oppression sociale

7. John Berger, who wrote significance into the smallest things he could find, like shadows and instants, was invited to speak about storytelling with the Zapatistas, who are engaged in a very real fight to maintain autonomous territory within the Mexican state.

8. John Berger, And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos