This could be Yemen; this could be Afghanistan; this could be Bosnia; this could be Ethiopia; this could be Haiti; this could be Myanmar…
The tragedy unfolding in Ukraine forces me to detour a bit from the usual conversation presented here. One cannot pretend for the sake of convenience that this topic can be sidelined or compartmentalized.
It occurs to me that a few words on this subject, in this space, may not be a detour at all. This column presents itself as a regular space for talking about creativity in its various forms. As bombs fall on Ukraine, and as declining global stability threatens to displace, upend, and ultimately degrade even the simplest dignities of life, the creative impetus appears in sharp relief because we are witnessing its precise opposite. The opposite of war is creation. War, conversely, concerns destroying things that have been created.
Artists can raise money and awareness about the plight of Ukrainian refugees. Art itself can offer insights, emotional expression, and succor. But creative works are hardly ballast against the drowning, downward pull of recent events. Art is not “the answer”, especially considering how time and time and time again the human collective seems to eschew creative options in favor of destructive ones. Charles Dickens put it this way: “…the shadows of our own desires stand between us and our better angels, and thus their brightness is eclipsed.”
Is Ukraine’s horror really that different from the slide toward bitter, divisive acrimony in our own country? It is insofar as the material violence— the kinetic and instantly destructive aspect of the invasion— has had such immediately dramatic and lasting influence. But history may ultimately record that as the only difference. To invert Carl von Clausewitz’s famous line, it seems politics is merely the continuation of war by other means.
No matter how much we try to make ourselves feel calm and morally stable, history has proven something darker: as a species we are quick to anger, fast to reject evidence, reluctant to hang in and hold fast for the benefit of everyone. It is much easier to vilify and isolate than cultivate and create. Blame the immigrants; blame the people who don’t look like you do; blame the uneducated; blame the elites; blame the religious believers; blame the stalwart atheists. Take up arms and tear it all down. What’s yours ought to be mine, and while I’m at it, I never really liked you very much in the first place.
Welcome to Ukraine.
In a recent tweet, I read about someone in Kyiv who had come across a small pile of old black and white photographs in mass of rubble outside a wrecked apartment building. The aging pictures had already been fading and degrading as all photos will do as they oxidize over decades. Here, scattered to the pavement by the unexpected surreality of a bomb, they faced almost immediate destruction.
Nothing fancy: they were family snapshots, keepsakes of personal histories decades old. They were memories of people who mattered to other people. They also revealed nuance and texture of a past world. Lying amid urban debris they were now exposed to gusts of wind and rain and dust and the grinding treads of war machines.
The person who posted the tweet asked if anyone recognized the people in the pictures, if there was any way to reunite these clearly valuable personal images to their owners. What immediately rises in me and many others, I suspect, is the momentary hope that this gesture of good will may result in a positive outcome, that photos and owners may be reunited. What grows in me shortly afterwards is the rueful awareness that we should not have to need such pursuits in the first place. Why should anyone’s photographs be cast to the sodden ground for any reason at all? Add some perspective, and the light fades further. The root of an idea begins to gain purchase. If we really take stock of the matter, this act of moral vandalism is more common and more ordinary than we like to admit.
Think that’s hyperbole? Think of all the books being banned by schools and communities around the country simply because people in power disagree with the writers and the ideas they write about. Ban books and you’re not far from banning people. Ban people and you’re on to a dark yet familiar road.
The wayward photographs represent a microcosm for the loss of memory that war inevitably will induce. Here was one family’s keepsake loss, a tragedy surrounded by aching tragedy. Now think of the accumulated loss of thousands of photographs and cultural life histories—hundreds of thousands— and the inevitable condemnation of it all to permanent, irretrievable darkness. Paintings, music, buildings, people: they don’t just come back. Once gone, they’re gone forever.
In case it’s not clear, Ukraine is only the most recent example. We (meaning humanity) does this all the time. Conflict is our default condition, apparently, even as we try to pretend otherwise. Consider Syria, consider Afghanistan, consider Myanmar, consider Yemen.
Consider voter suppression. It’s really the same thing before things get physical.
Now it’s Ukraine, and there’s no way to say it differently: this situation is terrifying. Nuclear powers are in military motion, cities are disappearing into smoke and rubble, promising lives are being scarred by lasting trauma, even as other lives are simply being cut short by capricious violence. These depredations are no more horrible than similar events in other parts of the world. The difference is that here, on the edge of the rest of Europe with risk of high tech armies getting pulled in to the conflict, we are witness to a war being transmitted to the world in realtime via social media and high definition television. But day to day, for the people caught in the middle, the horror here is the same as the horror everywhere.
I find myself reflecting again and again on a piece of a particular poem as I try to make sense of the collective traps we seem to lay for each other, as individuals, as communities, and as nations. It’s a familiar bit of verse, a common assignment in Freshman comp. The poet Matthew Arnold originally wrote this as a lament about modernity’s encroachment on religious faith, but I believe it actually speaks more movingly about our apparently inevitable choice to eschew better angels in favor of easier, destructive forces. Read the whole thing. It’s worth your time, and it won’t take much. Here’s the final stanza from “Dover Beach”.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.