Artist at the barricade; or living, politics

     It’s early spring. I walk up the hill to a favorite lookout point. Through and past thin branches with peeping leaf buds, I see the joining-parting of two beloved rivers, the Harlem River and the Hudson, fresh water mixing with salt water in each. 
     In this confluence at the point at the top of the contemporary island of Manhattan, there is movement up and down; shifting chemistry, environments and ecologies; mud and easily stirred muddiness under the water; and water movement below the muddiness and the mud. Why am I starting with this? In large part because I love this view in this season, before summer leaves fill the gaps between the branches. I love the chaos of the rivers coming together as the tide rises, and then diverging as the tide falls. It also is a potent metaphor. The potency of the metaphor is for you to judge. If I were able to describe what the metaphor conveys, I wouldn’t need the metaphor.
      In an interview presented by the Louisiana Channel, Svetlana Alexievich distinguishes between the rule of law — what she calls rules — and a (prison) code based on survival, suspicion, betrayal, power, and patronage. She describes a complex flow, and not just in one direction or dimension, much like the confluence and flow of the Harlem river and the Hudson that I describe above. She moves unerringly — sometimes chronologically, sometimes not — through the fashioning of a world in which torturers and their victims stood in queues together, WWII and its effects, education of citizenry in the Soviet system at its best, the prison-like life of neighbors-as-informants, the code of power and patronage, the cruelty of the gulag, the “vegetarian times” and simplicity after the labor camps and “extermination of the cossacks and kulaks,” the yearning for ‘socialism with a human face,’” the suspicion of capitalism, the Christian roots of a cultural understanding that “good and evil were mixed together,” the seduction of money, the decreasing levels of education, the frustrating emptiness of money for the oligarch social climbers, and “corruption… an internal enemy … in all of us.” 
     “Freedom,” Alexievich says, “… it means life, human community — built up based on laws, which are there in everyone’s interests.”
     This interview took place in August 2017, about six months after Donald Trump became President for the first time. “Take, for example, Donald Trump,” she says. “Is he a danger to the US? And yet everyone understands — that Trump doesn’t have the same capabilities as Putin. Because he will definitely get into a fight with the social organism. He already started to fight the old democracy, which everyone grew up with. And no one knows who is going to win or what the world will look like then.” About her own head of state in Belarus, she says, “But here, he can be called General Secretary or President, but he’s still a real old Tsar. Everything must be as he commands."
     That interview was eight years ago.
   I found and watched this interview because, in a conversation with Joy Reid, Anand Giridharadas quoted Alexievich as he raised a question both for himself and for Reid about the role of writers in intensely polarized conflict where one of the sides is increasingly harmful and authoritarian: “I feel like the times we live in push for a kind of certitude and taking a stand and saying it. But I also feel at the same time that’s it’s like bad for your brain and your heart. And I feel that in myself. Svetlana Alexievich, Nobel laureate writer has this great line that the barricades are a dangerous place for a writer…. What she means is being on the side of like these people good, these people bad. It’s like, it makes you bad at art. It makes, it’s bad for a nuanced, complicated mind. And yet it often feels like the moral obligation of this time… … How do you think about the effect of, kind of, the corrosive power of certitude in an age that, that, that makes that kind of clarity important?”
     What Alexievich said: “I looked at all that, at their glittering eyes, and I thought, ‘No.’ I don’t want to be a writer who enjoys the sight of human blood being spilled. Barricades are a dangerous place for an artist. You don’t see human beings. What you see is a target. Good guys, bad guys.”
    I am in the place Giridharadas and Alexievich conjure up: building a barricade, looking around the barricade, questioning the barricade, dismantling the barricade, stacking bricks up again, and so on. If you are reading this, you are likely in that place as well. 
    Reid pragmatically, politically, (and humorously!) responds: “You know, and I think this is the difference between a liberal and a conservative, right? I feel like the difference between a liberal and a conservative is that conservatives are certain that they’re right. And liberals are certain that they that they are probably wrong, and so they just keep looking for the answer and sort of looking at, beating their own brains out, going why am I always wrong?”
     Around the same time as Alexievich’s Louisiana Channel interview, I wrote about about the excellent, and very funny, conservative bumper sticker about liberal minds being so open that everything falls out. It’s true in a way that resonates with Reid’s response to Giridharadas's question. It’s funny and there’s a lot of truth to that barb, but that very self-doubting openness is a core strength of the left-liberal-what-you-will (LLWYW) at its best. That self-doubting openness also dissipates energy and disintegrates strategy. 
     I’m with Alexievich’s rejection of the binary good-bad universe that is expressed and often produced by the “barricade,” even when the barricade is set up as a desperate structure to protect vulnerable selves and to change the course of history. I share Giridharadas’s struggle to remain attentive to complexity — human, collective, ecological — in the face of escalating authoritarian actions, often cruel, crossing into lawless, and undermining institutions that, at least in principle, serve “everyone’s interests.” NO is the sound of the barricade. And I strongly join the implication of Reid’s response that meeting certitude with self-doubt in a time of deep moral crisis risks more harm — more extensive, more structural, longer-term, and more cruel — to the vulnerable and eventually to any who dissent. 
     The question Giridharadas raises, drawing on Alexievich’s comment on writing at the barricades and in turn drawing out Reid’s very pertinent response, comes from the crazy-making effect of dissonance especially when one is under threat. In our current time, with repeated evidence of urgent short and long-term harm, the barricade is very attractive. 
    The barricade is building up in my mind, and I know if — providence forbid — we come down to the need for a real barricade I will choose a side, though like Alexievich I don’t want my eyes to glitter at “the sight of human blood being spilled.” I also know, have already seen, that even the sides I would like to choose are messy; there are potential barricades dividing each side, over and over, in smaller and smaller definitions of valued “this-es” and rejected “thats.” Art comprehends the messiness, at its best holds it with the tenderness, rage, love, fear, open vulnerability, and, yes, shifting internal barricades of the artist navigating phenomena, meaning, emotion, and vast areas of not-knowing. But when the artist is on the ground of living, politics, what happens?
     Alexievich, Giridharadas, and Reid approach writing and art with their feet on the ground. They live, politically.  Social living is political. Yes, the artist potentially holds the universe, with a view that potentially goes below, beyond, and all around the surface of things, indeed below, beyond, and all around words, institutions, everything centered in and swirling around body and sensate living, integration, entropy, and emergence. Yes, the artist is potentially everything between universe and singular heart or singular cell. AND the artist also expresses and shapes ethos, which is never a personal ethos; we are all and always collective beings, nothing from me comes just from me.
     Alexievich, Giridharadas, and Reid, all three, live, politically; each in her/his way expresses and shapes ethos. Alexievich shies away from the barricades but illuminates messiness and ethos. Giridharadas questions the lure and risk of the barricade. Reid says, in essence, that this, right now, is neither about art nor the barricade, it’s about effective strategic action in a democracy. 
    How then do I (and you?) get through complexity and dissonance to strategy, decision, and action? To a fair degree, I am guided by clarity about what I don’t want (cruelty, exploitation, inequity, disingenuousness/dishonesty). Now I am trying to build and express more clarity about what I want more of: honesty that is non-harming to self and others; structures that support fairness and wellbeing; relationships of respect, reciprocity and care; clean air and recurrently beautiful spring, without plastics — in other words both ethos and physical wellbeing. I want to support and encourage movements and politicians who would understand what I want, but I don’t want to have to fight those who seem not to want these things. I want to dismantle the barricade, I want a democracy. And, when we can get back to it, I want a more effective and fair democracy.
     Democracy gives me and others more room to explore the messiness of living/politics, less need for blocking, barricades, fighting, and bloodshed. It’s not avoidance. When I read something like Karl Rove’s article in the WSJ a few days ago, I want to read him as a voice of the opposition party, with the (limited) generosity I can offer that voice. I don’t want to hear him as an apologist for a ruling party, trying to claim sanity for a party that currently looks insane to me. The barricade is definitely going up in my mind, bricks are being laid. I take some down to peer across. They go up again.
…
​     Sometimes I just need to forget about barricades, be simple in relation to life. I feel that need right now at the end of this essay. Spring — desperately beautiful after a long dreary winter — evokes that immediacy of sensate living. So I close with the photo below of a magnolia in full bloom that daily gives me respite from thoughts of politics and barricades, as I, living, engage with it, living.