When the World is On Fire--That's the Moment We Need to Create

On living through this.

Photo by MI PHAM on Unsplash

Most days, I feel as if I’m watching fires. Bodies piled on a pyre, the sky awash in ash, embers hot on the skin while millions mill about. They clap their hands. They shake their fists. Bombastic in their ignorance. Proud. And they’re shouting one sentence in pantomime: we voted for it all to burn. And by all I mean human decency and basic intelligence.

Although I was born in America, I’ve never called myself an American. After nearly thirty countries traveled, when people ask where I’m from, I say New York. Sometimes I say I’m a New Yorker who happens to live in California. Because saying the words I’m an American always felt like an ill-fitted suit. The kind where the wool nicks at your skin, the kind where you’re forever taking off your jacket because it’s too hot but then you’re too cold and the temperature never feels quite right. And so you oscillate between momentary comfort and longer stretches of discomfort—desperate for a new suit. A different suit.

I wake and I’m ashamed. I’m embarrassed. The memes and skits and commentaries are right—we are a disgrace. We are a racist country clawing their way back to a time when white men wore hats and white women fanned themselves with their silk gloves. A time when women didn’t speak much so they spent their days medicated, drugged, or bitter over the life they could’ve had had they been born a man. We are an ignorant country teeming with people who don’t understand basic economics.

It’s actually frightening to me how people refuse to learn when a library card and an open mind are free of charge.

Sometimes, I think of Japan’s Unit 731 and the systematic and gruesome human experimentation on the Chinese, horrors so unspeakable even the Nazis were taken aback. I think about the wars waged between the Japanese, Chinese, and Koreans—multi-generational trauma, rage, and pure, unadulterated hatred. All temporarily set aside because millions of people elected a stupid child who managed to bring ruin to its people and it hasn’t even been a year. Millions of people who voted their hatred and ignorance—although they dare not admit it—now dealing with a reckoning they still can’t comprehend.

Part of me limits how much news I consume because I would be subsumed. A burning body drowned in a tsunami—the sort of inexplicable horror you can’t put words to because you never thought you would have to form the sentences. Instead, I devise ways to get through my day without screaming. Because I have to take medication. I have to work. I have to take care. I have to exist.

Today, a mother and daughter stand behind me in a checkout line. The mother touches my arm and smiles but her eyes are glazed, lost, as if she’s trying to place me but can’t quite place herself. You could see the shards of her memory and her desire to mend them. Sort them. Re-assemble them. Her daughter reminds her that they’re in a line and they have to stand behind me because this is what they have to do. And the mother’s face becomes a mess of pain. A kind of grief that makes me stare at her longer than I should. The daughter says it’s us against the world, mom. The mother says, I don’t believe that. I have to believe it gets better than this. And the mother touches my arm again and she wants to form the words but they’ve escaped her. She can’t seem to catch them and her daughter looks at me with apology and I say, it’s okay. It’s all good.

On the Uber ride home, my driver asks me if I’m okay. I say, of course. Why? He says, you look so sad. And it occurred to me that I felt for that woman so wholly and completely because while it’s clear she’s loved, she occasionally loses words and the ability to form them. As someone who has an abiding affection for the English language, this would be my prison and ultimate execution.

I can’t imagine that the mind who’s spent a lifetime telling stories would be the same mind that couldn’t form the sentences.

I am someone who feels everything for far too much and too long. I feel as if I’m in a constant state of mourning. Mourning for strangers and their incalculable losses. Mourning for a time in the 90s when I was blissfully ignorant of what would come to pass. Mourning for those who are frightened in a country that once billed itself as a promised land. An American Dream that you have to be asleep to believe it, once quipped George Carlin.

How do you go on when you can’t go on but you have to go on? I offer this—create. I’ve learned more history from novels written during war and crisis than I have history books. Because history books only give you the facts—art gives you the experience. You can read about the Holocaust but you can also watch Sidney Lumet’s The Pawnbroker or read Primo Levi’s If This Be a Man.

There’s a scene in The Zone of Interest where a mother visits her daughter—wife to prominent Nazi—and she marvels over the home her daughter has made. The flowers that have bloomed. All the while a wall separates this idyllic garden and a concentration camp. It’s only at night when the mother hears the screams does she flee in the night. And for a moment, we think this woman has a conscience until the filmmaker shows us otherwise. How depravity can be displayed so openly and easily in the ordinary. Director Jonathan Glazer elaborates on the real reason the mother leaves:

It’s just the proximity. It’s no different, to someone like her, to buying your steak at Sainsbury’s and going to an abattoir. You know where that steak comes from, but you don’t really want to be around a cow being slaughtered or the smell of it, or have the blood running over your shoes . . . there’s no pang of conscience, no redemption. There’s no salvation in this film, and there can’t be. These characters end the way they start.

Primo Levi talked about how they were made of the same clay as the bourgeoisie in any country. They really were Mr and Mrs Smith at No 26. They were our neighbours, and our neighbours would say they were us. Those were the basics of what I got from the archival research: how grotesquely familiar and ordinary they were.

There’s a difference between consuming that art and reading the facts in a history book. It’s art that makes facts human. It puts a face to the suffering and pain and joy and sadness and all the mess in between that make us human.

So while I often don’t have the urge to write because there’s just too much or my writing means so little in the grander scheme of things—I think of this: art, in any of its forms, breeds joy and sustenance especially in the darkest times. But it can also be a powerful rendering of a historical moment. And maybe it won’t matter in this moment or it may only matter to a few, it matters.

It matters. Art matters. Those who create and consume it matter.