{"id":71137,"date":"2022-04-04T15:54:46","date_gmt":"2022-04-04T19:54:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/?p=71137"},"modified":"2022-04-05T15:13:39","modified_gmt":"2022-04-05T19:13:39","slug":"reading-on-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/2022\/04\/04\/reading-on-war\/","title":{"rendered":"Readings on War and Hope"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Francisco Goya: Disasters in a Time of War, 1810-1820<\/p><\/div>\n

“Believe in truth. To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.\u201d
\n–Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u201cThere is simply too much injustice in the world. And too much remembering (of ancient grievances: Serbs, Irish) embitters. To make peace is to forget. To reconcile, it is necessary that memory be faulty and limited.\u201d
\n-Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Following the daily news grind with its explicit images of war, can be emotionally draining. In a relentless “live” news cycle, the immediacy becomes almost numbing. Being stressed or unable to concentrate is an understandable result.<\/p>\n

In the 1981 experimental novel Easy Travel to Other Planets<\/a><\/strong>, the term “information sickness” first appeared. The symptoms of this futuristic disease included “bleeding from the nose and ears, vomiting, deliriously disconnected speech, apparent disorientation, and the desire to touch everything.” The current rage of dystopian novels is partly the result of our “age of spectacle.” One result of war is the creation of a shelter and refuge for art. Great artworks are usually the first to be placed safely underground, as the artwork’s survival becomes linked to our own.<\/p>\n

Regarding the Pain of Others<\/strong> is a book about war photography, and was Susan Sontag’s last book written before her death. The book opens with the Crimean War<\/a> in 1855, where Roger Fenton made the earliest field photographs ever taken in wartime. 235 of his images are available for viewing at the Library of Congress<\/a>. There are no images of combat or dead soldiers in Fenton’s work, due to the slowness of the camera lens, long exposure times, and Victorian propriety. One of the most often reproduced photos by Fenton is titled “The Valley of the Shadow of Death” which shows a ravine covered in cannon balls, an image which Sontag thought was “set up” by Fenton.<\/p>\n

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\nSontag claimed an “ethical value of an assault by images.” Their value lies “To steel oneself against weakness. To make oneself more numb. To acknowledge the existence of the incorrigible.” For Sontag, photography could be a call to action:<\/p>\n

People don’t become inured to what they are shown – if that’s the right way to describe what happens because of the quantity of images dumped on them. It is passivity that dulls feeling. The states described as apathy, moral or emotional anesthesia, are full of feelings; the feelings are rage and frustration.<\/p>\n

The outrage and frustration that happens while looking at war is part of the answer. This “information sickness” can propel us into action.<\/p>\n

War is a part of life and isn’t going away. Sontag’s New Yorker <\/em>essay “Looking at War”<\/a>, (a precursor to her final book) was a kind of redirection and reversal from her take in On Photography:<\/em><\/p>\n

Compassion, stretched to its limits, is going numb. So runs the familiar diagnosis. But what is really being asked for here? That images of carnage be cut back to, say, once a week? More generally, that we work toward an \u201cecology of images,\u201d as I suggested in On Photography<\/em>? But there isn\u2019t<\/em> going to be an ecology of images. No Committee of Guardians is going to ration horror, to keep fresh its ability to shock. And the horrors themselves are not going to abate.<\/p>\n

To offset this torrent of horror of images is not to diminish its meaning, but finding that yin-yang balance becomes a way to recharge and move forward. Otherwise we are locking ourselves into a frightening vision of despair. <\/p>\n

Reading can help put that horror-vision into perspective. History, philosophy, a novel or poem can allow something good, profound, or positive to counterbalance the sadness and chaos. That is partly the business of photography too, but photographs themselves are never the full truth.<\/p>\n

Art can shine light onto the interior of evil or almost any incomprehensible situation. It allows space for compassion, love, and empathy to live among the ruins. Mindful reading brings us closer to what is rational and what makes us more humane. In the back of the book The Poetry of Impermanence, Mindfulness, and Joy<\/a><\/strong>, there’s an essay on “Mindful Reading.” Editor John Brehm explains:<\/p>\n

A poem needs understanding through the senses. The point of diving in a lake is not immediately to swim to the shore; it’s to be in the lake, to luxuriate in the sensation of water. You do not work the lake out. It is an experience beyond thought. Poetry soothes and emboldens the soul to accept mystery<\/em>…The longer you can just sit with the poem, the more it will reveal. But it doesn’t really require effort \u2013 just presence, alertness, patience, care. Mindfulness, in other words.<\/p>\n

In a recent article, historian Joan Neuberger wrote: “I spent most of my life not reading poetry. Right now it\u2019s the only language that makes sense to me.” Her post in the LA Review of Books<\/a><\/em> has links to over a dozen of her colleagues brilliant and informed articles about the war in Ukraine.<\/p>\n

Harvard University recently published Ivan Franko and His Community<\/a><\/strong>, a bestseller in Ukraine, recently translated into English. A biography of the nineteenth century radical Ivan Franko (1856-1916), offers a deep look into Ukrainian radicalism, early modernism, and resistance. Reviewing the book, historian Timothy Snyder wrote; “This is a study of one of the most intriguing Ukrainian activists of a century ago by one of the most important Ukrainian thinkers of today. Anyone who wishes to see demanding theories of nationalism tested in the practice of nuanced historical research should read this book.”<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Odessa born poet Ilya Kaminsky<\/a>, recently was interviewed in the New York Times<\/em> and said, “Since the war began, I have received emails from journalists asking me to explain my poem<\/a> \u201cWe Lived Happily During the War,\u201d which went viral on the day Vladimir Putin\u2019s troops began bombing my birth country.” In his conversation with Times<\/em> poetry editor Victoria Chang, he said, “The hope of a poem is to help the reader to see their complicity. After all, how many wars can we live through, happily? It shows a different kind of so-called happiness.” Kaminsky’s poem is included in his latest collection Deaf Republic<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n

Local Iraqi-American poet Dunya Mikhail is represented inside Edward Hirsch’s stellar selection of a century’s worth of poetic works: 100 Poems that will Break Your Heart<\/a><\/strong> . Mikhail’s poem: \u201cThe War Works Hard\u201d<\/a>\u2014is a poem Hirsch found filled \u201cwith fateful understanding of what war does to people, those who kill and those being killed,\u201d and how Mikhail closes in on war with \u201ca new kind of anti-war poem\u201d\u2014sardonic and filled with irony. \u201cIt approaches the subject of violent destruction,\u201d said Hirsch, \u201cwith cutting wit, fierce humor, and brave humanity.\u201d Mikhail’s revolutionary poetry can be found in the collection: The War Works Hard<\/a><\/strong>.<\/p>\n

The Ukrainian National Anthem was first written down in 1862 by the poet Pavlo Chubynsky. The first verse of the lyrics translate roughly:<\/p>\n

Nay, thou art not dead, Ukraine, see, thy glory’s born again,
\nAnd the skies, O brethren, upon us smile once more!
\nAs in Springtime melts the snow, so shall melt away the foe,
\nAnd we shall be masters in our own home.<\/p>\n