The Struggle of Memory Against Forgetting

Welcome back to Culture Club, a feature where David and I discuss what we’ve been reading, watching, playing, and listening to, for paid subscribers.

As astute readers may have noticed, I've been suffering from an extended case of writer's block. So I turned to my friend Zach Rabiroff, a brilliant writer on comics, culture and anything else he sets his mind to, for a chat about writing and not-writing in the perfervid atmosphere of Trump 2.0., We talked about the writers and poets that inspire us, and art in ages of authoritarianism—both the deadly serious and the frivolous. For me, it was an enlightening and cathartic conversation, and I hope you find it interesting! A version of this week’s piece was originally published in Flaming Hydra, an art collective I'm proud to be a part of. We'll be back to our normal schedule as soon as I am able, and I am thankful for your patience as I find my footing on this dreadful ground.

— Talia

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Talia Lavin: Zach, I wanted to talk to you about what it's been like to write lately, in this foul era of Trump 2.0. For me, it's been a time of a lot of soul-searching, and maybe more than anytime in my whole life, I've been having a bit of an existential crisis about writing, and its worth.

I'm wondering if you've felt any of the same emotions, and how that's impacted your work, if at all.

Zach Rabiroff: You know, I’ve been thinking about this, because I’ve had the creeping sense ever since this all started to feel inevitable (which, for me anyway, was maybe around September of last year) that we, as writers and journalists, were all sort of whistling past the graveyard of encroaching fascism. And now that it’s right on top of us, it feels even more unavoidable. Which is to say, yeah: I spend a lot of my time these days staring directly at a blank computer screen with a mounting sense of existential angst. But tell me: what is it like for you right now? What is it about our Moment of Present Crisis that has you questioning what your writing is worth?

TL: I think it's a lot of things, really. Obviously, as a freelance writer, I don't have prestige behind me, or a publication with legal resources. That feels scary in the present moment, especially as I hope to do some investigative reporting. And when I write other pieces, they tend to be about the emotional impact of this moment—the fact of watching hatred and greed running amok in such profuse, careless abundance. So writing about it is about bearing witness. And I think that's important, but at the same time, I feel inadequate to it. Like, who the fuck am I to have a claim at "bearing witness"? Just some rando with a newsletter. And at the same time, forcing myself to really pay attention is painful. It's so much easier to keep things at a distance, or whatever distance I can maintain, whereas the act of documentation draws me closer to all the pain and destruction being wrought. That kind of shit can break you, and you kind of wonder—is it worth it?

Writing takes so much chutzpah and confidence, and it's hard not to doubt your own significance sometimes. The worth of your own words and your own perspective, especially on a moment of such sprawling, horrible gravity. Does any of that make sense, or resonate?

ZR: It does make sense, and it should probably be more of a comfort than it is that we’re obviously not the first generation of writers to be faced with it. You mentioned keeping this all at a distance, and in a lot of ways I think that’s the most human and the most inevitable response. There’s a poem that Bertolt Brecht wrote in 1939 called “To Future Generations,” where he wrote:

What are these times, when
A conversation about trees is almost a crime
Because it implies silence about so many misdeeds,
When, if you’re calmly crossing the street,
It means your friends can’t reach you
Who are in need?

And I think about that now, because—shouldn’t we just talk about the damn trees? Or is that just a surrender to the fact that what we’re doing now, and the audiences that we’re writing about, can’t fundamentally alter the increasingly miserable reality we’re all in?

TL: Right—frivolity feels like an abandonment, but misery is still miserable! I'm contracted to write a book about sandwiches. I've been pretty paralyzed about it. Like objectively, to a pretty insane degree, I’m just wracked with guilt about writing about a pastrami sandwich. But also all in knots about working on another piece about the history of the anti-vaccination movement in America. The block is pretty total, if I'm honest. That Brecht poem is really lovely, and strikes at the heart of it. I've always been inspired by art from ages of authoritarianism though! Like, Osip Mandelstam is my favorite poet, and he was sent to the gulag for writing a poem mocking Stalin, and reading it at a private party.

The Stalin Epigram

Our lives no longer feel ground under them.
At ten paces you can’t hear our words.

But whenever there’s a snatch of talk
it turns to the Kremlin mountaineer

the ten thick worms his fingers,
his words like measures of weight,

the huge laughing cockroaches on his top lip,
the glitter of his boot-rims.

Ringed with a scum of chicken-necked bosses
he toys with the tributes of half-men.

One whistles, another meows, a third snivels.
He pokes out his finger and he alone goes boom.

He forges decrees in a line like horseshoes,
One for the groin, one the forehead, temple, eye.

He rolls the executions on his tongue like berries.
He wishes he could hug them like big friends from home.

Mandelstam didn’t die of this poem. But he was arrested, and exiled, and then arrested again during the Great Purge in 1937, and he died of typhoid fever in a transit camp before he turned 50. The author of Tristia and the Voronezh Notebooks was buried in a mass grave, and it started with this poem.

ZR: It’s an incredible poem. And it’s a kind of fantasy I think a lot of writers—and especially journalists—have: that we’ll have a shot at our own, dramatic Ed Murrow moment when we can speak an important truth to a listening public.

And increasingly, even for the best of us, that’s a fantasy. There are fewer and fewer outlets that anyone is actually reading, there are fewer people actually reading them, and the ones that are no longer have a confidently shared faith in objective reality to begin with. It’s a problem! So we have to imagine, I think, that whatever we’re writing about is serving some purpose that’s smaller even than what Mandelstam was doing. I think, on some level, we have to be writing for ourselves. Does that feel true at all, or am I just spewing hot air?

TL: Mandelstam's audience was the NKVD, really. And the head memorized the poem, apparently, and sent him to his death. Which is certainly one kind of poetry review. Joseph Brodsky was put on trial for writing his poems. And at his trial in 1964—when the gulag was still alive but they were institutionalizing enemies of the regime in insane asylums, because rejecting Marxism-Leninism was an official mental disease—he said this:

Judge: And, in general, what is your specific occupation?

Brodsky: Poet. Poet-translator.

Judge: And who said you’re a poet? Who ranked you among poets?

Brodsky: No one. (Unsolicited) Who ranked me as a member of the human race?

Judge: Did you study for this?

Brodsky: Study for what?

Judge: To become a poet. Did you attend some university where people are trained… where they’re taught… ?

Brodsky: I didn’t think it was a matter of education.

Judge: How, then?

Brodsky: I think that… (perplexed) it comes from God…

It comes from God. He was sentenced to five years of hard labor. He shoveled shit and read Auden in exile, this disciple of Akhmatova.

But what you said is true—doesn't all of it feel like hot air right now? Who's listening? There's so much trash, so little real stuff.

ZR: Yeah, but that’s really always been true, hasn’t it? The difference is that finding the real stuff feels more urgent, because we’re all just looking for something to hang onto, literary or otherwise. But at the same time, I think it puts too much weight on people like us to ask ourselves to make each piece of writing a part of the movement that can save America. For one thing, it remains to be seen that America will in any event be saved. And for another, maybe our job is smaller than that. Maybe our job is just to provide regular bits of proof that this place still contains moments of joy and respite that are worth saving. Even if all that amounts to is a pastrami sandwich. But then again, maybe that’s just excuse-making on my part. What do you think? Do writers have an obligation to comment on this moment like we’re Pete Seeger at the Newport Festival? Or is it a valid act just to try and scavenge for art and happiness despite it all?

TL: I'm so torn! Because reading Auden or Mandelstam or Tsvetaeva or Akhmatova on authoritarianism is so inspiring, even when it's bleak. And the Russians at least were writing for posterity—for the drawer, unpublishably, at the moment. And maybe there's value in that?

I do think there's value in speaking out, too, even if your voice is drowned out. I question the value of my own voice, but not those of other writers in the same circumstances. At least they didn't have to contend with garbage-spewing robots.

ZR: So let’s say there’s value in speaking out—and I do think there is. That raises the obvious question of what it is that we’re obliged to be saying. One answer is just to observe the world as we see it, and try to set it down for posterity. But there’s another approach, too, which is maybe just as important. Milan Kundera had that line: “The struggle of man against nature is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” I get the sense these days that all of us in America, whether we know it or not, are refugees. The country we knew isn’t here anymore except to the extent that we knew it, and if anyone is going to remember what it meant or what it could have been, it will only be because people like you and me find a way to tell them.

And I guess, for me, that’s all I feel like I can do now: just to try and sputter through some indistinct recollections of a small, kind of boring world that for a while really seemed like a permanent thing.

TL: The book I keep circling back to is Svetlana Alexievich's Second-Hand Time, about the dislocation of identity in the post-Soviet former USSR. I guess you can tell I focused on Russian lit in college! But it's a great book about the dislocation of identity. Some grasp the collapse eagerly, some are totally at sea, there's a rash of suicides she writes about… it's a book of interviews and it's complex and shattering. I see a lot of people using American patriotic imagery in their resistance, and I don't condemn it, but I do feel a bit distant from it. To me the symbols I was brought up with already feel compromised. Maybe that's giving in too soon. Or maybe it's a certain leftist detachment from what they've meant—cruelty, imperialism—for a very long time, which is now coming into its ugliest fulness. Still, whatever part of me still felt attached to that imagery and that mythos of America has felt… wrenched. Like, my identity is sprained.

ZR: Well, and that’s the dislocation of the refugee I was getting at. And, no, I’m not sure that I can be the sort of person who goes out hoisting an American flag, but then again I’m not sure I ever was. At the same time, it feels like something of a cheat for me as a leftist to say that, well, America was always corrupted plaything of the capitalist plutocrats, et. al., so its memory isn’t worth defending. If I believed that in my heart, I wouldn’t be depressed right now. I wouldn’t feel like I lost something that was… I guess intrinsic to my life in a way I didn’t even appreciate until it was gone. A kidney of democratic government, or an appendix of freedom from a police state.

TL: It's all just so ugly and senseless! But I guess authoritarianism always is, even if it manifests in ways particular to each body politic it infects. People who know the law can't touch them don't have to be serious, as Sartre once said of bigots. And in the face of something both so terribly serious and so destructive, yet so graceless, how do you write? And who do you write for? The secret police? The drawer? Yourself? The future? Who are you or I to make such presumptions? Maybe that's what's blocking me up: who am I in this moment and who are the words for?

ZR: In a way, that answer is probably easier for someone like me, because the answer was always “basically nobody.” Back in the before time, my regular beat was as a comics industry journalist. Now, there hasn’t properly been a comics industry since (generously) 1994, and there hasn’t properly been a journalism industry since about 2020, which means that whatever I was doing was irrelevant twice over. If comics were a bourgeois luxury, comics journalism was an accessory for a luxury, like a gold Temu decal for a Gucci handbag. But what I found, writing for an audience of no one for a readership of none, is that the value of the writing was as a time capsule of a thought, or a feeling, or a glimpse of humanity that would be retrievable at some place and time when it might be needed. Gore Vidal, one of my Extremely Problematic Faves, wrote a line in the wonderful novel Julian: “How marvelous books are, crossing worlds and centuries, defeating ignorance and, finally, cruel time itself.” 

Which is to say, maybe we’re not writing for any audience now at all. Maybe we’re setting down words in the hope that somewhere, in some place, there’s going to be a person whose fear looks like our fear, and whose hope looks like our hopes, and by showing them what we saw and felt it will make their own world a little bit less bleak.

TL: Maybe that's all we can do, is grant ourselves the freedom to express our fears and joys and memories, and hope they reach another person across space and time. And isn't that all writing is anyway? Writing about comics is as much writing about America as anything could be, by the way. Some of the best parts of it, for that matter—immigrant resourcefulness, endless creativity, abundance, messiness, happiness. 

Anyway, you're talking to a nationally disgraced former fact-checker, so the self-doubt is echoed in me, anyway. It's hard to meet a moment that feels so big with your small self. I guess it was hard for my heroes too. 

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ZR: There’s a story I think back on sometimes. I saw it in a documentary about World War II once, and I wish I could remember where. There’s an outside chance my mind constructed it out of whole cloth, but I think what I’m about to say reflects something approximating historical reality. Anyway, it was an interview with an elderly Dutchman who had been a part of the underground resistance movement in occupied Holland. Now, for those who know about the history of occupied Holland, there were very few places that resisted fascism more forcefully, or suffered more brutally because of it.

The entire country staged a general strike in 1941, and it lasted until the Nazis literally starved the nation into forced submission. And the underground went on quixotically trying to resist anyway. And toward the end of the war, this man being interview said he started to wonder why. And he said to an older comrade in his movement, “What the hell are we even doing? We know this isn’t going to win. The end of the war is going to have nothing to do with us. All we’re doing is putting our own lives at risk every day. Why?”

And his comrade said this: “Somewhere, right now, there is a man standing in a line outside the gas chamber at Auschwitz. It may be that before he enters that room which will be the last room he ever sees, he’ll hear someone whisper a rumor about the people in Holland—about how even in the face of obvious defeat, and constant hunger, they continued to hold out because of that gas chamber at Auschwitz. And this man will know, for that one last moment, that he is not forgotten.”

Anyway, I think about that sometimes. 

TL: The real truth of it is that life goes on and people go to work and it's hot or cold and some people are dragged off to camps and the police stride through cities and some people are brave and some are scared and some people are baying for blood. That's where we are, this horrible cusp, this moment where the ship moves from listing to sinking. The banality and the cruelty juxtaposed. It's hard to understand and contend with, let alone capture. It's trying to capture a changeling creature that's savaging you all the while. But it matters if people are brave, it matters to write it down, to spread the rumor of the Dutchmen resisting, so it can reach those who need to hear it. We can be rumor-spreaders. Little saboteurs, gnawing at the straps holding people down. 

We're not at the point where people are imprisoned for poetry. Maybe we will be. I think it more likely than not. But for now, at the cusp, in this nebulous time where the horror is everywhere and inchoate, it needs clear eyes, impassioned hearts. I think. I hope.

Whether I can live up to a task that heavy remains to be seen, I guess. Or whether it merits being cast in such grandiose terms. When I think about it my words dry up.

ZR: Mine, too. But you’re right: this moment does just need clear eyes. And because we’re not yet being clasped in chains for the sin of writing about a Superman comic or a pastrami sandwich, and because there aren’t any battlements to man and there aren’t likely to be—because of those things, maybe the only fearless thing you or I can do right now is have the guts to see what we’re seeing and confess what we’re feeling even though we know it isn’t likely to make any difference at all. That courage might not be enough to save anything or anybody. But then again, maybe it will.

TL: Not to quote Mandelstam yet again, but he has a poem about feeling unequal to his times… it goes in part:

The wolfhound century leaps on my back
but I have no wolf in my blood,
oh hide me deep and warm, like a cap
in the sleeve of Siberia’s coat.

Let me see no coward, no sticky slime,
no wheel with bones and blood,
but silver foxes that shine all night
with a grace from before the flood.

Bear me off to the dark-flowing Yenisey
where pine trees stretch to the stars,
because I have no wolf in my blood,
and shall only be killed by my peers.

But still he wrote his “Stalin Epigram”. Mocked the moustache and the cruelty alike. Maybe you don't have to feel brave or worthy to write brave and worthy things. 

Because the wolfhound century is on us now, and we have to choose how to face it.