thin liminal high and rooted

Kerri ní Dochartaigh:

The island from which I come had no choice, really, than to find a name for these dancing, beating, healing places where the veil between so very many things is thin, where it has been known to lift, right before our humble, grateful eyes.

The folklore of almost every culture holds room for these liminal spaces—those in-between places—those unnamable places, not to be found on any map. Are these thin places spaces where we can more easily hear the land, the earth, talking to us? Or are they places in which we are able to feel more freely our own inner selves? Do places such as these therefore hold power?

We have built up a narrative over many years—decades, centuries?—of ‘nature’ as ‘other’. There is so much separation in the language we use with each other; we seek to divide humanity from its own self again and again, and this has naturally bled into how we view the land and water that we share with one another—and with other species. What do we mean when we talk about ‘nature’? About ‘place’? I want to know what it all means. I need to try to understand. When we are in a place where the manmade constructs of the world seem as though they have crumbled, where time feels like it no longer exists, that feeling of separation fades away. We are reminded, in the deepest, rawest parts of our being, that we are nature. It is in and of us. We are not superior or inferior, separate or removed; our breathing, breaking, ageing, bleeding, making and dying are the things of this earth. We are made up of materials we see in the places around us, and we cannot undo the blood and bone that forms us.

In thin places people often say they experience being taken ‘out of themselves’, or ‘nearer to god’. The places I return to over and over—both physically, and in my memory—certainly do hold power to make me feel light and hopeful, as though I am not quite of this world. Of much more power, though, is the way in which these places leave me feeling rooted—as utterly and completely in the landscape as I ever feel, as much a part of it as the bones and excrement that lie beneath my feet, as the salt and silt that course through the water. For me, it is in this that the absolute and unrivalled beauty of thin places lies.

(This also reminds of a roof nail from 2021, about the dialectic nature of trees.)

a very good Lenten poem

“At once the Spirit sent him out into the wilderness, and he was in the wilderness forty days, being tempted by Satan. He was with the wild animals, and angels attended him.” (Mark 1:12-13)

“Humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God so that at the proper time he may exalt you. Cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you.” (1 Peter 5:6-7)

Wikipedia:

The English word Lent is a shortened form of the Old English word lencten, meaning “spring season”, as its Dutch language cognate lente (Old Dutch lentin) still does today. A dated term in German, Lenz (Old High German lenzo), is also related. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, ‘the shorter form (? Old Germanic type *laŋgito– , *laŋgiton-) seems to be a derivative of *laŋgo– long […] and may possibly have reference to the lengthening of the days as characterizing the season of spring’.

In languages spoken where Christianity was earlier established, such as Greek and Latin, the term signifies the period dating from the 40th weekday before Easter. In modern Greek the term is Σαρακοστή (Sarakostí), derived from the earlier Τεσσαρακοστή (Tessarakostí), meaning “fortieth”. The corresponding word in Latin, quadragesima(“fortieth”), is the origin of the terms used in Latin-derived languages and in some others.

Jack Gilbert:

Horses at Midnight without a Moon

Our heart wanders lost in the dark woods.
Our dream wrestles in the castle of doubt.
But there’s music in us. Hope is pushed down
but the angel flies up again taking us with her.
The summer mornings begin inch by inch
while we sleep, and walk with us later
as long-legged beauty through
the dirty streets. It is no surprise
that danger and suffering surround us.
What astonishes is the singing.
We know the horses are there in the dark
meadow because we can smell them,
can hear them breathing.
Our spirit persists like a man struggling
through the frozen valley
who suddenly smells flowers
and realizes the snow is melting
out of sight on top of the mountain,
knows that spring has begun.

“empty altars everywhere”

I like Diana Butler Bass’s Lenten theme of “empty altars.” It’s a helpful way to think of the practice of Lent, to think about all the things that we put our hearts, minds, and bodies into that will ultimately wear away or be torn down. Things, but also people. Mostly, though, I like the way that she transitions into the theme of “searching for saints.”

It should go without saying (though it’s probably worth saying) that this is not a search for the ultra-pious but for the honest, down-to-earth faithful. One of the things I have enjoyed most about reading over the years, whether books or blogs or Substack subscriptions, is not the ideas or stories that are so valuable and encouraging, but simply finding people who I trust, who I think highly of. As I’ve mentioned before, while there are a few very important ones in my life, most of them are people I have never even met. But I love finding them. Searching for saints is a fun and active project; it is not, as Bass rightly points out, “a deconstruction project.”

Here, Bass says that this is because the deconstructing has already been done. Maybe her readers are already on board with it, but I think this assumes a lot. For some people, deconstruction might look like a view of life and the world that one day just, poof, disappears. For others, it might look like (I’m sure I can’t be the first to use this) a Jenga set, removing things piece by piece and seeing if it (faith) still stands, or whether the removal of some final building block brings the whole thing down—and with a boom rather than a poof. Or, it might be that, however you have or have not understood something called “deconstruction”—whether you had even thought of it or heard of it at all—you did realize at some point that there was work to be done to (re)construct your faith in a way that seems consistent and truthful, to yourself and to others.

Every generation has to ask and answer certain questions for and of itself, and deconstruction might just be the buzz word for this generation’s self-interrogation. I have not spent enough time thinking or writing about it to know exactly where I fit in to the whole thing. Sometimes I read something about deconstruction and I deeply relate. Other times, I hear the word used in someone’s story and I am completely put off by it. With the way that Bass uses it, it’s a mix, but I think I can say that I find at least enough value in it to keep reading.

Take the statues, for instance. This is not a topic that I have ever felt the need to write about, but it’s a good example of these mixed feelings. Bass seems to speak unequivocally about the good of taking down statues, but I’m less sure. I wouldn’t darken the doors of Fox News to save my life, but I liked Charles Krauthammer’s thoughtful take on the statue debate in 2017 (even if it aired on what might be the most thoughtless host-show ever to appear on television). Krauthammer mentions the varying motives behind Civil War statues and monuments, varying motives which he says calls for varying responses. And he goes straight to one that he says might be the most sacred, The Confederate Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery, which bears this inscription:

– NOT-FOR-FAME-OR-REWARD –
– NOT-FOR-PLACE-OR-FOR-RANK –
– NOT-LURED-BY-AMBITION-
-OR-GOADED-BY-NECESSITY-
-BUT-IN-SIMPLE-
-OBEDIENCE-TO-DUTY-
-AS-THEY-UNDERSTOOD-IT-
-THESE-MEN-SUFFERED-ALL-
-SACRIFICED-ALL-
-DARED ALL ~ AND-DIED-

Should many statues and monuments be torn down? Yes. Is the taking down of Confederate monuments de facto a helpful example of the stripping down of “cultural altars”? Surely not. But the point is not to talk about Confederate statues. The point is that the attempt to strip away everything that I view as wrong might itself be just as problematic.

As Bass puts it, “Ash Wednesday invites us to accept this truth of human existence—we are dust, what we build is dust, and sometimes you have to clean out the attic.” She goes on to say that there is a “concurrent truth” to this: “dust matters because it is the very stuff of creation.”

Dust matters. Sometimes I think the act of “deconstructing” forgets this, or loses sight of it. Bass rightly moves straight from the “empty altars” of Lent to asking the question, “What do we do now? What will we fill these empty spaces with?” But I can’t help lamenting just how empty all those spaces are. Surely some of us could wake up and find that we didn’t leave enough dust to work with at all.

There is a very important and concurrent truth to the idea that “dust matters.” Since we are made of dust, we have to remember that dust will never be gone. It’s where we come from and it’s where we go. So eventually, for creatures made of dust, “cleaning” can become deeply ironic and self-defeating. (And of course, an obsession with “stripping the altars” can quickly set up an altar of its own.)

Bass says, “The deconstruction has been done, these shifts in church and community are well underway.” True enough, in some cultural sense, but on the whole I think—I hope—that it assumes too much. The whole of history—world, state, human, church—is dust. Glorious, gritty, gory, gorgeous dust, from one end to the other. Sometimes, I think the altars and the attics are empty enough, and we might all do better to simply search for saints. Let the altars empty and deconstruct and return to dust as they will.

“a secret pouch of listening”

Naomi Shihab Nye (wonderfully read and illuminated by Pádraig Ó Tuama here):

I FEEL SORRY FOR JESUS

People won’t leave Him alone.
I know He said, wherever two or more
are gathered in my name…
but I’ll bet some days He regrets it.

Cozily they tell you what He wants
and doesn’t want
as if they just got an e-mail.
Remember ‘Telephone’, that pass-it-on game

where the message changed dramatically
by the time it rounded the circle?
Well.
People blame terrible pieties on Jesus.

They want to be his special pet.
Jesus deserves better.
I think He’s been exhausted
for a very long time.

He went into the desert, friends.
He didn’t go into the pomp.
He didn’t go into
the golden chandeliers

and say, the truth tastes better here.
See? I’m talking like I know.
It’s dangerous talking for Jesus.
You get carried away almost immediately.

I stood in the spot where He was born.
I closed my eyes where He died and didn’t die.
Every twist of the Via Dolorosa
was written on my skin.

And that makes me feel like being silent
for Him, you know? A secret pouch
of listening. You won’t hear me
mention this again.

Poem, Prose, & Praise (3)

I wasn’t sure what this would turn out to be, but in the end it seemed to fit with the Poem, Prose, & Praise theme, which is something that I thought was going to be a bigger Covid project three years ago, but it turned out to be just a fun couple writing activities.

IT HAS COME TO THIS

I have been thinking about this poem by Wisława Szymborska every day since I read it on one of the flights coming back from Ukraine in December:

No Title Required

It has come to this: I’m sitting under a tree
beside a river
on a sunny morning.
It’s an insignificant event
and won’t go down in history.
It’s not battles and pacts,
where motives are scrutinized,
or noteworthy tyrannicides.

And yet I’m sitting by this river, that’s a fact.
And since I’m here
I must have come from somewhere,
and before that
I must have turned up in many other places,
exactly like the conquerors of nations
before setting sail.

Even a passing moment has its fertile past,
its Friday before Saturday,
its May before June.
It’s horizons are no less real
than those that a marshal’s field glasses might scan.

This tree is a poplar that’s been rooted here for years.
The river is the Raba; it didn’t spring up yesterday.
The path leading through the bushes
wasn’t beaten last week.
The wind had to blow the clouds here
before it could blow them away.

And though nothing much is going on nearby,
the world is no poorer in details for that.
It’s just as grounded, just as definite
as when migrating races held it captive.

Conspiracies aren’t the only things shrouded in silence.
Retinues of reasons don’t trail coronations alone.
Anniversaries of revolutions may roll around,
but so do oval pebbles encircling the bay.

The tapestry of circumstance is intricate and dense.
Ants stitching in the grass.
The grass sewn into the ground.
The pattern of a wave being needled by a twig.

So it happens that I am and look.
Above me a white butterfly is fluttering through the air
on wings that are its alone.
and a shadow skims through my hands
that is none other than itself, no one else’s but its own.

When I see such things, I’m no longer sure
that what’s important
is more important than what’s not.
Translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh and Stanisław Baranczak

In a sense, it’s obvious why the poem would be meaningful. Coming from a hospital in eastern Ukraine, how does the daily, constant sound of rockets and artillery, destruction vibrating nearly every air molecule, compare to time off in Savannah, Georgia. One train and three flights, and I’m back on the other side of the world. How do you go, in less than two days, from a war-torn oblast, with Smerch rockets rattling the doors to the basement you’re sleeping in, to a peaceful walk through Forsyth Park with your dog? Last week, I sat on brick steps that today lie blown to pieces and looked out through empty autumn branches onto a cityscape that might as well have been colored in black and white. This week, I’ll be taking the brick sidewalk down a bright and sunny Bull Street to the Marsh Island Channel, surrounded the entire time by evergreen oak and Spanish moss that seem to have no end, in space or in time. The contrast between the two could not be more stark. And yet, in the middle of that transition, I find myself on a plane reading a poem that seems to say that the movement of an oval pebble with the tide could somehow be commensurable to my movement across the globe.

Still, I can’t help loving this poem. It helps that I don’t think the poem is saying that one thing is never any more or less significant than another. Obviously, for us—each of us or all of us together—there will be moments in life that are more significant, more condensed with meaning than other moments. But the poem is at least saying that we can’t know, with absolute certainty, what is and is not ultimately important—even for ourselves. And the reason we can’t know, says the poem, is because “the tapestry of circumstance is intricate and dense.”

The other day, I was flipping through an old commonplace notebook from 2018, and I came across a line from this passage in Julian Barnes’s Staring at the Sun:

Jean visited the Grand Canyon in November. The north rim was closed, and the snow-ploughs had been out chivvying the road up from Williams to the south rim. She booked into the lodge at the Canyon’s edge; it was early evening. She did not hurry with her unpacking, and even went to the hotel gift shop before looking at the Canyon itself. Not putting off pleasure, but the reverse; for Jean expected disappointment. At the last minute, she had even considered rescripting her Seven Wonders and visiting the Golden Gate Bridge instead.

A foot of snow lay on the ground and the sun, now almost level with the horizon, had thrown a firm-wristed sweep of orange across the mountains opposite. The sun’s kingdom began exactly at the snowline: above, the orange mountain crests had orange snow beneath indolent orange clouds; drop below the line and everything changed into dry browns and buffs and umbers, while far, far down, some murky greens enclosed a trickle of silver—like a lurex thread in a dull tweed suit. Jean gripped the frosty guard-rail and was glad to be alone, glad that what she saw didn’t have to be translated into words, to be reported, discussed, annotated. The extravagant fish-eye view was bigger, deeper, wider, grander, savager, more beautiful and more frightening than she had thought possible; but even this alignment of excited adjectives failed her. . . . Someone else had promised, “It’s like looking at Creation”—but that too was only words. Jean was fed up with words. If the Canyon shrank the watchers at its rim to midges, it shrank their noises—the prattle, the whoops, the camera clicks—into mere insect hum. This wasn’t a place where you made self-deprecating jokes, fiddled with your exposure meter, or threw snowballs. This was a place beyond words, beyond human noise, beyond interpretation.

The phrase “beyond interpretation” has a lot of depth. It’s not beyond experience or observation, not beyond meaningfulness or praise, but it is beyond interpretation. I think the point, at least for me, is not that it is beyond interpretation but that it should be beyond interpretation. It belongs there. It should be the way things are for us. There’s no reason, it seems to me, that “the extravagant, fish-eye view” of our own lives should be any less confounding, whether we are standing at the Grand Canyon or standing anywhere else.

When I thought about trying to write something, anything (though I admit, it isn’t much) about coming back from Ukraine, the first thing that I could think of was this: “Sometimes, I don’t know what I’m doing. Most of the time, I don’t know what I’m doing.” In fact, for several weeks, those two sentences are almost all that came to mind.

I walked into that sandbagged hospital in November and one of the first people I saw was my friend Bill. He looked at me, shook his finger in my direction, smiled and said, “You said you weren’t coming back.” And he was right. When I left Ukraine at the end of March last year, I did say I wasn’t going back, and I did think that I wasn’t going back. But like I said, I don’t know what I’m doing. And I am becoming more and more okay with this.

Also in that little commonplace book is a quote from Gilbert Meilaender’s The Way That Leads There, and it is one of my favorite quotes, one of my favorite thoughts in the world:

We cannot really know ourselves, Augustine concludes. Only God manages that—only God can catch the human heart, see it whole, and hold it still. Hence, only God can discern the ultimate significance of any moment in a person’s life.

We don’t know all that brought us here or all that will bring us there—or even where “there” is. We don’t know exactly what it will take to make the world right, or totally wrong, nor how big or small or numerous the steps might be that send us in one direction or the other. To step back for a moment and to view myself as one tiny speck within that intricate and dense tapestry—whether that speck-that-is-me is on this side of the world or the other, in a hospital or a coffee shop—is to see that any moment in life might be “bigger, deeper, wider, grander, savager, more beautiful or more frightening than we know.” And hopefully then we might admit that humility is the most necessary human quality, that life has seasons as well as days and moments, and that I cannot know which ones will ultimately be the most fruitful or the most meaningful.

Sometimes, all I can say is, “It has come to this: I am sitting in a coffee shop.” And sometimes, that’s enough, that’s all I need to know right now.

“dumb, loud, depthless and broken”

Peggy Noonan, on last week’s Superbowl ads:

What do we discern from them about how the nation’s ad makers see their country? That we’re a nation of morons, a people with fractured concentration, a people with no ability to follow even a 60-second spot, a people who need loud noises and obsess on media and respond only to movie stars playing movie stars spoofing movie stars. The feeling was one of exhaustion, of a culture folding in on itself.

The Ethics of Authenticity

Who are you? Where do you stand on [fill in the blank]? Are you for A or B?

No, it’s almost never put in those words. But it might as well be.

Almost every day I am given some form of two alternative stances that, if I don’t outright despise, I cannot simply choose between. Nor—to step upon the ol’ soapbox—can I aim to hold them in some (harmony-implying-but-ultimately-bullshit) “tension.” And though I do, on some rare occasions, consider myself a “centrist,” I never actually think of myself as occupying some average-of-the-whole or some equidistant space amid the clamoring noise-makers. Well, that last one might be accurate, but only because it describes how I feel whenever I read the news or hear about the latest imperative fear. That is to say, the experience of being stuck in the middle is descriptive and sad, not hopeful and prescriptive—and I want prescription!

Not only do I want some real prescription for life, I need it. It’s quite difficult to figure out “who you are” or “where you stand” when much of the time all you can tell is what you are not and where you do not stand. Don’t get me wrong, sometimes it’s enough just to know what to say “no” to. But “authenticity,” however anyone understands it, requires more.

I was looking for a quote from Charles Taylor’s The Ethics of Authenticity and decided to just reread the book. I think the first time I read it, I was reading for an objective knowledge (and by “objective knowledge” I mean “critique”) of the “culture of authenticity.” This time, I was reading it just for me—always a better way to read!—partly to take a look at my own “atomism” and “fragmentation,” of which there is plenty.

Here’s the line I was looking for:

We are expected to develop our own opinions, outlook, stances to things, to a considerable degree through solitary reflection. But this is not how things work with important issues, such as the definition of our identity. We define this always in dialogue with, sometimes in struggle against, the identities our significant others want to recognize in us. And even when we outgrow some of the latter—our parents, for instance—and they disappear from our lives, the conversation with them continues within us as long as we live.

I happen to love the reality, the many implications, of that statement. For all its frustrations, I love the entangled and entangling reality of life. I love that authenticity is hard to define, that it can be good or bad. I love that trying to chase authenticity is almost always self-defeating, but that if you stop trying so hard you might find it where you least expect. Or, as C.S. Lewis put it, “if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed.”

If authenticity reflects the question “who am I?”, then the ethic of authenticity seems to reflects that question as we are meant to ask it of ourselves. Like most books that address widely entrenched notions and beliefs, the resolution it points toward is far from being clearly laid out. But the description, diagnosis, and general way forward are, I think, exactly right. (And the book is no less relevant for being over 30 years old!) The overarching warning Taylor repeats is quite simple: don’t be shaped or confused by two mutually-condemning forces. When it comes to “authenticity,” to “being true to oneself,” we should understand it as a good that is abused, and to join either the “boosters” or the “knockers,” as Taylor puts it, will help no one. We need to find better ground to stand on:

. . . not in a middle ground so much as on a completely different ground. I suggest that in this matter we look not for the Trend, whatever it is, up or down, but that we break with our temptation to discern irreversible trends, and see that there is a struggle here, whose outcome is continually up for grabs.

That last part seems very important, and my growing, entrenching cynicism needs to hear it. This is not simply a third viewpoint, a perch from which to watch the world burn or to wait while the two sides (of any given debate) eat each other alive. In fact, this “completely different ground” is a little deceptively described. It is an opportunity for an involved presence, one that is unwilling to concede any permanent losses but, instead, looks for a persistence of possibility—within the space being criticized! Much like James Davison Hunter’s “faithful presence,” rather than offering pessimistic critique, and better even than an impassioned contention for the truth, Taylor thinks what we need is to “enter sympathetically into its animating ideal and to try to show what it really requires.” (What does this remind me of…?)

The opposite, as Gilbert Meilaender once put it, though on a more sentimental level, would be “a failure to love that which we criticize and seek to change.”

And so I’m back to the middle after all. But I’m still not thinking of my being “in the middle” as defined by some midpoint. No, I am, or want to be, “in the middle” as defined by being among.

The problem, of course, is that most of this is really hard, long-suffering work. It takes a lot of faith to see a persistence of possibility, even in myself alone. Here, or anywhere that matters, there are no shortcuts allowed, and no final victories either. Instead, “we understand [our predicament] as open to contestation, as a locus of probably unending struggle.”

It may not sound very cheery, but given the helpless alternative, I’m hearing it today as good and hopeful news, and as an obligation to pursue it.

democratic obligations

Two quotes against the reign of pragmatic politics.

Marilynne Robinson:

I find that people are moved by good language. I think that one of the things that is an affliction, and has been increasingly an affliction, is that we condescend to one another. . . . When Abraham Lincoln, a virtually totally uneducated man, wanted to speak to people, he did it with a degree of refinement that is extraordinary by an standard, because he had that kind of respect for the kind of people he was speaking to. [People in politics today], I’m afraid, they speak in this kind of minimized language that you would use to sell a defective product. . . . To whom are we condescending? How have we allowed ourselves to have such negative assumptions about people in general. Democracy cannot survive if we continue to condescend at that level, where we don’t give good information, we don’t articulate things with the sensitivity that they require to be articulated if they are to be meaning at all. […]

[You cannot free and enlarge the people around you] if you have contempt for people in general, you have no articulated aspiration for their well-being, no great interest in protecting dignity that you really don’t assign them in the first place.

Charles Taylor:

Now if something like this is true, then it matters to be able to say it. For then one has something to say, in all reason, to the people who invest their lives in these deviant forms [of individualism]. And this may make a difference to their lives. Some of these things may be heard. Articulacy here has a moral point, not just in correcting what may be wrong views but also in making the force of an ideal that people are already living by more palpable, more vivid for them; and by making it more vivid, empowering them to live up to it in a fuller and more integral fashion.

Hope Abandoned

In a world always hostile to fresh voices, one needs the encouragement
of a friendly eye or ear, good-humored banter, and lively debate.
To see a far-off speck of light and walk toward it alone
is far harder without companions and friends.
~ Nadezhda Mandelstam ~

The value of a book like this—along with her first memoir, Hope Against Hope—is truly, ultimately beyond words. Yet, so fortunate are we, words still do their work, and the work behind Nadezhda Mandelstam is immense. It wasn’t really until the closing chapter of Hope Abandoned that I came to appreciate just how incredible it is that she was able to write and publish so much of her life in these memoirs, not to mention the poems and writings of her husband, Osip Mandelstam.

In the introduction to Hope Against Hope, the biographer Clarence Brown described Nadezhda Mandelstam as “a vinegary, Brechtian, steel-hard woman of great intelligence, limitless courage, no illusions, permanent convictions and a wild sense of the absurdity of life.” That description still gives me chills to read. Who on earth would not want to hear what she has to say? Who would not want to sit down with her at a table with a coffee or a beer and hear her stories? I have not read Alan Jacobs’s recent book, Breaking Bread with the Dead, but I hope that it contains deep elements of this, of the privilege of pulling a person from the past off the shelf, traveling around the country with her and regularly sitting down with this soul who “went before you”—not to mention with someone so astounding, with one who lived so hard and finished so well. That is, anyway, what the thought of “breaking bread with the dead” evokes for me. And that is often how I felt in reading Hope Abandoned.

In a nutshell that does little justice to her full life, Nadezhda Mandelstam was the primary keeper of her husband’s poetry, both during his life and, especially, after his second arrest and subsequent death in a labor camp in Vladivostok in 1938. The poems were sometimes written on scattered pieces of paper, but more often they were dictated to Nadezhda and transcribed by her. And what’s more, some of these poems survived for long stretches only through memorization, as she and Osip were forced to move around the Soviet Union as internal exiles, from Moscow to Cherdyn to Voronezh, constantly fearing arrest and the confiscation of all their work. Nadezhda believed (in hindsight, at least) that it was her pre-ordained task in life, through no shortage of pain and trial, to preserve and share that poetry, in the hopes of stirring “numbed and dormant spirits” to life.

It should always be borne in mind by our friends in distant parts that this was true of every one of us, and of every scrap of paper we managed to save. The survival of each single article or manuscript is the result of a miracle. I am very conscious of the fact that in certain conditions it is more painful to live on in order to preserve such things than it is to die, but, as is well known, we are not hedonists, and were not created merely for our own happiness or pleasure. . . .”

There is no end to things that could be said about someone so single-minded and unflagging. In reading Nadezhda Mandelstam, everything she says convicts your attention, but not for the sake of her story or her generation alone. On any page or corner you turn, you might find yourself face to face with your own time, to find that a woman speaking of 1920’s or 1960’s Russia could just as easily be speaking of you, wherever you are in 2023. And I think she believed this as well, not with the arrogance of some self-described sage or scholar, but with the humility of one who trusted history to be meaningful, even if, in the end, it was nearly impossible to find hope anywhere.

Over and over, she has things to say to us today, things that she believed with a depth of experience that few of us could ever appreciate. She believed in a deep and overlooked civic courage, but saw that cowardice disguised as bravery was everywhere. She believed that nationalism was a sign of sickness and a distorted way to seek healing.

She believed that to renounce people was to give up on the gift of life; that a great temptation of the 20th century was for people “to believe their commissars [i.e., cultural authorities] instead of their grandmothers”; that the first thing to go is conversation (though “talkers” always remain), followed closely by any real quality of personality; that only fools sing praises to the strong; that one could just as easily—more easily—put a modern gloss on memory as to see and remember a thing clearly for what it was; that some buckwheat and a tin of tushonka laid out on a suitcase could, for the heart that refuses to curse fate, be called a banquet.

And of course, so central to her story, she believed, with her husband, that poetry was opposed, in its very essence, to all that she saw around her, to all those who actively or passively gave way.

Poetry did not agree with them at all. Poetry brings out the reader’s personality, deepens it, and makes him an accomplice in the poet’s cause—something quite impossible for men who control the destinies of whole peoples. The two things are mutually exclusive.

That mutual exclusivity is what made poetry such a dangerous thing in the Soviet Union. “There’s no place where more people are killed for it,” Osip repeatedly said. That’s because true poetry, the Mandelstam’s believed, had an ingrained “healing power,” that it produced and was itself a part of a vibrancy of life, the opposite of which was “unanimity”:

Lovers of strong-man regimes fail to realize that the stability and efficiency of a society stands not in direct but in inverse proportion to the increase in the use of dictatorial powers, and that “unanimity” is a sign of decay, not of vitality. […]

Terror works only when when people are impressed by the very idea of it; bribes can be placed only in outstretched palms, and “unanimity,” by the same token, is possible only when people are ready to abandon independence of thought in order to enjoy the feeling of being surrounded by the like-minded. Such types do not appear en masse in a single day. A long period of preparation is needed.

At the heart of the matter lies a mode—a need and a practice—of understanding. And it is a mode of understanding that is deeply, intrinsically open to… well, open to understanding. It is a language trying to breathe new life back into itself. Language, as much as it works in the service of knowledge and communication, can also—sometimes through natural stagnation, sometimes through force—become a barrier to any genuine thought. An increasingly dead and superficial use of words and phrases will inevitably lend “an air of consummate shallowness to knowledge that might otherwise have been living and tangible.”

Our ordinary everyday speech consists to a very large extent of set phrases, hackneyed combinations of words which stand in the way of any new thought struggling to burst forth. In poetry words have to penetrate the fog of ready-made, congealed speech in order to convey poetic ideas as effectively as possible. Such words gain strength in the very process of overcoming the obstacles, as they thrust up through the mounds of debris under which they are buried, emerging in fresh combinations to bring out whatever ideas are seeking expression.

The poet is one who seeks to convey that inchoate expression. And, whether poet or reader, it matters that you are open to what you seek, even if you don’t know precisely what that is. In fact, it is exactly the point that you don’t know in advance. What matters here, you might say, is that an impatience with poetry—with poetic understanding, poetic depth or direction—is an impatience with that-which-you-don’t-understand. Can you see where this is going?

All over Soviet Russia, the Mandelstam’s encountered others who seemed incapable of seeing or hearing other people. Language—written or otherwise—pervades life, and a person who is willing to use words only for what he already wants or needs, whether for safety or for power, will be, at best, dangerously close to seeing and using people in the same way. Such a person will only ever be protected morally by the culture around them. If the culture fails, it is almost certain that they, too, will fail.

Nadezhda Mandelstam saw this failure—of culture, of language, of character—quite literally everywhere, even leading to Osip’s death. And yet, while being utterly critical, she also managed to sympathize and to refrain from throwing stones. How could anyone act, how could anyone “do the right thing,” knowing what it would cost? She asks this, sometimes explicitly but always implicitly, of herself as well as others: “How could we go on living and laughing knowing all the time what end awaited us?”

Yet she does go on, living and laughing. She and Osip (referred to as “M.”) had their share of suffering, and about this she always speaks plainly.

M.’s horror of the cold and his craving for warmth and sun were a consequence of the years of hunger and malnutrition. In relatively good years, when we had enough food, he did not mind the cold at all, so that by the end he was quite reconciled to it—only to undergo, before his death, cold and hunger more than sufficient for a whole lifetime. I know myself how cold you feel when you are hungry—though I experienced it not in the camps but as a “free” Soviet citizen. The hunger suffered in a camp is unimaginable—all the sons of bitches who still block up their ears and close their eyes should know this.

That direct, “vinegary” character is peppered across her memoirs, and it can’t help sending a chill down your spine, but also, often, putting a smile on your face, if only for the candidness. But even with a smile, any reader knows that this is nothing if not serious business.

If any brave young fellow with no experience of these things feels inclined to laugh at me, I invite him back into the age we lived through, and I guarantee that he will need to taste only a hundredth part of what we endured to wake up in the night in a cold sweat, ready to do anything to save his skin the next morning.

Not once, however, not even in moments like these that speak of cold and hunger and pain, do I recall her even appearing to complain about the life they lived. Justified though she surely would be, and despite the title of the second memoir, it does not appear that she ever abandoned hope.

And this is another feature of her writing: a capacity for hard-boiled lament. It may be that ever-present tinge of hope in her perseverance, or it may be her matter-of-fact voice, or it may be that she rarely, if ever, offers a word of sorrow for herself apart from what it meant for those around her. Of course, it is all of these things and more, and I am happy to call the quality of her voice a mysterious thing. But it should catch your notice that, when you are done with these memoirs, you have just read over a thousand pages about the Soviet Union in the first half of the 20th century, a dead-honest account of life in one of the harshest regimes in human history, and yet you feel that you have not read one sentence that could be called a complaint. Lament, yes. But complaint is nowhere to be found.

In the early 1960’s, after finally getting Osip’s poems published in the United States, Nadezhda says that she was at last able to let go of her remaining fears.

Now [M.’s poetry] is indestructible, and I therefore feel totally and absolutely free, and I can breathe easily (despite the lack of air). How many people will understand what joy it is to breathe freely just once before you die?

How many of us will ever know what it’s like to live our whole lives holding our breath? Nadezhda Mandelstam spent nearly her entire life trying to speak, waiting for that moment when she could breath a sigh of relief. The terrible irony is that a woman who could not speak without risking her life somehow managed to speak more clearly and truthfully than most of us could ever hope to.

The most astonishing thing is that there are still a few people with just enough life in them to try making their voices heard, but only through an immense volume of water, from the bottom of the ocean, as it were. Among them I count myself—and I know, if anybody does, what superhuman efforts are needed just to preserve a handful of manuscripts. Yet I could not have departed this life without telling something about the blithe soul who once lived at my side, never letting me lose heart; about poetry and people, the living and the dead; about stopiatnitsas like myself, most of whom go on carefully hiding their past. . . . I say there can be no limit: we must go on talking of these things, over and over again, until every justice and every tear is accounted for, until the reasons for what happened (and still happens) are made plain to see.

In a 1974 review of Hope Abandoned, Robert Altar spends a good deal of time differentiating between Osip’s and Nadezhda’s relationship to Christianity, Nadezhda’s having gone on to become much more explicit, if still quite unique. He does this, he says, too address the problem it makes for the historian’s proper understanding of Osip. I think he is probably (mostly) right about this difference, and that it is a difference that Nadezhda herself was well aware of. But, perhaps too often, people have tended to read Nadezhda as a means of getting to her husband. Given the way she writes about her own life and of Osip’s, this is a perfectly understandable thing, and one for which she would take little offense.

She saw her life as inextricably bound to Osip’s. And she knew that behind her experience in life, there was a voice that needed to be heard. Only when she was able to share Osip’s work, to ensure that his death was not his end, could she find rest. Would that any of us knew a fraction of that self-sacrifice.

I am, however, very glad that, not only did Nadezhda live to preserve her husband’s poetry and legacy, but that in the process she was, and is, able to present her own life and legacy as well. Truly, for Osip or for Nadezhda, there is no way of understanding or hearing one without the other.

As Robert Altar put it in his review, “It is a miracle of fortunate coincidence that so extraordinary a poet should have had as a wife so extraordinary a witness.”

Well, amen.

preserving memory

Nadezhda Mandelstam:

The capacity of memory, both collective and individual, to gloss over, improve on, or distort the facts is particularly evident at periods when the foundations of a society are collapsing. Those disorders to which memory is prey—the tendency to embellish or suppress “awkward” detail, the need to vindicate oneself—show how dangerous it is to rely on one’s own conviction of being right; since this is all too often based on a false criterion, our main task is to find a true one. There is also the problem that, while distorting our recollections and thus hindering a proper appreciation of individual or historical experience, memory is yet the one feature that distinguishes us as human beings. How can we resolve this contradiction and arrive at the unadulterated truth, so that we stop deceiving ourselves and others and draw the right conclusions from our bitter experience? We have all played our part in the work of destruction, and heaven help us if it is taken to its logical conclusion.

Also a reminder that it is the task of that “memory,” at least at times, to “to save and preserve our souls out of the chaos.” That is, “to bear our lives more than to shape them, to hope more than to plan, to hold out more than to stride ahead.”