Anatevka: The Digital Landscape And The Longing For Home

Being Revived By Flannery O'Connor; And Why The Zoom Calls Led To An Awareness About The Need To Communicate More Sparingly, And Slowly

“There is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance to be restored. The reader of today looks for this motion, and rightly so, but what he has forgotten is the cost of it. His sense of evil is diluted or lacking altogether, and so he has forgotten the price of restoration. When he reads a novel, he wants either his sense tormented or his spirits raised. He wants to be transported, instantly, either to mock damnation or a mock innocence.”
― Flannery O'Connor,

Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose

Part 1. Alexander Blok Died “Because He Wanted To Die.”

“Blok was the first chairman of the Petrograd branch of the All-Russian Union of Poets organized immediately after the Revolution. But the chaos and disastrous disruptions of life that followed were more than his spirit could bear. Exhausted and disillusioned, Blok’s health and spirit declined rapidly and he fell into silence. Whenever he was asked why he did not write poetry anymore, Blok answered: “All sounds have stopped. Can’t you hear that there are no longer any sounds?”

His swan song was a speech honoring Pushkin in February 1921 in which he said that the peace and liberty indispensable to a poet were being taken away from him. “Not liberty to misbehave, not freedom to play the liberal, but creative liberty, the secret freedom. And the poet dies because he cannot breathe”. Following Pushkin’s lead he labeled bureaucrats “rabble”, and in a gloomy vision of the dark future he went on to warn: “Let those bureaucrats who plan to direct poetry through their own channels, violating its secret freedom and hindering it in fulfilling its mysterious mission, let them beware of an even worse label. We die, but art remains”.

Stricken ill later that spring, Blok died in July, but in the testimony of E. Gollerbakh, “the people who observed the poet up close in the last months of his life affirmed that Blok died because he wanted to die.”

RuVerses.com

Part 2. Reading Flanner O’Connor, Finally—Yesterday—Thinking She Sounded Like Blok?

“The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require his attention.”

—Flannery O’Connor

Yesterday

It was a moment of oxygen received; I knew I was coming back.

It was yesterday afternoon, and the moment involved pulling a book off a high shelf, as I was saying goodbye to my sister Bibi in my hallway; I am not aware of my books, generally, or most other objects. I climbed up onto a stool to pull it down. Everything That Rises Must Converge. Didn’t know I had it.

As it was, it was a half-page of prose, randomly opened to, which was so stunning it pulled me out of “freeze—” returned the spirit of life.

It could have been anything, but that’s what happened to bring me back. (I will post said half-page, before the end of this post, after I get through some other things.)

We Are All Over-Communicated: But Unsure What People Need Or Mean

Too many communications, not enough empty space, silence—Finnish style silence.

The joke goes like this: two Finns are drinking. One raises a glass and says: “Kippis!” (“Cheers!” The other slams his glasses down and says: ““Dammit, did we come here to talk or to drink?”)

It Has Taken Me Half The Day To Write To You Why No Zoom Calls Today Or In The Rest of May

We are discontinuing the weekly Zoom calls for a time, and bringing them back hopefully/possibly in June, in a new format. What I’m about to tell you is intended as an essay about many things, not just what happened to the Zoom gathering.

Boundaries, Connection, Time, And Soul Coherence; Writer In Training, Craving Time

Our bio-luminescent weekend Zoom meetings were in fact part of my recent bout with disassociation and total inability to write. The D-beast “depression,” my old whale friend, made an appearance, but I knew it was a temporary white-out, not a true descent. Many people here are familiar with “him” and nothing in this world is worth the risk. You see a whisker and you take it very seriously.

I believe “he” is possibly the worst illness of them all, but I haven’t “had” many others. He turns up when you have split yourself, or “betrayed” what you—actual you—meant to communicate.

Apart from faith, apart from all things I no longer ingest, (such as vegetables,) he can return from over-exposure to digital contexts, a blighting of the genuine self and time inside of which not to have to say, be, know, express, or compensate. It is as though we never trust anybody anymore, unless they communicated with us within the last 7 minutes.

Our Experiment

I was so happy about them—the Zoom calls.

I felt I was back “home” in Sweden, perhaps 15, surrounded by friends, in rooms where nothing could touch us, hurt us, or separate us. It was nothing short of the balm itself, the very answer to all the previous thrashings, and resultant social avoidances.

I also became extremely, and I mean extremely defensive about them, the Zoom calls. Too much so.

Knowing people, as I know people, I knew I would be hearing “feedback.” I hope if I get to heaven one day there is no feedback. I suppose this is the advantage of being a despot? No feedback. Haha.

Anyway.

I “crashed.” I began to go blank like an overexposed photo in a liquid bed. I was taking on too many souls, and all of the algorithms between said souls. I began to feel some of the fears of childhood. Fears of inadequacy and loss of what is called “agency.”

I could do the Zooms but I couldn't do the “feedback,” or make decisions about how things should be, like a manager. I forgot that I’m actually a total introvert, and most definitely “co-dependent.” (Have we any better word for this vague and unfortunate thing?) Yet I do this—I open up “vaults within vaults.” Then get lost in a cold forest, somehow, and all the trees appear to me to be angry. Even if they are not at all.

One of my best friends from Sweden once used the word “hudlös” (hud is “skin” and lös is “less, ie without skin) to describe her concern about the manner in which I, at that time, posted writings on Facebook. This was in 2013, during a very bad depressive spell, during which time I was attending an ortho-molecular clinic in Minnesota to try to overcome it. Some people saw the “depression” but not the research and struggle to overcome it, which I have, (largely) and which I remain obsessed about openly talking about. [Carnivore diet. With apologies to vegetarians.]

Two more people close to me, both female, said the similar things, within weeks, and I never quite got over it.

They were embarrassed for me, worried about me, and said so. Engulfed by shame, like flames, I pushed back with my reasons, and knowing me, I was probably hollering in full on PTSD trigger mode: “I’m using Facebook as a drafting board for ideas! I’m trying to write, become a writer. I’m not trying to create an impression on people, I’m not a product that attempts to shine.”

Pride, wounded, defensiveness of some inner sense of a clumsy, bad act. The reason I make so many excuses for Yevtushenko is because he was so great in lion-esque defense of the un-cool and rejected. More on this later.

I was, truthfully, livid. Because I was ashamed. I had not known I was creating all this concern. I had not known I was, let’s say, “wrong.” Or acting strange. Or doing things others don’t think normal. And once I was triggered, I had no idea if it was because they were all right, “at some level” and I could not concede this. Not without perishing.

I tried to wound my friend back, by reminding her of when we were teenagers and she was going to become a great painter. Don’t painters paint images that include human pain? (She didn’t become a painter, but a textile designer— an amazing one.) My argument was: “Self exposure is part of the process of creation.” Her argument was: “But aren’t you embarrassed to tell people these things?”

How about the feeling when you didn’t even realize you were supposed to feel embarrassed?

Now that’s embarrassing.

For years I withdrew from this friend, unable to even express what had so devastated me. Trust was lost. I didn’t want to be the deer bleeding in the snow, who would never get invited to the crayfish party. Our circle of friends were all successful, Swedish professionals—careers in and even on state TV.

Then there was…me.

The wound is still a little raw, and the question has no solid answers, only differing “views.”

What are we doing here, on this earth, together, and how are we navigating the trauma, apart from repressing it, in an attempt to impress people with good boundaries?

When I start to hear conventional statements like: “Well, I don’t share my private life with the world…” I become intensely defensive. Rather like a bull in a ring, with sticks in my back. Alone, horns down.

I reach for a discussion that is not there, about the process of writing, and the borders between “private self” and “public self.” In these shame storms, all I know is that I lack those things people call boundaries. And, lacking them, I begin to feel almost immeasurably sad. “Boundaries” create social acceptance, sanity, and order; Dissolution of them leads to depletion, melancholia, and, of you don’t guard against it, spiritual and emotional incoherence—and shame.

When I feel shame I write about it in front of all my subscribers at Substack, who don’t even “know” me?

Apparently.

I think it’s important. I don’t actually believe in the construct we call “strangers” and I believe the human race to be one. Once again, this warming stanza from the famous “Romanesque Arches,” makes the case I can’t always make, and don’t always believe:

“Don’t be ashamed to be a human being, be proud!
Inside you, one vault after another opens endlessly.
You’ll never be complete, and that’s as it should be.”

Tomas Tranströmer,

“Romanesque Arches”, 1989

One of my obsessions in our Zoom meetings was that nobody should be “shamed,” and another was that nobody should be cut off from speaking while they were speaking.

Turns out this was exactly what many people needed at this time, so no, I was not crazy.

Nor was it sustainable, this wobbly, rainbow bubble of ours. As an aside, two weeks ago I thought of what I thought was a perfect, and funny name. I wanted to name the gathering: “Nobody loves me.” (So that we might laugh at ourselves; I believe humor is the actual, untapped cure for “PTSD.”)

Maybe we learned that despite the deranged bludgeonings of “Covid” we still have love to give, to receive, and that we did not become dead twigs, or mere pollinators of “important information.”

Covid, maybe, brought back our humanity, instead of erasing it. We need friends and we need to be listened to, without correction.

But I couldn’t handle the intense responsibility of managing the reactions each person might have to each other person, nor the problem of making sure each person gets the right amount of space, hearing, etc.

That said, it was a very very important first draft, and learning curve—one of the happiest times in recent memory. It was ours, not “mine,” and of course, you all can re-ignite it without me. I think my contribution was the concept itself: Pure listening and being listened to that does not cost $250 an hour. Shedding our “gorilla suits,” and professional costumes, and how people “associate” us, or, God forbid, Google us.

The longest one was, I think, 17 hours, and during the last one, I went to a concert, came home, and had left the camera and meeting link running. I was happy to see everybody’s smiling faces when I came home, and we were laughing, because it was kind of unacceptably wonderful, how we seemed to be succeeding in conquering post-Covid isolation.

But really, we need to turn inward, to our own actual lives, for this.

They have so badly blighted our “actual lives,” though, and this is the dilemma. Technology, not geography, time, and space, offers “access.” But it feels like nobody can really reach anybody, even when we are directly in contact on their technological bridges, fields, and towns.

Albaicin, Granada

I’ve been missing my friends since I was 18, and had to say goodbye, because I was going back to America, supposedly to get on with my real life. My two best friends, one of them mentioned above, brought champagne to the airport and I remember them practically being on the tarmac when the plane lifted off. And we actually cried.

Leaving countries—I’ve done it many times—is a deep trauma. But the promise of your supposedly glorious future beckons.

“Anatevka.”

It was a very big deal, how close we were, back then. (Both of them, Peter and Ann-Cathrine, are still very close to me.) Our youthful paradise would be forever lost, but that’s, of course, adulthood itself. You’re supposed to stick yourself in a house with a partner and keep quiet about potentially feeling like you don’t have anybody to talk to and are losing your mind.

When I wrote the word “Anatevka” tears welled up. I got the video from Fiddler on The Roof, from YouTube, and something comical happened. (The Ancient Greeks said comedy is incongruity.)

The voice of Martha Stewart was loudly commanding me about her Masterclass thusly:

“Be fearless. Change is good.”

In this commercial, she’s juicing celery, in hair curlers, and talking about how exciting it is to wake up each day and see how much you can “get done.”

“Be fearless. Change is good,” made me feel a wish to reply sharply: “Stop trying to social engineer me Martha. I’m never going to be “fearless” and I’ve had more “change” in my life than I care to think about. And it was not “good.” At all.

I wanted time, to be with people, and to escape the relentless grind of information production I’ve been trapped in most of my life. “I’m worthy only if I find or decipher information.” You become a creature, that way.

Why can’t Americans understand the joys of doing “nothing?”

Pull a book off a shelf, any book. In my case, it was “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” by Flannery O’Connor. I haven’t thought about her in a long time but she’s in the culture now, because of a new film by Ethan Hawke. And there was a piece in The New Yorker by Paul Elie titled “How Racist Was Flannery O’Connor?” which I actually read, also yesterday. It was just about as mirthless as its title suggests—though he is a very good writer and so forth. My body was constricted, when I read it.

Modernity is loveless, by design. We’re exhausted to the bone from these labor camps of carrying endless moral criticisms, never to satisfy the deep urge to micro-judge and express our non-love, making us….modern.

My objection to Elie’s objection to O’Connor’s racism is that it’s a dangerous thing to aim to make writers un-objectionable—to try to make them some kind of better than species. We do the same with Presidential candidates: “Please be a masterpiece of perfect attributes. A luminous Daddy. Please not a true, broken, sinful-as-the-rest-of us human being.”

(A President is like a reverse scapegoat: Burdened with the nation’s need to idol-worship, to remain children.)

O’Connor left the literary world in a very uncomfortable bind, God bless her. “One of our greatest American writers was a ….serious Christian.”

Now Ethan Hawke’s daughter, Maya, who plays O’Connor in the film, has said that her father is a “closet Christian.”

This is all super interesting, to me. And I did not know, until yesterday, that I love her, for all her willingness to be less than wonderful—the only quality I insist upon in a writer. When writers try to be “wonderful” they lose my trust.

Now for the half page: I read it, itself, as a near-poem, and when page 2 starts, the poem, as I perceived it, dissolved, and the story began to fill up with people being “racist” Southerners, dark, strange, and all the other O’Connor things. (Also very valuable as literature.) I never knew, as an aside, how funny she was. And in this opening, she sounds, to me, like Alexander Blok (who I have also barely ever read)—but only on this one half page, before the house and the people in it awaken. For the past several months I have been obsessively interested in small fragments of the written word, as meditations, and protections from all the other billions of words out there, forming typhoons, “on the internet.” In a book you can slow down time.

I submit this to make the case that writing can cast a spell on us that can awaken the soul, make life magical again:

Indeed she was a a genius.

“…like some patient God come down to woo her—”

“He took a step backward and lowered his head as if to show the wreath across his horns.”

If you know the story, Greenleaf, (and I didn’t) the whole expectation of this relationship between this bull and this sleeping woman is overturned in the first few lines of the next page. I might say, “sadly.”

He is nothing but a source of irritation, and even rage, to her, and on page 25, Paul Elie’s charges of “racism” (which is also the same as a Southern writer in a given time being very observant, and having a great ear for speech) makes an appearance.

But never mind all that.

I saw the bull, knew he was “real,” understood him, and understood his loneliness, his pathos, thanks to the time this writer took to describe him and all the spaces around him. In what we call “reality,” the bull never existed, and had no particular feelings, only was chomping on a hedge, if he existed at all.

My prayer to myself is that I could one day write about a bull like that, even if I never saw him, and didn’t know if he existed, or was “true.”