Ironic points of light

There’s a war on.

The fact of that puts me about where I was when I wrote this back in 2015:

There is a sense that one should say something. If one is to speak at all, then one must speak of this.

But there is little that can be said. We can express our horror and grief, extend our “thoughts and prayers” to the victims and to those who knew and loved them. We can mourn with those who mourn.

Yet after calamity, we seem to wish that someone, somewhere, would say something else, something more. We want to hear someone explain this, explain how to correct it somehow, how to prevent it from ever happening again (or, less nobly, how to prevent it from ever happening to us). And there can be a pressure, or a temptation, to try to be the person who says all of that. Our desperate need to hear something that will make sense of it all can lead us to try to say something that might appear to make sense of it all.

And related to that is the pressure not to say the thing that none of us wants to hear — that maybe we can’t explain this or make sense of it or tidily reassure one another and ourselves that everything will always be sensible and understandable and fair and safe.

And so I find myself again re-reading Auden’s “September 1, 1939.” I’m drawn, again, to its sadly evergreen grim assessment of the world we’ve made for ourselves, as here:

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

And here:

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

And I’m struck by the way the final stanza, written in 1940, somehow seems to describe our strange new 21st-century world of social media:

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

War is bad. This war may be contained, the invader repelled by a desperate defense or by the financial coercion of unprecedented sanctions or by some combination of the two. Or this war may spread in any of the all-too-predictable ways that we dread or in some surprising unforeseen way. There’s a slim hope that the needless death and horror of this war will allow for better choices leading to a better future, and so in my doom-scrolling tracking of its every step I’m paying especial attention to the thousands of Russian protesters bravely defying their own dictator.

But I don’t know. There is a sense that one should say something and that if one is to speak at all, then one must speak of this. But beyond “War is bad” and “We must love one another or die” I have nothing much to add.

(Auden himself later regretted that line because, he said, we’re all going to die whether or not we love one another. Perhaps we should all carry seeds in our pockets.)

There’s a war on. There’s always a war on. So I’ll do my best here to resume flashing out ironic points of light and trying, despite all that, to show an affirming flame.