A different darkness, flowed above the clouds,
And dead ahead we saw, where sky and sea should meet,
A line, a white line, a long white line, A wall, a barrier, towards which we drove.
My God man there’s bears on it
A passage taken from a draft of Part IV of TS Eliot’s, The Waste Land, which has just marked its centenary. The final version of the ‘Death by Water’ section was considerably shorter, and generally considered better for it, but I must admit, I do like this bit where the sailor unexpectedly meets his end by an iceberg. It feels like an appropriate image as we approach the end of a year marked by surprises. Metaphorically and literally, we are in a world where there are more icebergs floating around for us to hit. All the while, we struggle to adequately express what is happening, it would probably be best if we could just edit it all out. Alas, there is no Ezra Pound that can remove the bad parts from the world today.
As the year reaches it end, I have many incomplete thoughts and partial conclusions swirling around my mind, and so this note will be less comprehensive than I had originally hoped. The aim is to still present a few themes from a rather fraught year. Before continuing, though, I do want to state that it has been heartening having my audience grow considerably, and I am grateful for your readership and support. All I ask is that if you find any of the notes interesting or worthwhile, please consider sharing them. Given the never-ending deluge of content – which I am admittedly contributing to – the challenge is being found and read. Any assistance with spreading the word is greatly appreciated. My hope is that these notes might prompt thinking and questioning, they are meant to have an open atmosphere, an invitation for further reflection. In a world of hot takes and confident assertions, there is something to be said for more honestly reckoning with the difficulty of making sense of where we collectively find ourselves. And so I aim to present fragmentary knowledge for a fragmenting world.
The line attributed to Leon Trotsky - ‘you may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you’ - is one that has rung true this year, with the consequences of Russia’s fateful misadventure reverberating across the globe. Incidentally, this precise formulation might actually be Michael Walzer’s, another legacy of his influential work, Just and Unjust Wars. The notes I have written on the conflict have sought to avoid the tendency to present the war as a sporting match or redemptive story. When trying to account for the year that has passed, announcing that the ‘West is back’ (Martin Wolf) and ‘the West was challenged and it found its footing’ (The Economist) are remarkably banal ways of viewing what has unfolded. Rehashing the ‘democracies versus authoritarians’ frame will not get us far in understanding a complicated and complex set of realities, one in which all regimes are struggling with governance problems, economic vulnerabilities, balancing order and freedom. The challenge is to recognise the bravery of the Ukrainians and the justness of their cause, as well the unwarranted aggression and brutality of the Russians, without getting sucked into simplistic narratives. The war means lives lost, homes destroyed, businesses wrecked, societies scarred. Until now, the progression of the conflict has been one of steady escalation, the dilemma is how to find a way out that manages the competing demands of security and justice, anger and fear. In this context, an important reason for emphasising the costs of war is to heighten our awareness to the dangers of sleepwalking into a far greater catastrophe. Time and distance desensitise us to what it really means when things break. In this sense, the Ukraine war simultaneously presents itself as a tragedy and a warning.
Another point I have tried to emphasise is the way the war has constantly thrown up surprises and defied our expectations. Calmer heads thought that war would not happen because it did not make sense, Europe was done with war. According to a senior US official, ‘to many in Western Europe, what the Russians were doing was “all coercive diplomacy, [Putin] was just building up to see what he could get. He’s not going to invade … it’s crazy.”’ The same piece quotes François Heisbourg, a French security advisor:
If you discover the plans of somebody to attack a country and the plans appear to be completely bonkers, the chances are that you are going to react rationally and consider that it’s so bonkers, it’s not going to happen.
For many others, the assumption was that Putin would prove smarter; either in choosing to avoid conflict, or undertaking it in a far more effective manner that would lead to a quick resolution. And yet this is also not what happened. Reviewing his eight rules for when to use military power, Lawrence Freedman reflected:
I had forgotten my ninth rule:
9.) As Rules 1-8 are self-evident those political leaders who ignore them and launch a war are apt to achieve surprise, simply by being stupid.
I was therefore wrong in assuming that Putin would see that a war designed to bring about regime change in Kyiv was a stupid idea, although right that it was a stupid idea.
‘Apt to achieve surprise, simply by being stupid’: an appropriate definition for the so-called ‘moron premium’, coined in reference to the impact of Truss and Kwarteng on UK bond yields, but clearly describing a much wider phenomenon. Perhaps the world isn’t so difficult to predict after all, as stupidity seems to be a rather constant feature.
To observe that we live in a lively world, where wills interact with the whims of Fortuna to dash our attempts at control and comprehension, is to acknowledge the limits of what we can know and do. What this means for how we understand and orientate ourselves in the world is a central concern in religion, philosophy and literature, and is a reminder of why we need to continually engage with traditions of art and thought. Nonetheless, there remains the powerful lure that we can know, that we do understand. And so, we are beset daily with confident pronouncements about what is happening, where we are going, what must be done. This all amplified by an information ecosystem geared towards clean, simplified messages.
Certainly this is not what one finds in the complex work of Eliot. While this note commenced with The Waste Land, it is his later Four Quartets that I have been constantly returning to and struggling with throughout the year. There are so many sections I am tempted to quote, but let me settle on this part from ‘East Coker’:
…There is, it seems to us,
At best, only a limited value
In the knowledge derived from experience.
The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,
For the pattern is new in every moment
And every moment is a new and shocking
Valuation of all we have been. We are only undeceived
Of that which, deceiving, could no longer harm.
In the middle, not only in the middle of the way
But all the way, in a dark wood, in a bramble,
On the edge of a grimpen, where is no secure foothold,
And menaced by monsters, fancy lights,
Risking enchantment. Do not let me hear
Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly,
Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession,
Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God.
The only wisdom we can hope to acquire
Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.
Instead of trying to dissect or interpret it, I’ll leave the passage to linger in the air. Rather, as a way of finishing, let us return to Eliot’s ill-fated iceberg. Two of the lines are solidly evocative: ‘A different darkness, flowed above the clouds … A line, a white line, a long white line, A wall, a barrier, towards which we drove.’ Yet the prose never congeals, and he really fails to land it with an end that is frankly not very good: ‘My God man there’s bears on it’. My God man, indeed. Eliot’s genius did not prevent him for producing some mediocrity too. Not only does that offer hope for the rest of us, there is something heartening in the way that the brilliance of The Waste Land was ultimately reached through collaboration, taking its final shape in conjunction with the inspired editing of Pound. Moreover, the poem contains so many allusions and expressions from other texts and traditions, full of resonances and clues. It extends a dialogue, across cultures and time, while evading easy resolution or interpretation. The poem invariably exceeds our attempts at comprehension, it wriggles free from our determination to know with certitude. We are left making sense of it in our own time and in our own way, and this very process captures something powerful and profound about how we must engage with our world. Partial, incomplete, endless, but hopefully moving towards understanding more, or more understanding. More? Understanding?
Thank you again for engaging with my work. I’ll be taking a break and returning in January, but I think I might be posting a bit less frequently while trying to work on a book manuscript. Wishing you all the best for the end of the year. Hopefully 2023 will be kinder.