on The Age of Loneliness by Laura Marris
Loneliness is in the news. Last year, the U. S. Surgeon General issued a report on “Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation,” finding the causes for it in our eroded social connections, resulting in a decline our bodily and mental health, prosperity, safety and resilience. Matthew Shaer’s essay in the New York Times magazine, “Why Is the Loneliness Epidemic So Hard To Cure,” reiterates that report at the outset, then notes that usage of the word “loneliness” began to spike in the Romantic era via “war, mechanization, the rise of the metropolis, war again … communities disintegrated.” In The Birth of Tragedy (1872), Nietzsche put it this way: “For now in every exuberant joy there is heard an undertone of terror, or else a wistful lament over an irrecoverable loss. It is as though … nature were bemoaning the fact of her fragmentation, her decomposition into separate individuals.”
In The Age of Loneliness, Laura Marris gives sound, shape and depth to her own world of loneliness, though it is not a forlorn vision, or rather, these personal essays are not primarily interested in performing distress. Here the instinct for memoir emerges from the passing of her father, an avid bird watcher who had introduced his daughter, “a child of the late eighties and early nineties,” to the woods and shoreline of Connecticut. But also, she recalls her itinerant life while longing for the presence of her husband; he was working in Buffalo while she commuted to Boston. (Today they both teach at the University of Buffalo.) “In Safer Skies for All Who Fly,” she reflects on the ecological effects of air travel, not just pollution but species decimation: “habitat loss isn’t just a phenomenon that takes place on the ground.” She can tell us that “the first bird to be hit by a plane was a redwing blackbird. In 1905, it met the top of the Wright Brothers’ aircraft during a flight over a cornfield in Ohio.” She takes us to the Feather Identification Lab at the Museum of Natural History in D.C. where bird strikes are identified, and she introduces us to the FAA’s wildlife-strike database used for “wildlife hazard mitigation.”
Although The Age of Loneliness is stocked with factual material about things that have happened, its motivating impulse motions toward something happening during the process of writing itself. Our way of life wants us to be inattentive to an environment from which we cannot exclude ourselves and in which we are always outnumbered. Referring to Google Maps and Waze, she says, “if the world is a map read by a machine, you never need to cultivate the intimacy with landscape that comes from wayfinding ability.” Before he relocated to Buffalo, Marris’ husband worked in a studio at Ann Arbor’s 32-acre development called Mcity. There she “heard a kind of ecological silence, a flatness in the aural landscape, an absence that triggered a subtle but persistent unease.” This is also an apt description of the essays’ own undertone of disquietude – and its urge to perceive what seems to be missing. She quotes landscape artist Richard Smithson: “It is the dimension of absence that remains to be found.”
Just a month before this book arrived in my post office box, I walked down to the salt tidal pond nearby to find a row of female horseshoe crabs at the shore. They were mating with their smaller male inseminators, sometimes paddling off a few yards and returning as if impatient to get it over with. And then I read “Cancerine,” the fourth essay in Marris collection, devoted to Limulus polyphemus, the Atlantic horseshoe crab’s official moniker. These anthropods have “lived through all five mass extinctions, surviving on this planet for some 445 to 475 million years.” In the late 1800’s, humans were harvesting Limulus in such numbers that “In less than one human lifetime, in an eyeblink, people have wiped out at minimum fifty to one hundred million crabs in the Delaware Bay alone.” The powdery fertilizer product is called Cancerine. Now, because Limulus “has an immune system that may well be one of the oldest in the world,” its blood is collected to create Amebocyte Lysate, used to test the efficacy of vaccines. Again, lots of facts, all riveting. But what is my actual relationship to our salt pond, beyond nature-gazing, that is? This is what Marris, with uncommon acuity, helps us to envision through the companionability of her languaged presence.
While reading, I recalled a moment from my childhood – watching the local news report of the crash of an Electra prop-jet into the waters off Logan Airport. October 4, 1960. The commuter plane had struck a flock of starlings at an altitude of 120 feet. Sixty-two people died. My parents’ house was located just to the south of the Boston-New York shuttle flight path; the intermittent sound of engines was an aspect of our neighborhood. Of course, the news was terrifying. But the starlings? Dispensable. Invasive. Crop-damaging. Noisy.
“As landscapes diminish, every generation has to unlearn the previous generation’s normal,” Marris writes. As an airborne commuter, she perceived “a deep two-body problem – between the person and the passenger in me.” She has given us a model of expression, inquiry and attitude to begin to resist the normalization of our lonely disconnection from what has left and what is leaving.
[Published by Graywolf Press on August 6, 2024, 208 pages, $18.00 trade paperback]
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on Mortevivum: Photography and the Politics of the Visual by Kimberly Juanita Brown
In the wake of the devastating earthquake in Haiti in 2010, Rebecca Solnit objected to photos and captions that claimed to show rampant looting in Port-Au-Prince. “The pictures convey desperation, but they don’t convey crime,” she wrote. “In disaster after disaster, at least since the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, those in power, those with guns and the force of law behind them, are too often more concerned about property than human life.” Her essay, “Words Can Kill: Haiti and the Vocabulary of Disaster,” was collected in Picturing Atrocity: Photography in Crisis (Reaktion Books, 2012), one of many books and texts dealing with the agonized relationship between the eye of the photographer, the photograph, and the deployment of imagery.
Commentary on imagery of Haitian people in precarity resumes in Mortevivum, Kimberly Juanita Brown’s fiercely illuminating study of photos and their viewers who “traffic in the visual demise of those registering as black.” Referring to the Haitian Revolution of 1791-1803, she asserts, “Haiti registers photographically to replace slave success (and revolutionary overthrow of the empire) with modernity’s revenge: a visual culture determined to illustrate, with devastating immediacy, how little that has meant to the world.” In a 1995 lecture, Nell Irvin Painter used the psychological term “soul murder” to denote the effects of deprivation, child abuse, rape, battering and harassment on blacks. Brown devised her own designation: “Mortevivum is the term I have come up with to understand this particular photographic phenomenon: the hyperavailability of images in the media that traffic in tropes of impending black death … they make any tragedy, any crisis, an opportunity for viewers to find pleasure in black people’s pain … . If we were to draw out a map illustrating instances of antiblackness, it would cover the known world.”
After President Kennedy was killed in Dallas in 1963, Life magazine published stills from the Zapruder film, but not of the lethal third shot. (The film wasn’t broadcast on national TV until 1975.) At Lyndon Johnson’s swearing in on Air Force One, Lady Bird Johnson asked Jackie Kennedy if she would like to change out of her bloodied dress and stockings. She replied, “No, let them see what they have done.” There is usually some deliberation about what we believe should be seen or withheld. In 1974, Toni Morrison at Random House published the nonfiction anthology The Black Book, including a photo of white people enjoying themselves at a lynching. Maurice Berger’s visual history of the Civil Rights movement, For All the World To See (Yale, 2010), includes an horrific image of Emmett Till’s disfigured corpse in a casket. But Brown directs our attention to a pervasive global othering and malign intention. For instance, she looks at Pulitzer Prize-winning photography from the last 40 years and finds, “Violent imagery coalesces around black subjects from present-day Zimbabwe to Ethiopia, to California, New Jersey, and Liberia.”
Brown extends the critique of photography by figures such as art historian John Tagg who in The Disciplinary Frame (2009) wrote, “Documentary strategies and their rhetorics of recruitment have to be mapped into a historically specific field of cultural politics … It is not only that ‘documentary value’ can no longer be anchored in the camera itself and its imagined access to the real, so that there can be no more talk arising from the nonmanipulative use of this camera’s properties.” Brown considers the visualizations of slaughter in Rwanda, South Africa, Haiti and the United States, and “photography’s ability to render blackness as stagnation … Blackness and death as ‘synonyms’ is the tally here.” Allusive and spirited, Brown’s narrative is an engrossing read that begins with indictments but leads us toward a rehabilitation of our vision. When violence occurs and people are killed, injured and distressed, what do we want or expect to see? What does the “high tolerance for black death” say about our media?
In her chapter on “The Viewer,” Brown considers “the possibilities engendered by refusing to capitulate to spectacles of violence that have held black people in a state of rigid dehumanization.” But Mortevivum is mainly focused on the reportage of violent events and how the front pages of media like The New York Times (a series of such pages are included) featured photos of black death without sufficient context. She also notes, “After Michael Brown was shot and killed in Ferguson, Missouri, his family asked that images of his dead body lying in the street not be circulated via social media. Their requests were largely ignored.”
In her moving conclusion, Brown recalls the final time she showed images of black death in a presentation at MIT in 2017. She recalls, “While I had quietly agreed to manage the psychic toll of this project for myself, I had not thought enough about the book’s presence as a traumatizing force that other black people would have to guard themselves against.” Those deathly images are not shown in Mortevivum.
[Published by the MIT Press on February 26, 2024, 143 pages, $$18.95USD/25.95CAN paperback]
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on Immediacy, Or The Style of Too Late Capitalism by Anna Kornbluh
A friend who teaches creative writing at a Boston-area college told me that one of her workshop students turns their chair away from their peers, faces a wall, and remains silent. I asked, “Why don’t you throw them out?” She replied, “Obviously you haven’t been on campus lately.” I was reminded of this exchange while reading Anna Kornbluh’s gutting of voice-first writing in Immediacy. Kornbluh takes aim at the high valuation bestowed on presence in literary production in which “fiction, narrative, impersonality, and collectivity withdraw; reality, voice, personality, and atomism ascend.” She maintains that late capitalism’s erosion of public forums and our media culture’s damage of real attachments have left many of us in a state of swollen abjection, further heightened by eco-worries. Immediacy style, she says, is one “in which voice and persona are solidities that precede forms, concepts, and canons.” Here the writer’s main subject matter isn’t the content under consideration but rather the writer’s “journey” (reparative, unfettered, unfiltered) into the moment of writing.
Kornbluh’s assertions suggest that you may think you’re a transgressive freedom-fighter when you blend or smash up the genres, but you’re actually a capitalist adjunct. She writes, “The world’s proliferating abasements continually render immediacy more seductive and continually inflate its apparent purchase, obscuring immediacy’s own role in immiseration … this is pharmakon: remedy and poison in one.” What’s missing is mediation – “the public, conceptual, and reasoned meditations” that allow constructive critique. Immediacy offers itself up as a response to societal dissolution but it takes “too much of its logic from the flames.” The unabating flow of immediacy, she says, mimics the rushing circulation of consumerist capitalism itself, asking to be regarded as a symptom and alluding “to a desire for mediation while also ideologically enjoining us to enjoy our devastation.”
In her previous three books, Kornbluh operated as a Marxist theorist in the clotted mode of Fredric Jameson. She continues as such here, but widens her lens to take in not only literature but also video, television, performance art, and journalism. For Marxists who advocate the process of dialectical materialism and historical inevitability, the abased autofictionist’s abandonment of a communal future is anathema, leaving us participating in a “broader culture of privatization and personalization.” In Immediacy, Kornbluh’s dismissiveness is tart and unrelenting, even satirical at times. She pivots her stance between culture pundit and structural theorist — or rather, she makes a plucky attempt to fish with two rods. Her locutions include neologisms, memes and slang.
A colleague told me that in Immediacy Kornbluh has picked apart the direct access style of our moment in some detail, but this isn’t what I encountered. Instead, Kornbluh writes energetically about the unsatisfying surfaces, the immediate effects, of popular titles by Sheila Heti, Ocean Vuong, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Rachel Cusk and a few others. And then she names memoirs (“the more abject the better”) by the likes of Jesmyn Ward, Hilary Mantelo, Roxane Gay, Alexander Chee, Saidya Hartmann and many others. I’m not quite certain, but it seems that she approves of Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts and work by Lauren Oyler.
But her generalizations are often compelling, or at least worth a second look. She writes, “Righteously appealing, immediacy theory takes for its content self-scrutiny and indeterminate entanglement, and increasingly it takes for its form an auto-authorizing, lyrical, fragmented first-personalism.” Such works inspire (or demand) empathy and valorize disclosure. What bothers her is the supposed disingenuousness of these narratives, inundating the reader with first-person incessancy: “far from crisis critique, flow is crisis continuous.” This observation comports with some of my experiences as reader.
But for me, in the end, the prevailing merit of Immediacy lies in the questions it triggers about how literature and writing are taught in the academy, or what distinguishes artful first-personalism from the banal or predictably victimized version. What about the onrush of agitated lineated memoir that floods the poetry lists of what we used to call “indie presses”? Do people keep secrets anymore? And as for the recalcitrant student in my opening anecdote, is there a connection, however marginal (or not), between the teaching of “voice-centered experiential writing, reflective writing, and metacognitive writing” and sociopathy? Kornbluh notes the stunning growth of the MFA cottage industry (6500 writing degrees awarded in 2013) and regards it as the academy’s capitalistic monetization of first-person overflow: “Universities themselves cannot have wholly manufactured this explosive demand for writing degrees. Rather, the popularity of these paths of study exemplifies the broader culture of privatization and personalization.”
Kornbluh makes her own case for the value of art, emphasizing its potential to “estrange, abstract, and mediate … [but] Immediacy’s propensity to quiver with extremities minimizes art’s capacity to imaginatively break with the merely given.” She describes the artistic effects inherent in third-person fictional narration, scorned by Rachel Cusk et al. “The whole point of fiction has always been to forget about me,” said Peter Orner. In a memoir published in Liberties, Christian Lorentzen said of his generation, “We may have shown up too late to be Modernists or Postmodernists of Dirty Realists or members of the New York School or writers of the New Narrative, but we weren’t too late for Publicity. We weren’t too late to be Famous.” Thus, Knausgaard et al.
I’ve taken pleasure from several immediacy-texts produced by those who feel disempowered and compelled to let me know that they exist, that they matter, and that they won’t be undone by oligarchs and autocrats. When I think of an autofiction like James Jeffries’ Wings of Red or Rachel Zucker’s presence-first memoir Soundmachine, Kornbluh’s claims seem cranky and excessive. But when immediacy narratives are displays of unmeasured flow and self-assertion more than textured response, they may fail me, regardless (or because) of their can’t-miss sincerity. Same goes for their convictions, usually approved in advance by their affiliated readers. As Milan Kundera said, “The enigma hides behind political certainty.”
[Published by Verso on January 23, 2024, 240 pages, $24.95 paperback]
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on Hitler’s People: The Faces of the Third Reich by Richard J. Evans
I initially hesitated to read Richard J. Evans’ Hitler’s People because all of his earlier books on the Third Reich are here on my shelf, along with biographies by other historians of Heinrich Himmler, Joachim von Ribbentrop and Reinhard Heydrich. But then I read Evans’ introduction in which he asks, among other questions, “Why did so many leading Germans in responsible positions, in key institutions of society, go along with dictatorship, war and genocide?” These questions, he says, “have gained new urgency and importance. For, since shortly after the beginning of the twenty-first century, democratic institutions have been under threat … Strongmen and dictators are emerging, often with considerable popular support, to undermine democracy …”
Evans devotes the first 100 pages to Hitler himself, providing an historical armature for the biographical chapters to follow. In the wake of his failed putsch and the trial that landed him in jail, “Hitler realized that the events of 1923-24 had catapulted him into a position of virtually undisputed leadership in the ultra-nationalist circles of the far right.” From then on, members of those circles, often bickering with each other, drew closer to him – while Hitler winnowed the ranks until he selected those men he could trust to carry out his agenda. “His earlier political rivals had been sidelined or dismissed,” Evans writes, which reminded me of Trump’s decimation of the Tea Party while co-opting the anger it had unleashed. “Only men who regarded him as a genius were allowed to come close,” Evans says of Hitler’s acolytes, “critics were not tolerated.” In his New Yorker article “Inside the Trump Plan for 2025” (July 22, 2024), Jonathan Blitzer writes, “Ever since Trump was acquitted in his first impeachment trial, in 2020, he has threatened to purge the government of anyone he considered loyal.” Hitler had little patience for administrative detail and made his own personnel decisions; Trump makes key decisions about the inner circle, and can rely on the Heritage Foundation and the American Accountability Foundation to vet the ranks of federal departments and the judiciary, looking for traitors.
We all seem to know what “Nazism” was and is, but it’s hard to define because it embraces a vague if radical ideology. Although Evans leaves no doubt that Hitler’s adherents embraced his hatred of Socialists, Communists, democrats and Jews, he also shows that characters like Hermann Göring, Julius Streicher, Hans Frank and Franz von Papen were drawn to the insurrection through appetites, habits and weaknesses particular to themselves. When writing on Rudolph Hess, Albert Speer, or Ernst Röhm and the others, Evans gauges the degree to which each figure was motivated by ideology, or hostility, or ambition. Although the story of each figure reiterates the foundational story of Hitler’s rise to and exercise of power, Evans never allows the narrative to bog down with repetition. Each figure develops a distinct relationship to Hitler. From my copy of his diary, here is Joseph Goebbels’ entry from March 9, 1943: “The Fuehrer became exceptionally open-hearted and personal at the end of our discussion. He hides absolutely nothing from me. Intimate talks like that really strengthen one’s heart. The Fuehrer assured me again and again that he was not only extremely satisfied with my work, but that he had the greatest admiration for it.”
Reinhard Heydrich was chief of the SS security service and the Gestapo, and a leading planner of the Final Solution. His profile reinforces the notion of the idiosyncrasies of Hitler’s main players. Like most of his contemporaries, Heydrich shared the traumas of the post-WWI generation. Yet unlike other Hitler buddies, he wasn’t a radical activist during the 1920’s and was repudiated by his fellow officers for not being sufficiently nationalistic. In 1931, a military court dismissed him from military service. Just at that moment, he met his future wife, an ardent Nazi, who convinced him to apply for a staff position in Heinrich Himmler’s elite SS. Perhaps to compensate for his lack of early Nazi credentials, he recast himself as an extreme figure of right-wing values. He claimed to have belonged to anti-semitic groups, but no records prove this claim — yet he ended up bearing responsibility for the “solutions of the Jewish question.” Evans’ fascinating portrait of Heydrich follows this path towards radicalization.
I ask my friends: how confident are you that your local police force would defend your town from armed insurrectionists? Hitler’s People proves how, with the loyalty and determination of a few men on top, dazzled by the promise of ultimate authority and influence, Hitler could rapidly wrest control of nation-wide police surveillance and enforcement. To a person, those men were the survivors of Hitler’s elimination of those who stood in his way.
[left: Ernst Röhm & his boss] In his introduction to The Goebbels Diaries, Louis P. Lochner mentions in passing that the only man in the Nazi hierarchy who addressed Hitler by the familiar “Du” was Ernst Röhm, the head of the Nazis’ SA paramilitary wing. Röhm was gay. Evans writes, of this anomalous character, “Despite his personal closeness to Hitler, he was never part of the Nazi leader’s inner decision-making circle and always maintained a degree of autonomy within the Nazi movement.” In 1934, when Hitler became concerned about the size and independence of the SA, the Nazis arrested Röhm and ordered his execution.
In his conclusion, Evans writes, “The willingness of ordinary Germans, members of the armed forces and the SS to engage in mass killing was strengthened by a sense of loyalty towards their comrades and the knowledge that what they were doing was approved, indeed, desired by the state they served, so that what they knew to be a transgression of the moral norms approved by the rest of the world would receive absolution.” But when many others in “rest of the world” are doing the same thing, transgression may seem even more urgent and essential. “That is why it is important above all,” says Evans, “to examine the mentalities and the motives of the people who were responsible for it.” Are responsible for it.
[Published by Penguin Press on August 13, 2024, 598 pages, $35.00US/$48.00CAN hardcover]