A Consciousness of Reality

A Consciousness of Reality 

By W. H. Auden The New Yorker

February 26, 1954 

In her diary, Virginia Woolf left behind the most truthful record of what a writer’s life is actually like. 

It is, probably, already too late to hope that someone will write a definitive history of Bloomsbury, that fascinating cultural milieu which formed itself around 1910, exercised its greatest influence during the twenties, and came to an end with the death of Virginia Woolf. There is an excellent account of the intellectual influences from which it was born in a posthumous essay by Maynard Keynes; for its later history we shall have to rely upon the memoirs of David Garnett, which are now appearing in England, and the journals of Virginia Woolf, of which “A Writer’s Diary” (Harcourt, Brace) is, we hope, only the first installment. 

Bloomsbury was not a “school” in any literary sense—there is no common Bloomsbury style or subject—nor was it centered on any one salon, like the Holland House set of the nineteenth century, or the Garsington set, to which many of its members also belonged. It included novelists, critics, painters, college dons but, curiously, no important poet (if one counts Virginia Woolf as a novelist) or composer. Nearly all its members had been to Cambridge and came from distinguished upper-middle-class families; i.e., without being aristocrats or large landowners, they were accustomed to efficient servants, first-rate meals, good silver and linen, and weekends in country houses. In rebellion against the rhetoric and conventional responses of their Victorian parents, hating dogma, ritual, and hypocritical expressions of unreal feelings, they, nevertheless, inherited from the Victorians a self-discipline and fastidiousness that made bohemian disorder impossible. “I have,” writes Virginia Woolf—and most of them could have written the same—“an internal, automatic scale of values; which decides what I had better do with my time. It dictates ‘This half hour must be spent on Russian,’ ‘This must be given to Wordsworth.’ Or ‘Now I’d better darn my brown stockings,’ ” and it is characteristic that the word she should find to express her critical reservations about “Ulysses” is “underbred.” Politically a little to the left of center, they all shared a deep distrust of Parties and the State, believing passionately in the supreme importance of personal relations: “If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country,” wrote E. M. Forster, and during the spring of 1940, when invasion seemed imminent, Virginia Woolf refused to be distracted from writing her life of Roger Fry: “It’s the vastness, and the smallness, that makes this possible. So intense are my feelings (about Roger); yet the circumference (the war) seems to make a hoop round them. No, I can’t get the odd incongruity of feeling intensely and at the same time knowing that there’s no importance in that feeling. Or is there, as I sometimes think, more importance than ever?” 

It was, I feel, a very happy idea to confine the selections from her diary to her reflections on her own career as a writer. Henry James in his notebooks, letters, and prefaces may have said more interesting things about literary technique, but I have never read any book that conveyed more truthfully what a writer’s life is like, what are its worries, its rewards, its day-by-day routine. Some readers, apparently, have been shocked to find how anxious and sensitive Virginia Woolf was about reviews, and how easily commendation of others could make her envious, but most writers, if they are honest, will recognize themselves in such remarks as “No creative writer can swallow another contemporary. The reception of living work is too coarse and partial if you’re doing the same thing yourself. . . . When Desmond praises ‘East Coker,’ and I am jealous, I walk over the marsh saying, I am I,” and even in her reflection on her father’s death: “Father . . . would have been 96 . . . and could have been 96, like other people one has known: but mercifully was not. His life would have entirely ended mine.” 

Some of us keep up an air of stoic indifference to reviews, some avoid distress by refusing to read them, but we all care, and for good reasons. Every writer who is original is often doubtful about the value of a work; praise from a critic whom he respects is a treasured reassurance, silence or blame a confirmation of his worst fears: “So I’m found out and that odious rice pudding of a book is what I thought it—a dank failure.” Then there are those critics who have made up their minds, for reasons of jealousy or fashion, about his work before they have read it, and the readers of those critics—rival contemporaries or the ambitious young—who are glad to hear that his work is bad: “I dislike the thought of being laughed at: of the glow of satisfaction that A., B., and C. will get from hearing V. W. demolished.” In Virginia Woolf’s case, the fact that she was a woman was a further aggravation. She belonged to a generation in which a woman had still to fight to be taken seriously as a writer. For her, therefore, good notices and brisk sales meant financial independence and masculine admission of her sex as a literary equal; when she writes, “I’m out to make £300 this summer by writing and build a bath and hot-water range at Rodmell,” she is thinking of the satisfaction it will give her, as a wife, to contribute substantially to the family budget. 

Sensitive as she was to attacks, she was never too vain to deny any truth there might be in even the most prejudiced: “The thing to do is to note the pith of what is said—that I don’t think—then to use the little kick of energy which opposition supplies to be more vigorously oneself. . . . To investigate candidly the charge; but not fussily, not very anxiously. On no account to retaliate by going to the other extreme—thinking too much.” 

These selections from Virginia Woolf’s diary begin in the last year of World War I, when, in spite of it, England still seemed to be pretty much the same country it had been before 1914, and end, a few days before her death, in the darkest days of World War II, when her London house had been destroyed by bombs and the future of England was problematic: “A kind of growl behind the cuckoos and t’other birds. A furnace behind the sky. It struck me that one curious feeling is, that the writing ‘I’ has vanished. No audience. No echo. . . . We live without a future. That’s what’s queer: with our noses pressed to a closed door.” 

At the beginning, her literary reputation is just established—“I get treated at great length and solemnity by old gentlemen.” During the twenties, she is universally admired; then, in the thirties, the wiggings start—she is bourgeois, oversensitive, out of date, and so on—and then she dies before she could become (what may well be the most painful fate of all) a sacred cow of whom everyone speaks in tones of hushed and bored reverence, but not before she has finished “Between the Acts,” which, in my opinion, is her masterpiece. 

With the exception of a description of an eclipse of the sun, which is as beautiful as any of the best pages in her novels, and an occasional comment, usually rather malicious, on people she knew, these selections are devoted to her thoughts upon the work in hand. Like every other writer, she was concerned about what particular kind of writer she was, and what her unique contribution could and should be. “My only interest as a writer lies, I begin to see, in some queer individuality; not in strength, or passion, or anything startling. Peacock for example: Borrow; Donne. . . . Fitzgerald’s Letters.” This is true if strength and passion are taken to mean what they conventionally mean when speaking of novelists. What she felt and expressed with the most intense passion was a mystical, religious vision of life, “a consciousness of what I call ‘reality’: a thing I see before me: something abstract; but residing in the downs or sky; beside which nothing matters; in which I shall exist and continue to exist. . . . How difficult not to go making ‘reality’ this and that, whereas it is one thing. Now perhaps this is my gift: this perhaps is what distinguishes me from other people: I think it may be rare to have so acute a sense of something like that—but again, who knows? I would like to express it too.” Moreover, as is true of most mystics, she also experienced the Dark Night when “reality” seemed malignant—“the old treadmill feeling, of going on and on and on, for no reason . . . contempt for my lack of intellectual power; reading Wells without understanding. . . . society; buying clothes; Rodmell spoilt; all England spoilt: terror at night of things generally wrong in the universe.” 

What is unique about her work is the combination of this mystical vision with the sharpest possible sense for the concrete, even in its humblest form: “One can’t,” she observes, “write directly about the soul. Looked at, it vanishes; but look at the ceiling, at Grizzle, at the cheaper beasts in the Zoo which are exposed to walkers in Regent’s Park, and the soul slips in.” In preserving this balance, her sex was probably a help; a man who becomes interested in the Ground of Being all too easily becomes like Lowes Dickinson—“Always live in the whole, life in the one: always Shelley and Goethe, and then he loses his hot-water bottle; and never notices a face or a cat or a dog or a flower, except in the flow of the universal.” A woman who has to run a house can never so lose contact with matter. The last entry in Virginia Woolf’s diary is typical: “And now with some pleasure I find that it’s seven; and must cook dinner. Haddock and sausage meat. I think it is true that one gains a certain hold on sausage and haddock by writing them down.” 

Though she took extraordinary pains over each book, she was a born spontaneous writer who never seems to have known periods when she was without a fresh idea; even while she was in the middle of writing one book, she got ideas for the next, and her output shows a greater variety than she is sometimes credited with. Each book set its particular problem and provoked in the author its particular psychosomatic reactions: “While I was forcing myself to do ‘Flush’ my old headache came back—for the first time this autumn. Why should ‘The Pargiters’ [‘The Years’] make my heart Jump; why should ‘Flush’ stiffen the back of my neck?” 

Within the years covered by this diary, Virginia Woolf wrote what her husband believes to be, and I agree with him, her three best books, “To the Lighthouse,” “The Waves,” and “Between the Acts,” and the fortunate reader is able to follow the writing of each. Here, for example, is the history of “The Waves”: 

1926 [She is finishing “To the Lighthouse”]: 

SEPTEMBER 30. It is not oneself but something in the universe that one’s left with. It is this that is frightening and exciting in the midst of my profound gloom, depression, boredom, whatever it is. One sees a fin passing far out. What image can I reach to convey what I mean? 

1927 [the year of “Orlando”]: 

FEBRUARY 21. Why not invent a new kind of play; as for instance: Woman thinks . . . He does. Organ plays. She writes. They say: She sings. Night speaks. They miss. 

JUNE 18. A man and a woman are to be sitting at a table talking. Or shall they remain silent? It is to be a love story; she is finally to let the last great moth in. 

1928: 

NOVEMBER 28. The poets succeeding by simplifying practically everything is left out. I want to put practically everything in: yet to saturate. . . . It must include nonsense, fact, sordidity: but made transparent. 

1929: 

JUNE 23. I think it will begin like this: dawn; the shells on a beach: I don’t know—voices of cock and nightingale; and then all the children at a long table—lessons. . . . Could one not get the waves to be heard all through? 

[On September 10th, she begins writing.] 

SEPTEMBER 25. Yesterday morning I made another start on “The Moths,” but that won’t be its title. . . . Who thinks it? And am I outside the thinker? 

DECEMBER 26. I wish I enjoyed it more. I don’t have it in my head all day like “The Lighthouse” and “Orlando.” 

1930: 

JANUARY 12. I can now hardly stop making up “The Waves.” . . . What is essential is to write fast and not break the mood. 

MARCH 17. The test of a book (to a writer) is if it makes a space in which, quite naturally, you can say what you want to say. As this morning I could say what Rhoda said. 

APRIL 9. It is bound to be very imperfect. But I think it possible that I have got my statues against the sky. 

APRIL 29. The greatest stretch of mind I ever knew. . . . I suspect the structure is wrong. Never mind. 

[She begins her second version of “The Waves.”] 

AUGUST 20. “The Waves” is I think resolving itself into a series of dramatic soliloquies. 

DECEMBER 22. . . . merge all the interjected passages into Bernard’s final speech and end with the words O solitude. 

1931: 

[On January 20th, she gets the idea, in her bath, for “Three Guineas.”] 

FEBRUARY 7. I wrote the words O Death fifteen minutes ago, having reeled across the last ten pages with some moments of such intensity and intoxication that I seemed only to stumble after my own voice, or almost, after some sort of speaker. . . . Anyhow it is done; and I have been sitting these fifteen minutes in a state of glory, and calm, and some tears. . . . How physical the sense of triumph and relief is! . . . I have netted that fin in the waste of water which appeared to me over the marshes out of my window at Rodmell. 

I do not know how Virginia Woolf is thought of by the younger literary generation; I do know that by my own, even in the palmiest days of social consciousness, she was admired and loved much more than she realized. I do not know if she is going to exert an influence on the future development of the novel—I rather suspect that her style and her vision were so unique that influence would only result in tame imitation—but I cannot imagine a time, however bleak, or a writer, whatever his school, when and for whom her devotion to her art, her industry, her severity with herself—above all, her passionate love, not only or chiefly for the big moments of life but also for its daily humdrum “sausage-and-haddock” details—will not remain an example that is at once an inspiration and a judge. If I had to choose an epitaph for her, I would take a passage from “The Waves,” which is the best description of the creative process that I know: 

There is a square: there is an oblong. The players take the square and place it upon the oblong. They place it very accurately; they make a perfect dwelling-place. Very little is left outside. The structure is now visible; what is inchoate is here stated; we are not so various or so mean; we have made oblongs and stood them upon squares. This is our triumph; this is our consolation. ? 

Published in the print edition of the March 6, 1954, issue. 

On My Way Again OLGA TOKARCZUK

On My Way Again 

OLGA TOKARCZUK 

The following is an excerpt from Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights, out August 14 from Riverhead. 

In what possible way could airports be considered inferior to actual cities, nowadays? 

The World In Your Head 

THE FIRST TRIP I EVER TOOK was across the fields, on foot. It took them a long time to notice I was gone, which meant I was able to make it quite some distance. I covered the whole park and even—going down dirt roads, through the corn and the damp meadows teeming with cowslip flowers, sectioned into squares by ditches—reached the river. Though of course the river was ubiquitous in that valley, soaking up under the ground cover and lapping at the fields. 

Clambering up onto the embankment, I could see an undulating ribbon, a road that kept flowing outside of the frame, outside of the world. If you were lucky, you might catch sight of a boat there, one of those great flat boats gliding over the river in either direction, oblivious to the shores, to the trees, to the people who stand on the embankment, unreliable landmarks, perhaps, not worth remarking, just an audience to the boats’ own motion, so full of grace. I dreamed of working on a boat like that when I grew up—or even better, of becoming one of those boats. 

It wasn’t a big river, only the Oder, but I, too, was little then. It had its place in the hierarchy of rivers, which I later checked on the maps—a minor one, but present, nonetheless, a kind of country viscountess at the court of the Amazon queen. But it was more than enough for me. It seemed enormous. It flowed as it liked, essentially unimpeded, prone to flooding, unpredictable. 


OCCASIONALLY ALONG THE BANKS it would catch on some underwater obstacle, and eddies would develop. But the river flowed on, parading, concerned only with its hidden aims beyond the horizon, somewhere far off to the north. Your eyes couldn’t keep focused on the water, which pulled your gaze along up past the horizon, so that you’d lose your balance. 

To me, of course, the river paid no attention, caring only for itself, those changing, roving waters into which—as I later learned—you can never step twice. 

Every year it charged a steep price to bear the weight of those boats because each year someone drowned in the river, whether a child taking a dip on a hot summer’s day or some drunk who somehow wound up on the bridge and, in spite of the railing, still fell into the water. The search for the drowned always took place with great pomp and circumstance, with everyone in the vicinity waiting with bated breath. They’d bring in divers and army boats. According to adults’ accounts we overheard, the recovered bodies were swollen and pale—the water had rinsed all the life out of them, blurring their facial features to such an extent that their loved ones would have a hard time identifying their corpses. 

Standing there on the embankment, staring into the current, I realized that—in spite of all the risks involved—a thing in motion will always be better than a thing at rest; that change will always be a nobler thing than permanence; that that which is static will degenerate and decay, turn to ash, while that which is in motion is able to last for all eternity. From then on, the river was like a needle inserted into my formerly safe and stable surroundings, the landscape composed of the park, the greenhouses with their vegetables that grew in sad little rows, and the sidewalk with its concrete slabs where we would go to play hopscotch. This needle went all the way through, marking a vertical third dimension; so pierced, the landscape of my childhood world turned out to be nothing more than a toy made of rubber from which all the air was escaping, with a hiss. 

MY PARENTS were not fully the settling kind. They moved from place to place, time and time again, until finally they paused for longer near a country school, far from any proper road or a train station. Then traveling simply became crossing the unplowed ridge between the furrows, going into the little town nearby, doing the shopping, filing paperwork at the district office. The hairdresser on the main square by the Town Hall was always there in the same apron, washed and bleached in vain because the clients’ hair dye left stains like calligraphy, like Chinese characters. My mom would have her hair dyed, and my father would wait for her at the New Café, at one of the two little tables set up outside. He’d read the local paper, where the most interesting section was always the one with the police reports, gherkins and jam jars stolen out of cellars. 

And then the vacations, their timid tourism, their Škoda packed to the gills. Endlessly prepared for, planned in the evenings in the early spring when the snow had all but stopped, though the ground had yet to come back to its senses; you had to wait until it finally gave itself to plow and hoe, when you could plant in it again, and from that moment forward it would take up all their time, from morning to eve. 

Theirs was the generation of motor homes, of tugging along behind them a whole surrogate household. A gas stove, little folding tables and chairs. A plastic cord to hang laundry up to dry when they stopped and some wooden clothespins. Waterproof tablecloths. A ready-made picnic set: colored plastic plates, utensils, salt and pepper shakers, and glasses. 

Somewhere along the way, at one of the flea markets that he and my mother particularly loved to visit (since they were not interested, for instance, in having their pictures taken at churches or monuments), my father had purchased an army kettle—a brass device, a vessel with a tube in the middle that you would fill up with tinder you lit on fire. Though you could get electricity at the campsites, he would heat up water in that smoking, spluttering pot. He’d kneel down over the hot kettle, taking no small pride in the gurgle of the boiling water he’d then pour over our tea bags—a true nomad. 

They’d set up in the designated areas, at campsites where they were always in the company of others just like them, having lively conversations with their neighbors, surrounded by socks drying on tent cords. The itineraries for these trips would be determined with the aid of guidebooks that painstakingly highlighted all the attractions. In the morning a swim in the sea or the lake, and in the afternoon an excursion into the city’s history, capped off by dinner, most often out of glass jars: goulash, meatballs in tomato sauce. You just had to cook the pasta or the rice. Costs were always being cut, the Polish zloty was weak—penny of the world. There was the search for a place where you could get electricity and then the reluctant decamping after, although all journeys remained within the same metaphysical orbit of home. They weren’t real travelers: they left in order to return. And they were relieved when they got back, with a sense of having fulfilled an obligation. They returned to collect the letters and bills that stacked up on the chest of drawers. To do a big wash. To bore their friends to death by showing pictures as everyone attempted to conceal their yawns. This is us in Carcassonne. Here’s my wife with the Acropolis in the background. 

Then they would lead a settled life for the next year, going back every morning to the same thing they had left in the evening, their clothes permeated by the scent of their own flat, their feet tirelessly wearing down a path in the carpet. 

That life is not for me. Clearly I did not inherit whatever gene it is that makes it so that when you linger in a place you start to put down roots. I’ve tried, a number of times, but my roots have always been shallow; the littlest breeze could always blow me right over. I don’t know how to germinate, I’m simply not in possession of that vegetable capacity. I can’t extract nutrition from the ground, I am the anti-Antaeus. My energy derives from movement—from the shuddering of buses, the rumble of planes, trains’ and ferries’ rocking. 

I have a practical build. I’m petite, compact. My stomach is tight, small, undemanding. My lungs and my shoulders are strong. I’m not on any prescriptions—not even the pill—and I don’t wear glasses. I cut my hair with clippers, once every three months, and I use almost no makeup. My teeth are healthy, perhaps a bit uneven, but intact, and I have just one old filling, which I believe is located in my lower left canine. My liver function is within the normal range. As is my pancreas. Both my right and left kidneys are in great shape. My abdominal aorta is normal. My bladder works. Hemoglobin 12.7. Leukocytes 4.5. Hematocrit 41.6. Platelets 228. Cholesterol 204. Creatinine 1.0. Bilirubin 4.2. And so on. My IQ—if you put any stock in that kind of thing—is 121; it’s passable. My spatial reasoning is particularly advanced, almost eidetic, though my laterality is lousy. Personality unstable, or not entirely reliable. Age all in your mind. Gender grammatical. I actually buy my books in paperback, so that I can leave them without remorse on the platform, for someone else to find. I don’t collect anything. 

I completed my degree, but I never really mastered any trade, which I do regret; my great-grandfather was a weaver, bleaching woven cloth by laying it out along the hillside, baring it to the sun’s hot rays. I would have been well suited to the intermingling of warp and weft, but there’s no such thing as a portable loom. Weaving is an art of sedentary tribes. When I’m traveling I knit. Sadly, in recent times some airlines have banned the use of knitting needles and crochet hooks on board. I never learned, as I say, any particular line of work, and yet in spite of what my parents always used to tell me, I’ve been able to get by, working different jobs as I go, staying afloat. 

When my parents went back to the city after their twenty-year experiment, when they had finally tired of the droughts and the frosts, healthy food that ailed all winter in the cellar, the wool from their own sheep assiduously stuffed inside the gaping mouths of comforters and pillows, they gave me a little bit of money, and I set off on my first trip. 

I took odd jobs wherever I happened to be. In an international factory on the outskirts of a large metropolis I assembled antennas for high-end yachts. There were a lot of people like me there. We were paid under the table and never questioned about where we came from or what our plans were for the future. Every Friday we got our money, and whoever didn’t feel like it anymore simply didn’t come back on Monday. There were high school graduates taking a break before applying to university. Immigrants still en route to that fair, idyllic country they were sure was somewhere in the West, where people are brothers and sisters, and a strong state plays the role of parent; fugitives from their families—from their wives, their husbands, their parents; the unhappily in love, the confused, the melancholic, those who were always cold. Those running from the law because they couldn’t pay off their debts. Wanderers, vagabonds. Crazy people who’d wind up in the hospital the next time they fell ill again, and from there they’d get deported back to their countries of origin on the basis of rules and regulations shrouded in mystery. 

Just one person worked there permanently, an Indian man who had been there for years, though in reality his situation was no different from ours. He didn’t have insurance or paid vacation. He worked in silence, patiently, on an even keel. He was never late. He never found any need to take time off. I tried to talk some people into setting up a trade union—these were the days of Solidarity—if only for him, but he didn’t want to. Touched by the interest I’d taken in him, however, he began to share with me the spicy curry he brought in a lunch box every day. I no longer remember what his name was. 

I was a waitress, a maid in an upscale hotel, and a nanny. I sold books. I sold tickets. I was employed in a small theater for one season to work in wardrobe, making it through that long winter ensconced backstage amidst heavy costumes, satin capes, and wigs. Once I’d finished my studies, I also worked as a teacher, as a rehab counselor, and—most recently—in a library. Whenever I managed to save any money, I would be on my way again. 


Benedictus, Qui Venit 

APRIL ON THE MOTORWAY, the sun’s red streaks across the asphalt, the world all delicately decorated with a glaze from the recent rain—an Easter cake. I’m driving on Good Friday, at dusk, from the Netherlands to Belgium—I don’t know which country I’m in now, since the border has vanished; unused, it’s been expunged. They’re playing a requiem on the radio. At the Benedictus, the lights come on along the motorway, as though reinforcing the blessing I’m getting involuntarily from the radio. 

But in reality it could not have meant anything other than that I’d made it to Belgium, where, happily for travelers, all the motorways are well lit. 

Airports 

ENORMOUS AIRPORTS assemble us together on the promise of connection with our next flight; it is an order of transferral and of timetables in the service of motion. But even if we had nowhere else to go in the coming couple of days, it would still be worth getting to know these spaces. 
Once they were in the outskirts, supplementing cities, like train stations. But now airports have emancipated themselves, so that today they have a whole identity of their own. Soon we may well say that it’s the cities that supplement the airports, as workplaces and places to sleep. It is widely known, after all, that real life takes place in movement. 

In what possible way could airports be considered inferior to actual cities, nowadays? They hold conference centers, interesting art exhibits, festivals, and product launches. They have gardens and promenades; they instruct: at Amsterdam’s Schiphol you can see excellent copies of Rembrandt, and there is an airport in Asia that has a museum of religion—a fabulous idea. We have access to good hotels and a wide variety of restaurants and bars from inside airports. There are little shops and supermarkets and shopping malls where you can stock up not only on provisions for the road, but also on souvenirs, in advance, so as to not waste any time once you get where you are going. There are gyms, places that offer both traditional and Eastern massage, hairstylists and customer service representatives from banks and mobile phone companies. And after satisfying the needs of our bodies, we can move on to spiritual succor at the numerous chapels and meditation spaces offered by airports. Sometimes they host readings and book signings for travelers. Somewhere in my backpack I still have the program from one such event: “The History and Foundations of Travel Psychology,” “The Development of Seventeenth-Century Anatomy.” 

Everything is well lit; moving walkways facilitate the migration of travelers from one terminal to another so they may go, in turn, from one airport to another (sometimes at a distance of some sixteen hours of flight!) while a discreet staff ensures the flawlessness of this great mechanism’s workings. 

They are more than travel hubs: this is a special category of city-state, with a stable location, but citizens in flux. They are airport-republics, members of a World Airport Union, and while they aren’t yet represented at the UN, it is only a matter of time. They are an example of a system where internal politics matter less than ties with other airport members of the Union—for only these provide them with their raison d’être. An example of an extroverted system, where the constitution is spelled out on every ticket, and where one’s boarding pass is one’s only identification as a citizen. 

The number of inhabitants here always varies quite a bit. Interestingly, the population increases in fogs and storms. Citizens, so as to feel comfortable anywhere, must not be too eye-catching. Sometimes, as one is going down a moving walkway, one passes one’s brothers-and sisters-in-travel, who may give the impression of having been preserved in formaldehyde—as though everyone is peering out at everyone else from inside bell jars. In the airport-republic, your address is your seat on the plane: 7D, let’s say, or 16A. Those great moving belts whisk us away in opposite directions, some voyagers in cloaks and hats, others in shorts and Hawaiian shirts, eyes blurred by snow or skin darkened by the sun, seeped in the damp of the north, the scent of rotting leaves and softened earth, or bearing desert sand in the recesses of their sandals. Some bronzed or tanned or burned, others blindingly, fluorescently white. People who shave their heads and those who never get a haircut. The big and tall, like that man, and the delicate and petite, like that woman who reaches up only to his waist. 

Airports also have a sound track, a symphony of airplane engines, a couple of simple sounds that extend into a space devoid of rhythm, an Orthodox twin-engine choir, gloomy minor, infrared, infrablack, largo, based on a single chord that bores even itself. A requiem that opens with the potent introitus of takeoff and closes with an amen descending into landing. 


A Very Long Quarter of an Hour 

ON THE PLANE between 8:45 and 9:00 AM. To my mind, it took an hour, or even longer. 


Plane of Profligates 

REDDENED NORTHERN FACES surprised by sudden sun. Faded by salt water, and that hair after several hours daily at the beach. Bags filled with dirty, sweated-in clothes. In their carry-ons last-minute purchases from the airport: souvenirs for loved ones, bottles of strong alcohol from the duty-free shop. Just men; they occupy the same part of the plane now in a sort of tacit pact. They settle into their seats, buckle their seat belts—they will sleep. They will make up for those nights without sleep. Their skin still gives off a smell of alcohol, their bodies have not yet managed to fully digest that two-week dosage—after several hours in the air this smell will have saturated the whole plane. In addition to a stench of sweat mixed with remnants of arousal. A good criminologist would uncover more evidence—a single long dark hair snagged on the button of a shirt; trace amounts of organic matter under index and middle fingernails—human, someone else’s DNA; in the cotton fibers of their underwear, microscopic skin flakes; in navels, microquantities of sperm. 

Before takeoff they get in a word or two with neighbors to their left and right. Reservedly they express their satisfaction with their recent stay—it wouldn’t do to say more, and in any case, it’s understood. Just a few, those most incorrigible, ask last questions about the prices and the range of services, and then—content—they doze off. It all turned out to be so cheap. 


Trains for Cowards 

THERE ARE TRAINS that are designed to be slept on. They are made up, in their entirety, of sleeping compartments and a single café car, not even a restaurant car, because a café car is enough. This type of train runs, for example, from Szczecin to Wroc?aw. It leaves at 10:30 at night and gets in at 7:00 in the morning, although the trip itself is not that long, only about two hundred miles, and you could make it in five hours. But the point isn’t always to get there faster: the company cares about its passengers’ comfort. The train stops in fields and stands in their nocturnal fogs, a quiet hotel on wheels. There’s no sense in trying to race the night. 

There’s a very good train from Berlin to Paris. And from Budapest to Belgrade. And from Bucharest to Zurich. I feel as though these trains were just invented for people with a fear of flying. They’re a little embarrassing—it’s better not to admit that you take them. And they’re not really advertised that much. They’re trains for long-standing customers, for that unfortunate percentage of the population that has a heart attack over every takeoff and every landing. For those with sweaty hands who wad up Kleenex after Kleenex in despair, and for those who grasp on to the flight attendants’ sleeves. 

This sort of train stands humbly on the side track, keeping a low profile. (For example, the one from Hamburg to Krakow at Altona, where it is concealed by billboards and other advertising.) People taking one for the first time wander around the station for a while before they find it. Boarding is carried out discreetly. In the outer pockets of suitcases there are pajamas and slippers, toiletry cases, earplugs. Clothing is hung carefully on special hooks, and at the minuscule washbasins closed off in closets the tools for teeth-brushing are arrayed. Soon the conductor will take breakfast orders. Coffee or tea? That’s the closest to freedom the railway gets. Had these passengers just got one of those cheap flights, they would have been there in an hour, and it would have cost them less money, too. They would have had a night in the arms of their longing lovers, breakfast at one of the restaurants on rue je‑ne‑sais-quoi, where oysters are served. An evening Mozart concert at a cathedral. A walk along the riverbanks. Instead they must fully surrender to the time taken by rail travel, must personally traverse every kilometer according to the age-old custom of their ancestors, go over every bridge and through each viaduct and tunnel on this voyage over land. Nothing can be skipped, nothing bypassed. Every millimeter of the way will be touched by the wheel, will for an instant be part of its tangent, and this will be an unrepeatable configuration for all time—of the wheel and the rail, of the time and place, unique throughout the cosmos. 

As soon as this train for cowards sets off into the night—practically without warning—the bar begins to fill up with people. Drawn in are men in suits who come for a couple of quick ones or for a pint to help them sleep, elegant gay men whose eyes dart around like castanets; forlorn football fans, separated from their friends—who’d flown—as insecure as sheep parted from their flocks; female friends over the age of forty who have left their boring husbands in search of some excitement. Slowly there begins to be less and less space, and passengers behave as though they are at a big party, and sometimes the amiable waiters will introduce them to one another: “This fellow travels with us every week”; “Ted, who says he won’t go to bed but is actually always the first one snoring”; “The passenger who travels every week to see his wife—he must really love her”; “Mrs. I’m Never Traveling on This Train Again.” 

In the middle of the night, as the train creeps along the plains of Belgium or Lubusz, as the nighttime mist thickens and blurs everything, the café car is host to a second round of visitors: exhausted, insomniac passengers who are not ashamed of the slippers on their unstockinged feet. They join in with the rest as though putting themselves in fate’s hands—whatever will be, will be. 

But it seems to me that the only things that can happen to them are the things that are for the best. After all, they are now in a place that is mobile, that moves through black space; they are borne by the night. Not knowing anyone and being recognized by no one. Escaping their own lives, and then being safely escorted right back to them. 

In Pursuit of Night 

IT’S HARD FOR ME TO GET A GOOD NIGHT’S SLEEP when I stay in a place for just one night. Now the city was slowly cooling off, calming down. My hotel was one run by the airlines and included in the price of my ticket. I was supposed to wait in it until tomorrow. 

On the bedside table there was a light blue pack of condoms. Right by the bed there was a Bible and the Teachings of the Buddha. Unfortunately, the plug for my electric kettle didn’t fit into the socket—so I would have to do without tea. Although perhaps it was coffee I should be drinking at this hour? My body was in no state to interpret the numbers on the clock built into the radio on the bedside table, although it would appear that numerals are international, despite being known as Arabic. Was the yellow glow out the window the onset of dawn, or was it a dusk that had already largely condensed into night? It was hard to determine whether this part of the world—over which the sun was about to appear or else had just vanished—was the East or the West. I concentrated on counting up the hours I’d spent on the plane, employing as an aid an image I’d once seen on the internet of a globe with a nocturnal bar that moves from east to west like a giant mouth that systematically devours the world. 

The square in front of the hotel was deserted, just stray dogs skirmishing around its closed stalls. I finally decided it must be the middle of the night, and without tea or a bath I went to bed. Although on my time, on the time I was carting around on my mobile phone, it was early afternoon. So I could not naively count on drifting off to sleep. 

WHAT YOU DO is get under the covers and turn on the TV—volume down, let it grumble, flicker, whine. You hold the remote out like a weapon, and you take shots at the very center of the screen. Each shot kills one channel, but then another follows directly on its heels. My game this time, though, was to pursue the night, to choose only those channels that were broadcast from places where it was currently dark. To picture the globe and the dark scar running down its gentle curvature, evidence of some past attack—disfigurement after an audacious operation to separate light and dark, those conjoined twins. 

Night never ends. Its dominion always spans some section of the world. And you can keep up with it with your remote, look exclusively for stations that fall within the shadowy purview of that dark, concave hand that upholds the earth, and in this way you can continue westward country by country, hour by hour. You will encounter an interesting phenomenon if you do. 

THE FIRST SHOT I FIRED at the smooth, mindless forehead of the television produced Channel 348, the Holy God Channel. Here I beheld a crucifixion scene—some movie from the sixties. The Virgin Mary had perfectly plucked eyebrows. Mary Magdalene must have had a corset on underneath her peasant dress, which was a dingy blue—you could tell it was a black-and-white movie that had been inexpertly colored later on. Her massive breasts, cone-shaped, protruding absurdly; her tiny waist. As the unattractive soldiers cackled and divided the outer garments, the filmmakers interspersed images of every cataclysm imaginable, footage that appeared to have been ripped right out of nature programs and inserted here without alteration. Now there were clouds gathering at an accelerated rate, lightning bolts, sky, funnel pointing down at the ground, whirlwind, finger of God—which would next sketch a series of flourishes on the earth’s surface. Now furious waves pounding a shore, some sailboats, some cheap-looking dummies blown to pieces by that riled water. Volcanoes erupting, a fiery ejaculation that might well have inseminated the sky—but it was a nonstarter; the lava slid inertly down the volcanoes’ sides. Thus was ecstasy unignited, demoted to plain old nocturnal emission. 

Enough. I took another shot. Channel 350, Blue Line TV. A woman masturbating, her fingertips disappearing between her slim thighs. The woman was talking to someone in Italian, speaking into a microphone that was clipped to her ear and reminiscent of a long thin tongue licking each of those Italian words right off her lips, every sì, sì, and prego. 

Channel 354, Sex Satellite 1: this time it was two girls masturbating, both bored—they must have been finishing up their shift, unable to hide their tiredness. One of them ran the camera that recorded them with her own remote control, so in that sense they were entirely self-sufficient. Every so often a kind of grimace would surface on their faces, as though they suddenly remembered what they were doing—eyes closed, mouth half open—but it would evaporate again in a flash, and tiredness and distraction would set in in its place. No one was calling them, despite what I presumed were alluring words in Arabic at the bottom of the screen. 

And suddenly Cyrillic—I’d taken another shot at the screen—Genesis in Cyrillic. The words that scrolled along the bottom of the screen were no doubt illustrious ones, illustrated in fact by images of mountains, of the sea, of clouds, plants, and animals. On 358 they were showing the best scenes by an apparent pornographic sensation whose name was Rocco. I paused here for a moment, noting a drop of sweat on his brow. As he executed his pelvic thrusts into anonymous buttocks, the porn star put one hand on his hip, and you might have mistaken him for someone concentrating on the practice of some samba move, or salsa move: one-two, one-two. 

On 288, Oman TV, they were reading verses from the Koran. So I supposed, anyway. A lovely and utterly unintelligible pattern of Arabic script floated placidly across the screen. It made me want to reach out and catch them first, hold them awhile before trying to decipher their meaning. Tease out those intricate flourishes, pull them out into a simple, soothing line. 

Another shot and there was a black minister and an audience eagerly rejoining hallelujahs. 

Night, then, quieted the raucous and aggressive news and weather and film channels, setting to one side the daytime ruckus of the world, bringing in instead the relief of the simple coordinate system of sex and religion. The body and the divine. Physiology and theology. 

—Translated by Jennifer Croft

President Obama & His Administration Did Indeed Have a Strategy for Syria:

President Obama & His Administration Did Indeed Have a Strategy for Syria: 

It is Not President Obama’s Fault if You Don’t Understand It and It is Not an Excuse for What the President Did Last Week

by Adam L Silverman Balloon Juice

(Figure 1: Combined Joint Task Force Operation Inherent Resolve Campaign Design)

Since the President’s horrendous decision to pull US Special Forces, as well as the US Marine Corps artillery batteries supporting them out of Syria, a cottage industry has sprung up among the President’s supporters and defenders that this is really the fault of President Obama because President Obama and his administration either had no Syria strategy or they had a bad one. And that this is the ultimate driver of the President’s betrayal of our Syrian Kurdish and Arab partners in the Syrian Democratic Forces that has enabled Erdogan to begin a campaign that will likely include an attempted ethnocide of Syria’s Kurds.

Some of these defenders would not know, let alone understand, low intensity warfare and/or strategy and policy if it walked up and bit them. Some actually know better. But all of them are actually grappling with a strawman. 

President Obama and his administration had two different, but related strategies regarding Syria. The first was to quite simply not get sucked into the Syrian Civil War. Humanitarian assistance would be provided to refugees seeking shelter in adjacent states, internally displaced Syrians that made it to where the US was operating along the Syrian-Iraqi border or within Syria would be provided for and protected, but the US would not get pulled into the Syrian Civil War, and the underlying proxy wars by regional powers that had been partially driving it, and risk escalating that conflict as it would have regional consequences. 

Frankly, from a semi-informed observer as this was playing out, this drove a number of President Obama’s actual advisors and senior national security officials nuts as several of them wanted the US to intervene because of the humanitarian crisis being created by the Syrian Civil War. Instead President Obama opted for what was, essentially, a containment strategy of trying to keep the Syrian Civil War and the proxy wars being fought by Israel, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Iran under its cover contained within Syria so as not to destabilize the rest of the region.

This strategy was really an assumption of risk strategy in order to buy time. The US, as the leader and largest and most militarily powerful member of the multinational coalition operating in the area, would assume the risk that the Syrian Civil War and the proxy wars for regional hegemony subsumed within it, would and could be kept within Syria. That they would not spill out and over its borders and negatively impact Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq, Israel. And that they wouldn’t negatively effect the two sets of high level diplomatic negotiations being undertaken in the region: the Israeli-Palestinian peace initiative of 2014 and what we now know were the JCPOA+5 negotiations with Iran regarding its nuclear energy and weapons programs. President Obama had decided to play for time. To assume the risk that either the Syrian Civil War, the proxy wars for regional hegemony taking place within it, or both wouldn’t blow up into a larger conflagration, spill over Syria’s borders, and engulf the entire region.

The Obama administrations’s second Syria strategy was for pursuing the campaign against ISIS. Specifically to apply low intensity and unconventional warfare doctrine to reduce ISIS’s physical caliphate that spanned Iraq and Syria’s shared border, and, ultimately, to reduce ISIS. This is the “by, with, and through” strategy that I’ve referenced here before and that you may have seen mentioned or referred to in news reports and other analyses. 

Simply put the “by, with, and through” strategy focuses on finding reliable host country partners who are willing to fight on their own behalf and then sending the US’s unconventional warfare specialists, the Green Berets (Special Forces) to embed with them in a train, advise, and assist mission. This is a very, very light footprint strategy. Small teams of US Special Forces known as Operational Detachments Alpha (ODAs), with specific enablers from other elements of US Special Operations Forces and, most likely some of the CIA’s paramilitary operators at the outset, as well as a small support element were sent into Syria to identify, recruit, and vet local Syrians that would then be trained, advised, and assisted with operations against ISIS. Eventually a small contingent of US Marine artillery were also moved into the US led Coalition’s theater of operations in Syria to provide fire support for the ODAs and their host country partners they were embedded with.

Train, advise, and assist has a very specific meaning here. Training means that the Soldiers on the ODAs would teach the Syrian Kurds and Arabs that are known as the Syrian Democratic Forces how to fight more effectively against ISIS. These host country fighters didn’t need to be taught how to fight, both the Syrian Kurds and Arabs have their own ways of war. What the Special Forces Soldiers on the ODAs did do was to teach them to fight more effectively at the tactical and operational levels against the specific type of enemy that is ISIS within the theater strategy that was established based on the US’s national strategy against ISIS. 

Training blends into advising and assisting, especially in regard to logistics and planning. As the Syrian Democratic Forces became a more effective host country fighting force, especially within the context of the type of campaign that had been designed to reduce ISIS’s physical caliphate, defeat them, and then retard their ability to continue to terrorize and destabilize the region*, the US Special Forces would do less assisting in the actual combat operations. Part of the assistance was also air support. The US led Coalition flew sorties day and night as necessary to degrade ISIS targets on the ground.  Here is the link to the continually updated list of these sorties and strikes.

The US and its coalition partners had been trying to successfully adapt and implement a “by, with, and through” strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan since GEN (ret) Petraues’s revised Counterinsurgency Manual, FM 3-24: Counterinsurgency, arrived to great fanfare in the mid aughts. The key idea behind a “by, with, and through” strategy is to empower the lowest societal level you can work with, ie the population layer/element, work from that level up (work from the bottom up), and then reconcile the tactical and operations gains made with the state to state strategic efforts, such as diplomatic initiatives and the use of economic and information power, being made at the top end. This never really worked during Operations Iraqi and Enduring Freedom (OIF and OEF) because we didn’t actually institute a true “by, with, and through” strategy. Rather, we had US Conventional Forces and our Coalition partners, also usually Conventional Forces, trying to implement and realize something that is the specialty of US Special Forces. I’m not knocking the efforts put in or the actual tactical and operational successes achieved, as there were and are many, just that the size of Iraq and Afghanistan and the need to have Conventional Forces work outside their expertise by undertaking an unconventional warfare strategy, did not lead to theater strategic success. Often because of failures at the national and theater strategic levels and despite the tactical and operational successes.

The size, scope, and scale of OIF and OEF made it impossible to let Special Forces take the lead as we simply do not have enough Green Berets to work one entire theater the size of Iraq, let alone two with the second theater being the size of Afghanistan. Even if we pulled in all the other US Special Operations Forces – SEALs, Operational Detachment Delta/Delta Force, Rangers, Air Commandos, Recon Marines, the Intelligence Support Activity (Gray Fox/Field Operating Group), Civil Affairs, and PSYOPers – and had them pick up the slack while ignoring their own missions and mission specialty areas, we still wouldn’t have had enough Special Operations Forces to do the job. There is a reason that Marines and Special Operations Forces fight battles and conventional Armies fight campaigns and wars in the Land Domain; because the former do not have the capacity to scale to the latter.

The campaign against ISIS in Syria, however, was different. The theater of operations was limited in size. We had been able to identify, recruit, vet, and then train reliable host country partners that we and our Coalition allies could work “by, with, and through”. A limited number of Operational Detachment Alphas, plussed up with personnel from other SOF elements, with a small support element and a small amount of Marine artillery batteries for fire support were tremendously successful! Perhaps beyond anyone’s legitimate expectations based on the mixed results from trying to apply the “by, with, and through” strategy during the latter portions of Operations Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom. And that success carried over to maintaining the peace in the area of operations once ISIS’s physical caliphate had been reduced. 

About 1,000 US Special Forces and Special Operating Forces, working with the SDF, had been able to reduce ISIS’s physical caliphate to nothing because the SDF, as the host country partners, did the hard, dangerous, and deadly work. Which is why the SDF suffered over 10,000 killed in action and the US Special Forces partnering with them suffered zero KIA in this campaign.

What the President has thrown away with his rash and ill considered pull out and betrayal of our Syrian Kurdish and Arab allies, and what his defenders and supporters don’t understand in their rush to defend him by blaming all of this on President Obama and his administration, is just how successful this campaign against ISIS has been. How much reward we reaped in exchange for the amount of blood and treasure wagered and risk assumed. And how well it was working to maintain the peace in this area of Syria by preventing ISIS from reestablishing a stable physical ground base of operations from which to try to reestablish the physical caliphate.

There wasn’t one single Obama administration strategy for Syria, there were two distinct and specific strategies. The first was to assume risk by not intervening in the Syrian Civil War in order to buy time for what were considered to be other regional priorities – the Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations and the JCPOA+5 negotiations and the reduction of ISIS. The second was an unconventional warfare strategy to degrade and reduce ISIS’s physical caliphate and reduce ISIS’s capacity to continue to terrorize and destabilize the region. 

While the first strategy’s efficacy is debatable, the second strategy to counter ISIS has been successful beyond all possible expectations. And the President has thrown away all of that success and by doing so betrayed our Syrian Kurdish and Arab partners, weakened and diminished the United States power and ability to project power, and degraded our moral standing. He has further destabilized the region. He has handed the Russians, the Syrians, the Iranians, and the Turks a victory without them having to actually contest for it. And he has most likely set the conditions for Erdogan to try to finally solve his Kurdish problem.

This post is dedicated to the late Sergeant First Class (ret) Terry Caldwell. Terry was my Area Specialty Officer (ASO) and taught me everything I know about small team operations and the practical realities of asymmetric, irregular, and unconventional warfare. Rest well Old Man!

* Interestingly enough the chart at the previous link is based on the four phases of conventional warfare, not the seven phases of unconventional warfare used by US Special Forces, which is the result of the commend element of CJTF-OIR being a conventional 3 star Corps headquarters. There is also a full description of the campaign at that link.

Disclosure: In May 2015 I was on site to present the kickoff and keynote briefing of XVIII Airborne Corps’ strategic assessment week and was on site throughout the week as the cultural subject matter expert/cultural advisor as their preparation for assuming command of Combined Joint Task Force Operation Inherent Resolve. 

The briefing focused on the regional strategic and geo-strategic considerations of the Levantine problem set and the campaign against ISIS. It was specifically prepared for the Commanding General, Command Group, senior staff, as much of their staff as could be jammed into the auditorium, and a variety of attendees by secure videoteleconference at a number of outstations. Also in attendance were several senior leaders (general officers) from our Coalition partners who were on the Coalition senior staff. In the weeks after the briefing I prepared a strategic assessment on how to leverage the campaign against ISIS to set the conditions in the theater of operations to secure the peace after the termination of military operations. 

My work for XVIII Airborne Corps was as a private consultant being paid on contract. I was asked to do this work by the then Corps’ G5 (Officer in Charge of Plans), who I’d both previously worked with at III Corps and who was a student at USAWC when I was the cultural advisor at both. My civilian mobilization/appointment as a senior civil servant at both USAWC and the Office of the Secretary of Defense for Security Dialogue assigned to US Army Europe were not political appointments. I was not then, nor have a I ever been, part of President Obama’s appointed foreign policy, national security, and/or defense policy team, though I did provide significant support to a number of those appointees during my civilian mobilization from 2010 through 2014.

On Joker

On Joker

BY AKIM REINHARDT Daily Koss

I saw Joker last week. I think it’s an excellent film. But the two friends I was with, whose tastes often overlap with my own, really hated it, and we spent the ensuing 90 minutes examining and debating the film. Critics are likewise fiercely divided. Towards the end of our conversation, one friend admitted that, love it or hate it, the film evokes strong reactions; it’s difficult to ignore.

One reason Joker is so divisive and controversial is that several issues have dogged the film.

The film seriously confronts issues of nihilism. Because this is almost unheard in major Hollywood movies, it’s challenging even sophisticated viewers.

Director Todd Phillips has recently said some very stupid shit.

In this Trumpist moment, it is difficult to separate the film from current concerns about violence, toxic masculinity, misdirected raging populism, and possibly even oppressive whiteness.

Any serious discussion of the film must deal with these and other issues. Let’s start with the bookends of Phillips’ intentions and possible audience interpretations.

Director Todd Phillips, he of the massively popular and progressively redundant Hangover film franchise, has recently joined the chorus of spoiled Gen X comedians whining about “cancel culture,” and opined quite stupidly that “woke culture” has made it impossible to do comedy, and thus, feeling cornered, he has turned to drama.

Phillips’ sentiments are moronic, fragile, self-absorbed, and immature. In the real world, “cancel culture” is called “business decisions.” If Saturday Night Live fires a new writer because some of his prior comedy amounted to little more than tired old racism, they have done so because they’re worried about their bottom line, not your feelings. But if you really want to put the lie to “woke culture” ruining comedy, just watch the raunchy comedy of a talented, young, boundary-pushing comic like Nikki Glaser. In that context, Phillips just sounds like another middle-aged, straight white guy angrily bitching that no one laughs at his dumb locker room jokes anymore. Rat tail!

So is it fair then to ask about Phillips’ artistic and political intentions in making this film? Yes and no.

For one, Phillips’ pablum about comedy isn’t particularly relevant. Beyond that, however, I don’t put too much stock into artistic intentions. Art is less about an authors’ intentions and more about the observers’ perceptions, which often do not line up. Thus, regardless of what Phillips’ intended, I and my friends can disagree sharply about a film, with neither of us being “wrong” per se. The film simply landed on each of us differently because like all people, we bring our own agendas and lenses to the experience. The exact same film was delivered to us in the exact same time and space, yet we received it differently. This kind of thing happens all the time. So in assessing art, does it really matter what inspired the artist to make it? Barring extreme cases, no.

Of course sometimes an artists’ intentions are absolutely unavoidable and cannot be separated from the final product. However, whether intentions are laudable or regrettable, didactic messaging is often a sign of ham-fisted art. In extreme cases, the result is as much propaganda as it is “art” (see: Socialist Realism).

I’m not interested in defining art, but clearly any definition of it must acknowledge art’s inherent subjectivity. If art is anything at all, then it is something open to interpretation. If you’re uncomfortable with that, stick to math.

Of course it’s perfectly fair to examine Todd Phillips’ intentions in making Joker. But that’s a different question than “Is the film good?” Some critics have accused Phillips of promoting a host of social ills. I find the case unconvincing, and I also thinking it’s telling that many of these critiques emerged before the film was nationally released and from people who hadn’t even seen it. However, even if Phillips’ motives were corrupt, it would hardly be the first time some dick head with bad motives made good art. (See: Richard Wagner, Ezra Pound, and about 10,000 others).

Which brings us to the inverse issue: concerns that misguided young men will see Joker as some kind of incel training manual. That, even if Phillips’ motives aren’t bad, the movie itself will encourage bad ideas and behavior among some. That regardless of Phillps’ front-end intentions, the back-end results will be grim.

But balling Joker up with such Trumpist ugliness is patently unfair to the film. Since when are we damning art because a minority of misguided observers misinterpret it as justification or inspiration for their own horrible actions? This is akin to claiming video games are responsible for school shootings and that we must banish the Beatles song “Helter Skelter” for fear it will produce another Charles Manson. As I will discuss further on, Joker is not a clarion call for toxic masculinity and violence. But anyone who takes it that way must be held accountable for their own stupidity and actions without blaming the film.

So how then do I understand Joker on its own terms? Let’s start with what I consider to be the film’s unquestionable artistic successes.

Front and center is Joaquin Phoenix. It’s safe to say that Phoenix is not for everyone; if you don’t dig his particular brand of intensity then you should definitely skip this film, because that’s its core. However, I’ve always enjoyed Phoenix’s work, whether it adds depth to shallow movies such as Gladiator, carries a biopic like Walk the Line, plays off of other outstanding actors as in The Master, or shapes cinematic atmosphere of films like You Were Never Really Here.

In Joker, Phoenix is the clear point of focus. The film is, after all, first and foremost a study of his titular character. Yet Phoenix also gets to play off of other excellent actors in supporting roles, including Frances Conroy, Zazie Beetz, and Robert DeNiro. And throughout, Phoenix’s performance dovetails perfectly with the film’s other obvious triumph, it’s cinematic atmosphere.

I’ve never been a comic book reader and have seen only a handful of super hero movies, but even I understand that Batman’s hometown of Gotham is at once based on New York and also a fictional city descending into a chaotic hellscape of poverty, violence, and corruption. To manifest this vision, Phillips and his crew filmed across the New York City area, including the decidedly unglamorous locales northern New Jersey and the Bronx, and recreated a version of desperate, decrepit 1970s – 1980s New York, replete with graffiti, garbage, crime, and old Times Square-style vice. I grew up in the Bronx during the 1970s and 1980s; trust me when I say the film does an excellent job of manufacturing an extreme version of dirty old New York.

But aside from excellent acting and a gripping cinematic atmosphere, what of the film’s larger artistic statements?

Central to the film, as I see it, is a successful effort to blur the lines between tragedy and comedy. This should come as no surprise in the character study of an eventual villain named “Joker.” And while it’s a three-thousand year old cliché to say that tragedy and comedy are two sides of the same coin, it’s still a sublime artistic achievement to not only stand that coin upright with its edge, but to also position it so that the edge itself, not either side, faces you. Doing so places the observer in the presence of both sides and neither side at the same time, making it difficult to discern and separate them, yet impossible to escape either. It fully enmeshes the observer simultaneously in both tragedy and comedy instead of simply having them take their turns.

Early in the film, I found myself laughing out loud at some of the horrible things that befall Arthur Fleck, the man who will one day become Joker. And I was the only one in the theater to do so.

But make no mistake; I was not laughing out of sadism. Indeed, true sadism is one of the few things in this world I will not brook. Rather, I laughed because I quickly recognized that comedy and tragedy would be intimately tangled in this film. And my isolated laughter reminded me of the last time I was the only person to chortle out loud in a crowded theater at a scene of ostensible horror: when the arch villain throws an ax into the back of the world’s most beautiful woman during the opening scene of Kung Fu Hustle. That act was so absurd it immediately signaled to me that this film would be an absurd comedy, and indeed Kung Fu Hustle is a true masterpiece of that genre. Joker, however, is not an absurd comedy. It is a filthy whirlwind that spirals from victimhood to villainy. Fleck’s comedy is tragic, and his tragedy is comedic. He is a professional clown and would-be standup comic who makes absolutely no one laugh unless they are laughing at him. He is a victim whose tragedy is so over the top and inescapable as to render it ludicrous.

This unyielding precept, of punching you hard in the gut when you want to laugh, and mocking you mercilessly when you want to cry, is, I believe, the film’s chief artistic triumph. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything quite like it, and the double helix roller coaster effect kept me enraptured, invigorated, and eventually half-exhausted in the best of ways.

Amid this confusing darkness is a roster of characters utterly devoid of heroes. There are only villains and victims, in all forms: old and young, rich and poor, white and minority, male and female. And that relentless darkness has led some to perceive the film as unforgivably nihilistic.

This Gotham is indeed rotten and rapidly drifting into nightmarish disaster. But exploring the nature of nihilism is hardly the same thing as endorsing it. And this film, so far as I can tell, is not an endorsement or celebration of nihilistic horror.

For starters, the movie does not exist in a narrative vacuum. All 122 minutes of it are back story to a canonical series of comic books, TV shows, and films that debuted 80 years ago. This prequel is merely a newly imagined opening chapter to that incredibly well established narrative, and so the nihilistic horrors we endure cannot be the narrative end game, even if by implication; a hero will in fact rise after all. His name is Batman. And of course Batman/Bruce Wayne’s own well established back story is fairly horrific: as a boy he personally witnesses his parents’ murder. The scene is recreated late in this film, but that’s hardly some Todd Phillips nihilistic fantasy; it’s eight decades of Batman back story. The Batman universe might have originally been written for kids and teens, but Joker is a very adult take on it.

In constructing this version of Gotham, Phillips confronts a potentially brutal question: How awful must Gotham be to eventually produce so moody and troubled vigilante such as Batman, and for the city’s denizens to embrace such a brooding, tortured hero? The answer is, Pretty awful.

But more to the point, how awful must Gotham be to produce such a horrific villain as Joker?

Arthur Fleck is a victim long before he is a villain. His life is a story of abuse and exploitation. He suffers from mental health problems, partly inherited and partly exacerbated by childhood neglect, beatings, and deprivations. Despite being forever damaged and scarred by those horrors, Arthur has grown to be an adult with a heart full of goodwill. This in turn opens him up to exploitation. His mother exploits his love. A corrupt economy exploits his labor. False friends exploit his trust. And society’s nastier elements, which come at him from various angles, violently exploit his glaring vulnerabilities. Nor does Arthur garner any sympathy, either from a society that cuts him loose by slashing funding to social services he so desperately needs just to hang on, or from a wealthy man (young Bruce Wayne’s father) who claims to be the city’s savior even as patronizes and distances himself from its on its “lessers,” and angrily and violently denies Arthur the love he so desperately craves. And throughout it all, Arthur laughs. Not because he thinks its funny, but as a symptom of his deteriorating mental health.

Indeed. Villains are made, not born. As Arthur suffers beyond the breaking point, his clownish makeup begins to smear and adhere, disfiguring him and covering up his true self.

But we are not here to celebrate Arthur Fleck’s moral downfall and rise to villainy as Joker. That’s made clear when his own sense of tenuous success turns out to be nothing more than a series of psychotic hallucinations. Chief among them is a fantasy that his neighbor Sophie is his loving girlfriend. In reality, she flirted innocently with Arthur when he was fellow victim in a broken elevator. But as the evil begins to envelop and emanate from Arthur, she is terrified of him, any loving connection between them only one of Arthur’s delusions as he descends into madness.

Despite being one of the film’s many victims, it seems that Arthur’s fictive girlfriend escapes real trauma. Her potential suffering at Arthur’s hands, while quite scarey, does not come to fruition on screen. Sparing her is perhaps his final act kindness before the ultimate descent into evil. Or, if you think he did kill her and perhaps her child, then it is his final turn towards evil.

Either way, Sophie is our protagonist’s literary foil. Each is a victim, tied to each other through circumstance, but each’s suffering serves as a signpost to a different path in life. Sophie exists, in part, to tells us that Joker’s impending villainy is unjustified despite all his sufferings, and that his horribleness is tragic not heroic.

Furthermore, as Arthur’s mood and actions darken amid worsening circumstances, his slow bend from pure victim to iconic ultra villain is partly accidental. His violence begins in self-defense. And he has no intention whatsoever of igniting a larger movement of chaotic social violence, but he will inspire one inadvertently, and that movement will literally find him and scoop him up.

Arthur’s pivotal and semi-sympathetic turn towards villainy accidentally inspires a new social movement of misguided populism. Initially attracting people who are rightly disgusted with their society’s failures, the movement soon grows antagonistic and violent. Its members anonymously pay homage to Arthur, whose true identity is unknown to them, by wearing clown masks. And as the movement turns darker, it mirrors Arthur’s crumbling personal life and descent into madness. Protests become violent and unfocused while Arthur’s tragicomic suffering and victimhood yields to a wild id of rage. If Arthur’s never-was girlfriend sees through him and represents his lost innocence, this social movement he accidentally inspired misinterprets his unintentional cues and blindly hurtles down the wrong path right along with him. And when Arthur’s transformation into Joker is nearly complete, when his violence is utterly unjustifiable despite even his obscene sufferings, it is a group of masked strangers, would-be loyalists, who violently free him from police custody, physically raise him up from the wreckage of a totaled police cruiser, and exalt him as their dark jester.

This penultimate scene explains how it is that Joker eventually gets his gang of criminals. He will not choose them, search for them, or even consider that they exist. Rather, as he gives in to madness and violence, they will find and choose him, and anoint him their King of Fools.

Those who crave a strong moral message, even if it is a subtle one, will be taken aback. One friend accused the film of casting bad and good characters as equals. But I do not think Joker is guilty of such a false equivalence. After all, Arthur’s would-be girlfriend has readily seen through his darkness and rejected it. So should the viewer.

So what is Joker? First and foremost it is the character study of a famous antagonist that serves as a vehicle for Joaquin Phoenix’s riveting performance. It is also a consideration of what produces evil. And perhaps most disorienting to many, it is an adult view of a comic book world sans any heroes.

As the credits roll, Gotham is nearing a new rock bottom, and is still more than a decade away from finding its dark paladin. For now and in the immediate future there will only be villains and victims. But an absence of heroes does not reduce villains and victims to equals. Rather, it leaves us to wonder how we might build a world without either of them.

Akim Reinhardt’s website is ThePublicProfessor.com