Writing in Dark Times
Last week I turned seventy - three score and ten. There was a time when I couldn’t even begin to imagine what it would feel like to be this old. Looking forward, seven decades on earth seem like an impossibly distant landmark. In retrospect, those decades seem to have passed in a flash. As Constantine Cavafy once put it:
The days of our future stand in front of us/like a row of little lit candles - golden, warm, and lively little candles/The days past remain behind us, a mournful line of extinguished candles.
I don’t feel quite so desolate about the candles. They may be extinguished, but they did burn, and so many of those lost days still shine brightly in my memory. I feel lucky to have had them and lucky to still be here, when so many who deserved to live this long did not get the chance. At the age of seventy, I am probably more aware than I once was of my ephemerality and inconsequentiality, but I try to let that awareness sharpen my appreciation of the time I still have.
Much of my life has been based around writing, and I am grateful, beyond measure, that I have been able to do this for so many years. It would be an understatement to say that my writing career hasn’t always gone smoothly. But the career part has never been my dominant concern. Writing has always been something I felt compelled to do, regardless of where it led or the constant uncertainty that the writing life entails.
In my bleaker moments, this compulsion has felt like a curse, an illness, and a trap that I walked blindly into. At the same time, writing has steered and guided me through times of personal and political crisis, and it still does. Contrary to the opinions of more than a few people I’ve known, writing is not a flight from the world. It is not an act of self-indulgence, self-gratification or an expression of my self-importance.
It is not escapism or a substitute for ‘action’. It is action. It is engagement, communication, and persuasion - a social activity conceived and executed in solitude. It is - for me at least - a space of absolute freedom. It is a bridge between myself and the world, an instrument for making sense of the world and its contradictions, a lifelong conversation with readers who I may or may not know.
I write because life is too important not to write about, because life for me, is not complete unless I write about it. Writing is my weapon. It is how I try to find light in a world that is often dark, and which is getting noticeably darker, and where I try to combat what is vicious, cruel and ugly.
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In the week that I turned seventy, a former Disney star named Calum Worthy, announced an app that would enable bereaved people to speak to their loved ones for three minutes through AI. This not the first such innovation, but Worthy’s app was spectacularly inane. ‘What if the loved ones we’ve lost could be part of our future?’ he tweeted, in a video showing a pregnant woman presenting her baby bump to an AI representation of her dead mother.
Then the baby grows up and becomes a child, and the child becomes an adult who also speaks on his phone to an AI grandmother and great grandmother. The app is free to download. But – no surprises here – you need a paid subscription if you want to ‘text and chat in real-time with fictional, historical and celebrity HoloAvatars in a safe and secure environment.’
Hollow indeed. And there is so much more where this came from, in an ever more cynical technopolis that seeks to exploit human vulnerability, override biology, and replace the dead with the vapid creations of AI dreck.
Because let’s not kid ourselves here: that avatar on the phone can never be your dead mother. It can never be a person or a sentient being. It cannot be the person you once loved, and it would be a grotesque insult to that person - and a reductionist parody of humanity itself - to believe that such ‘resurrections’ are possible.
These innovations do not offer the prospect of eternal life, but eternal idiocy in the never never land of the post-human. According to Worthy, the 2Wai company is building a ‘living archive of humanity.’
I beg to differ. These avatars that ‘look and talk like you, and even share the same memories’ are another indication of the dystopian future that awaits our atomised, lonely, disconnected society where AI lovers take the place of the lover you don’t have, and the friends you don’t have, and death capitalism sells you the illusion that you can escape the human predicament and find eternal life in your iPhone or computer screen.
I have to admit, I did not see this coming.
But then so many things have surprised me. Last week, the leader of the most powerful nation on earth met with the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman, who the US intelligence services once identified as the intellectual author of the brutal murder of the dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Prince Salman was in Washington as part of a $1 trillion deal, organized under the auspices of Trump’s sinister son-in-law Jared Kushner.
While Prince Salman looked on, Trump said that Khashoggi had not been popular, that ‘many people didn’t like him’ and that ‘things happen.’
No wonder Prince Salman was smiling. He knows that money has made him untouchable, and he’s right. No world leader criticized Trump for the deal, or for mocking a murdered journalist. This is what you get, if you abandon even the possibility of virtue and embrace the dumbest, nastiest, most corrupt politicians you can find simply to make the libtards cry.
That same week, the US announced that it had blown up another boat in Venezuelan waters. So far, Don Mangolini and his made guys and gals have killed more than 90 alleged drug traffickers, without offering any evidence that they are drug traffickers, or any legal justification for killing them even if they were, when the US navy could have issued a warning and detained them.
At present, the US appears to be openly plotting regime change in Venezuela - without any legal or moral justification. It has just announced an evil ‘peace plan’ which may have been written by the Putin regime, and which would give Russia everything it asked for, erase the criminality of the invasion, and effectively leave Ukraine at Putin’s mercy.
I have no illusions about the murderous consequences of US military and covert power during and after the Cold War, but this brazen arrogance, lawlessness and corruption still shocks. It heralds the end of the (flawed) international post-World War II attempts to reign in the destructive nationalism and geopolitical thuggery that wrought such havoc in the first half of the twentieth century, and a return to the rule of the strong and the logic of brute power.
Closer to home, last week the British Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood, introduced the cruellest and most draconian anti-asylum legislation in British history. These measures earned the praise of Tommy Robinson, Nigel Farage, but not the Conservatives, who did not consider them draconian enough. Leaving aside the immorality of these proposals and the degrading, dehumanising language that has accompanied them, there is no guarantee that these measures will ‘work’ even in their own terms.
The Home Secretary even had the temerity to try and justify these policies on anti-racist grounds – as though racist insults and attacks are just a wrongheaded response to legitimate concerns, rather than a product of the poisonous ‘debate’ about migration that has polluted our country for so many years.
We are used to this from Mosley-Farage, and from the Conservatives, but this was a Labour government, trying to defend its own political interests by abandoning the Labour movement’s principles of solidarity and internationalism.
This is how so many countries are reacting to a world where the ‘migrant’ has become a universal political scapegoat. That same week, the first round of the Chilean elections pointed towards a clear victory in the second round of José Antonio Kast – a far-right would-be strongman who plans to build a thousand-mile ditch along Chile’s northern desert frontier to prevent undocumented migration.
These are just a few random examples from a single week - the week in which I happened to turn seventy - of a generalised moral, political and intellectual collapse that is spreading across the so-called developed world, fuelled by a tidal wave of misinformation, disinformation and manufactured ignorance.
In this amoral, philistine, post-truth world of the gangster, the demagogue, the shyster and the influencer, it is tempting to turn away, to conclude that humanity is heading for obsolescence, and that the humanities belong to another age. This is what Karl Kraus once concluded, at the outbreak of World War I, when he called on writers to step forward and say nothing, because there were no words left to address the unfolding horror.
Kraus found the words. And it is precisely in times of crisis, collapse and disarray that we need writers most. From an early age, writers explained and revealed the world to me. They made me feel its weight, and helped me understand the privilege as well as the tragedy that is part of the experience of being human. Writers provided me with a window on the past. They took me into other people’s skins, and helped me see the world through other people’s eyes.
I grew up in a world shaped by genocide, fascism and war, by revolution, colonization, and decolonization, at the birth-pangs of the consumer society, beneath the shadow of the Cold War and Mutual Assured Destruction. Even in those early years, writers denounced oppression, gave voice to the voiceless, and addressed questions that I was asking. They reminded me, again and again, that humanity was worth saving. They helped to persuade me that there were better ways of doing things than the ways that my generation had inherited. They showed me that what Gramsci called ‘this great and terrible world’ was too important to go unspoken about.
Decades later, they are still doing that. And that is why I am still doing it. I am still writing and reading. Still looking for the writers - and there are many of them - who can make me believe that even when the worst of humanity seems to be winning, they have not won yet.
Writers cannot change the world by themselves. But they can inform the conversations that make change possible. At the very least, they can call the bastards out. They can persuade, convince and inspire. They can remind us that we are not avatars, but humans, with the gift of thought and speech. They can light what Auden called, ‘an affirming flame’ and provide a counterpoint to ‘negation and despair.’ They can remind us that we are not alone in this wilderness.
They can help us to remember, as Theodore Roethke once put it in his poem ‘In a Dark Time’ that:
In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood—
A lord of nature weeping to a tree.
I live between the heron and the wren,
Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.
