Mega-Live More Lives
Shattering email length limits, a wee update
Dear Gentle Readers,
I love books that focus tightly on a simple narrative line that nevertheless encompasses the whole world. Magically, the tight and small refracts an image that represents everything important about the world as well, like fractal patterns where the tiny is a miniature version of the large, with all its essential features retained.
Still I try—I am still trying—to take this maximalist dough and run it through some sort of a minimalism pasta-maker that will squeeze out austere, striking, fractal noodles.
In the interest of doing so, I reduced the original five hundred or so words I devoted to the topic of fractal literature to just this. I feel that there is both more to say on the subject, and more simple ways of saying it, but I’m still trying to focus on the novel.
Focus is a challenge for many of us these days.
I began this newsletter to share my pure and unsullied love of literature. Also, my curiosity about literature’s relationship to real-life experience; evocations of experience in literature; and the experience that literature itself offers—letting us effectively live more lives than the single one we each get. So my constant, obsessive return here to the growing deaths and misery and gradual disappearance of voices speaking directly from Gaza must seem odd.
TBH, every time I open my mouth to say something that’s not “ceasefire and end the siege now,” I feel I may have wasted my precious breath (I will be lucky to be allotted 672,768,000 breaths over my lifetime, and I’m already almost 47, so you don’t want to do that, even in less dark and urgent times). And I feel I may have failed in my responsibility as a human being, where speaking and acting against destruction of an entire people, that crime of crimes, has always seemed to me the bare minimum, unavoidable requirement for membership in the Decent Human Club. This is making writing about anything else quite challenging.
As a matter of fact, for most of my life I avoided knowing too much about Palestine. It seemed to me wrong to suppose I should take any particular interest in what went on in the Middle East—I’ve never been there, anywhere there—just because I am Jewish. My family having come to Canada from the shtetls of the Netherlands and Lithuania, Poland and Russia, all by way of South Africa, I have no horse in the race. It is, in fact, anti-Semitic to assume that I must have thoughts on it for reason of my Jewishness alone. It’s a particularly racist, dangerous, and time-worn (and false) trope that Jews all hold secret loyalties—to Communism, to Capitalism, to Israel, whatever—that supersede and undermine whatever citizenship they hold.
The opportunistic far Right (responsible for most acts of anti-Semitism over at least the past decade, according to the conservative Jewish Anti-Defamation League) seizes with delight upon the idea that all Jews support a particular government. In fact, the Right, from immigration skeptics to outright cross-burners and Nazis, love to promote the idea all Jews support the right-wing, racist, and incompetent government of Israel. To promote the idea that it’s not them (the Nazis & friends) who are anti-Semitic but in fact anyone—even a principled and Jewish someone—who fails to endorse collective punishment of the Palestinian people, or who seeks to explain that oppression will be met with resistance, always. When literal Nazis form alliances with people who purport to represent all people who happen to be Jewish, when Jews are arrested for protesting genocide, then I feel like the world is upside down and you can’t not take a stand.
After all, all humans should oppose genocide and anything that smells of it. Examples: serial bombings of hospitals, civilian areas, refugee camps, universities, archives, and cultural buildings, targeting of journalists, children, and babies, collective punishment by mass intentional starvation, and so on and so forth. The list of poignant and detailed examples I could add is long.
I and other Jewish people, in particular, are being smeared—by pro-Israel Jews, pro-Israel Christians (both ‘liberal’ and Trumpist) for whom Jews are instrumental in various religious or military ways, and outright Nazis alike, each taking advantage of the general public’s confusion about whose story it is that Jews support whatever Israel does—with the assertion that serial actions very, very, very plausibly constituting genocide are actions we in fact might support, for whatever reason (self-defence, even if this were effective self-defence, is not a reason).
More than all this is that no set of war crimes has ever been broadcast live moment-to-moment like this. We are watching live (or averting our eyes, and selecting our sources with care to support our aversion), we are ignoring appeals for help, we are collectively and passively endorsing everything I’ve wondered all my life if I’d have the individual courage to oppose, if I were a non-Jew during the Holocaust in the Netherlands, from where many of my far extended family ended up in Auschwitz (I always hoped, but doubted, that I might instead act like Miep Gies and her Dutch resistance member husband Jan and the others who risked their lives to harbour and sustain Anne Frank’s family, as one example).
I never thought this would be the way our cowardice would come out, en masse and on screen.
I am working—in my head, for now—on an essay, part of which I hope, perhaps, to share with you here, on why I believe Gaza represents a turning point in world literature, in its production and consumption alike. Theodor Adorno wrote (here, in Samuel Weber’s translation),
Cultural criticism finds itself today faced with the final state of the dialectic of culture and barbarism. To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. And this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today. Absolute reification, which presupposed intellectual progress as one of its elements, is now preparing to absorb the mind entirely. Critical intelligence cannot be equal to this challenge as long as it confines itself to self-satisfied contemplation.
As James Schmidt explains here, this isn’t the same as what Adorno is always misquoted or misunderstood as saying, that it’s impossible to write poetry after Auschwitz, which has clearly been proven untrue, anyway. There have been other genocides since the one Auschwitz ably represents. Is what’s going on in Gaza today any different? What do Palestinian writers in and outside Gaza, survivors, think, and do I have anything relevant to say about it? These questions torment me but since I’m hardly taking anyone’s place here on my own Substack, and since I do have views on the matter, I’d like to give it a try. We’ll see how relevant it feels a few months down the line.
On sources (& yes, more on Gaza)
So yeah, I never intended to write week after week about the ever-increasing suffering in Gaza, the brave resistance and, horribly, the things I knew to expect thanks to my preparation in literature, both about the Holocaust and in other real and imagined settings.
These things I know about mostly from literature include the extreme, otherwise indescribable forms of terror and misery, pathos and sick juxtapositions that occur in situations such as this deliberate famine; constant, unimaginably intense bombing; and overt acts of humiliation and cruelty. (I do think it is not qualitatively any different from the Holocaust at this stage—there is a degree of human suffering beyond which you can’t really compare and contrast oppressions.)
It would be so much better for these terrible extremes of human experience to stay in the imagination, as many writers and journalists and publishing world figures seem to think it can do. It can’t, not when reality proceeds apace.
Perhaps you have not been following non-Western media. The difference in awareness and understanding among those who read peer-reviewed publications and followed covid-alert scientists and engineers from the start of the pandemic from those who follow the daily national news has been startling, creating two entirely different felt realities, one of which determines policy and the other of which attempts to respond to reality. The same applies to awareness of climate change from say the 1980s or 90s among scientists versus the general, educated, news-consuming public. In the documentary based on his co-authored book Manufacturing Consent, Noam Chomsky explored the way this occurred in relation to the Indonesian invasion of East Timor, both in framing and in omission of important information in trusted mainstream media. The same phenomenon applies here.
On Gaza, Al Jazeera has been very measured in tone, but does actually report on the realities on the ground; +972, an Israeli publication, has written important investigations of atrocities and analyses of Israeli politics although they’ve been reasonably criticized as well for their own continuing biases; individual journalists in Palestine1 or (reliably sourced, multiply verified) reports of atrocities posted by individuals in Gaza on social media, especially Twitter, have been invaluable. It is genuinely possible that without such sources, you are not aware of just how bad this situation is, or how appallingly, directly complicit countries like the US, the UK, many European countries, and my Canada are in the indefensible deaths and unbearable suffering of millions of innocent people in Gaza and also in other parts of Palestine.
It’s unfortunate that awareness of reality requires so much work. Unfortunate for all of us, when Israel, the United States, and other allies are taking actions that appear geared to lead us to global and unnecessary war and the collapse of the post-World War II system of international law. And a time when we are ready, but working to become still-readier, to blow ourselves up, and when there are, one might think, other things (such as global boiling) that need our very urgent attention and dramatic cooperative action than ever before! As with climate change, pandemic, and other issues, we sleepwalk into disaster and the remaking of a beautiful world into an incredibly ugly one. And then, all too often, we convince ourselves and our children that this ugly version of the world is normal, and that we should be grateful to live in it.
The things I have seen (I could share pictures, maybe I should, but I won’t), I have seen largely by paying attention to individual journalists who I have followed for some time. There are real people on the ground in Gaza with both expertise in reporting, and the most terrible possible lived experience: reporting on one’s own genocide, on the extermination of one’s neighbourhood infrastructure, healthcare and education system, and one’s neighbours, families, children.
I have seen unspeakable, unbearable photographs, authentic and verified, that have by and large not made it into mainstream newspapers or news reports, although details verifying them do regularly appear (take for example the underreported Flour Massacre, which is now an almost-literal daily massacre of Gazans seeking aid). Each one is burned on my retina, as it must be on that of every other person who sees it and understands that these are not stills from violent movies that, in the best case, wield their violence for a reason—The Boys, or Robocop—but the actual destruction of individual human beings for no reason except, variously, revenge, land theft, fear (never a justification for war crimes), and the desire, explicit or effective, to eliminate a people.
What is being done in Gaza are multiple, multiple war crimes, a deliberate and loudly announced policy of extermination and violation of international law, equal in scale of cruelty and destruction to the devastation of Hiroshima or the Holocaust.
I wrote a tiny bit about it
My story on antibiotic resistance in war and conflict situations—with an obvious and necessary focus on Gaza—is out now in Salon.
Inability to sufficiently differentiate between self and non-self
In my defense, because I feel defensive about this obsessive return to the same themes, I’d like to share something with thanks to the lovely and valuable Joe Eastman of Dr. Joe's Covid and Science Newsletter, which among many interesting things on January 20th included a snippet of a journal article about how viral infections may lead to the onset of new autoimmune disease such as ankylosing spondylitis, my personal first autoimmune disease2.
I’m not sharing this right now for the science or for the personal story, though the many long-term things viruses do to us, far more than we’ve understood until the current pandemic, is of course interesting and relevant3, but for the existential poetry of this first line from the abstract (bolded text added by me), which sums up autoimmune disease as well as pathological empathy. It also seems to include a novel or two:
Autoimmune diseases (AIDs) are the consequence of a breach in immune tolerance, leading to the inability to sufficiently differentiate between self and non-self.
I get the feeling that some people see such pathology in empathy, deciding it has crossed a line when it affects one’s soul, causing either distress or solidarity. I think of the school psychiatrist who, when I sought help for major depression part-way through my second year of university, seized oddly on one of the best things in my life, a source of friendships that got me through depression and some of which I retain to this day, of adventures and of meaningful engagement in the world—my participation in the Ontario Public Interest Research Group-Toronto, a local chapter of the Ralph Nader-founded student activist network.
Through this group, as an action group member (Global Solidarity, Corporate Rule and I think one other one that I’ve forgotten) and then board member, I learned about consensus decision-making, the dark side of globalization, corporate philanthropy, and bilateral or multilateral agreements on investment.
I learned about leadership, about cooperation, about difference, about fair trade.
I learned to be silly in the service of my values (dressing up in an orange jumpsuit to lead tours of the University of Toronto campus, pointing out sites of interest relating to corporate influence on university decision-making, sometimes in violation of human rights here and abroad; taking part in a sweatshop-free fashion show).
I made the aforementioned friends.
But the psychiatrist had an idée fixe about the causes of my depression: I’m obsessed, she thought, with fairness.
She’s right that I care very much about it. But what kind of world would we have if it was rare to care about justice?
Oh yeah …the world we’ve got :(
She also missed that the reason I4 care about justice is that I care about suffering, and about the vulnerable and innocent. In the culture I live in, we talk a lot about boundaries and toxic people and self-care, but rarely about commitment, about our responsibility for each other, about our collective power, about the fact that my freedom is bound up in the freedom of others. Also: talk—like literature, like empathy—is not action. What is needed now, on Gaza, SARS-2, mass extinction, and climate change alike, is effective action that meets the scale of the need.
This is most of the second half of a poem by Muriel Rukeyser:
In the day I would be reminded of those men and women,
Brave, setting up signals across vast distances,
Considering a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined values.
As the lights darkened, as the lights of night brightened,
We would try to imagine them, try to find each other,
To construct peace, to make love, to reconcile
Waking with sleeping, ourselves with each other,
Ourselves with ourselves. We would try by any means
To reach the limits of ourselves, to reach beyond ourselves,
To let go the means, to wake.
I lived in the first century of these wars.
Some more of my recent work
On our origins in stardust, the multiverse and other realities, on the beautiful face of a gorilla, on babbling young chimpanzees, on organ transplants, on a drug that interrupts addiction.
And an essay I wrote several years ago, called “Your city on drugs”—about the toxic drug crisis in Toronto—appears in a colourful, 248-page new collection by Toronto’s Spacing Magazine to mark their twentieth anniversary. I had a chance to review my essay and annotate it with the very sad story of what happened after I wrote the original piece. As in On Opium, where I described it in detail, I tried to make this a sort of tribute or memorial to the person concerned. The sort of policy changes I’ve called for, that the subject of this memorial worked for, would be better than any written tribute. You can get The Big Book of Spacing here (I don’t get royalties, posting for interest only. I do however get paid, eventually, when you get your own copy of On Opium. Go go go).
More of the journalism I’ve been doing over the past little while is up on my website here.
Getting to the point
As you may be able to tell, this Live More Lives has been derailed many times as I wrote and rewrote it. I put in some gobsmacking, gut-wrenching update about the ongoing and now terminal-phase genocide in Gaza, then I remove it as not of adequate interest to my readers or because I’m insufficiently expert in the area to comment or because new horrible events keep overtaking the old.
The actual focus here was, of course, meant to be a straightforward update. I had suspended paid subscriptions for 4 months and suspended my enjoyable but demanding regular publication schedule in order to make progress on the novel I’m writing, The Escape Artists.
And also to sleep a hell of a lot, as I’m still suffering from the hypersomnia I’ve experienced since getting COVID-19 in August, which cuts into already very limited fiction-writing and noodling (that essential part of fiction-writing) time as well as earning-a-living time.
So, the intended update
I met my 100,000 word target nearly a month early, which is great! I now have ten chapters that I am working and reworking! It seems meaningless in the grand scheme of things! But what can you do!
I’m not ready to return to a reliable schedule for publishing Live More Lives, even though I keep reading wonderful, wonderful things I want to share with you. I will therefore continue to suspend paid subscriptions for now, and will keep you all updated, and will attempt to gradually return to a sustainable schedule while also trying to shut out the world and its demands and my sorry over its devastation just enough to finish the bloody novel.
I invite you to continue to share this newsletter with all your lovely friends, and to enjoy its archive of dozens and dozens of very varied essays. It is very cheering to see new people still signing up and it would be a delight to return to find an even larger group of readers eager to read with me, and to consider with me the magical ways in which literature multiplies our experience.
May everyone have this privilege. May the world of our reality be once again more glorious than our imaginations can contain.
Oh wait: maybe you’ve been starved for novel recommendations since I last wrote to you5!
Well, among the books littering my floor right now I can recommend multiple novels from Henning Mankell’s Kurt Wallander series (Firewall is my favourite but have been enjoying Faceless Killers), Helen DeWitt’s wonderful The Last Samurai, Martin Amis’ extraordinary Time’s Arrow, Graham Robb’s novelistic non-fiction, Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris, a few books I’ve only started but that are very appealing so far (Cathy Stonehouse’s The Causes; Rachel Cusk’s Second Place; Andrés Barba’s Luminous Republic), and Philip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther series, especially Field Gray and Berlin Noir (the March Violets trilogy in one volume), which I am rereading for the umpteenth time.
I’ve also re-discovered Edward Said (I’d read Orientalism but now am reading and loving Late Style and his Selected Works, and will surely return to these in a future Live More Lives)
I’ll be in touch again soon, friends. Keep reading until then!
-Carlyn
Unsurprisingly, these voices are dwindling in number as they are killed or starved, or in rare cases evacuated from Gaza.
Ankylosing spondylitis has for some time been believed to be the product of a combination of genetics and environment, including most likely a never-noticed or barely-noticed viral gastrointestinal infection, perhaps in childhood, though symptoms first struck in my late twenties and set in shortly after giving birth at 28.
Ahem—wear a mask in shared indoor spaces so long as covid rates remain high, as they have for years (they are relatively lower right now than say a month ago, but the current lows continue to exceed our former scary peaks!) while continuing to cause long-term symptoms in a significant percentage of mild cases and to have cumulative effect with successive mild infections.
(and, goodness, many, many other people! It’s too rare that people are embarrassingly obsessed with justice. But it’s not that rare. It’s rare among those in positions of power.)
Channelling Ebenezer Scrooge: “Are there no libraries? Are there no independent bookshops?”