i spent the first weeks of December in bed, sick again, with another round of covid. This is maybe the third of fourth time i’ve had it, and it’s getting very boring at this stage. i sometimes wonder if it ever really went away, like it’s buried in some grimy secret place in my blood or my central nervous system, lying in wait for my moment of weakness. i shouldn’t think like this really, but it’s been a long year.
Stuck in my sickbed, i struggled to really watch tv or play computer games or to absorb new information, so i resigned myself to re-reading books i had read before. First, i downloaded a pdf of White Noise, by Don DeLillo, not least because i was fascinated by the upcoming Netflix adaptation, directed by Noah Baumbach. From my memory of reading it as a teen, White Noise might be the least Netflix-adaptable book in the world, cynical, esoteric, and fixated with death. On re-reading it as an adult, that impression was not only confirmed by amplified. It was hard for me to remember what I had found compelling about the book as a teenager, between the Hitler Studies professor reasoning with his son about mass shooters and the invocation of the supermarket as a site of spiritual rebirth. No coincidence that all of the narrators’ ex-wives are CIA operatives. From beginning to end, the novel appears as a dirge for imperial decay, an inchoate awareness of the death bestowed on the world by the American project, and a desperate fascist hope to seize command of that death before it overtakes you.
A similar anxiety haunts William Dalrymple’s From the Holy Mountain: A Journey in the Shadow of Byzantium, another teen read I re-read from my sickbed. Whilst Dalrymple’s account is probably the best popular introduction to the Christian communities of West Asia, it is nonetheless stalked by a persistent orientalist whiplash between empathy and exoticism, between sympathising with these troubled survivors, dwindling in the face of Islamic fanaticism, and baffling at their continued belief in miraculous healings, incorruptible relics, and other such premodern notions. Occasionally, as when encountering shrines, such as those in Istanbul to St George or Al-Khidr, that are shared by people of many faiths, or hearing of Muslims praying before Christian icons for specific requests, Dalrymple seems on the verge of a realisation that it may not be possible to properly understand West Asia’s Christians without a close and charitable attention to the region’s Muslim majority. Mostly, he prefers to see them as stragglers of Byzantium, preserving the remnants of a forgotten empire, with traditions that lie submerged beneath later histories, both Islamic and ‘modern’. i suspect Dalrymple’s nostalgia is for a different kind of imperialism, one that could preserve its veneer of cosmopolitanism, increasingly untenable in the deepening crises of unipolar capitalism.
Re-reading them now, i find it hard to see what i found so compelling in these books. My memory for my past is very bad, and i have been many different people over the course of my life. i have made many mistakes. (In February, i wrote a whole substack about why i didn’t think there would be a war in Ukraine and why that mattered! i stand by some of what i said in that post, but when you focus so much on repeated imperialist visibilisations of crisis where nothing happens, sometimes you’re bound to miss the real events for the trees.) i will probably be many more people, and make many more mistakes, soon enough.
In some ways, these books and their inventories of imperial anxiety and decay feel like a fitting end to the year. i have lost friends. i have been forced to hate, and finally quit, a job i loved. everyone i know seems to be constantly going through it. Between the queen’s death and the NATO intervention in Ukraine’s war, a certain kind of reactionary respectability seems to have set it and demoralised what felt like stirrings of resistance. And i cannot stop dreaming about being sexually assaulted. It’s been a fucking shitty year.
Lying in the bath yesterday evening, depressed out of my mind, fully prepared to submerge myself in the tepid water in that grotty little bathroom, i remembered that i’m full of shit. It is so easy to be melodramatic, but beneath it all, i’m as much a participant in the world as its victim, and if i’ve become anything other than that, its only through one foot in front of the other, a sheer will to hope, and a certain attentiveness to what’s in front of me in all of its beauty and brutality.
At the end of White Noise, the narrator, Jack, asks a nun what the Church teaches about heaven today, and she laughs. She mocks him for asking her about such a crude faith. He is incredulous and presses her, and she tells him, “The nonbelievers need the believers. They are desperate to have someone believe. But show me a saint. Give me one hair from the body of a saint.” She is serious; she is disciplined; she takes her vocation, to represent some faith for the rest of the world, seriously. But it is all hollow functionalism.
This is all that is left for Don DeLillo, for William Dalrymple, and the rest. But not for us. We have more reasons for imperial anxiety than they could even dream of. We have renewed waves of worker militancy, deepening ties against American hegemony at the international stage, increasing waves of popular mobilisation towards anti-imperialist ends. Maybe we’re all going through it, but we’ve made it this far, with only each other to hope with. And the world, in all its beauty and brutality, is decaying all around us. Here’s to the new world struggling to be born. Aren’t we struggling? Happy new year.
Ignatz x
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