Close Your Eyes and Live Through Your Tale

29 Sep, 2024

In Munir Hachemi’s Living Things, the narrator ends up convinced that “Some people view storytelling as a kind of therapy or a way of getting things off your chest. But that’s not true: at most, storytelling… is something we do on instinct while the world falls to pieces around us.”¹ It’s a variation on the assertion that so much literature, art, film, etc., is, or should be, a form of escapism, an allegation that would then be countered by those who’re convinced that all forms of art must serve some greater social mission. If followed, that latter decree usually just results in bad propaganda or embarrassingly earnest protest music.

Hachemi’s claim feels like a reaction of self-defense or -protection, something other than the sort of sitcom drivel that keeps us from even being able to notice everything crumbling: an instinct that says there’s really nothing else you can do when faced with insurmountable forces. In this particular tale, those forces are agribusiness, capitalist systems of labor, and the everyday desires that drive and surrender to them—and/or the realities of which the holders of those desires try not to be aware. The problem, for a thinking being who can’t but help getting caught up in it all, is that those forces can’t be avoided, nor can their realities be ignored. You can diagnose their ills and evils all you want, but that’s as far as you’ll get. Keep railing against it, and most people, understanding the futility of banging your head against what is, will most likely get sick of hearing your diatribes; fall on the wrong side of some truly powerful person or entity, and you’ll suddenly not be ignored, at the risk of your own safety. Rarely—let’s face it—do our legitimate objections to unjust or even ridiculous states of affairs result in any change for the better.

It’s not that we’re all necessarily afraid of some physical or even overt threat manifesting itself as soon as we think about trying to change something. Rather, we’ve grown up and been formed within the expectations and assumptions that allow the structures and big forces that support them to keep running. One of the characters in Living Things asks another if he’s read Byung-Chul Han. Though that conversation goes no further, it’s easy to believe the philosopher-critic, famous for his committed slow living and his assertion that what we think serves as narration these days is little more than shallow advertising, has influenced Hachemi’s own efforts—evident among other places in the narrator/protagonist’s soberingly reasonable claim that “We in the West are incapable of conceiving of intelligence without ambition. Capitalism has taught us that intelligence as a trait increases production and output, improving time management and eliminating all the nooks and crannies in which fiction can be made.”² I know I frequently hold up LinkedIn as the predictable pathetic butt of my cultural complaints—but it can’t be helped; its idiotic pressure to self-promote offers proof positive, time and again, of just the sort of Hachemian-Hanian quotation I just threw down.³ And I singled out that quotation because it, in essence, picked, or rather, screamed out at, me.

Here’s the deal: although I’m not at the level of wondering where my next meal will come from, or whether I’ll have a place to stay next week, it’s no stretch to say that my financial situation is precarious. And when compared with peers of similar educational and professional experience, I’m downright poor, that irritating presence who eats before a meet-up at a restaurant and orders water and a cracker because the expense would be too uncomfortably significant otherwise. In spite of some pop psychologist’s assertion that unique people like me (I’ve been told more than once that I fit the profile of a “highly sensitive person,” which throws me to the verge of barfing) are a welcome presence among those of more conventional means, it’s hard to be convinced that the interesting and financially successful people around me aren’t wondering what the hell’s wrong with me, where my ambition is hiding and what sort of output I could point to that would justify my existence.⁴ If I’d just put myself out there more, I could get a great job!

When among those who (seemingly) effortlessly have more, and are quite comfortable doing what they have to do to get and maintain that more, I come to a greater understanding of ascetics who willingly close ranks to live in a community of shared commitments. Purposeful collective poverty, even if it doesn’t eliminate the pettiness that arises in any community, at least seems less prone to contributing to members feeling bad about themselves because they have to buy store brands. And that fellowship of shared obligation is what you’d hope could be possible in some sort of literary or artistic community, in which devotion to artistic creation as a meaningful form of living (as opposed to frantic production) trumps the desire or felt need to fund your retirement with a top-forty hit. But as reality programs like Work of Art: The Next Great Artist make evident, no one’s immune from the promise of fame, or even the understandable dream of not having to worry about how you’ll pay your utilities, much less afford health care remotely worthy of that name.

As channeled through some authors’ voices, the disembodied presence of that potential literary community, and not the one made up of MFA aspirants to great publishing deals, does make me feel less alone. Within the confines of the right pages, at least, there’s some evidence that you’re not a singular freak who can’t shake the feeling that much of what guides us isn’t worth the time spent thinking about it, much less wearing yourself out trying to accommodate—and that to try and do something different when faced with the bafflement of those who buy into that guidance is exhausting, disheartening, often maddening.

Books are certainly not alone in this capacity, but it’s hardly rare to find, especially in works of past eras, evidence of people somehow being supported in their inability to get with the program of their time—sometimes gladly, as in Osip Mandelstam’s Semyon Akimych Ansky, a doler-outter of “advice and consolations, conveyed in the guise of parables, anecdotes, and so on,” who required merely “a place to spend the night and strong tea. People ran after him to hear his stories” based on the fact that he “preserved everything, remembered everything.”⁵ Those stories, we’re told, were “marvelous [and] unhurried,” massive sagas that would flop according to the aesthetic requirements of the “blurb without depth” Han deplores, or the inspirational or needlessly braggy LinkedIn posts I can’t stop beating to the ground.⁶ Of course, as in say, Jane Austen or the Brontës, there are always the widows and aunts and unmarried sisters and wards dependent on better-resourced family members—and though I can’t for the life of me find where Mandelstam says it, I’m pretty sure even Semyon Akimych’s family abandoned him and what they considered the burden of his presence to the equivalent of an old folks’ home. Too, there are the traveling troupes and bards and later, circuses, who come into town and somehow find support in spite of their marginal relation to prevailing reality. But since in our neck of the woods, we’ve all got the freedom now to join in the fray of senseless advancement, those people, fictional or not, seem almost impossible to imagine in this day and age.

Semyon Akimych, though, seems to be providing a service for people (other than his own kin!) whose instinct tells them what they need, but not clearly or urgently enough for them to fulfill that need for story on their own. And it was worth it to them to support him—not to push him into the limelight so that he could live into full financial glory and fame—but rather to keep him there, unambitious as he was, glad to do his thing and to have his tea and a place to stay.

Much like Hachemi’s narrator states, though, I’m not sure there’s much to this essay beyond itself: “There’s no intent, just storytelling”—or in this instance, a strange cry in the virtual wilderness, grateful for not being the only one of its kind.⁷

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