the inflammable peat of the subconscious

on a great book and family separations

From Vasily Grossman, written in 1959:

An electronic machine can carry out mathematical calculations, remember historical facts, play chess and translate books from one language to another. It is able to solve mathematical problems more quickly than man and its memory is faultless. Is there any limit to progress, to its ability to create machines in the image and likeness of man? It seems that the answer is no.

It is not impossible to imagine the machine of future ages and millennia. It will be able to listen to music and appreciate art; it will even be able to compose melodies, paint pictures and write poems. Is there a limit to its perfection? Can it be compared to man? Will it surpass him?

Childhood memories … tears of happiness … the bitterness of parting … love of freedom … feelings of pity for a sick puppy … nervousness … a mother’s tenderness … thoughts of death … sadness … friendship … love of the weak … sudden hope … a fortunate guess … melancholy … unreasoning joy … sudden embarrassment …

The machine will be able to recreate all of this! But the surface of the whole earth will be too small to accommodate this machine — this machine whose dimensions and weight will continually increase as it attempts to reproduce the peculiarities of mind and soul of an average, inconspicuous human being.

Fascism annihilated tens of million of people.

Life and Fate

The above is a chapter, in its entirety, from Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, a 900-plus-page book written in the late 1950s. Grossman began his career as a chemist, then became a war correspondent for the Soviets during World War II. He was one of the first reporters to break the story on the Treblinka death camp, and one of the few Soviet writers to write about the forced collectivization and mass starvation policies Stalin imposed on Ukraine. (See my previous post on Timothy Snyder’s book, Bloodlands, for more on that history.)

Those “anti-Soviet” revelations prompted authorities to arrest not Grossman, surprisingly, but the book itself. Supposedly even the typewriter ribbons that the book was written on were confiscated.

“Which Truth?”

Maxim Gorky, esteemed leader of Soviet literary world, as well as gulag-apologist, responded to Grossman’s first novel, Glück Auf, which detailed and exposed the extreme hardships of mining in the Donbas region of Ukraine: “This is, of course, truth — but it is a disgusting and tormenting truth. It is a truth we must struggle against and mercilessly extirpate.”

How do you extirpate truth? I want to say that ripping truth up from the roots, or burying it — either through censorship, obfuscation, or the gulag — doesn’t work, but probably it sometimes does. There are some truths, maybe many, that get distorted, lost, masked, or simply forgotten, and probably will stay that way for ever.

But here I find some hope in the etymology of the ancient Greek word for truth, ἀλήθεια, or aletheia, which can be loosely translated into unforgetting. The word makes me wonder if — and hope that — even if truths are long buried or arrested or cast astray, they at least could be remembered.

Grossman bravely and beautifully remembered.

One of the many marvels of Life and Fate is how its form and content align. It is almost postmodern in the multiplicity of its perspectives (which include Jews on their way to the gas chamber, Eichmann sitting down to wine and hors-d’oeuvres in that very chamber, a scientist pining for his best friend’s wife, a young female typist surviving amongst starving and lecherous soldiers, Hitler walking alone through a forest, Grossman himself, and on and on and on) its veerings directly into essay, reportage, exclamation, and philosophy. It’s a salmagundi of characters and situations that Grossman expertly and compassionately renders in all of their grace and crudity.

Throughout, he returns again and again to how an individual confronts, and is confronted by, the juggernaut of politics.

But there were also the beginnings of other, deeper changes, in the hearts and minds of the soldiers who until now had been spellbound by the inhuman power of the nation-state. These changes took place in the subsoil of human life and mostly went unnoticed.

What were these changes, exactly? Grossman is too honest, and his work is too complex, to answer. Or, put another way, the answer is the book.

I sometimes feel that good books are one of two things: answers without clear questions or questions without clear answers — inarticulable except by the book itself.

Ruining Children —

— or trying to, at least, is what a recent investigative article of mine, in collaboration with Anna-Cat Brigida for The Texas Observer, is about. (Anna-Cat is an inspiring journalist and was great to team up with, and I recommend looking up her work.)

The story delves into how the outrage and uproar about family separations at the U.S.-Mexico border largely died down, but the practice very much continues.

From the day Biden took office until August 2022—the latest month for which data has been published—U.S. authorities have reported at least 372 cases of family separation. (The Trump admin, meanwhile, separated at least 5,500 children, including breastfeeding infants, from their parents.)

One of the kids recently torn from his mother and father’s arms is Felipe. He was ten years old and traveling with his parents from Colombia to seek asylum in the U.S. They brought paperwork and evidence with them to support their asylum claim, but, after they crossed the border in south Texas and turned themselves into Border Patrol agents, they were taken into custody. Agents threw away some of their documents.

A few days later, a guard told Felipe and his mom that he was being taken for a snack. Instead, he was loaded into a van and flown to Chicago. His parents were both charged with the crime of crossing into the country outside of an official port of entry and sent to a for-profit detention center. (Official ports of entry are currently closed to asylum seekers, so they had no other option if they wanted to ask for asylum.)

While in custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, Felipe turned 11. Both of his parents are still detained in Texas. Between them, they are allowed one 15-minute phone call a week. Recently, Felipe — angry, confused, and struggling with “wanting to be alive” — began refusing the calls with his parents.

He drew this self-portrait, which his attorney took a photo of and shared with me

Why is the U.S. government doing this?

Like all questions I’m asking in this newsletter, it’s complicated. But, in short, I think the answer goes something like this:

Following in the long tradition of racist, anti-immigrant, nationalist fervor, government officials are attempting to use the suffering of children and their parents to deter other potential migrants from making the journey.

Besides being immoral and awful — see my previous post about using humans as means — this sort of deterrence tactic doesn’t work. In the months directly following the worst and most loudly broadcast and decried cases of family separation in 2018, the number of families crossing the border actually increased. That’s because the motivations for migrating — persecution, insecurity, hunger, hurricanes — were stronger than the possible consequences.

So what? So what do we do? How much longer will Felipe be stuck in his “carcel,” his prison, as he labeled his self-portrait?

Reforms do mitigate the worst harms. Under the Biden admin, fewer children are suffering these deliberately imposed miseries than were suffering them under Trump — but how to stop the practice? How to stop a government from using children as pawns? How to institute justice or reparations to the victims?

I have some answers to those questions, too, but I’ll save that discussion for when I announce my next book. (Announcement coming pretty soon.)

Grossman asked and, in his way, answered a question in the chapter I began this newsletter with. Writing of a computer (back in 1959), he asks “Is there a limit to its perfection? Can it be compared to man? Will it surpass him?”

His answer is this:

Childhood memories … tears of happiness … the bitterness of parting … love of freedom … feelings of pity for a sick puppy … nervousness … a mother’s tenderness … thoughts of death … sadness … friendship … love of the weak … sudden hope … a fortunate guess … melancholy … unreasoning joy … sudden embarrassment …

followed by

Fascism annihilated tens of million of people.

In other words, be careful (and save your typewriter ribbons).