The video pauses so that we can see the small, dark pixels in the sky. It resumes so that we can see them fall and explode into fire and death. On maps, the red circles stand for captured cities, the blue lines for defenses. The borderlines bleed with red as troops advance. The updates are swift, the updates are merciless, the updates are in real time. The headlines marshal opinion and scorn. Events must be explained. Outcomes must be forecasted for we who sit and watch the war.
Dazed by the constant coverage, I have turned instead to the daily war diary of Yevgenia Belorusets, a writer and photographer who lives in Kyiv. Co-published through a small magazine press, Isolarii, it is a plain and plaintive record of her days. She writes of being threatened for photographing empty streets, talking to people in stores, taping her windows so they won’t shatter. She writes of being searched by four men in the street; she writes of drinking a cappuccino. The data journalism of the Times may be a feat of reporting, but Belorusets’ account has a haunting quality that lingers far longer than news of the next airstrike, the next sanction:
A well-known teacher, eighty-six years old, spends most nights in the basement of a school that is next to her house. Today she recorded a video. In a distinct, almost forgotten, and noble Kyiv accent, she addressed the women of Russia: they should not let their sons go to war.
It is snowing, the air is damp and cold, and it seems to me that I can no longer get close to my own city, the place where I live, whose events I witness. I resist the violence more than I used to, I resist acknowledging that the war is going on, that it is allowed, that it has been allowed.
All diaries, I think, share a kind of disbelief that gives them form. They are first drafts from the receding moment: unconfident and brave, unsure of what exactly to put down, given to small scenes and bursts of thought rather than long arcs of meaning. Belorusets writes: “I orient myself in the present because the days offer little structure.” And a week later: “Sometimes, these days, it’s hard to grasp tomorrow. Tomorrow seems an eternity away, as if it were happening on another planet. One can imagine tomorrow in theory, but not as a moment in one’s own passage of time.” In times of crisis, the diary is an act—at times a costly one—of witnessing and recording. But it is also the ongoing struggle of creating a structure, an idea of “one’s own passage of time.”
Begun in time, the diary gathers meaning gradually. Through repeating, persisting, observing. Through being read and reread. It is the inverse of the notification, which burns bright with fact and then fizzles out. For if the livestream comes in “real time,” the diary’s time is half-real. But more haunting, more human:
The city is sinking into spring fog, but it is still cold. Since yesterday, here, in the center of Kyiv, you can tell a story about the war on every street corner. Almost every intersection is guarded day and night by armed members of the Territorial Defense. There are more groups of saboteurs in the city, more violence. I look with relief into the eyes of the men and women of the defense. In one of the faces yesterday I recognized with amazement a barista who was popular in our neighborhood because he painted particularly beautiful swans on the milk foam of the coffees.
ben tapeworm
on the turntable
on the screen
I watched Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir (2019) and Ross McElwee’s Bright Leaves (2003) recently, which are both fantastic. I just ran out of time to say anything about them.
from the discourse
Alexandra Schwartz interviews Erin L. Thompson about ongoing debates over Confederate monuments:
Yeah, and Frederick Douglass, for example, knew that this was a problem as soon as this art went up. He criticized a statue that still stands, in D.C., celebrating Lincoln’s granting of emancipation to African Americans. There’s this grovelling Black man kneeling in front of Lincoln. Ironically enough, that man’s face is modelled after an actual man, who escaped from slavery and then re-escaped after being kidnapped by men who wanted to send him back into slavery. This is Archer Alexander. So he liberated himself twice with no help from Lincoln, but has been made into a powerless recipient of the largesse of white Americans.
Mike Davis breathes fire in a jeremiad for NLR:
What I find most remarkable about these strange days – as thermobaric bombs melt shopping malls and fires rage in nuclear reactors – is the inability of our supermen to validate their power in any plausible narrative of the near future.
on the bookshelf
Muriel Rukeyser’s Elegies is a series of ten hallucinatory poems, first published together in 1949. Inspired by Rilke’s Duino Elegies and drawn from Rukeyser’s experience reporting from the Spanish Civil War, they are strange prophecies filled with half-burning trees, angels in gardens, and refugee children. The First Elegy, “Rotten Lake,” begins:
As I went down to Rotten Lake I remembered
the wrecked season, haunted by plans of salvage,
snow, the closed door, footsteps and resurrections,
machinery of sorrow.
I have a feeling I will have “I remembered / the wrecked season, haunted by plans of salvage” in my head for a long time.
from my incoming texts
“I knew the nelly furtado was a risk”
“Do you mind seeing ~skeletal remains~”
“And sometimes we get caught suspended, courage summoned, but waiting for a window that will never come”
weekly wiki
Read back about War on Terror TV, death in the archives, and the end of 2021. Get a print issue. Follow @bentapeworm on Twitter.