The World Has Always Been On Fire

What now?

This is the sort of piece I’d never be able to publish at a mainstream outlet — not because of its subject matter, but because it meanders from question to question without an unequivocal argument or a stern recommendation. It’s not an op-ed; it’s an invitation. What would it look like to hang out more in this curious, questioning space?

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Last month, publicity for the poet and author Ocean Vuong’s new novel, The Emperor of Gladness, began saturating my media diet. I read Vuong’s first book, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, over the course of a hot, stormy August afternoon back in 2019. It was luxurious, stunning writing and very deliberately loose on plot. I don’t remember reading On Earth so much as experiencing it.

Not a lot of poets do big press tours, but these past few weeks, Vuong’s been everywhere: on Oprah, on the other side of *the* New York Times Magazine interview with David Marchese, on PBS NewsHour, plus countless events where he’s been asked big questions in front of big, hungry audiences. Last week, Vuong was at Politics & Prose in Washington D.C., and someone asked what he tells us students — he’s a professor of creative writing at New York University — about how to write in this moment.

Here’s how he responded:

I know it’s hard. The world is on fire. Metaphorically, and figuratively. However, it has always been on fire. There has never been a single author that had the immense luxury of writing at a time of absolute peace.

And so, choosing this work, you are entering a lineage of despair. And it’s up to you to turn the sentence into a medium from which we can understand each other and make something new out of this.

sixthandi

A post shared by @sixthandi

That answer has been ricocheting around my head for the last few days, like a pinball that keeps hitting bumpers long past all expectations. Our history is a history of terror, unrest, and flight. If you were ignorant of it — or could forge a space where you could maintain ignorance — that didn’t mean the fires weren’t burning. The smoke is our air. As one teacher put it in the comments of the Instagram post above, “oftentimes I say to my students, ‘nothing has actually changed other than your awareness.’”

It’s a crucial corrective to the notion that creating art in dark times is somehow inappropriate — or evidence of a lack of commitment to justice. If no one wrote about romance or frivolity or joy or fantasy because times were too dark then we have nothing but despairing, didactic dramas. Making sense of the world takes so many forms! Some of them just engage the lineage of despair more explicitly than others.

When Vuong evokes the power of the sentence, he’s talking about writing — but you could expand his understanding to so many other forms of art, including the unheralded art of living our everyday lives, and the creation and maintenance of connection. What does it look like to cherish other people? To cultivate our empathy for one another, even when our own experiences are so disparate? If a burning world is our lived reality, how do we continue to steer ourselves towards the sort of compassion that might create a different one?

It’s not by policing each other, or parsing others' good faith posts for ill-intent. It’s also not by telling people to stop caring about what they care about. I’m not saying make friends with fascists, because that is always the bad faith interpretation of this argument: you want me to cozy up to people who hate me, who want me dead. Never, not at all.

But we do have to figure out how to create narratives — amongst people who hold very similar beliefs, but also with those who do not — that have a stronger gravity than fascism, or Steven Miller-style white supremacy, or JD Vance/trad-wife pronatalism, or so many other noxious ways of orienting oneself to the world. All of those ideologies are, at heart, antidotes to the deep sadness at the heart of everyday life. We need better ones.

But wow is there a marketing problem. It’s so much easier to market rage than care. Gentleness and openness are so squishy and squirmy! It reminds me of the cloying Pass It On ad campaign, whose aim is to “promote good values.” This sort of shit makes me want to punch “good values” in the face, and with good reason. Everyone knows these ads are vacuous, ineffective shit. They only endure because billionaires have wild ideas about absolution.

By contrast, you can tap into someone’s insecurities with astonishing ease. You don’t have to actually shame them so much as present the possibility: come with us, buy this product, espouse this theory, otherwise humiliation is imminent. Economically, sexually, situationally. If you haven’t been cucked already, you will be soon.

MAGA, with the fantasy of the American strong man at its center, has offered an alternative. As Max Read astutely pointed out, cuckoldry “structure[d] the first Trump administration’s understanding of politics and focus[ed] its obsessions: the idea of a black or brown stranger entering one’s home in order to replace and emasculate its owners is almost too on-the-nose as a parable about the Trumpist understanding of immigration.” Now, the Trump administration’s fixation has moved from cuckoldry to pronatalism —  a sort of “public-policy breeding fetish,” as Max puts it. “The concern here is less “strangers fucking your wife” and more “strangers fucking their own wives while you and your wife don’t fuck at all.”

When I read something like that — or the similarly persuasive argument that the DOGE ethos is, ultimately, all about sad men being mad that women have what they perceive to be bullshit email jobs — my first reaction is: I have no interest in creating something that will speak to anyone who has been swayed by that logic. It’s so fucking dumb. I feel debased just considering it.

Here’s where I think we take the proposition of connection — of generating alternatives — too literally. And by we, I mean everyone who sees the MAGA/DOGE viewpoint as a problem, but especially the Democratic party, desperate to reverse engineer a blockbuster political message that will magically erase years of residue about how the world should work and who we should blame for it not working that way. Going on the stump with Liz Cheney is not the solution! Neither is every college-educated liberal buying a copy of Hillbilly Elegy or pontificating about deaths of despair.

It’s like expecting all those READ posters from the ‘90s with Mister T or Nicolas Cage to somehow convince someone who’s been told for years that reading is a waste of time that reading is, in fact, very cool. The propaganda is too obvious! It just makes people think you think they’re dumb enough to fall for it! Insulting all around! And yes: propaganda is a reality of political life. An additional reality is that it will never work if it isn’t created by people who are living the same sort of life, with the same sort of fears, as the people you want to reach. (See: Gramsci’s understanding of the organic intellectual).

Of course, the propaganda coming from the right is also ham-fisted, transparent, and bad. But bear with me here: you see that clearly because it’s not touching any of your shame or fear points. That doesn’t mean you’re smarter; it means your fears are different. Or, more precisely, your reaction to those fears are different. When faced with change, do you try to preserve the way things are (or the way you imagine they used to be) or do you try and grapple with the realities of the future? Do you understand norms as fixed or always shifting? Do you think difference should be assimilated or celebrated? How open are you to changing your mind?

If you think of yourself on the left of the political spectrum, it’s easy to graft your politics onto those dichotomies and come out feeling great: I welcome change; I don’t fetishize the past; I celebrate difference; I’m open and affirming and ready to change my mind. And yes, at least when it comes to identity politics, those descriptions are (pretty) true of most people on the left. But that openness has its limits. A very incomplete list of things that trouble it: anything that threatens bourgeois class status, when your public school is “bad,” unions in actual practice not just in theory, polyamory, the Land Back movement, prison abolition, reconsidering the value of higher education, the primacy of home ownership, fat liberation, trans people who don’t aspire to homonormativity, and unhoused people.

I’ve seen all of those things activate fear centers in people who consider themselves liberal, causing them to act and speak and cling to solutions that aim to conserve their personal and financial status quo. I point this out not to shame, or to absolve, but to invite us to consider a common tenderness —and shared susceptibility to janky, ill-begotten salves. Maybe the first step to actually understanding each other is to stop fancying our own politics as somehow pristine, without contradiction, and above reproach.

The dynamics of polarization — in which we are “right” in part because we are not “them” — goad us into thinking that way. And once we agree the other side of the political spectrum is an abomination, and yet somehow out of our control or censor, we turn our opprobrium where it actually does work: on those in our ideological vicinity.

And that eats movements from within. The more we try to parse others’ impurities, the more we lose the plot. Do we want less suffering? Less fear, more compassion? Less corruption and more stability? Great. That’s the point. Now let’s get out of our own fucking way. Sometimes that’s how I try and explain the reality of solidarity: not missing the fucking point.

In his interview with the New York Times Magazine, Vuong points to the American obsession with dynamic stories of change, of heroes and anti-heroes, of happy endings and character evolution. But “American life is often very static,” he says. “You drive the same car, people live in the same apartment, but it doesn’t mean their lives are worthless.”

Most of our lives are that way, too. Apart from a few seismic events, we live our lives and live our lives and live our lives and keep living them, usually without the promise of glory or recognition. “I’ve been interested in this idea of kindness without hope,” Vuong continues. “What I saw working in fast food growing up in Hartford County was that people are kind even when they know it won’t matter. Where does that come from? I watched co-workers get together and dig each other out of blizzards. They could just dig themselves out and leave, go home sooner, hug their families, but they all stayed, and they dug each other out. What is kindness exhibited knowing there is no payoff?”

Like so many other writers, these past years have been filled with moments where writing — writing anything, publishing anything — has felt self-deluded and futile. But we have to use the mediums available to us, whatever they are, to speak — but also to listen. To write — but also to read. To extend care‚ and be cared for in return. To change someone else’s mind and allow your mind to be changed. To practice kindness, even and especially without hope.

And then, maybe — and I hesitate to even write it, lest it sound too much like hope — forking subtly from our lineage of despair, there’s the whisper of the idea Vuong leaves at the end of his advice to his students. Something new.

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For today’s discussion: there are admittedly a lot of ideas swirling around here, so please treat this piece in the spirit in which I wrote it: as exploratory, entreating, and curious.

Along those lines: What makes communicating while the world is burning so difficult in this moment? And what does kindness without hope look like to you?