Yesterday — though by the time you read this it will no longer be yesterday, and I dread the geopolitics of tomorrow — I read Weil on the Iliad . I scanned Sontag on the pain of [others] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regarding_the_Pain_of_Others). I rewatched Klimov on war.

This is how I coped, via analysis and analogy. Yoking my overwhelmed faculties to the thoughts of others, I wondered about history with a capital H and human life with a small one. I wondered about conflict, about distance, about how and when we go into shock, into numbness, into self-anesthetization. Far from the shells and the bombs, I wondered why there can be no “we” to speak of. And then, I knew that I must write about us and bitter incommensurability.

Let me first tell you about Klimov’s masterpiece, where you are forced into a young boy’s piercing eyes, with a lens that gazes into Flyora’s gaze, into irises going dim and a child growing impossibly old. There is, for the briefest breath, a sparkle there at the very beginning. Then, for two hours, the eyes shrivel, cringe, leak and change. In Klimov’s hands, Flyora hollows out. He is pummeled by exposures to wreckage, devastated by burning landscapes and lives.

A lyric meditation on annihilation, Come and See shows the self’s destabilization at the hands of friend and foe. Chipped to Flyora’s shoulder, we penetrate deep into an adolescent psyche, experiencing his world at war. Surprise, surprise — he learns little, instead losing his desire to learn. There is, after all, scant to be found in the vicissitudes of violence. We see land mines, carpet bombs and crowded barns set ablaze. But death throes are bad teachers. And the irrational, un-logic of genocide? It is irreconcilable with the communitarianism that structures much of social life. Flyora, for instance, looks aghast as a recently invaded village has its members feed and service an SS officer, who promptly abets their murder.

For Klimov, the heat of battle does not burnish, it melts and fuses in all the wrong places, deconfiguring the schemata of body and soul. Flyora is left hapless, shooting at an image of evil, before even that act seems absurd. He shudders to a halt — there is no justice here. He walks back to his column, desensed. In Come and See, all war is pyrrhic. All conflict internecine. And in the long run, only the traumatized remain.

Flyora, sweet, murderous child, younger than me. He gazes, deathly pale and wrinkled, flesh hanging from darkening holes, his once-eyes. He is charred, ravaged, ruined by the endless, the repeating, the unquenchable letting of blood. No innocence — it does not survive certain sights and smells.

I keep returning to the moment of the first barrage, when the brute force of the bombs begin to rip a forest apart. Halfway through the scene, the intensely audiovisual experience shudders, fumbles, then decouples. The detonative display continues, but its sounds stop. Instead, a high pitched static, a one-tone wail, takes over. We are in Flyora’s mind, his deafened ear. This debilitated body of a child is inscripted and impaired by war. And so, alongside the resonant dying, [impairment] (https://www.dukeupress.edu/diminished-faculties) and debility become crucial heuristics for coming to terms with Come and See.

Bagged and bogged, the film propulses from scene to scene, from atrocity to atrocity. Chapped lips and snot, dried blood and bile, the macabre glazes the surface of each shot. Early in the film, Kosach, a leader of the resistance, declaring “we won’t have any cowards here” is a dark, ironic jest in retrospect. If one idea becomes clearer by the end, it is that we are all cowards here. For Klimov’s war is pathetic and bathetic. It forces us to confront the worst of humanity. “He’s deaf. He’s crazy. He’s gone mad. He can’t hear,” says Glasha, a nurse entangled with both Kosach and Flyora. And who wouldn’t be, in the face of such brutality?

So what is art's use in times of suffering that reverberates, that echoes through time and rends the present? Which is to say, what is the purpose of art, and criticism for that matter, at any time?

I watched Come and See because I was reeling. I also know that the blow hit me at an angle, that its force was muffled by the circumstances of my nationality, my ethnicity, my gender, my … .

You can outsource the processing of a catastrophe, push it into art and literature, when the pain is not yours to bear — when it can be shut out without the threat of harm to kith or kin. That is, however, not how most pain works. That is also not how people work. But on the flip side, have I not shut out heaviness even when its weight was rightfully mine?

Self-preservation is not a cop out or crime. It should not be. The non-airtightness of human experience allows affects to spill, overflowing into others, into the sharing of burdens. And so, we have empathy. Often, it is all that makes pain bearable. Sometimes, the fact of violence obliterates anyway. Both these truths exist simultaneously, at all times.

As I thought about the breaking news at dawn on Thursday, I sensed Benjamin’s angel of history. For the immediately affected, and some others, in differing degrees, that painted image, its explication of history as one continuum of accumulating disaster, feels rawer. Rawer this weekend. Rawer this year, the last three, the decade we have left. Rawer than we once thought imaginable.

For others, I do not know. Seventy years of peace, they say. They are shocked that what we once witnessed could not change the minds of the mongers and mongrels of suffering. Whose peace? Where have you been looking? Not here, for sure. Down south, us proxies. And there? There is, as Stein taught us, no there there.

What we have had is a separate peace. And, without diminishing the calamity at hand, the question has always been one of grief, turning on the myth of a we that cannot, could never, be. The shock of today teaches us something about the politics of counting; it raises the question of death and grievability. Precarious phrases, precarious nations. There has been, I submit, no peace. But this does not forgive and cannot distract from the reprehensible: another war.

Of course, it is selfish, this business of criticism. But I want to hold on to writing, precisely as an a-proximate enterprise. The work of empathy, I believe, is also a willingness to drown in impossible, unbridgeable gulfs. And the work of thinking deeply about things? That begins to formulate the ethics Come and See will not supply directly. The contemplative act, pondering feelings and actions at various scales and their manifold degrees, an act so many seek to limit, denigrate, and excoriate … This slow practice of processing is what allows us to understand one another despite it all. And perhaps that is what is so threatening about empathy. Dilating time, it induces care-relations between the incommensurable world and (in)consolable me, parties that should be distended by circumstance. But when I feel you … you feel me?

Yes. This is its own kind of resistance, a kind resistance.

I wish I could end here, saying, “let us say no…”. I wish I could say we should watch Klimov, and artworks like his, and host days of remembrance and put up marked memorials at graveyards, or unmarked graves in open fields. I wish I could sing of solutions and that they were sufficient.

Empty words.

We come, we see, we do not learn.

But empathy, a curious creature, makes you try again. Empathy amplifies because of failure, not despite.

The one good thing about all the violence in the world is that it is all connected. The sooner we see that—the sooner we care, without diminishment or flattening, we can start to notice our imbrications in suffering. And then, we march. Remember, Flyora does not leave his comrades. He rushes after them. He catches up with the battered, battering crew. The last shot of the film? It is of them walking off into the green, together. Then, we tilt up into the blue. Cut.

Things will get worse tomorrow. When they do, let us not walk alone.