© Kael Alford
Bright Unbearable Reality (NYRB, 2022) is Anna Badhken’s expression of the moral imperative to bring the world to account. Her collection of essays forces us to look and truly see. As she keeps a record of her wanderings, she maps with absolute forensic precision what we ourselves have made of what was given to us—her own Ludovico technique exposing our reality in all its shades of suffering and inequities. It is bright. It is unbearable. It is everywhere tainted with our presence. And yet, she makes sure we cannot look away. More than that, her voice urges us to remember, to empathize, to act. The title is a translation of Greek enargeia, which, says the poet Alice Oswald, is “when gods come to earth not in disguise but as themselves.” Once we learn to see, we can finally trust and relate to one another, and find our own true self in the process.
Here she talks to Daniel Nemo about how seeing the world requires us to look inward, and her attempt at finding the right questions over the correct answers.
Daniel Nemo: You moved, same as me, to the US from a very different place, culturally as well as politically. How did that come to happen for you? Tell me about your transition to American living.
Anna Badkhen: I moved to the US from Russia in 2004, with my husband at the time and our two children. It was a move of convenience—David, who had been the Moscow Bureau chief for the Boston Globe, was returning home to Massachusetts to work at the Globe’s office. I had been working as a war correspondent for the San Francisco Chronicle since 2001, so I simply moved airports. And the kids got to grow up close to the ocean. It was a very, very privileged immigration.
DN: What do you reckon makes you spend your life “documenting the world’s iniquities,” as you put it?
AB: It’s my responsibility as a writer and a human, the only ethical thing for me to do. Given my personal background, the limitations of my skillset, and my professional experience—including my past as a war correspondent—writing about the world’s iniquities is the closest I can come to trying to bring the world to some kind of accountability. It is a moral imperative.
DN: Are most of us guilty of bird’s-eye view detachment when it comes to forced displacement and mass migration? Is there more each and every one of us could do about it?
AB: Are most of us guilty of bird’s-eye view detachment when it comes to pretty much anything? It is intuitive to turn away from suffering. Do you remember Ilya Kaminsky’s piercing poem, "We Lived Happily During the War"? Or Auden, who writes about the Breughel painting, “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus”:
About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along
Turning away is a very human response. It is fair to say that we are always not doing enough. So, let’s just acknowledge that right off the bat. The trick is figuring out our next step. I think it is, as you put it, for each and every one of us to figure out, it is a very individual decision. I do believe that knowing it—not just recognizing it, but continuously keeping this knowledge in our minds, in our hearts—can pave way for a myriad individual decisions, individual changes in behavior.
DN: In your essay “Ways of Seeing”, you quote a vital question from a José Eduardo Agualusa novel: “Is it more important to bear witness to beauty, or to denounce horror?”). I believe we must do both, but how does one open eyes which seem to purposely look away—from each?
AB: I agree: we must remember to do both. Galway Kinnell wrote: “Before us, our first task is to astonish, / and then, harder by far, to be astonished.” If I recall correctly, this was his final poem published during his life. It is a difficult practice, to pay attention, to walk through life with a heart open. But I don’t think this practice of acknowledging beauty and denouncing horror is much more difficult than the practice of loving. In fact, I think it is very much a part of the practice of loving.
DN: Here is a great passage from Bright Unbearable Reality: “… the oldest known maps were series of hollows, scars, notches—portholes—scooped out of bone, chinked into rock. Some of them appear to depict landmarks, some the starry sky. What each map always shows is a relationship between elements of some space; what each map always implies is the observer, you. Each represents our effort to make sense of ourselves in a particular place—and thus, each charts our reach for meaning.”
Do you see this human reach for meaning as something which fulfils a need arising from a region of thought, intellect, or from a more intuitive place—as a natural, emotional, perhaps mystical way of knowing? Is it similar to what you identify as the writer’s “irrepressible impulse to draw connections, identify patterns, establish syllogisms”?
AB: Oh gosh, I don’t know this. Perhaps this is why I write: to try to understand, or at least perhaps brush up against a sense of why we are the way we are. This is why I stopped being a journalist many years ago: I am not very interested in providing answers. I am much more interested in trying to figure out the right questions.
DN: You write: “Grief makes it impossible to move: This is aporia, an absence of path, a passagelessness that engenders a state of powerless, immobilized confusion, of being at a loss, a no-way that is not the same as a presence, a separation of heart and will…
[…] Gillian Rose […] says that accepting aporia means accepting “that there may not be solutions to questions, only the clarification of their statement,” and that such acceptance is essential to a philosophic life.”
Is such a life, a no-way that is not the same as presence, experienced as a vision state, something akin to a dissolution of the self? Correspondingly, is a philosophic life, or a life which is, in that sense, exploratory and self-effacing, something taking place in the realm of a mythical consciousness?
AB: Yes! I think learning not to know—not in a denialist kind of way, but in a truly philosophic way—is an important practice. I think that possibly this kind of not-knowing may open space within us for the astonishment and grief that Agualusa’s character wonders about.
DN: This question leads me to wonder if you tend to discover your work directly by writing it?
AB: Not entirely. There has to be some kind of an inkling, going into it, that there is something to be discovered in the first place. I always work toward something, some idea or a suggestion of an idea, because I think my time here is very limited and I need to maximize how I spend it. I don’t come to my study in the morning thinking, I’m just going to write something and see what comes out of it. I come to my study thinking, I have an idea in mind, now, how do I articulate it on the page. The writing, for me, is the learning of how to use language properly in order to articulate a thought with maximum clarity (including emotional clarity) and, I hope, impact.
DN: You say that “all the poets in my line are gone.” Yet you yourself are a poet. As I read your book what appeared at first to be prose contained at its root the musicality of poetry—was poetry. How do you feel about moving deeper into it at some point?
AB: Ah, you are really very kind. Thank you. I believe that language is a very powerful and a very delicate tool. I am so grateful that I get to spend my life learning how to use it, and it is an immense privilege to know that my efforts in this learning bring—if not solace, then at least a modicum of delight—to the people who read my work.
Here she talks to Daniel Nemo about how seeing the world requires us to look inward, and her attempt at finding the right questions over the correct answers.
Daniel Nemo: You moved, same as me, to the US from a very different place, culturally as well as politically. How did that come to happen for you? Tell me about your transition to American living.
Anna Badkhen: I moved to the US from Russia in 2004, with my husband at the time and our two children. It was a move of convenience—David, who had been the Moscow Bureau chief for the Boston Globe, was returning home to Massachusetts to work at the Globe’s office. I had been working as a war correspondent for the San Francisco Chronicle since 2001, so I simply moved airports. And the kids got to grow up close to the ocean. It was a very, very privileged immigration.
DN: What do you reckon makes you spend your life “documenting the world’s iniquities,” as you put it?
AB: It’s my responsibility as a writer and a human, the only ethical thing for me to do. Given my personal background, the limitations of my skillset, and my professional experience—including my past as a war correspondent—writing about the world’s iniquities is the closest I can come to trying to bring the world to some kind of accountability. It is a moral imperative.
DN: Are most of us guilty of bird’s-eye view detachment when it comes to forced displacement and mass migration? Is there more each and every one of us could do about it?
AB: Are most of us guilty of bird’s-eye view detachment when it comes to pretty much anything? It is intuitive to turn away from suffering. Do you remember Ilya Kaminsky’s piercing poem, "We Lived Happily During the War"? Or Auden, who writes about the Breughel painting, “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus”:
About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along
Turning away is a very human response. It is fair to say that we are always not doing enough. So, let’s just acknowledge that right off the bat. The trick is figuring out our next step. I think it is, as you put it, for each and every one of us to figure out, it is a very individual decision. I do believe that knowing it—not just recognizing it, but continuously keeping this knowledge in our minds, in our hearts—can pave way for a myriad individual decisions, individual changes in behavior.
DN: In your essay “Ways of Seeing”, you quote a vital question from a José Eduardo Agualusa novel: “Is it more important to bear witness to beauty, or to denounce horror?”). I believe we must do both, but how does one open eyes which seem to purposely look away—from each?
AB: I agree: we must remember to do both. Galway Kinnell wrote: “Before us, our first task is to astonish, / and then, harder by far, to be astonished.” If I recall correctly, this was his final poem published during his life. It is a difficult practice, to pay attention, to walk through life with a heart open. But I don’t think this practice of acknowledging beauty and denouncing horror is much more difficult than the practice of loving. In fact, I think it is very much a part of the practice of loving.
DN: Here is a great passage from Bright Unbearable Reality: “… the oldest known maps were series of hollows, scars, notches—portholes—scooped out of bone, chinked into rock. Some of them appear to depict landmarks, some the starry sky. What each map always shows is a relationship between elements of some space; what each map always implies is the observer, you. Each represents our effort to make sense of ourselves in a particular place—and thus, each charts our reach for meaning.”
Do you see this human reach for meaning as something which fulfils a need arising from a region of thought, intellect, or from a more intuitive place—as a natural, emotional, perhaps mystical way of knowing? Is it similar to what you identify as the writer’s “irrepressible impulse to draw connections, identify patterns, establish syllogisms”?
AB: Oh gosh, I don’t know this. Perhaps this is why I write: to try to understand, or at least perhaps brush up against a sense of why we are the way we are. This is why I stopped being a journalist many years ago: I am not very interested in providing answers. I am much more interested in trying to figure out the right questions.
DN: You write: “Grief makes it impossible to move: This is aporia, an absence of path, a passagelessness that engenders a state of powerless, immobilized confusion, of being at a loss, a no-way that is not the same as a presence, a separation of heart and will…
[…] Gillian Rose […] says that accepting aporia means accepting “that there may not be solutions to questions, only the clarification of their statement,” and that such acceptance is essential to a philosophic life.”
Is such a life, a no-way that is not the same as presence, experienced as a vision state, something akin to a dissolution of the self? Correspondingly, is a philosophic life, or a life which is, in that sense, exploratory and self-effacing, something taking place in the realm of a mythical consciousness?
AB: Yes! I think learning not to know—not in a denialist kind of way, but in a truly philosophic way—is an important practice. I think that possibly this kind of not-knowing may open space within us for the astonishment and grief that Agualusa’s character wonders about.
DN: This question leads me to wonder if you tend to discover your work directly by writing it?
AB: Not entirely. There has to be some kind of an inkling, going into it, that there is something to be discovered in the first place. I always work toward something, some idea or a suggestion of an idea, because I think my time here is very limited and I need to maximize how I spend it. I don’t come to my study in the morning thinking, I’m just going to write something and see what comes out of it. I come to my study thinking, I have an idea in mind, now, how do I articulate it on the page. The writing, for me, is the learning of how to use language properly in order to articulate a thought with maximum clarity (including emotional clarity) and, I hope, impact.
DN: You say that “all the poets in my line are gone.” Yet you yourself are a poet. As I read your book what appeared at first to be prose contained at its root the musicality of poetry—was poetry. How do you feel about moving deeper into it at some point?
AB: Ah, you are really very kind. Thank you. I believe that language is a very powerful and a very delicate tool. I am so grateful that I get to spend my life learning how to use it, and it is an immense privilege to know that my efforts in this learning bring—if not solace, then at least a modicum of delight—to the people who read my work.
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Anna Badkhen is the author of seven books, most recently the essay collection Bright Unbearable Reality, which was longlisted for the 2022 National Book Award. She has received the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Barry Lopez Visiting Writer in Ethics and Community Fellowship, and the Joel R. Seldin Award from Psychologists for Social Responsibility for writing about civilians in war zones. Badkhen was born in the Soviet Union and is a US citizen.
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Bright Unbearable Reality, by Anna Badkhen (New York Review Books, 2022)
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