Stopping 'Business as Usual'

Artists and Politics

Nov 10, 2023

I’ve been thinking a lot about how we are conditioned to continue moving on and moving past. I think the phrase I’ve been seeing a lot of, “We will not continue business as usual,” is so effective. The opposite is all we know, to place the struggles of the world in a small compartment in our mind, eventually pushing and moving it further from our present as we continue on with our business.

I have such admiration and solidarity with my colleagues who have taken professional and personal risks in showing support for Palestine. If you aren’t already, please follow Writers Against the War on Gaza1. I truly believe we will see Palestine free in our lifetime, and that there is change in the air.

I haven’t wanted to continue on business as usual. There were a few topics that one could expect from me here that I would have otherwise written about, but I just can’t bring myself to do it. In my last Voice Note, I talked about this one line I read in Sheila Heti’s new book Alphabetical Diaries (out in February), “Been thinking about authenticity and about how we have been done a great disservice by being taught that [what] we are to be authentic to is our feelings, as opposed to our values.”

As someone who has been interested in the first half of the twentieth century, I have always thought the relationship between artists, writers, and politics is very close—Whether we choose to see it or not. As is my tendency, in order to better understand the present, I like to think about the past and think about where I would hope to fit within its political and artistic lineage.

Earlier this year, I finally finished reading a book called February House2. Non-fiction following the years when writers W.H. Auden, Carson McCullers, Paul and Jane Bowles, and Gypsy Rose Lee lived under one roof in a run-down brownstone in Brooklyn. It covers the early WWII years before America entered the war. Of course, there are many fun, salacious tidbits about living in what was ultimately an urban commune, but what was more fascinating was the political atmosphere of the time. W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood were often ragged on in the British press for having left England during the war. Thomas Mann’s children, Erika and Klaus Mann, would often bring over exiled Germans to the Brooklyn house (having been stripped of their own citizenship by the Nazi regime).

For a brief period, Klaus Mann founded an anti-fascist literary magazine for exiled German writers called Decision, with prominent contributors such as Brecht and Jean Cocteau. I always joke that now, people think they can start new magazines or journals and believe they are onto something radical. They often fall short of anything meaningful because they substitute a true moral compass with a hollow “edge.”

“The contributors were Germans and non-Germans clearly engaged in the socio-political issues of the time, bringing forth documents of resistance with the aim to promote a free world […] in their effort to unite against a totalitarian regime of terror.”3

There is a sense, especially by the time America enters the war, that all of these artists and thinkers could no longer idly stand by.

Another book I read recently was the memoir by Mary Oppen, Meaning a Life.4 Where poets and artists Mary and George Oppen gave up on their art to join the resistance. I suggest reading the New Yorker article on the memoir.5 For now, I will leave you with the last paragraph from that article, by Miranda Popkey:

“They tried to have an exemplary life,” DuPlessis told me. It is an example that feels especially apt now—particularly their ability to perform unromantic, inconvenient, unpleasant tasks when necessary; to set personal ambition and pleasure aside in favor of what can be dreary and largely unrewarded work. “Meaning a Life” is a reminder that sympathy is not nothing, but sympathy, when it leads to action, is something more, and greater.

From the Desk of Marlowe Granados

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