On Steep Waves, for Maikel Nabil, Vienna, November 2011
Dear Maikel
Nabil,
Weeks have
passed since you were finally released from imprisonment, and one might think
that those weeks turned into years – for greater than before have been the
horrors to which we have been exposed since then – making us hesitate in which
side of the bars had you been and had we been throughout this time; ask
ourselves if maybe it was the same side after all? It is at best strange to
want to write a letter of sorts to someone who is not a friend or a relative,
to spend a thought or two on a person about whom we know so little and the
details, that is, the journalistic details, are unimportant. People who write –
in particular those who cover tragedies and restless corners of the world –
have an obligation to place themselves at a distance from the subjects of their
endeavors and must attempt to see the larger picture, but yet sometimes it is
necessary to communicate things in another way, and it is precisely that direct
communication what humanizes the writer and the journalist by humanizing his
own subjects.
After those
many months of patiently waiting to hear news, of sinking, of unraveling, of
being infinitely hopeful in spite of the circumstances collapsing under one’s
feet; it was infinitely joyous to hear that at long last you were free at the
same time that it was a joy marred by the full knowledge of how dovetailed was
the freedom that the world was again offering you, and by tour de passage,
offering us. The truth being said, I personally did nothing other than offering
empathy and perhaps I am sorry that I didn’t do anything else, for I didn’t
know what could possibly be done and it is clear to me at this point that
talking and writing simply do not release people from injustice but rather,
only overstate the obvious – that such injustice exists, that we live with it
and are often part of it as well. An Israeli writer said once that he had
dreamt with being a book rather than a writer, because writers are easier to
kill than it is to burn books that always might survive and damaged as they
might be, find a way to a shelf somewhere. Noble as writing might be, it’s
incredibly powerless before reality.
Thoughts,
opinions, words… They are often rendered powerless but not insignificant. After
all it was through reading the thoughts of an anonymous somebody in another
corner of the world that I became familiar with Maikel Nabil the blogger, the
prisoner, the striker, etc. I do not think that the important thing was whether
I agreed with or loved what you said; whether I condemned it or praised it,
that is entirely besides the point here. It is also not an issue of proclaiming
that one should defend anyone’s thoughts no matter what, as per the use and
abuse of Voltaire among the liberals that hated your thoughts but opposed the
injustice – this is something I can never comprehend. I do not think personally
that all thoughts must be defended or that there is equality in thinking; some
thoughts are indefensible and even worthy of condemnation; not all thoughts are
of equal value or quality. Thinking can be a very solitary thing and it often
is, and there is a difference between the things we think, the persons we are,
the worlds in which we live; sometimes there might be not even a relation. It
is possible to hate thoughts of people we love, and to love thoughts of people
we despise. To be
honest, I find it reproachable that you had to do what you did in order to
preserve your dignity and what accorded to your actions the status of heroic;
reproachable not about you but about ourselves and the times in which we are
living, for as Bertolt Brecht wrote once, “Unhappy is the country that needs a
hero”.
Commenting on the character in that play of Brecht where the telling
line is included, a friend of mine wrote recently: “Did he escape unhappiness
in this way? Certainly not; for unhappiness reigns as long as the demand for
heroes exist. It does not help to turn down individual heroism. The situation
won’t improve. One should therefore read the sentence contrary to its
intention: Because unhappiness is the rule and not the exception, there will be
always need for heroes.” One doesn’t need to be too well informed to know about
the fate of heroes that is well documented from the Greek tragedies to Jesus to
our own days. To be heroic does not accord a higher personal or spiritual
status, at least from the perspective of the maker of the heroic deed. My
friend comments then on Vaclav Havel and says about heroes: “Their relationship
to the world is pragmatic and rather cheerful than melancholy or brooding. They
have a free spirit, but this is no reason for them to be vain; sometimes they
do not even know it. If heroism is to overcome, it can also dispense pathos and
vanity. It needs no reward, not even that of great importance and meaning.
Probably only heroism without reward is true heroism. It is a matter of the
moment and of a far off future.”
While this
might be true for you as the bearer of such incredible dignity, it is never
true for the observer who needs to resort to pathos and to his own inability to
act, in order to recognize the heroic nature of something or somebody. For all
the above, I will keep myself from calling you a hero, especially because
heroism has to do mostly with two things – with courage and with tragedy. On
the one hand I love the world too much – brutal as it might be – to appreciate
the melancholy figure of the hero, and on the other, courage is not a virtue or
a value. Susan Sontag writes: “Courage has no moral value in itself, for courage
is not, in itself, a moral virtue. Vicious scoundrels, murderers, terrorists
may be brave. To describe courage as a virtue, we need an adjective: we speak
of moral courage – because there is such a thing as amoral courage too. And
resistance has no value in itself. It is the content of the resistance that
determines its merit, its moral necessity. There’s nothing inherently superior
about resistance”. While courage might be a political virtue, it no longer has
anything to do with you as a person because in politics it is not life or the
objective personality but the world what is at stake.
With so
many tragic events, uncalled for heroes – even the dead ones – and wars raging
all over the world as we speak, what is it then that compels a perfect stranger
to write a letter to Maikel Nabil? I do not think that the fact that you are
one another subject in the vast repertory of Middle Eastern tragedies is the
really significant part; for it is not the content of your thoughts, or the
heroic and courageous nature of your actions what has turned your objective
person into a sort of fixed image, I believe you are just a guy like any one of
us is, with friends and enemies, with a past – maybe a bad one, who are we to
know that? – and with all the virtues and defects that are found among human
beings, with goodness and cruelty, with selfishness and altruism. For all the
above I do not want to pretend that I had anything to do with campaigning for
your release or that anything I said or did had any effect on anyone; my
thoughts are private and in writing there can be nothing more superficial than
patronizing a reader rather than stirring him up, and as such there is no
reason why I consider that you owe any gratitude to anyone but life itself, and
why not, chance. There is an emotional element to this, which was less the good
intention and more the despair and the powerlessness about the injustice
committed and that we certainly couldn’t fix.
What I
think is really unique about you is not WHAT you thought but that you THOUGHT
at all, and because it was your thoughts what put you in jail and not anyone
else’s thoughts, what matters ultimately is how you defended and still defend
the life of the mind and the right to thinking with pride and not following
whatever is available or offered in the open market of political ideas; sense
in which you are defending something that is infinitely beyond the realm of
mere politics and it constitutes something so incredibly human because it puts
the life of the mind above the practical concerns of the day and in doing so,
one equates his own sense of freedom with the burden of responsibility for the
others as well; something nearly impossible to do today. In the words of Hannah
Arendt: “The vicarious responsibility for
things we have not done, this taking upon ourselves the consequences for things
we are entirely innocent of, is the price we pay for the fact that we live our
lives not by ourselves but among our fellow men, and that the faculty of
action, which, after all, is the political faculty par excellence, can be
actualized only as one of the many and manifold forces of human community.”
Only those who think
for themselves are able to grasp the extent to which they are also responsible
for others, and whoever defends the life of the mind from the tyranny of faith
and conviction and persuasion, will understand that heroism and courage is not
necessary UNLESS it is immediately necessary. Because I strongly believe this I
refuse to take part in the culture of hero worship and in the insatiable
ambition for recognition, for after all infinitely good deeds might be as banal
as infinitely bad deeds once they are put into the world and we are no longer
in control of them. In moments such as this when the world surfaces in its
ugliest shades of color, we do not need more tragic or dead heroes and courage
is not a virtue but a necessity and obligation for survival; but thinking for
yourself, the life of the mind, what I believe you represent, is the only
insurance left for those who want to navigate through the ocean of cruelty and
war without getting lost in it by adopting what seem to be the practical
solutions of the day, it is the insurance that guarantees we are thinking what
we are doing and doing what we are thinking.
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