Asymmetry

Some notes on vulnerability.

I have found myself with almost infinite appetite for poetry recently. The specific poets and genres seem to be varying wildly.

I’m moving from Western love poems:

You are near enough to be a far horizon.
Your body breathing is a silver edge
Of a long black mountain rising and falling slowly
Against the morning and the morning star…
Or I can say to myself as if I were
A wanderer being asked where he had been
Among the hills: “There was a range of mountains
Once I loved until I could not breathe.”

To Homer on violence:

As Dawn rose up in her golden robe from Ocean’s tides,
bringing light to immortal gods and mortal men,
Thetis sped Hephaestus’ gifts to the ships.
She found her Beloved son lying facedown,
embracing Patroclus’ body, sobbing, wailing

To an astonishing new poet that I recently discovered in Baltimore:

She’s holding the joint
while he lights it, and then they take
a deep breath together
and she says, Let’s not go
just yet, oh my love, not now
when I’ve found you, please,
let’s circle slow

I worry that the theme word for 2025 might be: sludge.

In a long Substack post last week, Rod Dreher detailed his experiences whilst in DC for a trip designed around meetings between Victor Orban and JD Vance. His account compiles countless conversations in which the usually NatCon-sympathetic Dreher gets stretched further and further beyond his boundaries by young conservatives who tell him not only about what they see as growing antagonism against Jews among Gen-Z, but the desire for pure bloodlines, and openness to actual fascism.

The account tracks the broader events that we are seeing as the Right begins to rip at itself over Nick Fuentes and Jeffrey Epstein. It also echoes countless conversations I have also had — particularly with female friends — about how DC dating culture is recalibrating under the Trump administration. What started as curiosity about somewhat more traditional relationship structures is morphing quickly into increasingly strident rejection of the equality of the sexes. Many of these stories — from demands for female submission to questions about racial heritage — have made me more incandescently angry than anything I can remember.

But I’m also the perfect age — old enough to remember a world before Trump, young enough to have very little sentimentality for it — to recognize that the roots of this crisis began well before 2024 or even 2016.

After I started writing this essay, the news broke that Larry Summers has decided to step back from his public commitments because of the release of documents related to his interactions with Jeffrey Epstein, including asking Epstein for advice about how to “pursue” (prowl after) a mentee of his, and emphasizing that women have lower IQs than men.

In Summers’ statement he states “I am deeply ashamed of my actions and recognize the pain they have caused … I take full responsibility for my misguided decision … ” Summers’ silky prose lingers for just long enough to remember that the reason for this apology is not because he has found himself so troubled by his actions that he can’t keep them hidden any longer, but because other people can now see the truth because the House decided to release a trove of illicit emails. The files are filled with sludge — just an ongoing stream of putrescence by many figures who were or still are in the public eye — and have now spent decades obfuscating, sidestepping and lying.

The word “vulnerable” in English has both negative and positive connotations. Negatively it’s the condition of “exposure” which traces back to its origin from vulnus “wound” — the susceptibility to be violated. Given this etymology, it is strange that we consider it such an aspirational word — something that is actually close to the culmination of life. The ability to be open, exposed, revealed to other people. In some sense intimacy just is, I think, the capacity to take the boundaries one would ordinarily reserve only in one’s own hands — “here is where I protect myself” — and place them externally in the hands of another person.

Violence, in other words, is a real and constant possibility in human life. Even in moments of full self-protection, the possibility of being overwhelmed by external force is real. And definitionally to be vulnerable is to make oneself intentionally susceptible to wounding.

But the paradox that I’ve been wrestling with is a prior one — assume pain, assume violence — what is lost in self-protection?

Our generation is not unique in being born into a violent or mendacious time. But such times do provoke their own questions. If the world around begins to bubble with lies or hostility, the immediate intuition is to respond with equivalent force. To draw up one’s guard and to develop mechanisms for counter-attack.

But at that moment, one has already lost. That decision is a decision also to be ripped away from the possibility of trust. An act of violence then reproduces itself in one’s own actions. The first iteration then creates counter-actions and counter-counter-actions — overt revenge or a quiet hardening — and that road can never lead back home again.

Hence, I think, the need for asymmetric combat. The actual fight is not about which combatant wins, but what of human life is lost in resigning oneself to a world of violence or lies. To stooping one’s head.

The world that Summers represented was something that — for those who lived in it — already felt duplicitous, sordid. And in many ways, New Washington is a direct reaction, repudiation of it. But neither are innocent and both in their own ways have diminished their hopes of what life should be.

The Jewish Romanian poet Paul Celan made what seems like a fairly conscious decision to write the bulk of his poetry in German. In his acceptance speech for a literary prize late in life he reflects on the degree to which language itself became the great problem: “it had to go through its own lack of answers, through terrifying silence, through the thousand darknesses of murderous speech.” Language in general, and German in particular had been used to lie, coerce, manipulate, condemn. German, it turns out, was porous, taking in the filth of the entire regime, soaking it deep into its sinews.

But that was all the more reason to live in that language. As he says “In this language I tried, during those years and the years after, to write poems … to find out where I was, where I was going, to chart my reality … the poem does not stand outside time. True it claims the infinite and tries to reach across time — but across, not above.”

Every time I read this speech — especially that last line “across, not above” — it’s like air rushing back into my lungs. It’s the directness of the poet. The honesty about violence, and the full fragility which we mortals carry. It’s the sense — even in Homeric war poetry — that the world is large and the stakes are real. But somehow poetry is also the place that begins to heal the paradox.

How to get out of the paradox of strength v. weakness — the triumph of will. I have a friend who after a recent romantic shock took herself to a week of operas — soaking in beauty to remember a different world. If another world, a world defined not by lies or the conceit of coercion is real, we should live in it. This is the whole point. The vision of life that involves vulnerability is itself a picture of strength — of far greater strength. It is precisely a demand that life is high, and that respect — dignity one deserves — is genuine. But it is a version of strength that can never be symmetric to violence. The cost of violence is high, but the cost of invulnerability far higher — far too high.

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