[ad_1]
“And now,” writes George Prochnik in his new memoir, I Dream with Open Eyes, “I have left America because the country became alien to me, or because I believe that somewhere out there in the great beyond I might still find a place that sings home?”
On that subtle “or” hangs an inquiry.
After the shock of the 2016 presidential election, Prochnik, the author of five books of nonfiction (including The Impossible Exile, winner of a National Jewish Book Award), and his wife shared a decision to leave the United States and relocate to England. The reasons were many and complicated, having to do with existential notions of home and attendant thoughts of duty and belonging. Yet, a question remained: What was the real root of this choice? From what was the energy made that finally compelled Prochnik and his family to self-exile across 3,500 miles of ocean? Was it Donald Trump and his base insurrections, or private, long-harbored feelings of displacement?
Prochnik’s memoir, in prose at once personal as well as profound, attempts to come to grips with provocations and polarities both inner and outer, forces nourished within his own being and down the line of his family tree, as well as those thrust upon him by a country marching to the verge of self-destruction.
The following interview was conducted via email and edited for length.
Ryan Asmussen
Early on you write, “Sometimes I feel I’ve spent my life fleeing the United States, then being swept back into the country’s . . . embrace.” You ring serious changes on this feeling throughout the book, analyzing it as objectively as you can from various angles. Have you reached any conclusions?
George Prochnik
Even at a moment when America’s political and economic dominance is challenged and feels precarious, the country’s cultural sway remains globally nearly inescapable, and the face of that global “brand America” is generally materialistic, homogenizing, and destructive. As someone who has spent his life as a writer working in the cultural sphere to defend the kaleidoscopic heterogeneity of human self-expression—independent of market value—this omni-monetizing, monolithic tendency is a problem. The line you cite refers to the ineludible reach of that empty aspiration, but of course there are also much deeper, more profound ideals and prospects—the beauty of America’s unbound horizons that one can’t let go of without feeling that one’s sacrificing the promise of boundlessness as such. If I’ve come to any conclusion, it’s that the positive dimension of America’s boundlessness has to be directed toward some new project which would be the reverse of everything that culminated in the last presidency.
Ryan Asmussen
Hinging, as it does, on these facts of relocation, of displacement, the book naturally deals with belonging, whether a particular spot on the planet, away from one’s familiar surroundings, can offer real sustenance. How does one, in effect, arrive at a state of belonging? Is it even possible?
George Prochnik
In my own experience, the mirror reflection or painted glass prefiguration of a “peaceable kingdom” in which belonging is modeled as some version of a cooperative, communal society has shattered. So that now belonging happens only in a fragmentary, fleeting way. Sometimes this occurs through the channels of memory. For instance, there are features of the sky and green spaces in London where I now live that bring back shards of other places I’ve spent time in, from Cooperstown, New York, where my grandparents lived when I was a child, to Jerusalem where I moved in my late twenties. There are also aspects of the English language here that recall the language of my maternal ancestors. When I feel those shards of connection to significant past scenes and dialogues, I feel a sudden current of belonging. It’s transient, but maybe that’s as it should be. More than really belonging, I’m interested in reconciling myself to permanent dislocation. At a moment when so many people are displaced for such drastic reasons—refugees of war and global warming for starters—it seems reasonable to consider an enacted solidarity with the variants of exile as preferable to older forms of belonging. One can belong perhaps to a certain state of the human condition with which one identifies or empathizes.
Ryan Asmussen
You suggest we need to find a way to live with the polarities of our lives, inner and outer, that this is an essential problem for us as human beings. One of the ways we see this manifest in the U.S. is in our current partisan climate. How do we decide which of our polarities may, in fact, be truly harmful to us, even ultimately unacceptable?
George Prochnik
As individuals we must learn to live in a state of dynamic tension with our polarities if we’re not going to either withdraw altogether or impose our narcissistic visions onto others. But as a society, as you point out, the accommodation of polarities has dangers that can be catastrophic. I subscribe to Freud’s position that only rare individuals really transcend the primal, selfish instincts. Most of us must intermittently but regularly battle to tamp down at least a few abhorrent impulses—the vicious, solipsistic urges that Trump let out of the bottle en masse and then paraded as virtues. The pole of extremist, hate-mongering views shouldn’t be “held in the balance” in a healthy political system—it has to be declawed and disassembled. Doing otherwise would be to indulge in the kind of gross relativism that much of the media fell into around the 2016 elections when the principle of giving equal airtime to opposing viewpoints ends up just handing a microphone to various advocates of contemporary fascism. I don’t see any way around the need for laws to regulate greed, violence, and manipulative lying. In the case of greed, my position is that laws in America need to be far more strict. I think if humanity survives for another century people will look back at how much money an individual businessperson could make in America in the first decades of the twenty-first century, while hundreds of millions of people suffered food insecurity, with the same aghast horror that we look back on massive institutional crimes like colonialism.
Ryan Asmussen
I question, as you do, whether we live anymore in a world of reasonable political opposition, of the relative equality of both sides. Perhaps we never did. Before you and your family left America, friends tried to convince you that Trump wasn’t worth a departure: “[h]e’s a joke, a clown, a narcissistic pig, a nothing.” Now, in addition to the damage he has already done to this country, we have classified documents secreted away at Mar-a-Lago. What are your current thoughts about the 45th president?
George Prochnik
As you point out, many of my friends essentially sneered at the Trump phenomenon even after his election, and though I had not foreseen that he could win in 2016, I never thought that he was a negligible figure. His cruel, brazen megalomania was too entrancing to too many people even in his capacity as an entertainer to treat lightly. I write at one point in the book that Trump “might have been a bad joke, but he was an infinitely bad joke nonetheless,” and I hold by that. The school of thought arguing that all the wretched policies and values Trump openly championed and embodied were already present in the American sociopolitical landscape, and that he was only a symptom, is of course correct. But sometimes it’s the symptoms that kill you. I think that Trump’s ability to “normalize” dehumanizing the “other,” darkly conspiratorial thinking, and disregard for all governmental checks and balances represented a seismic break with the past precisely because he didn’t hide anything. Or rather because everything was hidden in plain sight. Nobody knew how to respond effectively to his outrages because they were so brazenly unabashed. Conversely, with regard to Trump, while I disagree with some of what Hannah Arendt argues in Eichmann in Jerusalem with its famous line about the “banality of evil,” her assertion that “evil can lay waste the entire world, like a fungus growing rampant on the surface,” is inspired and seems very applicable to the last presidency. All of this is to say that nothing that has happened since I wrote this book has made me think Trump’s importance or wickedness can be exaggerated. Clearly, to this day Trump has the ability to communicate to millions upon millions of people the conviction that no matter how debased, neglected, and imperiled your current life may be, anything is possible—any degree of worldly success and reified happiness. That message is of course very close to the foundational American Dream. It’s horrific, but what would happen to the country if we were forced to accept that the end point of the American Dream as such is the kind of apocalyptic capitalism Trump personified? How do we think our way past that to an alternative, inspiring vision? This is where I think people like myself have to look at our own implication in the Trump phenomenon and accept that at least pre-Trump the mainstream, neoliberal Democratic party suffered from a fatal lack of imagination.
Ryan Asmussen
Let’s move to a happier subject. Your parents, a deeply important part of your story, are beautifully evoked. What do you feel that each parent has passed on to you—a character trait, a value—that you’re most appreciative of?
George Prochnik
My mother’s family on her own maternal side was in the country that became the United States of America since the seventeenth century, and she really did embody for me the best of American-New England values: tolerance, public service, an absolute commitment to truth and civic action on behalf of social justice. She couldn’t turn her eyes away from what she saw as the country’s moral failings in the suburb where she lived most of her adult life—racial injustices and the often related economic inequities above all. When she saw an ethical obligation she was fearless in realizing her responsibility. The force of her moral vision is always with me. My father—much as he sometimes hid the fact—was an immensely cosmopolitan person who retained what I think of as a European-Jewish worldliness throughout his life, even though he’d escaped Hitler’s Vienna as a child. I’ll never forget the day, shortly before my mother died in 2015, when my father and I walked into the lobby of the continuing care facility where she then was resident and abruptly sat down at the piano that was on display there. He’d never done so before. Out of nowhere, he began playing from memory a piece by Chopin—perfectly. He’d never once played the piano in my presence as far as I can recall. But his mother was a singer and pianist, and he’d obviously learned the instrument as a child, as part of his heritage. The musical ability was an inextricable part of him and that’s how I think of his whole relationship to European culture. This, too, remains a model for me informing my own devotion to art, music, and literature.
Ryan Asmussen
On a more wistful day, what do you most miss about any of the places you called home in America?
George Prochnik
On a wistful day, I miss everything. The splendid natural world of America in all its awesome variety. The openness and warmth of people all over the country, even notwithstanding their sometimes repugnant political opinions. The dazzling cities and even the suburban wastelands, which have, after all, their nightmare fascinations and cornucopian conveniences. Even on a non-wistful day I miss many things about the country, and many loved ones who still live there, above all. But that missing doesn’t, of course, in itself constitute an answer to the question I posed earlier from Emerson, “How shall I live?” Or even, “Where shall I live?” We can miss a place we once called home without knowing how to find home there any longer. That’s not to say that it’s inconceivable I’d ever live in America again—or that I could ever get away, for better and worse both, from the America inside me. At the end of the book I suggest that my decision to leave America when and how I did, in the spirit of believing that I could actually reimagine the nature and geographical contours of my home, was in fact a quintessentially American move. What could be more American than imagining you can radically change your life by moving to a new world, even if that new realm happens right now to be called the Old World?
Ryan Asmussen
What, finally, have you discovered concerning the idea of home? What does this well-freighted word now mean to you?
George Prochnik
What occurs to me reflexively when I try to answer this momentous question is that home is where I feel powerfully connected to a larger world and bigger picture—not trapped in the cage of my own self, with its most parochial fears and circular fixations. Home in this sense is where I feel able to “dream with open eyes.” That phrase comes from the work of the nineteenth-century poet, Heinrich Heine, who once said, “I dream with open eyes and my eyes see.” That’s an ambition that makes sense to me: simultaneously dreaming of some better, even joyful, creatively fertile, humanely caring future for everyone, and refusing to deny the harsh realities looming before one’s eyes right now. The place that enables us to dream with open eyes may be the closest thing to home that any of us who now feel displaced may be able to attain at this moment in history.
NONFICTION
I Dream with Open Eyes
By George Prochnik
Counterpoint
Published September 27, 2022
[ad_2]
Source link