Crisis 22

Fog & Shadow

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~ August 20, 2024 ~

It’s the end of Summer, 2024, and the Ukrainians have just opened a front in Kurst Oblast, throwing back at the Russians what they’ve dealt with for the last ten years: Invasion. It’s a word that even the conflicts in Vietnam, Chechnya, and the former Yugoslavia didn’t conjure. At the start of the push into Kursk, the term border raid was considered, but it soon became an incursion. But now, with the destruction of the three main bridges connecting south-western Kursk to Russia, invasion seems more appropriate.

How did we get to this? And where do we even start in trying to contextualize what’s going on? The simple truth might be a good place to start: the Kremlin has chosen to invade its neighbour. Why? Perhaps so that Putin can stay in power, which isn’t a stretch since he rode to power decades ago on his war horse in Chechnya. Yet there are other possibilities, none of which are mutually exclusive. Perhaps the Kremlin really does believe in a Greater Russia, and perhaps it knows that the Russian people share this imperial aim. Or perhaps the Kremlin really does fear — and/or despise — the West, although once we get into this type of reason, it’s hard to separate what a people thinks from what they’re allowed to think. This is no mean distinction in a country where to defenestrate is an active verb. Journalists, opposition leaders, followers of Pussy Riot, whoever poses a real challenge to the regime is silenced one way or another.

It’s exactly here, in the muddle of intentions, seen through the fog of war, in a global climate of catastrophe and torn loyalties, that my little project comes in.

One of the things I think it’s necessary to understand in this opaque situation is that we don’t necessarily understand as much as we think we do. It’s for this reason that I emphasize ways of coping when fumbling in the half-light, ways of moving forward despite the fact that we can’t know where it’s all heading. A helpful metaphor here is the shadow theatre, where we can see the shadow images on a screen, or we can watch the person controlling the images on the other side of the screen — for example, by maneuvering stick puppets between a light source and a diaphanous screen. The metaphor works in at least two ways: 1. we watch performances from the audience side, curious to see beyond the shows, beyond the flitting images on the screens, to the manipulations of the people running the shows, and 2. we watch performances from the puppet-master side, and then need to reconcile what the puppet-masters are doing with the effect or influence their narratives are having on the audience. In terms of media, culture, and politics, this means we need to find ways to blunt or reinforce the effect of their manipulative artistry.

In Christopher Koch’s novel The Year of Living Dangerously (1978), an Australian journalist (Hamilton) tries to find out what’s happening in Jakarta behind the scenes, in the hidden corridors of power in the tumultuous months of 1965, when Sukarno the puppet-master is tilting his country toward China and the Indonesian Communists.

Two-thirds of the way into the novel, Hamilton travels into rural Indonesia looking for information about the strength of the Communist Party. On the outskirts of Bandung he comes upon a humble performance of the Wayang Kulit, or Shadow Theatre — literally Shadow Leather, since the flat stick-puppets are made of leather.

Hamilton hears the dalang or puppet-master singing, and he realizes that this form of art is a complex way of understanding the world. Yet Hamilton hasn’t spent the time necessary to understand the Wayang. As a result, his understanding of the country is a limited one:

People pressed close to watch the sacred theatre's mysteries; but Hamilton drifted away to the other side of the screen, to the magic side, where only the filigreed silhouettes could be seen, their insect profiles darting, looming into hugeness, or dwindling to vanishing-point. Their voices chattered things he could never understand, rising into the warm dark: but the schoolroom rapping on the puppet-box commanded his attention. Standing behind solemn elders from the kampong, for whom chairs had been placed on the grass, he seemed to be watching the deeply important activity of dreams.

The dalang was singing. His wailing, almost female voice climbed higher and higher, while the little drum pattered on underneath, and the gongs bubbled. On one wavering note, his voice was drawn out and out, until Hamilton, transfixed, seemed to see it like a bright thread against eternal sky; until it connected with Heaven. What was the dalang singing about? He would never know.

Koch’s treatment of the Wayang shows us another way of looking at the world. Although Koch doesn’t say it directly, he suggests that we ought to pay attention to paradigms and ways of thinking that will be very helpful to the West if it’s to understand and cooperate with the East. His treatment of the Wayang also includes many insights into the Cold War and even touches on Russia: on the verge of starting to understand something of the Wayang, thanks to a friendly villager who explains the plot, Hamilton is tugged from the scene by Vera, a Russian agent who then seduces, drugs, and interrogates him in a nearby colonial Dutch hotel.

At several moments in the novel, Koch asks his reader if he believes in the spy thriller scenarios we find in James Bond novels. He wrote The Year of Living Dangerously in 1978, when such scenarios were part of Western culture. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the scenarios faded away somewhat, the Russian spies often replaced by Russian mafia dons and Islamic terrorists. As a tourist in Moscow in April 24, 2005, I thought, What an irony, what an anachronism all this James Bond stuff is! Now 007 is used to sell fancy clothes! Then came 2014 and 2024…

Back in 2005, my experience of Russia was realistic, involving trains and rented apartments, Georgian restaurants and hockey rinks. The “007” above the shop window was a comic anachronism, a sort of fairy tale. It came from an old spy novel rather than real life. Why worry about James Bond and Russian villains when the communists were gone? Yet that sense of anachronism turned out to be an illusion. Paradoxically, my fantastical, poetic take on today’s war (on the right side of the graphic) has become far more real. Good and evil have taken on the dimensions of the Indonesian shadow theatre, with its mythic diversity, its moral ambiguity, and its apocalyptic battles. Reality became fairy tale, and fairy tale became real.

Yet happily ever after is as elusive as ever. In the old Ramayana story, the demons are defeated, and unity is restored:

If only this were the case! Unfortunately, what we have today is closer to the Mahabharata scenario in which cousins are lined in battle against cousins. In the middle of the fray, the anguished hero Arjuna must reconcile himself to the imminent slaughter.

While I often wade into such mythic or literary scenarios, Crisis 22 has two clear goals: 1. it aims to explore the Ukraine Crisis from personal, literary, and political perspectives, and 2. it aims to explore personal, literary, and political issues from the perspective of the Ukraine War. I go back and forth between these two, often using the Ukraine Crisis as a starting point, from where I spin off to other realms and time periods, in order to make personal points about psychology, identity, philosophy, religion, etc., literary points about narrative, myth, beauty, points of view, etc., and political points about the Cold War, dictatorship, rhetoric, propaganda, mass violence, etc.

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