Notes for October 2025

One year a wolfshead

Usually, repression is enforced by powerful members of the group threatening punishment, the most common being some form of ostracization or excommunication. This may take the form of no longer including an individual’s thoughts or writing in relevant discussions, especially publication, or excluding individuals from important meetings and conferences. And in some cases it may take the form of a consistent, behind-the-scenes effort to cast doubt verbally on their credibility.

—bell hooks, “Censorship from Left and Right”¹

And what I said, is unrepented of,
As truth is always.

—Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh

It has now been a year—two years, to be accurate, although those who began their campaign against me in 2023 were fewer and more subtle—that I have been pilloried for presenting evidence for both sides of an argument and speaking plainly and truthfully what far more powerful men knew but were too terrified to say. I was not the first person to do so, and knew what the penalty would be. Most of what I was punished for saying was corroborated by the New York Times in June of this year, which is not the first time I’ve noticed a three-year delay in the NYT’s publication of stories inconvenient to its activist contingent.

What is most interesting to me about the past twelve months is not the predictable abandonment by friends and colleagues, not the tissue-paper lies told about me that you could put your finger through, but the glittering traces left like moldavite in the impact crater. For one thing, despite some doubtful moments, my eyesight remains intact.² For another, in this retelling of King Lear, although Lear hasn’t come to his senses yet, Cordelia is still alive.³ Best of all,

Isabella Cêpa

, who was facing twenty-five years in prison in Brazil for describing a male politician as male, was granted asylum in August in an unnamed European country on the grounds of political persecution. She is the first feminist to be protected in this way and has created a path for the rest.⁴

I have come to realize that there exists a pattern far larger than the individual, operating on a scale of centuries, nearly mechanical in its motions. It might arise as a natural, manipulable phenomenon of human nature, as Le Bon suggested; it might arise from the eternal confrontation between good and evil, as Buber thought. What matters is that it does arise, and that it repeats every couple of generations.

In spite of the differences in time, place, and social milieu, the pattern remains the same from decade to decade, century to century. Joan’s trial is Galileo’s trial; Galileo’s trial is Sophie Scholl’s. Hildegard von Bingen’s being placed under interdict is Galileo’s being “vehemently suspected of heresy.” There is not so much of a difference between Sophie Scholl and Jeremiah, fundamentally speaking, as the several millennia between them and the differences in their circumstances might suggest. Václav Havel, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Czesław Miłosz, Alexei Navalny, and Boris Pasternak are very different people with very different lives, and yet their positions and their functions in the pattern are essentially identical. They play a single role, the same role, each in his society at his time. Quietly and clearly, by pamphlet or book or banner, knowing what it will cost them, each one says to those in power: “I beg to differ.”

Here is Zamyatin’s June 1931 appeal to Stalin:

I know that I have a highly inconvenient habit of speaking what I consider to be the truth rather than saying what may be expedient at the moment. Specifically, I have never concealed my attitude toward literary servility, fawning, and chameleon changes of color: I have felt—and I still feel—that this is equally degrading both to the writer and to the Revolution. I raised this problem in one of my articles⁵…in a form that many people found to be sharp and offensive, and this served as a signal at the time for the launching of a newspaper and magazine campaign against me….

Everything possible was done to close to me all avenues for further work. I became an object of fear to my former friends, publishing houses and theaters. My books were banned from the libraries. My play The Flea, presented with invariable success by the Second Studio of the Moscow Art Theater for four seasons, was withdrawn from the repertory. The publication of my collected works by the Federatsiya Publishing House was halted. Every publishing house which attempted to issue my works was immediately placed under fire…. Last spring, the Leningrad branch of the RAPP succeeded in forcing me off the board and putting an end to this work. The Literary Gazette triumphantly announced this accomplishment, adding quite unequivocally: “The publishing house must be preserved, but not for the Zamyatins.” The last door to the reader was closed to Zamyatin.

….I beg to be permitted to go abroad with my wife temporarily, or at least one year, with the right to return as soon as it becomes possible in our country to serve great ideas in literature without cringing before little men.⁶

Here is Thomas Merton on Boris Pasternak’s suppression after the publication of Dr. Zhivago in 1957, which was, per Merton, too Christian, too human, too alive for apparatchik readers:

Pasternak stands out as a gigantic paradox in a world of servile and mercenary conformities…. In some (for instance, the pundits of Soviet literature) this guilt has produced hatred and rage against Pasternak. The fear he aroused was intolerable. His colleagues in the Soviet Writers’ Union⁷ began to yell for his blood, and yelled all the more loudly in proportion as they were themselves servile and second rate.

A few thousand years before them, here is the prophet Jeremiah on his countrymen threatening to kill him if he continues to speak politically inconvenient prophecies (Jer 11:18-19, NIV):

Because the Lord revealed their plot to me, I knew it, for at that time he showed me what they were doing. I had been like a gentle lamb led to the slaughter; I did not realize that they had plotted against me, saying,

“Let us destroy the tree and its fruit;
let us cut him off from the land of the living,
that his name be remembered no more.”

And here is Eric Abrahamsen in the NYT in 2015, writing about literary censorship and self-censorship in China:

All literary societies probably tend toward cliquishness, but China’s is an especially monolithic old-boy network driven by personal relations. It is also governed by a tendency known as kan ren bu kan zuopin: looking at the writer, not the writing. Yan Lianke, who has often fallen afoul of the system, explained to me by email that, “‘Looking at the writers’ means looking at where they stand on various issues, their loyalties: Do you have the same ethical or artistic standpoint as I do?”

….There are people to take to dinner, tastes to cater to, artistic maxims to uphold. There is also outright corruption, as literary careers are ruined over personal vendettas and prizes are bought and paid for. This structure, and the pressures it creates on authors, would remain in place if Sapprft were disbanded tomorrow.⁸

Some examples outside of literature can be found in The butterfly catcher. The general pattern is the same. A critical mass of people come to participate in a popular hysteria, delusion, or some other method of consolidating power (指鹿为马), sweeping everyone else along with them. Anyone who resists is destroyed. The question is then whether anyone is left who can still say, knowing the futility of doing so, “No, that is not true. I will not comply.” It does seems to accelerate a society’s return to sanity if someone takes up this function, although that person does not always survive. I don’t know what happens if no one is willing or able to do this. There are fictional depictions of that outcome in We and 1984.

The choice is almost always an individual one,⁹ but in the end the individual does not matter. This personal insignificance has been acknowledged by some of those who have taken up that function. (“But what does my death matter…” “It does not matter what happens to you.”¹⁰) In that sense it is a pure, almost mathematical function, f(x) given any x. Being impersonal and repetitive, the pattern is interesting to study in transparent section—reviving RAPP a century later seems to have disinterred the House Un-American Activities Committee as well¹¹—but once you have perceived the moral requirement and filled it, it is ultimately of no personal importance. A hundred people have done the same thing before you; if you are lucky, a dozen people are doing the same thing now. The function has little to do with you.

When you look into a six-inch reflector at the bright moons of Jupiter, however, or shade your eyes to see the long white threads of snow geese against the mountains—that is life, unrepeated, yours alone. And that is what I wish to remember of this year: the rare moments of kindness, of light breaking through the darkness, of lobster mushrooms blooming under duff and blackbirds alighting on my hand.

To those who showed me kindness when cruelty was fashionable and profitable: thank you. May I remember you always and forget the rest.

---

Notes

• I will be at

  The Rabbit Room
  in Nashville on Wednesday, October 29, 1-4pm. I would not have known about Rabbit Room, and they would not have known about me, were it not for
  Anna A. Friedrich
  ’s kind review.

• Since the books are mostly gone from bookstores, with the Rabbit Room being one of a few exceptions, it’s worth noting that On Fragile Waves and Break, Blow, Burn, & Make are half off when directly purchased from Amazon right now. Jewel Box is also discounted.

• Paying subscribers recently received an essay on rivets and a two-part disquisition on writing endings (1, 2).

1. In Outlaw Culture (NY: Routledge Classics, 2006) 76-77.

2. Because I once worked under a sadist, I’ve learned not to flinch or show when a hit has landed.

3. In March of this year I said to a mixed group that to speak honestly and factually about this matter, you had to be willing to die. I put my affairs in order back in April 2024.

4. For comparison, a rape conviction in Brazil carries a sentence of 6-10 years. You’d need to be convicted of more than two rapes to face a prison term comparable to Cêpa’s potential 25-year sentence for the crime of calling men “men.” Brazil considers her honesty to be a form of “social racism,” similar to the Washington Human Rights Commission’s claim that female-only jjimjilbang are equivalent to “whites-only” signs (Olympus Spa v. Armstrong).

A few weeks after asylum was granted, charges against Cêpa were dropped. Separately, Karen Mizuno and an unnamed university administrator and a janitor are still facing prosecution and potential imprisonment for, in Mizuno’s case, laughing at the idea that archaeologists wouldn’t be able to determine sex from pelvises.

On the other hand, Colorado has stopped trying to jail journalists who describe male criminals as “male.” The punishment for such statements of fact has been reduced to a fine of $5,000 via civil action. Compared to the 200,000 AUD that the Australian government is levying on Kirralie Smith for calling two male soccer players “men,” that seems downright affordable.

5. The article in question is “I Am Afraid” (1921), which is also in A Soviet Heretic. Still relevant and worth reading.

6. “Letter to Stalin” in A Soviet Heretic: Essays by Yevgeny Zamyatin, trans. Mira Ginsburg (Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1970) 305-8. That the appeal was successful, insofar as an impoverished death in exile is successful, seems to have been partly due to Maxim Gorky’s intervention on Zamyatin’s behalf, partly due to Zamyatin being persecuted by the RAPP rather than by Stalin directly.

7. Successor to RAPP. As Ginsburg notes, Zamyatin’s greatest persecutor at the RAPP, Leopold Leonidovich Averbakh, disappeared during the purges in the 1930s, probably shot.

8. Eric Abrahamsen, “The Real Censors of China,” New York Times (June 16, 2015). Winter Pasture by Li Juan, who is mentioned in the article, is a solid book with a sense of humor.

9. Several individuals may respond separately; on rare occasions, as was the case in Compiègne, a group makes the choice together.

10. 1945 letter by Else Gebel; Baldwin, “The Artist’s Struggle for Integrity.”

11. Or are RAPP, Bluesky, the NY Society for Suppression of Vice, the Trier witch trials, and so on transient names for a permanent phenomenon?