There’s always the danger, in a project like this, of enjoying the theatre of real events too much. Playacting someone else’s dangerous time. Which means that when your own world turns dangerous in the midst of your playacting, a question of nerve comes up.
We have a pandemic; we have Trump and the people using him; a month ago we had an election, and thanks mainly to the residents of a few American cities, democracy gets a reprieve. How that would turn out, though, was completely unclear even the night of the election, when it appeared that the citizens of the world’s most powerful country had voted to end the democratic experiment and turn the lights out on the democratic postwar world, voted overwhelmingly for a despotic authoritarianism and all its looting, ignorance, and death. We all knew the election probably wasn’t over, that the picture would likely improve as the absentee ballots were counted, if they were counted, but there were no guarantees of anything, including peace, and everyone knew that, too. I went to bed the night of November 3rd thinking of my students who’d escaped, physically at least, the small football-obsessed towns six or seven streets wide where they’d been needled and abused all their lives, hadn’t been any good at sports, and were wary even at university of sounding smart, and of the delicate ones who’d disguised the fact that they were bright with lots of muscle and Christian positivity and were still wandering around university wearing all that muscle and their backwards baseball caps. I went to bed thinking, well, now we’ll all know what that’s like, and thinking of Danny Smiřický in Škvorecký’s The Engineer of Human Souls, particularly the scene at the end in which his cheerful, illiterate, Party-loyal buddy writes to say he’s being made into a writer. Except that Danny was reading that letter in Canada, a democracy backstopped by the United States.
In the few weeks before the election, as everyone’s chest tightened, I kept looking at the prison letters I’d typed, dated October 13, 1979, and November 3-6, 1979, thinking I ought to send them, that the first was overdue. The first is the one Havel wrote after his trial and sentencing, a much heavier sentence than he’d expected; the second is a long organizational letter, or at least it tries to remain organizational and ends up helplessly all-capsing Olga. And I thought: can I send these to people right now, can I send it to their mailboxes, what would it be like to open this letter now, get this answer to the question floating in the week. Is it right to kick people in the chest this way, is it too demoralizing, will it hurt someone, right now. I read the first letter and had a weak impulse to anger about how close sentencing and election were, not funny, but mostly there was just a settled dread, reading him: I know, I don’t need to hear it from you, too.
Into the midst of my dithering my daughter came home from her father’s and went into quarantine in the rooms where my copying machine is, so that bought me a two-week reprieve, by the end of which we knew that we all had a reprieve, and I sent the letters.
It was real, and I flinched, I didn’t want to play. And this is only a reprieve, and as I watch the old new president assemble his government I see nothing that addresses the fact that seventy million people, wittingly or no, voted for despotism. Earlier today I talked to a co-worker whose family are huge (yuge) Trump supporters; they send him facebook stories about animatronic murder cats sent by Biden to roam the countryside. In the rest that other people, my college friends, art friends, science friends are taking now, though, things are fine, fine, things will be fine, and now, sending Havel’s letters into all this assurance, they don’t seem to me to have any voice at all: they’re about something that happened to someone who wasn’t safe, but that was long ago and he was someone else, and now in this empty space of a rest we have all these competent people coming to straighten the furniture in this floating dream and make life normal again.
The Havel Project 