BRIGHT UNBEARABLE REALITY

A brief collection of essays in search of solace in a time of global upheaval.

The “bright unbearable reality” of the title comes from a translation of the Greek word enargeia, which poet Alice Oswald uses to describe “when gods come to earth not in disguise but as themselves.” Badkhen explores this idea in her preface, asking, “Why do we find it unbearable to acknowledge what truly is?” Via a series of ethereal scholarly essays, the author aims to find a better way to see and understand grief, especially as embodied in the world’s migrant crisis. Badkhen recounts her travels around the globe and bolsters her experiences with a dizzying wealth of literary and artistic touchstones. Hazily poetic, she constructs her essays like a collagist, in search of the untapped resonance that can be channeled when seemingly incongruous ideas are placed in proximity. In “Landscape With Icarus,” she presents facts about children seeking asylum next to vignettes about the Pied Piper, who, according to some legends, lured children into exodus. Badkhen later invokes Auden’s poem on Brueghel’s painting “Landscape With the Fall of Icarus,” a busy seaside scene in which Icarus is barely discernible, having crashed into the surf. “Where is the child, where is Icarus?” she asks. “Only the faint plunging legs twitch their last dance beneath the slim-crescent drift of feathers, and fingers grasp uselessly at a wave, and a vague splash forever rends your heart.” Another essay superimposes a trumpet player in the “pogromed neighborhood” of Greenwood, Tulsa, with tales of horns found in Tutankhamen’s tomb and the falling walls of Jericho. When these layers stack up, an ominous feeling creeps in: Could our contemporary traumas be simply the continuation of a millennia-old, ineffable trajectory? Perhaps, but Badkhen offers glimmers of hope: “Imagine the other ways in which the Anthropocene connects us: the polythreaded, shimmering veil of yearning and missing and care and love.”

A soulful, ambitious quest for a path through centuries of loss and displacement.