The world is in chaos. It's time to make your art.

But you have to make it yourself.

I don’t want to be harsh. I don’t want to be uncaring. But every now and then I hear someone say something like this and I want to scream:

“What the point of writing my book anyway? The world is going to shit.”

I’m not saying I’ve never thought of this myself. If left to my worst devices, I can think of a dozen reasons not to do my work. Are my particular arrangements of words valuable enough to cut down trees for? Who will want to read this column on Borges or that essay applying Foucault to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight when their home is flooded due to climate change? Actually, while I’m at it, will anyone even be reading books in a few years? Who am I writing for?

So I get it. I get the despair. The creative-intellectual life is full of petty despairs anyway — the missing sources, the lost notes, the thoughts that will not come together, the words that will not do as they’re bidden. How can we be expected to gather the courage to do our work when faced with larger despairs such as tyranny, war, and climate catastrophe?

But this way of thinking is a lie. Because here is the truth: catastrophes are the best time to do artistic and intellectual work. Times of crisis are precisely when writing novels and histories, composing rap songs and sonatas, painting and sculpting and dancing and filming and banging on the drum set matter most. And — the humour is perverse, but it’s there — these are also the times that give us lots of material to work with.

I can’t think about this topic without thinking of two women who have indelibly marked my life. María Rosa Menocal was one of my professors at Yale. I wasn’t one of her graduate students or mentees, just a student in a class she taught on Borges and the medieval tradition. The class inspired me, and so did she: the way she played with her statement necklaces, or had a set of reading glasses hanging on a cord around her neck, or peppered her lectures with the phrase “grosso modo” spoken emphatically, with quotation marks.

Menocal told me about how her first book, The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History, was turned down by six publishers before she got it accepted. It turned out a field-defining book. I remember sitting in her office and silently vowing to myself that I would never give up on my own book before I had been rejected at least as many times as hers had been. She told me, too, about writing her trade history, The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain, and how little recognition it had received among her academic peers, even as it became a bestseller. “They think it’s easy,” she told me, “but it’s the hardest writing I ever did.”

The scene I want to recall now took place sometime around 2008 or so. Menocal was giving a talk somewhere on campus. She was widely known for her promotion of the idea of “convivencia,” or the coexistence of three religions, Islam, Christianity, and Judaism in medieval Andalusia. Other scholars thought her approach a bit idealistic, and insisted on the histories of violence between these groups. At one point in her talk, Menocal noted, in a kind of wondering voice, that it was funny to notice that Andalusian culture was at its most productive and original in the times when the taifas, or Muslim kingdoms, were at war.

I put my hand up in the question period and said that it was no surprise at all. We need strong art less when we are comfortable. It’s in the worst times, historically and politically, that we need art to survive. She agreed.

I met the second woman a few years later, when I was editing Rumba Under Fire: The Arts of Survival from West Point to Delhi. I was living in Dallas at the time and used to go to Half Price Books to buy cookbooks I didn’t need, but kept running across a book in that section that I very much did not want to buy. It was called In Memory's Kitchen: A Legacy from the Women of Terezín, and it was not, in fact, a cookbook. It was a collection of recipes that women prisoners at the Theresienstadt concentration camp had written down from memory and smuggled out. The recipes had errors in them, as the women were starving and could no longer remember with accuracy. It was not a cookbook, but a testament to endurance, to these Jewish women’s insistence on preserving their own identity.

A New York-based food writer had edited the book, so I wrote her and asked her if she could to contribute something to my volume. Cara De Silva answered that she’d be willing to do an interview instead, as she had continued her research on the culinary imagination of prisoners-of-war and concentration camp inmates. I still have the Skype recording, which lasted for almost two hours. We both have big, wild hair that fills the screen, and smudged eyeliner from crying. It was impossible to talk about her research without crying.

Cara and I became friends, and continued the conversation in emails, and on my occasional visits to New York. She was interested in the ways that people who are actively starving can keep themselves alive by doing something she called “cooking with the mind,” imagining recipes even when one couldn’t actually cook or eat them. “In Auschwitz people shouted out recipes over the fences,” she told me.

María Rosa Menocal was only 59 when she died from melanoma, in 2012. Cara De Silva was 83, and her sudden death in 2022 came as a shock. I haven’t fully articulated what they gave me, both as writers and as role models. But I do think a lot of that has to do with endurance, both in the face of personal rejection and of terrifying political movements. They also left me with a wild respect for human creativity, wherever it flourishes.

What I find most frightening about the times we live in now is not that we face enormous political and environmental challenges. What I find most frightening is that we face these crises while, at the same time, tech moguls are luring us into outsourcing our creative and analytical faculties to machines.

For Rumba Under Fire, I wrote an essay on intellectual and artistic activity in Romanian political prisons in the 1950s and 1960s, as reflected in the memoirs of those prisoners. I wrote about how tyrants, are, in a funny sort of way, the people who best appreciate the power of the arts and humanities — they are the ones who try to censor it, after all. But I also worried about what tyranny was possible was when most people grew not to care at all about these things:

I gather prison tales because their authors have a laser-like focus on what matters. They understand the power of stories and melodies not simply to move and entertain, but to sustain and resist. The people who put them in prison understood this too, thought that someone who lectured on Tristan and Isolde posed a danger to their ideology. Tyrants can be such good literary critics, censorship the best reading list.

We have been taught to think of art and scholarship as decorative, unnecessary, wasteful. We have been taught to think of it as optional. I do not want my students to understand what these memoirists did; the price would be much too high. But I also do not want them to fall prey to this new, more insidious censorship, hard to fight because impossible to see.

Using AI to create art and scholarship adds another layer of insidious censorship. In a way, it’s almost worse — people think they are writing and thinking and making, but in many cases, they are generating something obvious and pre-controlled.

I want to be nuanced about this. I know there are many ways to use large language models in creative work. Some people use them to bounce ideas off of, the way they might with a person. Some use them to copyedit their work, or to suggest potential structures or critiques. I have no doubt that there are all sorts of clever uses in which LLMs are a spur to thinking rather than its replacement.

But the fact is that a lot of people also use LLMs to replace the work of composition and creation. Some of my students do, for example. And the result is that they weaken their own capability to come up with something new, unexpected. In the worst cases, their own prose starts to resemble ChatGPT’s, because the machine is starting to redefine good writing for them.

If the environmental considerations were out of the way, I wouldn’t care if someone used AI to generate reports no one reads or marketing copy that just has to be produced and sold. But I do care about the relentless assault of the last decades’ technological innovations on people’s ability to concentrate, think for themselves, and be surprised in the power of their own creation.

What we will need in the coming years, which will bring new, unimaginable crises (I tell you this as an East European, we know about these things), is the ability to come up with new language, new ideas, new images, new songs, hell, even new recipes. I think humanity can survive just about anything as long as it responds to chaos with creativity. But to hold on to our creativity will be a battle all on its own.

Irina

Updates

• My first publication of the year was a review of the Sheila Hicks’ retrospective at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf for Apollo Magazine. I can’t tell if I find humour in so many of the exhibitions I see these days because I’m imagining it, or because so many artists create with a sense of wit. But Hicks’ work struck me as wonderfully playful, and left me with an urge to make textile art myself.

• For Times Higher Education, I wrote about my morning writing group, and how it’s sustained me over several years. You can read some other scholars’ tips for starting the academic day well.

• Two more of my columns have come out in the Times Literary Supplement since the last post, one on Austro-Hungarian desserts and the wonderful names they have, and another on novels that satirize the publishing industry, and the authors who try to make it in it.

• Mary Wellesley and I closed out our London Review of Books podcast series, Medieval LOLs, with an episode dedicated to a glorious medieval Welsh poem, Gwerful Mechain’s ‘Ode to the Vagina’.

• The journal Studies in Philology recently published my article on how pupils in medieval and early modern schools learned to perform emotional texts in Latin using Terence.

• Stay tuned for: a TLS column on what a 13th century adventure story tells us about just rulership; a NYRB essay on living under Communism; and an episode of Anna Gát’s podcast, The Hope Axis, on the joys and lessons of medieval literature.