Nothing is True and Everything is Possible
by Peter Pomerantsev
First reviewed February 2015
I think I stuffed NYC into every review because I spent a dozen hours a day wandering around, either for work or for fun, and almost 100% of my money went to rent and loans. Guess what is free? Library books! Guess who was using a 180$ trash computer to try to write things in 2015? This guy.
I appreciate that his is nearly eight years ago—I found of lot of sentences that really required fine-tuning for clarity. I’m pretty sure I knew what old me meant, but I am also pretty sure the sentences required too much untangling for a person that wasn’t me to bother with.
Everything is currently thawing in New York City and all I want to do is run long distances. It is easy to forget the traffic lights and crowds of tourists and the fluctuations in body temperature as you dart between the scorching blasts of sunlight and the frigid shade cast by the monumental, tomb-like superstructures dotting the skyline. To idealize the act of running outside during the long, silent winters is to wish a different world into being.
“Silent” is actually a rhapsodic, non-applicable term for running in the winter—though one may hold an image of soft steps, as though within the lyrical verse of a Robert Frost poem, as one bounds through white powdery snowscapes—but the practical reality contains the whirr of conveyor belts and the thudding of stride-checked, treadmill-hobbled footfalls filling the terrarium-esque air of a crowded gym with a disconcerting cacophony.
Lusting after spring during the cold dead winter is akin to illness, when the body must rest and the mind swirls with thoughts of a healthy body, idealized and capable of handling any physical request made of it. It is in these twilight periods where one affirms a desire to never take for granted the ability to run five miles—\a desire which usually lasts up until the vagaries of the injury or sickness have been replaced by the dulcet tones of tedious wellbeing. “I’ll never take my health for granted” is the mantra of the sick and injured; if you’ve got it, you don’t even acknowledge how wonderful or tenuous it might be.
And what is it? It can be, and often is, anything. Air. Water. Shelter. Roads. Schools. Fire Departments. Traffic lights. Social contracts. Things you really, really don’t know you need until all of a sudden, they aren’t there:
Gangsters became the establishment, the glue that holds everything together. In this new world no one knew quite how to behave: all the old Soviet role models had been made redundant, and the “West” was just a store far away. But the gangsters had their own prison code, which had survived perestroika. And this made the gangsters more than just feared bullies. They were the only people in this lost, new Russia who knew who on earth they were and what they stood for.
Structure is required. It doesn’t really matter what the structure is. People live in patterns and create habits and fill in blanks and extrapolate thoughts like we extrapolate breath. Does anyone live in the moment, survive and thrive solely within each single breath? Not particularly; we string together a thousand-thousand single breaths, reorder our own minds into a great tapestry of meaning and coherence. Structure is applied to the inherently structureless. Such is life.
So while my heart is filled with thoughts of racing half-marathons and scoring PRs, my head is clearly stuffed with Nothing is Real and Everything is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia. It has the kind of scripted surprises of the reality TV genre, which is fitting since the author has been a reality TV producer for years. It flits around from pointless musing to structured narrative; the pointlessness supports and lends meaning to the entire endeavor:
Meet the Russians is about the new, post-Soviet rich in London, and the ad promises to take the viewer “into a world of wealth he has never before witnessed.”
The show rates well and feeds a double appetite. The local audience gets to titter and feel pleasantly superior to the new rich they are selling parts of their country to: “Meet the most vulgar reality characters ever on TV,” explains the Daily Mail. But beyond this there is a deeper comfort in the thought that though the new Russian rich might be wealthier than any English person could ever hope to be, though the Sunday Times rich is topped no longer by the queen but by Abramovich, Usmanov, and Blavatnik, at the end of the day these global nouveaux all yearn to fit into “our way of doing things.” Instinctively, out of habit, the editorial producers on Meet the Russians reach for some version of Vanity Fair, My Fair Lady, the myths the English grow up with. The Victorian compromise, the traditional marriage between new money and old class, is extrapolated to the era of globalization.
The whole book wraps the techniques of voyeurism and schadenfreude into an intellectual dissection of modern Russia. Widen out, and it offers a look at the organization and reorganization of modern life, a post-Burroughs discussion of the discussionlessness that we’re all obliquely, overtly blind to—the abundance of dialectics and polemics obscuring how tenebrous the undercurrents of inevitability that permeate the conception and propagation of a Western Empire of Thought. How did society hoist itself to this meaningless-is-meaningful quest for something? Or is it meaningful-is-meaningless:
The lost-in-new-wealth world of Moscow rises and blends with the sudden global money from all the emerging, expanding new economies. And the Russians are the pacesetters, the trendsetters. Because they’ve been perfecting this for just a few years longer, because the learning curve was so much harder and faster when their Soviet world disappeared and they were all shot into cold space. They become post-Soviet a breath before the whole world went post-everything. Post-national and post-West and post-Bretton-Woods and post-whatever-else. The Yuri Gagarins of the culture of zero gravity.
Nothing is Real and Everything is Possible is good. Really good. Readable. Interesting. Sometimes too convenient; the tightness plot that reality shows ostensibly rebel against while actively employing. Characters, concepts, locations all tie back into each other in a woven script of brilliant, terrifying reality. There’s nothing here to latch onto, nothing to say you’ve learned. Just things to experience. Thoughts to think. Words to read. Nothing is Real and Everything is Possible comes into your life, offers a few hundred pages of distraction and thoughts and startling admissions:
The President’s credibility was based on quelling the rebellion in Chechnya. In the late 1990s. when he was still prime minister, he had been transformed from gray nobody to warrior by the second Chechen War, suddenly appearing in camouflage sharing toasts with soldiers on the front. The war had been launched after a series of apartment buildings had been bombed in mainland Russia, killing 293 people in their homes. Nowhere, nowhere at all, had seemed safe. The perpetrators were announced on TV to be Chechen terrorists— though many still suspect they were working with the Kremlin’s connivance to give the gray nobody who was meant to become president reason to start a war. Many in the Russian public, cynical after living among Soviet lies so long, often assume the Kremlin’s reality is scripted. There were indeed some grounds for skepticism: the Russian security services had been caught planting a bomb in an apartment block (they claimed it was a training accident); the speaker of the Duma had publicly announced one of the explosions before it had taken place.
Then it becomes just another speck in the distance, a faint memory that shades your perception ever more softly the further life takes you.