Numbness

"Numbness mattered, it was what the Nazis did, made people feel like things were moving too fast to stop and though unpleasant and eventually terrifying and appalling, were probably impossible to do anything about. She'd been reading a book by Philip Guston. On 23 October 1968, Guston had been in conversation with Morton Feldman at the New York Studio School. He'd been thinking a lot about the Holocaust, he said, especially the concentration camp Treblinka. It worked, the mass killing, he told Feldman, because the Nazis deliberately induced numbness on both sides, in the victims and also the tormentors. And yet a small group of prisoners had managed to escape. Imagine what a process it was to unnumb yourself, he said, to see it as it actually was. That's the only reason to be an artist; to escape, to bear witness to this."

~~ from Crudo by Olivia Laing