The Mouse and the Tower

Max Trutt

When I began to spend more time on drawing and painting, setting aside for a while analytical and editorial work, I realized that I was not so much changing my occupation as my point of view. I discovered that an artist has no vantage point that allows him to take in the whole landscape at once and see the ant trails along which the observed creatures go out in the morning to find food and return in the evening to their anthill-homes. An artist, or at least the kind of artist I like being, does not look at the world from above.

When you look straight ahead and around you, setting aside linear perspective as unnecessary, you see figures, objects, and their relationships very clearly but not their place in the big scheme of things. When you draw a fox and a rabbit intensely focused on each other, you are not looking down from above and thus you climb down from the tower. That tower was built for taking measurements and drawing diagrams. From up there, one does not see the territory of the country so much as its map. With the right tools, from that tower you can observe fields, forests, cities, houses, the movement of people, and even their opinions. So many people have arrived, so many have left, their pockets now contain this much more or this much less money, this many percent expressed agreement, disagreement, or avoided a response. They supported the war, and they supported peace as well. A sociologist will find a way to connect the dots and, looking at the resulting figure, invent a theory and give it a name.

Climbing up that tower, you might say: “Patient, you are suffering from preference falsification. It’s unpleasant, but it happens under personalist autocracies complicated by a reliance on an expanded bureaucracy civil and coercive. Take a dose of harsh truth in the morning and evening, though of course you won’t. You cannot tell facts from opinions; you are content with what propagandists and social-media algorithmic bots feed you.”

The view from the tower is a perspective on the world that both experts and state officials rely on. State strategists looking from the tower are officially tasked with creating order, but in practice they are occupied with the same measurements, analyses, and diagrams. To impose order, one must number the houses, register and count the people who live in them, learn everything about their ages and incomes, so that they can be sent to serve at the right time and taxed appropriately. Strategists create orderly spaces: cities, laws, and rules. The result is a world in which the territory is replaced by its approximate map, and people by dotted lines, clusters, and arrows indicating the prescribed direction of movement, whether in a city or in a war.

The inhabitants of the tower differ mainly in that some are tasked with describing while others are tasked with prescribing. Experts calculate resources; politicians direct them toward various projects, peaceful or warlike. Experts carry less responsibility, though of course they may engage in expert disputes with their own victories and defeats. Politicians, too, know how to avoid responsibility. Bureaucracies, planning committees, executive apparatuses all operate through abstractions, reducing real life to indicators and reports. Simplification and standardization are treated as progress.

The experience of those living beings whose lives do not fit these schemes goes unrecorded. Their problems are either ignored or interpreted as exceptions. Turning living beings into points is convenient for those who remain on the tower. It allows them not to see the details that would undermine their theories and plans. The map is considered up to date even when the situation on the ground has long since changed. But for those who are below, this simplification means alienation. Their lives become subordinated to rules and prescriptions designed not for them but for the convenience of governance.

There is a cliché attributed to several theorists of war: “No military plan survives contact with the enemy.” In its most concentrated form, the logic of the tower is revealed in the planning and conduct of war.

No matter what monstrous crimes are committed on the ground, the expert and the politician see “human resources,” “manpower and equipment,” maps with arrows, blue and red lines, numbers describing losses. But in this language, in the detached language of the analyst one cannot express the unbearable. The expert and the politician must call things by the accepted terms. Terms and schemes are ways of understanding and explaining, and therefore of accepting what is happening. The one who has made the diagnosis (“dear Russians, you are suffering from preference falsification”) can, and indeed must, calmly observe the condition of the patient rather than scream in horror. But observation, understanding – and therefore acceptance – can themselves become unbearable. The terminology, the diagrams, the maps, and the tower’s own perspective can become unbearable. Even the word “observer,” as journalists are sometimes called, can become unbearable.

As an artist, I am drawn to animals as images of “the other,” eternal companions of humans trying to explain themselves to themselves. Whom to flee from, whom to hunt, whom to compare oneself with, and whom not to. At some point, in retrospect, I realized that I had become a bearer of wordlessness or, at times, cautious allegory. This is not the language of the tower dwellers, nor the language of those who can afford to speak directly – the language of heroes or of people protected by status or by a safe position. It is the language of the weak, of those who dodge the question, who do not want or cannot afford to have an opinion, make a choice, and bear responsibility.

Down below it is not so much interesting as it is frightening. Behind cheerful pictures with cute animals hide ignorance, frailty, and fear. In large social projects – for example, on the construction sites of industrialization or in wars conducted by politicians and their generals guided by outdated maps – all creatures end up resembling cows, sheep, and goats confined to pens, following paths laid out by invisible shepherds whose plans remain out of reach. A mouse running through a maze is forced to obey the laws of the maze. It does not see the maze’s layout and does not even know that it is a maze. It cannot break through the wall. It does not know that breaking through is possible.

Creatures moving along a dotted line drawn from above either cannot or do not want to question the plans imposed on them, because they have no way of seeing the situation from the height of the tower. The construction plan, the war plan, the layout of the maze -- all of this is visible only from there. As an artist, I cannot condemn the mouse for not wanting to break through the wall, or the sheep for not wanting to escape the pen. This is a gesture of sympathy toward the powerless. The artist, in my case, inhabits the weakness and the powerlessness rather than judges it. The artist is among those who remain silent or who choose the safety of fables, parables, and internet memes, unable to see the whole picture. When I put on an exhibition, I am not on the tower. I do not see the map and do not know what all of this is called.

Vmesto Media 

06.02.2025

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