Filter by Category : Tag : Date

Filter by Category : Tag : Date

Filter by Category : Tag : Date

Browsing Category

Poetry

Seeking Warmth.

“It is the fundamental task of art to fight against alienation – to go to bat for authentic hearing, seeing, feeling, thinking against the stereotypes and societal patterns that are full of hostility towards being thoughtful and perceptive.” – Erich Fried in Rudolf Wolff (Hrsg.): Erich Fried. Gespräche und Kritiken, 1986. (My translation.)

***

If you look up the meaning of the word “authentic,” the Thesaurus suggests this: genuine, honest, true, real, original, unmistakable, historical. I cannot think of a better description of the art of Ceija Stojka (1933-2013) a Roma artist, Holocaust survivor, and activist whose work is increasingly displayed by major venues, providing welcome contrast to so much of the inauthentic hokum out there.

Ceija Stojka The Mama (detail with gallery entrance reflected in the glass covering the painting.)

Across the last few years the artist’s paintings, drawings and journaling were on view at Gallery Christophe Gaillard in Brussels, the Museum of the City of Lodz in Poland, at the European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture, at the 35th Bienal de São Paulo, at Kassel’s Documenta 15 in Germany, among others. Opening in April, they are at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris, in a group exhibition, Apocalypse. Yesterday and Tomorrow.

Luckily, we dont have to travel that far. Some of Stojka’s work is currently shown at the Vancouver, WA gallery Art at the Cave, together with exhibits by Daniel Baker and Sam Marroquin, and short videos about the artists by Erin Aquarian, in a show titled “Seeking Warmth.”

Stojka’s father was murdered by the Nazis even before the entire family was imprisoned in concentration camps. She, her mother and all siblings but one brother survived, despite being routed through Auschwitz, Ravensbrück and ultimately Bergen-Belsen. A miracle, given that out of 12 000 Austrian Roma, between 9000 and 10 000 perished during the Holocaust. After liberation, she attended school for a few years before she had her first child at age 15. She became a successful carpet merchant, and had two more children within the decade (two of whom preceded her in death, adding more tragedy.) It was only in her mid-fifties that she started to put her traumatic experiences into diverse forms of expression, music, self-taught visual art and journaling. It is no exaggeration to say her memories poured out, with over a thousand works of art and writing composed during the decades before her death at age 79 in 2013.

Ceija Stojka Untitled (Wagon in Forest)

Before I turn to her art, a grateful acknowledgement that individual people accompanied this artist to express herself and help bring about the prominence she has achieved. One of Austria’s most distinguished documentarian film makers, Karin Berger, was the first to engage with Stojka in the late eighties. A full documentary about the artist and her trauma, Ceija Stojka: Portrait of a Roma, was published in 1999. Lorely French, who taught German language and literature, as well as film and Roma writers, retiring this May after 39 years at Pacific University, was the artist’s friend. Importantly, she translated the first English version of the memoirs of Ceija Stojka, and is a founding member and member of the board of the Ceija Stojka International Association.

The art on display in the current exhibition is a small-scale version of Stojka’s oeuvre as a whole: there are the paintings that represent a “bright cycle” – scenes referencing life as the Romani people experienced it before the descent into the hell of the Holocaust. The acrylics are expressive, colorful, reminiscent of folk-art, and often quite sophisticated in their perspective for a self-taught artist. They report what was seen, but also communicate a sense of longing for a way of life that no longer exists. Wagons, streams, summer meadows, birds and flowers everywhere, and many people forming community around chores, more often seemingly idyllic than not. Exactly a way a child would experience her childhood, without the adult knowledge of how the Roma had to fight against prejudice and persecution long before the fascists arrived on the scene. It is a remarkable feat as an artist to be able to reproduce that experience from a memory store that by all means should have been overwritten by the horrors that followed.

Ceija Stojka Untitled (Wagon with people at stream)

These very horrors are captured in Stojka’s “dark cycle,” drawings in ink and some other materials that comprise the other half of her output. These drawings are often accompanied by text. For clarity, the English translations are repeating the meaning of the words, accurately conveying what was said (a choice I would have made as well.) What gets inevitably lost – and the part that makes her texts so indelibly authentic – is the orthography of the artist. Having had but a few years of school, after liberation and before she had her first child, Stojka writes how one hears the words, phonetically, and not according to our spelling and grammar rules. It gives the texts a texture of spontaneity and intensity, of words tumbling out of a mouth rather than a pen, providing the message with an amount of urgency that can simply not be captured in translation.

Ceija Stojka Ravensbrück 1944. Liberation 15.4.1945

These two cycles, bright and dark, interact to magnify the void caused by evil, by offering us the memorial building blocs of a remembered childhood, catapulted into the abyss. The longing for the wholeness of life before is drawing us in, and then spitting us out into the agony of what came after, or the bitterness of the realization of what the artist had to endure. The yearning for the remembered ideal frames the depicted trauma caused by genocide, multiplying the horror exponentially.

Ceija Stojka They devoured us.

We find both, personal grief and political anger in Stojka’s drawings and texts. What makes her so effective as a messenger is the concreteness of her reporting. She did seek warmth by resting amongst the dead (hence the title of the exhibition), shielding her from the wind. She fought off starvation by chewing and swallowing little balls of wool her mother had unraveled from the sweaters still on the corpses, or by eating grass pried from under the floorboards of the barracks, or sap clawed from trees. She banned despair by clinging to hope, perceived by her to be what gave them strength.

Ceija Stojka Hope – that was what gave us strength 1944

***

“Was wir suchen ist schwer zu finden. Die Angst, die müssen wir nicht suchen. Die ist da.” “What we are searching for is hard to find. We don’t have to search for the fear. That is there.” (Translation by Lorely French.)

***

Stojka’s relationship to fear is more complex. On the one hand, she models for all of us an incomprehensible amount of fierceness and courage in poems like this.

On the other hand, she describes, again concretely, a typical behavior that is the result of her experience: “You can’t walk along the street without looking over your shoulder.” (This sentence was juxtaposed with a quote by the poet Erich Fried, an Austrian compatriot who fled into exile after the Nazis killed his father and who survived the war in England. “For I cannot think without remembering.”)

Fear permeates the past, her book titled: Even Death is terrified of Auschwitz. It seeps into the presence – already in the year 2000, she worries about next generations forgetting history, and the fact that a far-right party joins the government coalition.

She proclaims soon after: “Ich habe Angst, dass Europa seine Vergangenheit vergisst und das Auschwitz nur am Schlafen ist. Anti-ziganistische Bedrohnungen, Vorgänge und Taten beunruhigen mich und machen mich sehr traurig.” (“I fear that Europe is forgetting its past and that Auschwitz is only asleep. Anti-Romani threats, happenings and attacks worry me and make me quite sad.”) (Ref.)

The fear, however, seems to be one of the motors for her activism to educate Austrians and the world about the history and the plight of the Romani people, activism for which she received accolades and awards. To this day, Austria has not officially recognized the Holocaust or the Samudaripen/Porajmos – in Austria referred to as the Holocaust of the Roma – through any legislative act; the Holocaust of the Roma is instead recognized as an integral part of the Holocaust as such. (Ref.)The Romani people, assumed to have originated in Asia, most likely Punjab or Kashmir, and who have never identified themselves with a homeland, have been persecuted since the middle ages within the various countries where they traveled and traded. The Porajmos saw up to half a million Roma murdered. Like Jews, they were segregated into ghettos before transport to extermination camps. After the war they were forced to settle in various locations. In post-war Czechoslovakia, where they were considered a “socially degraded stratum”, Romani women were sterilized as part of a state policy to reduce their population. As recently as the 1990s, Germany deported tens of thousands of migrants to Central and Eastern Europe, with large percentages of the Romanians among them being Roma.

Postcard work of Ceija Stojka (which I consider some of her strongest communications.)

Fast forward to our own times, where for the first time ever since 1945, Austria saw this far-right party, the FPÖ (Austrian Freedom Party,) win the most seats in national elections with garnering almost 30% of the vote last September. (The centrist parties managed to form a governing coalition some many months later that excludes the extremists.) A member of the FPÖ had only a few years back distributed anti- Romani, hate-filled videos on social media, but could not be criminally indicted since he is protected by immunity as a member of congress.) Anti-Roma hate crimes are frequent occurrences across Europe, with assault and arson attacks against homes physically endangering people. Ethnic hatred and claims of “Gypsy criminality” are clearly making a comeback in tandem with rising anti-Semitic sentiments fostered by extremists movements and now parties.

Fear can be a tool. It can motivate us to (re)act and fight for justice, as the artist did. It can be both, exploited and imposed by draconian measures and persecution, as radical right ideologies have successfully discovered. Fear of others, of globalization and immigration, of status loss or “replacement,” can be turned into hatred of scapegoats, often ethnicities other than one’s own. Fear of consequences of protest or non-conformity can smooth the path of authoritarians who want to consolidate power.

Ceija Stojka knew that, expressed that, resisted that. In life and in art.

***

Daniel Baker is a Roma artist and theorist of renown who lives in the U.K. He uses metalised polyethelene rescue blankets, sometimes sculpted, sometimes crocheted, to combine conceptual issues related to survival strategies and practices with a visual aesthetic that echos Romani patterns. Part of his theoretical work concerns the (in)visibility of ethnic minorities, particularly those that are not geographically anchored. In a somewhat ironic turn, his work could have been displayed a bit more visibly in the gallery – you had to work to discover it.

Daniel Baker Emergency Artefacts.

Sam Marroquin shows her series The Madness of War in the upper parts of the gallery. An astonishingly large number of charcoal and acrylic paintings were fitted into the space without overcrowding. Kudos to whoever hung this, likely Sharon Svec, whose curation of this exhibition is splendid overall. The paintings are simplified reproductions of scenes depicted on videos and print material of first hand experiences by those living through the hell that is contemporary Gaza. Put on paper with the artist’s non-dominant hand, they appear more like the drawing of a younger person, a lack of perfection and child-like approach that parallels what we see in the paintings of Stojka. Here, too, are concrete depictions of humans in existentially threatening situations, their bodies and spirits bombed into extinction, their grief more than a single life time can hold. Block letters introduce the artist’s suggestions of the emotions and thoughts likely experienced, all universal enough that they promise verisimilitude.

Sam Marroquin Paintings along the Gallery Wall from the series The Madness of War.

The work makes several strong points. For one, any claim that we have moved beyond atrocities imposed on any one group is moot. The indiscriminate killing of men, women and children, of rescue personnel and journalists/reporters is not a thing of the past, intentional starvation included. Secondly, the suffering depicted is universal, even if it is applied in this case to the particulars of the fate of Palestinians. We could as well be looking at Syria, Ukraine, Sudan or the Republic of Congo. And, importantly, Marroquin’s drawings reveal a humanity of the victims that will elicit empathy in all but the most hardened, allowing a sense of shared humanity across borders.

Sam Marroquin Paintings from the series The Madness of War

The issue, then, is the fact that all of these images were, as “originals,” available in public sources, live-reported during this conflict. They never made their way to those fixated on selective mass media or social media sources that are ideologically inclined to show some sides of suffering but not others. The polarization experienced in a country divided about our political future, is reflected in the visual diet that we consume, basically determined by what the powers that be put into the relevant “larders.” In some way, then, art that is not explicitly associated with media that we deem trustworthy or disreputable, respectively, might inform consumers whose minds can be opened if approaching artistic depictions without easily triggered prejudice. In theory. In practice, of course, we have to mourn the fact that the likely distribution of this important body of work pales in comparison to that of even the smallest partisan social media outlet.

Sam Marroquin Paintings from the series The Madness of War

Before we despair, and in honor of the remarkable resilience of Ceija Stojka and others exposed to existential threats, let me close with a poem (Ertrag is the German title) by Erich Fried, whose words introduced this review. (And yes, I’ve been a fan since my teens, when he was first published by the German publishing house Klaus Wagenbach, before anyone else took on his poetry.)

Dividend

Gathering hope
from solvable problems
from possibilities
from all that
which holds promise

Reserving
strength
for only that
which truly
requires action

Is the way to amass
quietly
a supply of
despair
never spent.

-by Erich Fried

SEEKING WARMTH

March 2025

ART AT THE CAVE, 108 EAST EVERGREEN BOULEVARD, VANCOUVER, WA, 98660, UNITED STATES360-314-6506 GALLERY@ARTATTHECAVE.COM

HOURS: TUES-THURS 11-5PM, FRI AND SAT 11-6

For specific upcoming programs related to the exhibition, go here.

1 Comments

Hope and Ashes

Would you like to walk with me, or, as the case may be, drive from Oregon’s West across the mountain passes to the High Desert? We’ll see varied beauty of landscapes moving from winter to spring, with remnants of snow offset by greening pastures and budding trees.

Once we have crossed Mt. Hood, the Sisters’ and Mt. Bachelor’s snowcapped peaks form the background for grazing horses, some looking decidedly in search for a prince. Soon you start driving along the Deschutes river, not yet raging at full strength expected after the snowmelt.

If you are curious enough for a small detour, we can visit the Pelton Dam, which impounds the waters of the Deschutes to create the deep Lake Simtustus, filling a narrow canyon about 7 miles (11 km) back to the Round Butte Dam built in 1964. The water is intensely green in parts, despite blue skies, making you wonder about algae. The surrounding rock formations are majestic. See me wince when I assume the name “Simtustus” honors a Native American, and then learn that it does indeed, but one who scouted for the U.S. Army during the 1867–68 campaign against the Paiute Indians. The Snake War, as it was known, has been ignored by historians, concentrating on the contemporaneous American Civil War and its aftermath, instead. Yet the Snake War was statistically the deadliest of the Indian Wars in the West in terms of casualties. By the end, a total of 1,762 men were known to have been killed, wounded, and captured on both sides. By comparison, the Battle of the Little Bighorn produced about 847 casualties. The Paiutes fought bitterly against the encroachment of colonial settlers onto their territory.

Driving further South, we eventually land in Sunriver, a community near Bend, and a favorite vacation spot for outdoors enthusiasts and families who love being in nature with their kids, but also enjoy the amenities of pools, nature centers, tennis and golf courts, maintained bike paths and the like.

One of the most amazing natural sights, next to deep ponderosa pine forests and the river itself,

are the lava fields produced by one of the largest High Desert volcanoes, the Newberry Volcano. Three million years old, it covers more than 2,000 square miles and sent basalt flows down the canyon of the Deschutes River as far as 65 miles from the main crater (overall it just looks like a mountain chain rather than a dome.)

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) considers it to be a very high threat volcano because of its recent volcanic activity (within the past 1,500 years) in an area where numerous people live. Up until now it has been regularly monitored to detect seismic activity, measuring swelling or deflation of the ground, and trying to detect distinctive volcanic earthquakes caused by molten rock (magma) movement beneath the volcano. Who knows if those services have fallen prey to Musk’s chainsaw as well. (I checked, the answer is YES.)

It is a strange feeling to walk on top of this sleeping giant, something I last did a decade ago, and now again, as if nothing had changed in-between, except for my (reduced) speed and level of fatigue after a ridiculously short hike. I was then and still am a speck in space and time, a particle, a glimmer, given the dimensions of this geological behemoth. And I am still in awe of the beauty around me, the sense of grandeur between the expanse of the High Desert landscape and the height of the surrounding mountains.

Yet I am also aware of human achievement, if lasting so many fewer years, reaching across millennia nonetheless. Thinking here of a poem related to volcanoes, by a smart, formerly East-german poet who weaves into his dry observations allusions to Greek mythology and writing – knowledge transmitted throughout the generations (although who knows if we will see it on U.S curricula after this administration is done, installing the Christian Bible as a textbook instead…)

Active

Then someone says crater and you’re tumbling down.
A word from ancient Greek, a fragment, it means
The pitcher, in which they mixed water and wine.
The volcanic abyss, Empedocles’s tomb.

No more than a word, a splinter, and you see the sandals
Perched on the crater’s rim. Peering down through
The hole in the skullcap at the grey matter.—These pallid
Pockmarks puncturing the map of the moon.

You just hear the word crater—there’s a crack,
And the ear conjures myths out of ceramic and molten rock.
Hephaestus, the smith, in scenes with figures of red.
Or Hades, dragging Persephone down to the dead.

BY DURS GRÜNBEIN
Translated by Karin Leeder from the German, below


“Aktiv”

Da sagt jemand Krater, und schon stürzt du hinab.
Ein Wort aus dem Griechischen, Bruchstück, es meint
Einen Krug, in dem mischten sie Wasser und Wein.
Den vulkanischen Abgrund, Empedokles’ Grab.

Ein Wort nur, ein Splitter, und du siehst die Sandalen
Am Trichterrand. Starrst durchs Loch in der Schädeldecke
Auf die graue Substanz. – Diese riesigen, fahlen,
Im Mondatlas abgebildeten, pockennarbigen Flecken.

Du hörst nur Krater – es knirscht, und das Ohr,
Aus Keramik und Lavaschutt, zaubert Mythen hervor.
Rotfigurige Szenen mit Hephaistos, dem Schmied.
Oder Hades, der Persephone in sein Totenreich zieht

Newberry National Monument – Lava lands

The poem is, unfortunately, rather badly translated, which is surprising given the talent and caliber of this award-winning translator.

In my own understanding of the German, the first line describes a rather more violent, instantaneous crashing than tumbling down the slopes of a crater at the mere mention of the word. This sets the tone for the juxtaposition of “active” and “reflexive” or passive, that runs through the poem. In the second verse, the word crater is no longer a fragment but compared to a shard (not a splinter, fitting way better into the theme of the ceramic pitcher). At the end of the verse the poet refers to actually printed maps of the moon on which huge pallid flecks look like pock marks and which hung in children’s bedrooms during the poet’s youth . In the last verse, the translator uses “crack” instead of “crunch”, which is far more applicable to the crumbling lava and ceramic mix that conjures myths. But maybe I’m nit-picking. Let’s look at the references that really make this a memorable poem.

Both meanings of the word crater, volcano and ceramic pitcher, weave through the poem. Both are provided with references to Ancient Greek mythology, from writing, or found in the imagery painted onto the vessels.

The reaction to the mention of “crater” is linked to Empedocles, a philosopher who, as far as we know, was the first to offer a theory about the connection between light and vision, something picked up and developed later by Euclid. He was a strict vegetarian, had some significant ideas about human psychology and was said to have jumped into an active volcano to prove that he was immortal and live on as a God, leaving his sandals at the rim to “prove” that he had departed. There are numerous version about his demise, some claiming he faked it, others attributing it to an erupting Vesuvius which blasted his sandals up to the rim.

Empedocles’ example of a voluntary jump into the abyss provides a clear contrast to the narrator’s sense that he is inescapably falling into the depth. His imagination is active, but the experience is reflexively forced on him.

The next allusions pick up the theme of catastrophic endings by active means or passive experience. Remember who Hephaestus was, so often depicted as a red silhouette on a black vase? He was the God of fire, volcanoes, metalworking, artisans, metallurgy, carpenters, forges, sculpting, and blacksmiths, creating all the tools needed for unleashing war. And if that was not enough, he also brought a first gift to man: Pandora and her miserable box. All of it drowning the world in evil by active design. Contrast this with Persephone, who was abducted into the Underworld, tricked into eating some pomegranate seeds so that she had to stay there for most of the year, no active resistance possible.

Then again, not all is black and white, or red on black, as the case may be. Persephone still helped to bring spring and harvest about together with her mother, upon her temporary jaunts back into the world, and was Queen rather than pure victim in the underworld.

And Pandora, sent to us by a God who also provided us with habitat and tools as well as the weapons of war? She used to be a life-bringing goddess in early renderings of the Greek cosmos (in fact her name means “all-giving”), before she was eclipsed by the death-bringing human Pandora. And in contrast to the misery she unleashed, one thing stayed permanently in the box, not irretrievably dispersed across the corners of the earth: HOPE, still available.

Maybe we feel like being sucked into craters, drowned by evil that has existed amongst humans since people started to record their histories, left with a torched and jagged, infertile landscape. But we have choices: the choice to think of something as providing sustenance rather than demise (pitcher vs crater), the choice to focus on hope rather than conditioned fears that drag us down the slopes of the volcano. And we have all this because the ancients laid out the maps, and our schools taught us the history. The grey matter might be pockmarked, but it can still be put to use. Let it be active and lead to the right moves.

Chem trails in just the right position….


Music today is a life version of Genesis’ Dance on the Volcano. Here is another song from that album that remains one of my favorite of years gone by, Trick of the Tail.



2 Comments

WHAT WAR IS

WHAT WAR IS

Maybe someday they’ll decide to write a textbook
only we won’t be invited to contribute

because others always know better what war is

because others always know better

okay

but just one chapter

give us one chapter

you won’t find any supplemental material anyway

this will be a chapter on silence

whoever hasn’t been in war doesn’t know what silence is

but to the contrary, they know

that we don’t know

the way fish don’t know about the water that sustains them and the oil that kills them

the way a field mouse doesn’t know about the dark that hides it from the hawk but

it hides the hawk too

let us write this chapter

i know you’re afraid of blood so we’ll write it with water

the water the wounded man asked for when he could no longer swallow and just

looked at it

water that seeps through a shelled-out roof

water that can replace tears

yes – we’ll come to you with water

we’ll leave no permanent marks

on your slogans and values that we’ve so flagrantly misused

that you can’t even show them to your children anymore

these will be our few pages

and only a few will know they aren’t empty

by  Ostap Slyvynsky

Timothy Snyder introduced us to this poet and poem on Monday, the three year-anniversary of the day Russia invaded Ukraine. The words speak for themselves. Will we heed them?

The poem is contained in Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine, published by Academic Studies Press (Boston, MA) and Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute (Cambridge, MA). It is available at bookshop.org, or your local bookstore. (As a reminder: this Friday, February 28th, has been dedicated to buying or paying NOTHING, a nation-wide economic boycott to protest the new administration and the businesses raising prices because they can. Put gas in the car and get your groceries on Thursday…)

***

Two recommended long reads that you might want to pick up:

Aisha Ahmad, Political Science Professor at the University of Toronto, writes about the consequences of a potential war with Canada.

Jonathan Rauch is a senior fellow in the Governance Studies program at the Brookings Institution and writes about a way to think about the current President and his posse’s approach to governing, relating back to a term originally coined by Max Weber: Patrimonialism.

“Patrimonialism is less a form of government than a style of governing. It is not defined by institutions or rules; rather, it can infect all forms of government by replacing impersonal, formal lines of authority with personalized, informal ones. Based on individual loyalty and connections, and on rewarding friends and punishing enemies (real or perceived), it can be found not just in states but also among tribes, street gangs, and criminal organizations.”

Today minimalist music. The Book of Sounds was composed by Hans Otte between 1979 and 1982. Played here by Carlos Cipa, himself a contemporary classical composer and pianist.

2023 photo montage series about war and nuclear proliferation.

1 Comments

Moloch

Some persistent bug had me under the weather last week. Consequently I watched even more movies than usual, with shows divided between those I stream while knitting and those I devour intently. Given the quality of what’s currently out there, the “knitting” category covered about 90% of my movie diet, with the remaining 10% providing a sigh of relief.

I photographed at the waterfront in San Francisco in September 2020, around noon. The smoke from the fires blocked out the sun. These colors are not manipulated.

In the latter category, one series stood out in particular. It’s a French/Belgian production from 2020, now playing on the Sundance Channel, called Moloch. Not for the faint of heart – the series contains not just very violent images, it also creates pervasive fear in any viewer sensitive to horror and asks disturbing psychological questions that we have to answer ourselves. It offers magic realism as a plot device, but it is also as smart a documentation as they come of what ails our societies, and delivers superb psychodrama. Next to the terrific acting, the cinematography is brilliant, mirroring the suffering of its protagonists in the desolate land- and cityscapes that are as beautiful as paintings. If you plan on viewing it and don’t want spoilers, stop reading here!

The plot revolves around people spontaneously combusting into columns of fire in a Northern French coastal town. An unlikely duo of a young journalist and an older psychiatrist team up to solve the mystery, both burdened with tragedies of their own. A number of the psychiatrist’s patients are peripherally involved, as potential victims or perpetrators of the deeds, no one knows. As the story unfolds, the crimes are attributed by the increasingly riled population to Moloch, the ancient God of Fire to whom children were regularly sacrificed. (Evidence concerning Moloch worship in ancient Israel, by the way, is found in the legal, as well as in the historical and prophetic literature of the Bible, in the Pentateuch, Deuteronomy, the Books of Kings and Numbers. The Moloch cult was an established institution with a fixed location (the Topheth), at Carthage, a colony founded by Phoenicians on the coast of Northeast Tunisia. Archaeological discoveries at Carthage attest some 20,000 burials of infant bones along with animal bones in what are evidently was institutional sacrifice. )(Ref.)

The film’s victims of these seeming self-immolations are all revealed to have been violent, cruel and abusive in their own right, and the steady background noise of radio and news reports points to larger syndicates as well, recklessly polluting the sea with toxic run-offs, setting a general tone of late-stage capitalism dysphoria.

Some part of the population, however, thrives on the sense that justice is done in an unjust world, a world that sees repeat areas of violation: child abuse, sexting among teenagers bent on shaming young girls, crimes related to drug dealing, bankers driving people into ruin, and so on. The treatment of immigration – refugees as witnesses or potential perpetrators – slowly emerges, with a compassionate lens on the fate of African migrants whose suffering makes them buy into religious frenzy of an avenging God.

The core issue, though, turns out to be anger, depicted in various degrees and various manifestations, ultimately so intense in those who have no means to escape it, that it becomes fiery enough to immolate hated targets. And what, at first, was meant to be a crusade for a better world, with victims given a chance to change their behavior lest being punished, becomes in the end a reckless tour of revenge, blind with fury. The allegory of a society devouring its young who then strike back by sacrificing representatives of said system, ultimately ends in self-sacrifice of the perpetrator. And the viewer’s own moral compass is by then upside down, feeling only compassion for a life un-lived, turned to evil. All this is narrated in long, calm, pensive scenes, only occasionally disrupted by action shots.

Who needs such bleakness, you ask? My answer: any work of art that teaches us something about our state of affairs might help us, in turn, to promote some change, if only we are courageous enough to look. Regarding the particular theme of Moloch, the best artists of their times picked it up – just re-watch Metropolis from 1927 or re-read Allen Ginsberg. (More below.)

I think the question why so many young men (and increasingly some young women) are turning to dreams or actualization of violence, to revenge fantasies concerning a world that is seen as depriving them, trapping and suffocating them, needs to be investigated. How can we convey that it is not feminism, or DEI, or some other convenient subgroup thwarting them, dangled as culprits before their eyes by some politicians eager for foot soldiers? Flooding them with ideology that keeps them in suspension, unable to think of and realize a productive future for themselves?

What can be done to unravel myth from reality about the causes of inequality, injustice and purposeless lives for entire generations experiencing a steady drop in life quality and life expectancy, leading to ubiquitous anger? If a film makes you think about those issues along parallel lines, brings them up with metaphors that grab you emotionally as well as philosophically, more power to it, even if it uses the tropes of thriller-cum-horror movie as a vehicle.

Here is poetry published in 1956 (!) alerting us to the point: an excerpt of Allen Ginsberg‘s Howl.

II.

What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?

Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!

Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!

Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!

Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!

Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose factories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose smoke-stacks and antennae crown the cities!

Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind!

Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream Angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch!

Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy! Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch! Light streaming out of the sky!

Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!

They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us!

Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down the American river!

Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!

Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions! gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs! Ten years’ animal screams and suicides! Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on the rocks of Time!

Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell! They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving! carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the street! 

(The entire written poem can be found here. A reading by Ginsberg himself here.)

Here is new music for an old (1927) silent movie: the Moloch Scene in Metropolis, rescored by Matt Mason.

0 Comments

Valentine’s Day 2025.

Some claim that Valentine’s Day had its origins in the Roman festival of Lupercalia, held in mid-February. The festival included fertility rites, wild bacchanalia and the pairing off of women with men by lottery. “Young women’s names were drawn by bachelors from a jar. These matches, initially formed for the festival’s duration, often led to long-term relationships and marriages.”

Enter the church, eager to replace Pagan rites with Christian values. Up pops the symbolic martyr St. Valentine who secretly married lovers, ignoring Roman Emperor Claudius II’s edict that prohibited young men from marrying, as to serve more efficiently as soldiers. Valentinus was executed for his defiance, but lives on as a champion of love. (Ref.)

First comes love, then comes marriage. And then comes the forfeit of women’s right to vote.

Think I am joking? Here is what Wendy Weiser at the Brennan Center for Justice has to say about the consequences of a new Republican voter registration bill sponsored by Texas Republican congressman Chip Roy, the SAVE Act, which experts warn could be a major threat to voting rights for all Americans, and particularly for married women, in addition to people of color, young voters, and other marginalized groups.

“The legislation would require all potential voters to provide, in person, proof of citizenship, such as a passport or birth certificate, when they register or reregister to vote.” The bill would not only impact the 21.3 million Americans who do not have ready access to a birth certificate or passport, as well as anyone who relies on voting by mail. It would also have a direct impact on anyone whose legal name does not match the name on their birth certificate or passport, such as the 79% of heterosexual married women, per Pew Research, who take their spouse’s last name. “If a married woman hasn’t paid $130 to update her passport—assuming she has one, which only about half of Americans do—she may not be able to vote in the next election if the SAVE Act becomes law.”

They chitter at each other violently, then hop at each other, until one flies off.

The festival Lupercalia was celebrated in and around caves. Looks like that is the location we are pushed back towards – Project 2025 explicitly condones and seeks to enforce a family structure where only the head of household, the man, votes. This was, of course, a common argument against women’s suffrage before the 19th amendment was introduced.

While I might angrily scream at the hostility extended towards all those threatening the top tier of the power hierarchy, there are others devoted to peace – probably way more effective (and certainly better for your blood pressure…)

You can join them in a Multicultural Celebration for Connection, Love, and Peace this Sunday in Hillsboro, OR. Here are the details:

A Community Event Promoting Unity and Understanding


The Oregon Society of Translators and Interpreters (OSTI), Lutheran
Community Services Northwest (Beaverton Office), the Immigrant and Refugee Community
Organization – Greater Middle East Center (IRCO GMEC), DAWN, and Unite Oregon, in
partnership with the City of Hillsboro and the Office of Immigrant and Refugee Advancement,
are proud to present the Multicultural Celebration for Connection, Love, and Peace.

This inaugural event will bring together community members from diverse backgrounds to celebrate culture, share stories, and promote unity through music, dance, art, and meaningful
conversations. This event aims to foster a sense of community amidst the attacks on immigrant and refugee communities in Oregon and across the country by the new administration.

Date: Sunday, February 16, 2025
Time: 2:00 – 5:00 PM
Location: The Walters Cultural Arts Center, 527 E Main St, Hillsboro, OR 97123
Website: https://tinyurl.com/connectionlovepeace

Here is a poem that will be read on Sunday, in various translations as well.

A Proclamation for Peace 

Whereas the world is a house on fire;
Whereas the nations are filled with shouting;
Whereas hope seems small, sometimes
a single bird on a wire
left by migration behind.

Whereas kindness is seldom in the news
and peace an abstraction
while war is real;

Whereas words are all I have;
Whereas my life is short;
Whereas I am afraid;
Whereas I am free—despite all
fire and anger and fear;

Be it therefore resolved a song
shall be my calling—a song
not yet made shall be vocation
and peaceful words the work
of my remaining days.

by Kim Stafford

Photographs from yesterday through my (dirty) window, with House Finches and Junkos going at it, competing for seeds rather than showing some loving solidarity. Then again, maybe they are off mating in a cave, once fed. Happy Valentine’s Day!

Music is a Romanze by Schumann so long held apart from his beloved Clara. I really like this slow version. Brings out the longing.


0 Comments

Another Thought Experiment.

When I wrote about my worries regarding the novel Corona virus in early (!) January 2020, I got some push-back. Did I have to be catastrophizing all the time? Couldn’t I provide a bit more levity or at least some art? 1.9 million U.S. deaths later, much as I’d like not to, I am back in Cassandra mode.

I’ll provide art (a poem below), all right, and photographs that I took at beautiful Point Lobos, CA last November, but today’s focus are issues related to the bird flu. Don’t yell at me. I am as sick, literally, as the next person, under the barrage of bad news. And today’s musings are as bleak as they come. But we must think things through to reach some kind of preparedness. That much we’ve learned from the last epidemic.

Let’s try a thought experiment, given that the Republicans’ slashing of NIH/NSF grants by more than half curtails actual scientific experimentation. (Here is a detailed, excellent review of the new rules.) Assume you learn the most important facts and statistics about the new H5N1 virus. Why assume? Well, since last week, many official publications of information about infectious diseases have disappeared from government websites. Data that briefly appeared on a C.D.C. website were gone a short time later, irretrievable despite scientists begging for a full report. For example, according to the NYT, “Cats that became infected with bird flu might have spread the virus to humans in the same household and vice versa, according to data that briefly appeared online in a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention but then abruptly vanished. The data appear to have been mistakenly posted but includes crucial information about the risks of bird flu to people and pets.”

So what facts do we actually know? The disease originated in Asia, almost 30 years ago. It spread among poultry farms, caused some 400 deaths in humans across these years, but rarely spread human-to-human. The virus started to explode exponentially since 2020, when it did not simply jump from poultry farms to wild bird populations, but when the latter started to disperse it along migration routes, spreading from flock to flock. It arrived on our shores in 2021, with 148 million poultry alone ordered to be euthanized since 2022. More than 5 million egg-laying chickens died in the first 16 days of 2025. (Ref.)

From North America it jumped to South America where it traveled 6000 km in just 6 months. It caused mass mortality, not just in birds, but in infected mammals as well, with elephant seals, sea lions, porpoises, dolphins and otters all affected. Almost 50% of the Peruvian pelican population succumbed. The ecological consequences are still up for grabs but likely devastating up and down the food chain.

Deceased elephant seal pups line the beach at Punta Delgada in Chabut, Argentina, along with a bird carcass. Cause of death: bird flu. Ralph Venstreets/University of California, Davis

Now cows are infected with the virus. As of last week almost 1000 herds across 16 states in the U.S. tested positive. In fact, cows in Nevada exhibited a new variant of the virus which has scientists alarmed for its potential to trigger a pandemic in humans. The genotype, known as D1.1, contains a genetic mutation that may help the virus more easily copy itself in mammals—including humans. This D1.1 version of the virus is the same variant that killed a man in Louisiana and left a Canadian teen hospitalized in critical condition. (Ref.) The real worry: with each genetic mutation, so easily accomplished since this virus mixes with other flu viruses quite rapidly, we might see increased severity of the disease and increased probability for human-to-human infection.

Back to our thought experiment. You now know that the virus is around us, mutating, and you start seeing people felled by it (by current expectations, it has a mortality rate between 40 and 50%. Compare that to Corona Disease mortality rate: about 1%. Imagine the hospital overload, increasing otherwise preventable deaths outside of bird flu mortality as well.) Let’s assume that scientists do find a vaccine (we have to be optimistic until the last minute!), just like they did for Covid, and it proves to be safe and effective in tests done outside of the U.S., since stateside we no longer support much contagious disease research. And now factor in the fact that you have an anti-vaxxer health tzar voted into office by a Republican Senate, instructing the FDA not to approve the vaccine. (You can still write to your Senator about Kennedy’s confirmation… their websites have a contact me link.) Fantasy? Read the proposed law debated on Friday in Montana (House Bill 371) that would ban the use of mRNA vaccines – you know the ones used to treat tuberculosis, malaria, zika, the rapidly mutating influenza viruses, hepatitis b, HPV, Covid 19 and in treatment of pancreatic, lung, prostate, and brain cancer.

What would you do?

Rich folks traveling abroad to inoculate themselves and their families? Would foreigners even be served if there are limited quantities available? What about poor folks?

Stock up on masks? There are already 16 states with masking prohibitions in effect, with more legislation in the works. And always think of the babies and toddlers that can’t be masked…

What will we do?

I can’t help but wonder about questions raised a decade ago by America’s smartest Cassandra, Sarah Kendzior, who has previously predicted everything we have seen unfolding since January 20th, 2025. in great detail.

***

Omnicide

And when our children ask,
Why did  you do nothing as the world
was dying?   what will we tell them?

Will we say, We didn’t know how
sick it was, or admit that We gathered
our rosebuds while we could,

Old  Time was still a-flying—?
It’s now the end of  everything,
our children will say, go crawl

into your arks and sail off  destitute into
your doom, and leave us only
your shadows. And our children

will light candles across seven continents
empty now of  lions, kangaroos, ravens,
squirrels, javelinas, pelicans—

devoid of praying mantises, koalas, ants,
cobras, snails, Doberman pinschers, pigs,
vultures, lizards, and alley cats.

Our children will hide in caves with blind
cockroaches, together feeding on the algae
glowing in neon greens and blues

across dolomite and limestone walls.
They’ll leave no pictographs behind,
no sprayed handprints, no artful gods.

Such silence now, they’ll say, this  you’ve
bequeathed us, this human indifference.
And we’ll beg them, Survive.

BY MAURYA SIMON

Music today is from France, with entirely home-made and recycled instruments, a funky melange that should cheer us up. Always music.

1 Comments

Who decides what we remember?

In the dark times, will there also be singing?
Yes, there will be singing.
About the dark times.
—Bertolt Brecht

I would not be surprised if one or another of you read the document below and thought: “History is written by the victors…”

The special observances to be eliminated by fiat of the new administration include Black history month, Holocaust Days of Remembrance, Women’s History Month, and so on.

Memorial Site of Concentration Camp Buchenwald.

Once you discard the public remembering and teaching of history, you can fill in the blanks with anything you like, likely falsehoods that will stay with the next generations who have no access to the actual records, if it is done thoroughly enough. The current attacks on the contents of teaching materials, and even independent sources like Wikipedia (reported in Newsweek,) clearly speak to the issue. As journalist Adam Server from The Atlantic commented: “They want to ban the teaching of the unpleasant facts of American history because people might conclude injustices in the past that contribute to inequalities in the present should be rectified, instead of their belief, which is that some groups of people are inherently superior to others.”

The quote about victors shaping the narrative in their preferred fashion was attributed to Winston Churchill for the longest time. Falsely, as it turns out. People then pointed to words uttered by Reichsmarschall and war criminal Hermann Göring, a coward who did not even face his Nürnberg Trial sentence of death by hanging, resorting to suicide by poison the night before. “Der Sieger wird immer der Richter und der Besiegte stets der Angeklagte sein,” “the victor will always be the judge, and the vanquished the accused.”

Apparently, the sentiment had been around for a much longer time, in various European nations, France in 1842, Italy in 1852 and Great Britain in 1889. It arrived at our own shores a few years later:

“In 1891, Missouri Sen. George Graham Vest, a former congressman for the Confederacy who was still at that late date an advocate for the rights of states to secede, used the phrase in a speech: “In all revolutions the vanquished are the ones who are guilty of treason, even by the historians,” Vest said, “for history is written by the victors and framed according to the prejudices and bias existing on their side.” (Ref.)

Well, if you have (and abuse) the power to erase history when it is at odds with your ideology, you sound more like a loser than a victor to me. Might as well go golfing on Holocaust Remembrance Day…. (yes, he did.)

The real question is, of course, what can be done when the powers that be try to eliminate our remembering of acts of horror as well as acts of heroism, acts of oppression met by acts of resistance, of an evolution of rights for those who had been denied them since times immemorial. The prohibitions of public remembrances, the choice of names for institutions, the restriction of text book contents might not be easy to stop, particularly when appeals to “forgetting” are voiced by some of the largest communication platform owners in the world. (e.g. Musk’s contribution to the neo-Nazi party AfD rally last week in Germany.)

But this can be counterbalanced by art (although admittedly much harder to distribute to large enough audiences.) Films that try to document the past as it unfolded can be useful and convey content pretty directly. Poetry can be a teacher. One of the best collections I can think of is Carolyn Forché’s Against Forgetting (1993). The classic anthology contains hundreds of poems centered around events that changed history. No other than Nelson Mandela introduced the book at the time:

“Poetry cannot block a bullet or still a sjambok, but it can bear witness to brutality—thereby cultivating a flower in a graveyard. Carolyn Forché’s Against Forgetting is itself a blow against tyranny, against prejudice, against injustice. It bears witness to the evil we would prefer to forget, but never can—and never should.”

Primroses and bush anemones under the beeches of KZ Buchenwald (Beechwood) near Weimar.

A more recent one is Poetry of the Holocaust (2019), edited and translated by Jean Boase-Beier and Marian de Vooght. This volumes contains work by many lesser known poets, intended, with the help of 35 translators from languages as varied as Yiddish, Norwegian, Japanese and Hungarian, to present the poems in original and translation, with a contextual note for each. It is a remarkable book.

A particularly timely read, too. I am writing this on the day of the signing of an Executive Order to prepare a 30,000 capacity migrant detention camp in Guantanamo Bay. The site of previous human right abuses (including torture) identified by the UN, Amnesty International and Red Cross. A site three times the size of Auschwitz, outside of U.S jurisdiction (leased from Cuba,) so that many of our legal protections don’t apply and access of observers and journalists can be restricted or altogether prohibited. The justification, at this point, is that it will house undocumented immigrants, to be deported. When will the first US citizen be shipped off shore as well? According to NBC news, the President himself “suggested Monday that the United States could pay a “small fee” to foreign countries to imprison Americans (bolded by me) who are repeat criminal offenders, floating a kind of modern-day penal colony. Trump billed the idea as a cost-saving measure in remarks at a conference for House Republicans in Miami.” Gitmo next?

Crematorium at Buchenwald

Photographs today from my visits to memorial sites of German concentration camps.

Music today is unfortunately just a snippet of a piece we should have access to in its entirety. Click on the blue arrow in the lower left corner to listen to the excerpt of Jüdische Chronik, organized by Paul Dessau.

KZ Ravensbrück

The Vanished

For Nelly Sachs

It wasn’t the earth that swallowed them. Was it the air?
Numerous as the sand, they did not become
sand, but came to naught instead. They’ve been forgotten
in droves. Often, and hand in hand,

like minutes. More than us,
but without memorials. Not registered,
not cipherable from dust, but vanished—
their names, spoons, and footsoles.

They don’t make us sorry. Nobody
can remember them: Were they born,
did they flee, have they died? They were
not missed. The world is airtight
yet held together
by what it does not house,
by the vanished. They are everywhere.

Without the absent ones, there would be nothing.
Without the fugitives, nothing is firm.
Without the forgotten, nothing for certain.

The vanished are just.
That’s how we’ll fade, too.

BY HANS MAGNUS ENZENSBERGER

TRANSLATED BY RITA DOVE

Nelly Sachs, to whom the poem is dedicated, was one of the foremost Holocaust poets who escaped to Sweden. The German original can be read here. It references themes of one of her famous poems, Flight and Metamorphosis.

2 Comments

After the Fire.

Here they were, salmons “singing in the street,” in Northern morning light that favored gold and blues. Right out of an Auden poem that stirred in the recesses of my brain, vaguely remembered. Had to dig it out, oddly relevant to our times when Southern light is dimmed by black smoke, or flickers as burning embers. Like all truly meaningful poetry, his poem captures universal truth, models defiance and stirs hope.

Malo Hasselblad Metal Fish Walkway at Washougal, WA waterfront Trail

***

As I Walked Out One Evening

As I walked out one evening,
   Walking down Bristol Street,
The crowds upon the pavement
   Were fields of harvest wheat.

And down by the brimming river
   I heard a lover sing
Under an arch of the railway:
   ‘Love has no ending.

‘I’ll love you, dear, I’ll love you
   Till China and Africa meet,
And the river jumps over the mountain
   And the salmon sing in the street,

‘I’ll love you till the ocean
   Is folded and hung up to dry
And the seven stars go squawking
   Like geese about the sky.

‘The years shall run like rabbits,
   For in my arms I hold
The Flower of the Ages,
   And the first love of the world.’

But all the clocks in the city
   Began to whirr and chime:
‘O let not Time deceive you,
   You cannot conquer Time.

‘In the burrows of the Nightmare
   Where Justice naked is,
Time watches from the shadow
   And coughs when you would kiss.

‘In headaches and in worry
   Vaguely life leaks away,
And Time will have his fancy
   To-morrow or to-day.

‘Into many a green valley
   Drifts the appalling snow;
Time breaks the threaded dances
   And the diver’s brilliant bow.

‘O plunge your hands in water,
   Plunge them in up to the wrist;
Stare, stare in the basin
   And wonder what you’ve missed.

‘The glacier knocks in the cupboard,
   The desert sighs in the bed,
And the crack in the tea-cup opens
   A lane to the land of the dead.

‘Where the beggars raffle the banknotes
   And the Giant is enchanting to Jack,
And the Lily-white Boy is a Roarer,
   And Jill goes down on her back.

‘O look, look in the mirror,
   O look in your distress:
Life remains a blessing
   Although you cannot bless.

‘O stand, stand at the window
   As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbour
   With your crooked heart.’

It was late, late in the evening,
   The lovers they were gone;
The clocks had ceased their chiming,
   And the deep river ran on.

by W. H. Auden (1907 – 1973)

From Another Time by W. H. Auden, published by Random House. Copyright © 1940 W. H. Auden, renewed by the Estate of W. H. Auden. Used by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd.

The poem is disguised as a traditional ballad, filled with cliches which altogether take on different meanings when read in the context the poet builds around them. The message is as serious as it gets.

Our narrator is out on an evening stroll amongst the sea of humanity, fields of harvest “wheat,” that might soon meet their reaper. He overhears a lover singing, near a brimming river and the train tracks that could quickly carry one away, looming disaster and flight metaphors in one simple verse.

The lover borrows every available absurdity to express the strength and longevity of his sentiments, with love lasting until the impossible happens, physically, geographically, biologically, metaphorically – in other words, lasting forever. The depth of love is expressed in fertility symbols (said singing salmons and the rabbits.) The allusion to disaster and flight is repeated in the image of the seven stars, squawking like geese. It refers to the Pleiades, a star cluster that played a major role in Greek mythology. Like migrating geese, the seven daughters of Atlas fled from place to place for many years pursued by Orion, until Zeus turned them into a constellation as he did with Orion, who still hunts them across the sky.

The lover’s song expresses the belief of singularity: the first love of the world, flower of the ages. But, more importantly, an unshakable faith in continuity, or even permanence. This is of course, a core belief that keeps us all going. Not just for love, but for life plans, for the existence of what and who we know and hold dear.

An unshakable faith, until it is shaken, or burnt to ashes, as the current case may be.

Such relentless optimism awakens the malevolent clocks: Time will have none of it, our lovers soon be disabused of their notion of eternity. Physical decline, material worries and economic stress (icebergs in the cupboard,) the eventual abating of sexual desire (desert in the bed) all putting cracks in the vessel once thought to last forever. Time manages to put the very notion of fairy tales onto its head: the presumed innocents prove to be lascivious, and relationships revert in unexpected ways. Why should “happily ever after” be the one to survive?

Looks like an inevitable ride downhill towards impermanence or even death. But now Auden rescues us with some strangely placed exhortations that are subtly encouraging.

‘O plunge your hands in water,
   Plunge them in up to the wrist;
Stare, stare in the basin
   And wonder what you’ve missed.

Could be washing your hands free from guilt of having been so naive, mistaken about continuity, or unable to live up to the promise of eternal love. But could also be a suggestion that you interrupt the narcissistic admiration of your Self in the basin, by making waves that destroy the image, pushing the focus on something else. That would make sense given how much Auden had embraced Freudian theories. It would also very much explain the next command:

‘O look, look in the mirror,
   O look in your distress:
Life remains a blessing
   Although you cannot bless.

YOU might have failed in your naive or misdirected optimism, but LIFE remains a blessing. I read this as such an important reminder to be grateful. There is stuff out there, even if not what you hoped for, even if you lack agency, even if you dropped, or were dropped by a lover (a repeated theme in Auden’s personal life, made more complicated by being gay in times where it was illegal.) Even if you incurred unimaginable losses, there is a world out there. (One, I might add, shouting for us to find ways to protect it.)

And significantly:

‘O stand, stand at the window
   As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbour
   With your crooked heart.’

Look out towards the world, no matter how rotten you feel, and remember the commandment to love your neighbor like yourself. They might be crooked, so are you. The whole idea is about goodwill/love towards others, a form that is not necessarily the sexual rush of the lovers we encountered in the first part of the poem, but the notion of Agape, the “unselfish loyal and benevolent concern for the good of another, “as the dictionary defines it. Reaching out towards humanity as a whole, engaging in brotherly love, might protect from time’s relentless drag.

***

We are experiencing Agape at this very moment. The love and support extended towards the displaced by the Eaton Fire is beyond description. I cannot thank everyone personally, but am deeply grateful for the outpour regarding my kids. From what I hear, mutual aid is generally flourishing in Altadena, trying to soften the blows while everyone is still in a state of shock, where even finding a meal or a change of clothes can become an overwhelming task. The fire is forging an already tight community into a whole, held by concern for each other.

In our personal case, it feels like a small child is at the protected core of concentric rings, reaching ever further outward. Fiercely shielded by parents, who are supported by grandparents, aunts and uncles, then friends, then acquaintances, then friends of the older generations – a whole network of emotional sustenance, physical comfort, shared expertise and financial generosity.

The Greek word apocalypsis actually means not so much doomsday, but revelation or unveiling. The fires reveal humanity’s fragility and the consequences of ecological overshoot – using more than the planet can sustain. But they also reveal something essential: We cannot count on permanence, but we are here and now surrounded by love.

You don’t know how much of a difference that makes at this very moment.

Auden wrote this in 1937, unsettling times in Europe with rising fascism, not unlike our own – he soon after emigrated to the U.S., having had a harrowing time when traveling to Spain to report on the Civil war. I think it is a poem to be bookmarked for the year(s) to come.

Here is Auden reading his poem.

And here is a song cycle by Benjamin Britten. “Our Hunting Fathers, Op. 8, was first performed in 1936. Its text, assembled and partly written by W. H. Auden, with a pacifist slant, puzzled audiences at the premiere.”

2 Comments

Merry Christmas and Happy Hannukah.

This was sent by a friend – I thought I’d share the welcome sentiments.

E. B. White’s Christmas – From the New Yorker 1952
 
From this high midtown hall, undecked with boughs, unfortified
with mistletoe, we send forth our tinselled greetings as of
old, to friends, to readers, to strangers of many conditions
in many places.
 
Merry Christmas to uncertified accountants, to tellers who have
made a mistake in addition, to girls who have made a mistake in
judgment, to grounded airline passengers, and to all those who
can’t eat clams! We greet with particular warmth people who
wake and smell smoke. To captains of river boats on snowy
mornings we send an answering toot at this holiday time.
 
Merry Christmas to intellectuals and other despised minorities!
 
Merry Christmas to the musicians of Muzak and men whose shoes
don’t fit! Greetings of the season to unemployed actors and the
blacklisted everywhere who suffer for sins uncommitted; a holly
thorn in the thumb of compilers of lists!
 
Greetings to wives who can’t find their glasses and to poets who
can’t find their rhymes!
 
Merry Christmas to the unloved, the misunderstood, the overweight.
Joy to the authors of books whose titles begin with the word “How”
(as though they knew!). Greetings to people with a ringing in
their ears; greetings to growers of gourds, to shearers of sheep,
and to makers of change in the lonely underground booths!
 
Merry Christmas to old men asleep in libraries! Merry Christmas to
people who can’t stay in the same room with a cat! We greet, too,
the boarders in boarding hoses on 25 December, the duennas in
Central Park in fair weather and foul, and young lovers who got
nothing in the mail.
 
Merry Christmas to people who plant trees in city streets; Merry
Christmas to people who save prairie chickens from extinction!
Greetings of a purely mechanical sort to machines that think–
plus a sprig of artificial holly. Joyous Yule to Cadillac owners
whose conduct is unworthy of their car!
 
Merry Christmas to the defeated, the forgotten, the inept; Joy
to all dandiprats and bunglers! We send, most particularly and
most hopefully, our greetings and our prayers  to soldiers and
guardsmen on land and sea and in the air– the young men doing
the hardest things at the hardest time of life. To all such,
Merry Christmas, blessings, and good luck! We greet the
Secretaries-designate, the President-elect; Merry Christmas to our
new leaders, peace on earth, good will, and good management!
 
Merry Christmas to couples unhappy in doorways! Merry Christmas
to all who think they are in love but aren’t sure!
 
Greetings to people waiting for trains that will take them in the
wrong direction, to people doing up a bundle and the string is
too short, to children with sleds and no snow! We greet ministers
who can’t think of a moral, gagmen who can’t think of a joke.
 
Greetings, too, to the inhabitants of other planets; see you soon!
 
And last, we greet all skaters on small natural ponds at the edge
of woods toward the end of afternoon. Merry Christmas, skaters!
Ring, steel! Grow red, sky! Die down, wind!
 
Merry Christmas to all and to all a good morrow!

Man, do I miss NYC at times. The mere memory of the million varieties of sufganiyot make my mouth water. Here are 2024’s recommended bakeries for this greasy dessert.

3 Comments

Thoughts triggered by Geese.

Returning Birds.

This spring the birds came back again too early.
Rejoice, O reason: instinct can err, too.
It gathers wool, it dozes off — and down they fall
into the snow, into a foolish fate, a death
that doesn’t suit their well-wrought throats and splendid claws,
their honest cartilage and conscientious webbing,
the heart’s sensible sluice, the entrails’ maze,
the nave of ribs, the vertebrae in stunning enfilades,
feathers deserving their own wing in any crafts museum,
the Benedictine patience of the beak.

This is not a dirge — no, it’s only indignation.
An angel made of earthbound protein,
a living kite with glands straight from the Song of Songs,
singular in air, without number in the hand,
its tissues tied into a common knot
of place and time, as in an Aristotelian drama
unfolding to the wings’ applause,
falls down and lies beside a stone,
which in its own archaic, simpleminded way
sees life as a chain of failed attempts.

by Wislawa Szymborska

Still awed by all the snow geese I recently encountered. And it was tempting to post Mary Oliver’s Snow Geese poem for its gratitude for unexpected beauty, or Wendell Berry’s Wild Geese with its admonition to recognize the here and now, but you know me. Szymborska hits the spot, every single time. Particularly since she depicts the death of a few unlucky birds, while I try not to think about the deaths of millions of them, saving the dispiriting topic of the bird flu (and its catastrophic implications) for another blog. We’ve had our fill of horrors already earlier this week.

I adore the poet’s sly juxtaposition of instinct and reason, both known to fail. I admire the way she describes the biological features of the birds in all their beauty, linking them to positive traits like patience, honesty and conscientiousness, but also works of art, sculptural finesse worthy of museums.

“This is not a dirge — no, it’s only indignation.”

That is the feistiness I want to take into my day, my life, when contemplating mortality or dealing with the “foolish fate” of witnessing erosion of achievements, justice and equality among them, that so many generations fought for. Maybe each single life is a chain of failed attempts, indeed, but lives accumulating across centuries were clearly able to improve the world.

What was this thing about the arc of the moral universe? It’s long, but bends towards justice? If a murdered man could cling to this belief, so can we. We could even muster some sort of hope that the danger of a snowy death upon too early a return is now gone with the arrival of climate change and rising temperatures. Oh well, another “failed attempt” – at gallows humor.

Then again, we could just stick with the poet’s resigned realism. It served her well, all the way to the Nobel Prize.

No, indignation it shall be, not sorrow, indignation hatching action.

In any case. The geese were luminous and loud and basking in the California sun, grey and white geese alike. The light still radiates inside of me, providing needed warmth.

Music today is about another white bird….

1 Comments
© 2025