Some things finally awaken in the garden, the columbines, some iris, a first little hedge rose, corn flowers, daisies, buttercups,
and the foxgloves.
A magnet to bees, this plant is actually highly toxic, but, used in the right amounts, can also be healing. (Don’t try at home…!) As a source of dioxin, it is used to treat cardiac arrhythmia, ever since British physician, William Withering, published his book, An Account of the Foxglove, in 1785. He and subsequent healers used it for a variety of ailments, edema, epilepsy, hydrothorax (fluid in the pleural cavities) and phthisis pulmonalis (probably tuberculosis.)(Ref.)
Some people speculate that Vincent van Gogh used digitalis (the plant’s latin name) to treat his epileptic seizures towards the end of his life. The chemicals cause haziness of vision, or a yellow tinge to everything one sees, known as xanthopsia. Occasionally, points of light may appear to have coloured halos around them. Rarer still are effects on pupil size, such as dilation, constriction or even unequal-sized pupils.
“The effects of digitalis intoxication have been suggested as the cause of Van Gogh’s “yellow period” and the spectacular sky he painted in The Starry Night. More circumstantial evidence comes from the two portraits Van Gogh produced of his doctor, Paul Gachet, showing him holding a foxglove flower. One of Van Gogh’s self portraits also shows uneven pupils.
All of this is very interesting but it is pure speculation. Van Gogh may not have taken digitalis, and perhaps simply liked the colour yellow and the effect of swirling colours around the stars he painted. Unequal pupil size in his self-portrait may have been the result of a simple slip of the paintbrush.” (Ref.)
Then again, he was known to indulge in drinking absinthe. The alkaloids in Artemisia absinthium which is used to brew the liquor cause similar visual effects.
Who knows…
Vincent van Gogh Dr. Gachet (1890)
The bees don’t care….
Today’s poem is by John Lee Clark, a DeafBlind poet, essayist, and independent scholar from Minnesota. The German name for the plant is Fingerhut, which translates as thimble.
Music is some mellow folk songs today. Titled Foxgloves, of course.
I take my victories where I can find them. Two days ago I won a staring contest with a coyote. The bunny, paralyzed with fear between us, lived, too. I stood still for what seemed half an eternity, he approached a step or two but then reconsidered. Time enough to take the photographs, and for a Painted Lady to land on the scat he left behind. No matter how often I feel blessed by nature, some encounters are unexpected, as if by magic, and make my heart race. With joy more than fear.
It had already been a morning filled with sweet encounters. The hungry scrub jay fledglings waiting for their mother,
other mothers readjusting worms in beaks.
Egrets hanging out, with a cacophony of their screaming offspring in nests in the woods behind them.
Glimpses of snowcapped Mt. St. Helens in the distance.
I had come to photograph something altogether different, though. I wanted to capture the star-like flowers of hemlock or cow parsley, you choose. (I have written about the distinction between these two, the former highly toxic, the latter good for making soup, previously here.) I needed a stand-in for stars, since they play such an important role in the poem attached below, not having images for the real thing since I rarely see them these days. Either it is too cloudy, or I am in bed already.
I don’t know why I had not come across this poem earlier – it has been around for a long time. Since 1977, to be precise, in a volume called The Hocus-Pocus of the Universe. The author, Laura Gilpin, had received the Walt Whitman Poetry award the previous year. She died, not yet age 56, barely 6 months after a diagnosis of cancer, in 2007.
The Two-Headed Calf
Tomorrow when the farm boys find this freak of nature, they will wrap his body in newspaper and carry him to the museum.
But tonight he is alive and in the north field with his mother. It is a perfect summer evening: the moon rising over the orchard, the wind in the grass. And as he stares into the sky, there are twice as many stars as usual.
by Laura Gilpin (1950- 2007)
The poem hit me at gut level, about the precariousness of life, about “othering,” and the hope one can find when staying in the moment, if only for a moment. It also fascinated me with a level of writing skill that manages to suggest so many different scenarios in so few lines.
What do we have here? Immediately we get introduced to the derogatory term freak. Wrapped in newspaper (a calf with two heads? Large newspaper…) reminiscent of ways to discard refuse like stinking fish. It will be displayed, gawked at, the museum replacing freak shows of yore on the circus circuit.
“...a term used to describe the exhibition of exotic or deformed animals as well as humans considered to be in some way abnormal or outside broadly accepted norms. Although the collection and display of such so-called freaks have a long history, the term freak show refers to an arguably distinct American phenomenon that can be dated to the 19th century.”
Promoted by P.T.Barnum, people raved about the entertainment delivered by watching disfigured animals or humans with disabilities, weight and height differences, dwarfism included, absence or increased presence of limbs, vitiligo, and persons with ambiguous sexual characteristics including hermaphroditism. Given how indefensible and indecent amusement at the sight of human abnormalities is, it is no surprise that the world saw a “Revolt of the Freaks” in 1898, when a collection of the 40 or so most-famous performers in the world staged a labour strike while on tour in London, demanding that the management of the Barnum and Bailey circus remove the term freak from promotional materials for their shows. To no avail. It took until the middle of the 20th century for these shows to be abandoned.
What is unfortunately alive and well, though, is a (religious and ideological) movement that defines “non-normative” people as freaks, abnormalities to be eradicated from a healthy societal body, and threatens to, at best, exclude them and force them into hiding, or punish them and those who support them, or, at worst call for their extermination. From a church pulpit, no less.
In this year alone, more than 240 bills have been introduced directed against LGTBQ people, most of them trans, and the year isn’t half over. The Human Rights Campaign reports that last year, 50 transgender and gender non-conforming people have been killed in the U.S., 14 so far this year. That is not counting the suicides of mobbed or despairing trans teenagers. According to NPR, a third of the known trans-youth, 58.000 people, are in danger of losing gender affirming health care. Actually, newest statistics show that the U.S. has about 1.6 million people who are transgender, 43% young adults or teenagers.
Gilpin draws a scenario in the second stanza that shows the domesticated framework of a summer evening at the farm. North field, like a neighbor’s address, with mother, a loving family then, mellow conditions lit by the moon, soothing noises by soft wind, the mention of an orchard promising the sweetness of fruit. All is right here, as long as the cruel world can be kept at bay, and the fate of non-conforming to norms, or of disability, postponed for just a few hours longer. It is inevitable, but in the meantime there is beauty to behold. And here is a glint of magic: four eyes in two heads see double the beauty, a privilege not granted to the rest of us.
Yet the added shimmer is no compensation, in my mind, for the lack of a glimmer of hope that people will attempt to integrate physical or mental disability without prejudice, or accept gender non-conformity (not a disability!) as a human right. Or stop using it as a wedge issue in a war between polarized ideological factions.
Gilpin worked for decades on a second volume of poetry, finished shortly before her death and published posthumously, The Weight of a Soul. Mine was left less heavy by the thought that poetry can still help us think things through, sort out who is discriminating and who needs protection. My soul was also made lighter by the hocus-pocus of nature, creating every variability imaginable, shimmering in the light.
Here is some beautiful music from Australia Superclusters. More stars, for your ears this time.
The sun was out. The sky was blue. Puffy white clouds. Miracle of miracles, after these endless rains, the cold, a May more like February. Yesterday was a promise of better times.
And everyone, I mean everyone, was out drying their plumage, preening, soaking up some warmth.
The herons opened their wings to the sun rays, or flying low in a bit of a breeze.
The Bullock’s Oriole (says my bird book) competed with the golden light around it, more interested in getting the gnats out of its feathers than watching the busy swallows right above it.
Bullock’s Oriole
And the turtles?
Lined up in a row, late comers trying to score a place as well, not too successfully.
Mothers and offspring sharing a log.
Heads stretched up high, opening wet folds, drying out.
Before we get too excited with all those harbingers of better times ahead, let’s be pragmatic. The rains will reappear in the not too distant future, says the weatherman. Good for our parched state, bad for our mood. Lets not be like the theoretic turtle – let’s follow canine advice: work around it and all other nuisances…
The Theoretic Turtle
The theoretic turtle started out to see the toad; He came to a stop at a liberty-pole in the middle of the road. “Now how, in the name of the spouting whale,” the indignant turtle cried, “Can I climb this perpendicular cliff and get on the other side? If I only could make a big balloon I’d lightly over it fly; Or a very long ladder might reach the top though it does look fearfully high. If a beaver were in my place, he’d gnaw a passage through with his teeth; I can’t do that but I can dig a tunnel and pass beneath.” He was digging his tunnel with might and main, when a dog looked down at the hole. “The easiest way, my friend,” said he, “is to walk around the pole.”
This is for the kids who die, Black and white, For kids will die certainly. The old and rich will live on awhile, As always, Eating blood and gold, Letting kids die.
Kids will die in the swamps of Mississippi Organizing sharecroppers Kids will die in the streets of Chicago Organizing workers Kids will die in the orange groves of California Telling others to get together Whites and Filipinos, Negroes and Mexicans, All kinds of kids will die Who don’t believe in lies, and bribes, and contentment And a lousy peace.
Of course, the wise and the learned Who pen editorials in the papers, And the gentlemen with Dr. in front of their names White and black, Who make surveys and write books Will live on weaving words to smother the kids who die, And the sleazy courts, And the bribe-reaching police, And the blood-loving generals, And the money-loving preachers Will all raise their hands against the kids who die, Beating them with laws and clubs and bayonets and bullets To frighten the people— For the kids who die are like iron in the blood of the people— And the old and rich don’t want the people To taste the iron of the kids who die, Don’t want the people to get wise to their own power, To believe an Angelo Herndon, or even get together
Listen, kids who die— Maybe, now, there will be no monument for you Except in our hearts Maybe your bodies’ll be lost in a swamp Or a prison grave, or the potter’s field, Or the rivers where you’re drowned like Leibknecht
But the day will come— You are sure yourselves that it is coming— When the marching feet of the masses Will raise for you a living monument of love, And joy, and laughter, And black hands and white hands clasped as one, And a song that reaches the sky— The song of the life triumphant Through the kids who die.
I had said I’m taking the week off, and I am. But could not think about yesterday’s massacre in Texas without thinking of this poem, and the insistence on life triumphant in the last lines, a defiant – helpless- cry, wrapped in hope. Needed to share it.
The powers that be in this country tolerate that guns are the highest cause of death for kids in this nation. 27 school shootings in the first 5 months of this year alone. The powers that be are content to see money from weapons flow into certain coffers, their own included. I am not even listing the ones that got NRA donations in the tens of thousands, just the ones overt a million.
But the powers that (want to) be are interested in more than money, and that is important to remember. We will not see any significant change because mass death primes for authoritarianism. As Ruth Ben-Ghiat explains, systemic gun violence is part of a Republican political design to destabilize American society. Her recent essay in the Washington Post spells out in great detail how transforming public schools into death traps is tolerated as part of a deliberate strategy to create an atmosphere of fear and suspicion conducive to survivalist mentalities and support for illiberal politics.
Let Langston Hughes be right, a day will come where the song of life triumphant will rise to the sky, a monument to all the lost kids. But in whose lifetime?
“Hope doesn’t preclude feeling sadness or frustration or anger or any other emotion that makes total sense. Hope isn’t an emotion, you know? Hope is not optimism. Hope is a discipline… we have to practice it every single day.”
— Mariame Kaba
You are getting two for one today. I wanted to post a piece of music, Our Phoenix by Mari Esabel Valverde, because it is a heartbreakingly beautiful reaction to the white-supremacist incited and enacted violence and terrorism in this country, Buffalo, NY as the most recent instance. The words are from a poem (full text of Our Dangerous Sweetness in the link) by Amir Rabiyah, who was born in London, England, to a mixed Cherokee and white mother and a Lebanese and Syrian father and who, as a trans poet, explores living at the margin.
I thought, though, that another one of their poems is more powerfully hopeful, needed in a world and era where positive thinking is ever harder to conjure, as well as gloriously full of double-meaning. So here’s my daily dose of practicing hope. And besides, I can show you what’s currently on my kitchen windowsill, glittering in the darkness …still waiting for blossoms, though.
Cactus Flower
We flash victory signs in the darkness, so the darkness may glitter. — Mahmoud Darwish
As the sun sets—we set our plan into motion. Our sole purpose to overthrow
any assumptions, to change the course of ordinary thinking.
Our work begins by speaking to darkness and telling darkness soon :
we will demonstrate through the secrecy of stars,
earth’s magnetic embrace how we can be many things at once.
So much of the work we do is internal, goes unnoticed, uncompensated.
We get written off or not written at all, labeled freakish, prickled, rough around the edges.
We learn to thrive in the dry humor of soil; carry water in our bellies to quench our own thirst.
We survive, over again. Adapt. Even after being carried in the beaks of birds, dropped elsewhere,
far from our roots, we grow. We flourish. And when least expected, when histories
not told by us, for us, claims we are defeated,
we gather our tears as dew. We release our anguish, intoxicated by our own sexed pollen. We burst,
displaying the luscious folds of our petals.
by AmirRabiyah
And if you you are in the mood for analysis rather than poetry, read this. Or this from the Jewish perspective. Or this from an economic-systems approach.
They are sitting in front of my window, courting, day after day. Sometimes they come as a small flock, sometimes just the two of them, she more cautious, reserved, but eventually joining him at the bird bath. We used to put seeds out, but that attracted too many squirrels onto the balcony.
These birds have been struggling, over-hunted, numbers slowly picking up for a while, now declining again. They eat berries, love to hang out in the Hawthorne and munch, sitting upright. I wave to them, they blink at me, unperturbed. Leaving as suddenly as they appeared.
Maybe it was the cold. Maybe the decline in pollinators. The number of wildflowers were sparse. It made finding every single one a particular joy, of course, hah, another iris! Maybe this 231 acres Cooper Mountain park, new to me, never had that many to begin with, or it was still too early in the season. When trails announce Larkspur Meadow, and all you find are a few puny specimens of the plant, it does make you wonder, though.
Made me think about a recent book. If you have time, read the The Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet. It is a fascinating anthology of conversations between and presentations by some twenty scientists and humanists (artists and poets included), presented during a conference at UCSC Santa Cruz a few years go. As conferences go, this was surely an imaginative one: the topics of how we can live and progress on a damaged planet were divided under two headings concerning he Anthropocene: Ghosts and Monsters.
Ghosts referred to issues around landscapes altered by the violent extraction and modification during human expansion. Monsters concerned interspecies and intraspecies social interactions. The goal for all theses scholars in anthropology, ecology, science studies, art, literature, and bioinformatics was to suggest critical and creative tools for collaborative survival in a more-than-human Anthropocene. A planet we share with other species, in other words, while making it inhabitable.
Dandelion and Wild Geranium
It is a book that has a wide range of topics, not to be read as a whole, but digested bit by bit, at least that worked for me with my aging brain. It will familiarize you with ants, lichen, rocks, electrons, flying foxes, salmon, chestnut trees, mud volcanoes, border zones, graves, radioactive waste, to name a few. We learn what has been harmed, what can be rescued, what needs adapting, and, importantly, how art can be of help in the process.
Lupine
It came to my mind on a walk on Sunday, a warm, sunny day so atypical for this dreadful April, where I found myself ambling through various biotopes: paths through old growth forests, along sunlit prairie, and in groves sheltering what remains of the oaks and freshly budding maple trees, both hung with veils of Spanish moss. Me and the rest of town – this is an easy 3.4 mile hike on Cooper Mountain near Beaverton and e v e r y o n e was out. Good for all of us – being in nature remains restorative, even when the damage is visible and seen, perhaps, by multitudes. Engaging with nature helps with (re)learning how to be in the world.
At least this was part of what Ursula Le Guin, a participant in the conference that led to the book, suggested: “To use the world well, to be able to stop wasting it and our time in it, we need to relearn our being in it.” She defined two possible approaches in ways I have cited before: “Science describes accurately from outside; poetry describes accurately from inside. Science explicates; poetry implicates. Both celebrate what they describe.” She explained: Skill in living, awareness of belonging to the world, delight in being part of the world, always tends to involve knowing our kinship as animals with animals.”
And here she put it in her inimitable poetic way:
THE STORY It’s just part of a story, actually quite a lot of stories, the part where the third son or the stepdaughter sent on the impossible mission through the uncanny forest comes across a fox with its paw caught in a trap or little sparrows fallen from the nest or some ants in trouble in a puddle of water. He frees the fox, she puts the fledglings in the nest, they get the ants safe to their ant-hill. The little fox will come back later and lead him to the castle where the princess is imprisoned, the sparrow will fly before her to where the golden egg is hidden, the ants will sort out every poppyseed for them from the heap of sand before the fatal morning, and I don’t think I can add much to this story. All my life it’s been telling me if I’ll only listen who the hero is and how to live happily ever after.
–Ursula Le Guin
I’d like to add to the focus on animals an acknowledgement of plants. People nowadays, kids in particular, know fewer plants than ever before. It is a phenomenon called Plant Blindness,the inability to notice or recognize plants in our own environment. The term was coined by two botanists, James Wandersee and Elisabeth Schussler, who originally proposed that we are blind to plants because they lack visual attention cues. They don’t have a face; they don’t move in the way that animals do; and they aren’t threatening. They look more like each other than animals do – and the human brain is geared to detect differences over similarities. We also favor things more familiar, and animal behavior is closer to humans in that regard, establishing some bio behavioral kinship. Add to that our general separation from nature, and you end up with people unable to identify more than a few plants.
Larkspur
This ignorance, echoed and anchored in the demise of academic instruction in plant biology, is all the more worrying given the role plants play in societal developments: global warming, food security and the need for new pharmaceuticals that might help in the fight against diseases. Without young people being drawn into plant sciences we might not be able to fight new plant diseases or develop plant strains adapted to changing climate conditions or discover new medications, and so on. In Great Britain you can no longer enroll for a botany degree, for example. Across the US, university Herbaria are closing. Funding is affected: 10 years ago plants made up 57% of the federal endangered species list – they received less than 4% of the endangered species funding! (Here is a good overview article on the consequences.)
Wild Strawberries
If schools fail at instruction, take the kids to the park. An emotional connection outweighs dry instruction in any case. Teach them how plants can be – are – heroes when it comes to their healing properties or their role in environmental protection – there are plenty of guides and apps for the phone available in case you’re not so sure yourself about names and species. Snap a picture and have an identification within a minute.
Prairie Meadow. I believe the yellow flower is Monkey flower, but am not sure.
Turn it into a treasure hunt to spur the kids’ interest. Who can find more larkspur than irises? Who spots the first saxifrage? Who can tell a strawberry by their blossom?
Saxifrage
Tell fairy tales where plants play a significant role (Hans Christian Andersen scored here, as do many Native American tales), seek out botanical gardens that help with education.
Lilies
I have my doubts about living happily ever after at which LeGuin’s poem hinted – but I believe walks are the moments when we can live happily, encountering spring’s renewal, however sparse, in all its beauty, and learn in the process.
Last Friday was Earth Day. The Oak Island nature trail on Sauvies Island had just opened after its annual 6 months-closure to protect migratory birds. I can think of no better place to celebrate nature – off I went, except it felt more like an attempt to escape than to celebrate.
Escape from thinking about the ever expanding, ever faster cycle of crises, ever larger looming dangers, ever more consequential action (or inaction) threatening this planet and its inhabitants. A carnival of negativity, as someone put it in The Atlantic while describing what is happening to our young people. There comes a point where you either shut off in depression or get enraged to the point of non-functioning.
One of the opinion writers at one of Germany’s most influential weekly, Der Spiegel, advised us this week to go milk cows, or commune with nature in any which way, or hang out at a spa, in all seriousness grappling with these options to fend off paralyzing doom, sounding simultaneously ridiculous and echoing my own sentiments (I guess ridiculous ones as well.)
Poets have gone a step further, exploring the desire to go back to a state of non-sentient existence, compared to one of calmed thought after a bovine encounter (the latter state, by the way, does not result from milking cows. As one who has engaged in that activity regularly, it is somewhat nerve-racking, just saying.)
The poem below speaks to the issue, the desire to be a speck that seeded the universe, un-thinking, un-feeling, un-remembering. It will be followed by another poem written in response, that I found somehow more encouraging (and encountered here). Written by Marissa Davis, illustrated by Lottie Kingslake and sort of sung by Toshi Reagon, it celebrates more than just “being.”
Ospreys
I was thinking of these kinds of poems while walking the loop. It used to be knee deep under water in April, now dry underfoot even though this has been one of the wettest Aprils in a long while. Trees had crashed down during the winter in unprecedented numbers.
Song birds flourished. Junkos and white crowned sparrows galore.
Those old fruit trees who remained standing were pushing out enormous amounts of blossoms – I hear that is a reaction to last year’s drought, cannot confirm.
Busy birds, herons up very high flying to and fro from their nests hidden in the woods across the slough.
I even saw a humongous swan flying west from the Columbia river (not captured on camera.) Ospreys nesting, hawks hanging, buzzards circling.
Jays everywhere,
and a few glimpses of yellow-rumped warblers and wrens.
Wren in center
The sky changed constantly, from grey to blue and back. The land and water was shimmering green, a color associated with the word hope in German. If we have to feel at all, unable to escape into the singularity, let that be the emotion associated with Earth Day! (Fed by the election results in France and Slovenia this Sunday, as well. Although I do believe, as you know, that a continuation of unconstrained neoliberal policies is but creating the substrate on which those barely defeated extremist political movements grow.)
Do you sometimes want to wake up to the singularity we once were?
so compact nobody needed a bed, or food or money—
nobody hiding in the school bathroom or home alone
pulling open the drawer where the pills are kept.
For every atom belonging to me as good Belongs to you. Remember? There was no Nature. No them. No tests to determine if the elephant grieves her calf or if
the coral reef feels pain. Trashed oceans don’t speak English or Farsi or French;
would that we could wake up to what we were —when we were ocean and before that to when sky was earth, and animal was energy, and rock was liquid and stars were space and space was not
at all—nothing
before we came to believe humans were so important before this awful loneliness.
Can molecules recall it? what once was? before anything happened?
No I, no We, no one. No was No verb no noun only a tiny tiny dot brimming with
is is is is is
All everything home
And here is the response poem, also called Singularity, by Marissa Davis.
I have been cold in April before. Seriously cold. Shipped off to England from Germany during Easter break to learn English as a 10-year-old, the host family’s daughter dragged me to old churches and had me do some brass rubbing while she absconded with a secret boyfriend. On my knees on someone’s commemorative brass plaques on the floor, large swaths of butcher paper rolled over it and rubbing oil crayon on it, like you would do with a pencil over a coin. Hours on end in unheated Cambridge cathedrals. Miserable, as well as cold.
A decade later the state was self-inflicted. I had agreed to “meet” my boyfriend who was traveling in North Africa at the Spanish port of Algeciras to drive back home together. I had taken a ferry, crowded with drunk tourists, from the island of Ibiza where my mother spent Easter with me, to Barcelona. From there a long train trip to the Southern tip of Spain. All this in the age before cell phones and credit cards, the early 70s, mind you. Found the cheapest hostel possible in Algeciras with no heat, a threadbare blanket matched by a threadbare towel for the sink with cold water in the room, WC down the hall, no showers. And then the wait began. Each day a walk to the post office to see if there was a letter kept at “poste restante.” Each day a walk to the harbor where the ferry from Africa (Ceuta, really a Spanish enclave) arrived. Standing in harsh winds from the Strait of Gibraltar waiting for the cars to unload in long lines. No message, no boyfriend. Plenty of catcalling. Cold nights with only one incomprehensible book to distract me, Leon Trotsky’s letters – don’t ask – until funds ran out, must have been a week or so. I hitchhiked home, having not enough money left over for a train ticket, with some friendly Brits. Happy ending delayed by about 2 weeks, when the parts for the broken-down land rover finally arrived in some atlas mountain hamlet and the return trip resumed. I think I was still freezing when we reunited in Germany all those weeks later…
And now snow. Mid-April. In Portland, Oregon. Obscuring the plum- and pear-tree blossoms, eliciting shivers and uncanny thoughts about another harvest damaged by extreme weather. Dickinson came to mind and her ways to observe the landscape, distilling views, providing new associations. Never mentioning the word snow once while writing an entire poem about it….
Photographs today from my garden within a 5 day span, from warmth in the 70s to today’s snowfall of 2.5 inches. I first thought I might add the newest political news on the climate denial/regulation/Supreme Court decisions front. Then I decided against it. Why mix the brightness of the snow with the underlying dark issues. Let these beautiful words ring in our ears, and the images speak for themselves.
The poem below was written this year in obvious response to what’s lurking. Volodymyr Dibrovar is a scholar at Harvard’s Ukrainian Research interview, historian Timothy Snyder was the translator. Dibrovar is a writer, translator and literary critic, a laureate of the Mykola Lukash Award in Translation for his translation of Samuel Beckett’s “Watt” (1991) and the Ukrainian BBC Book of the Year Award for his novel “The Andriivskyi Descent” (2007.)
I am posting it not to feed the increasing depression I see rising in myself and many around me, but because I think it speaks to something larger than the horrors of war alone. The sulphur fumes of a desire to annihilate born out of contempt and clinging to power are spreading everywhere, nationally and internationally. I write this after the Hungarian and before the French election this weekend, and cannot but wonder why fascism is even allowed at the doorstep, much less across it.
My photomontages today were work commissioned byThe North Coast Chorale in Astoria for a 2016 concert performance of Karl Jenkins’ The Armed Man – a mass for peace (which in turn was dedicated to the victims of the Kosovo conflict.) The music uses the structure of a catholic mass, but is filled with diverse, surprising and moving texts from all kinds of sources.
As it unfolds it brings the listener closer and closer to the devastation wrought by war, the emotional emptiness and trauma that comes with loss and being a victim as much as with being part of the perpetrating forces. It ends with appeals to hope, with a belief that we can and must pursue peace and that memory of the suffering must be kept alive to avoid repetition of warfare.
Look!
The barrier between us and the netherworld. We don’t usually see it. Why should we pay attention? Our cares are heavy enough already.
But something has happened.
Do you see?
The membrane is broken, a miasma of lies and hatred flows out. It drains will and reason from the weak. Even the strong are in shock.
It seems to defy the laws of physics
It is what it is, look out.
Toxic, not to be touched, not yet named. And that’s our problem.
What is unnamed escapes unpunished.
Where’s our word for spasmodic contempt and blinding annihilation?
For a lie so thick it absorbs every truth?
Search. To name is to know.
That is the only rule.
Of our only game.
Volodymyr Dibrova, (2022) Translated by Timothy Snyder.
***
Дивися!
Ось той невидимий кордон, який захищає нас від потойбічного світу. Тому ж ми його і не бачимо. Нащо він нам? Ми й без нього ледве даємо собі раду.
Але щось сталося.
Бачиш?
Загата розірвана, і з рани цебенить суміш ненависті та брехні. В слабаків вона відбирає розум і волю. Сильних вкидає у шок.
За законами фізики такого не може бути.
Але так є.
Обережно!
Це – дуже токсична субстанція. Її не можна торкатися. Тому вона й досі не має назви. І в цьому проблема.
Усе, що не названо, вислизає й лишається непокараним.
Де ж нам знайти влучне слово для корчів ненависті та бажання нищити все на своєму шляху?
Або для брехні, настільки щільної, що її не можна розчинити ніякою правдою?
