“The premeditation of death is nothing less than the forethinking of freedom.” Simon Critchley

02 Wednesday May 2012

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Sitting here at my desk in North America, surrounded by meaningless words flung about in luxury and distracting waste, it is hard to imagine that the act of creating words could bring an endangerment to your life. How could words be lethal to your children, your spouse, to anyone that helped you, even when these words speak for the welfare of others? When words crafted as acts of love fall upon deaf and murderous ears.

I won’t bore you with the details of the current news story of a blind dissident in China, Chen Guangcheng, who made an improbable escape over the walls into the US Embassy in Beijing, amid Sec. Of State Clinton’s precarious diplomatic visit — you probably know more than I of it. But I read that in the last few hours, only after threats against his wife and family and the imprisonment of a man who helped him, did he acquiesce to the idea of leaving China. Until then, he refused to become any one of the numerous political dissidents who are harbored in friendly, yet stranger, countries.

I thought instantly to Anna Akhmatova, who suffered immeasurably during the Russian Revolution for her poetry. Her literary friends and colleagues were systematically killed, starved, exiled. Several took their own lives. Her husband was executed by firing squad. Her son spent years emaciating in prison camps. For words. Even when in poetry, words reveal themselves to be words.

Yet, while others moved to Western Europe and beyond, she remained a steadfast resident of her homeland, despite censorship and slander (the grammars of war), dedicating herself to promote a golden age of Russian poetry.

To The Many

I — am your voice, the warmth of your breath,
I — am the reflection of your face,
The futile trembling of futile wings,
I am with you to the end, in any case.

That’s why you so fervently love
Me in my weakness and in my sin;
That’s why you impulsively gave
Me the best of your sons;
That’s why you never even asked
Me for any word of him
And blackened my forever-deserted home
With fumes of praise.
And they’d say — it’s impossible to fuse more closely,
Impossible to love more abandonedly…

As the shadow from my body wants to part,
As the flesh from the soul wants to separate,
So I want now — to be forgotten.

Anna Akhmatova (1922)

“What is ultimately required of us with respect to our love of beings?” Henry Bugbee

30 Monday Apr 2012

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This weekend, I sympathized with my dear friend who writes an amazingly tender and delicious food blog, www.themooninmykitchen.blogspot.com, that like art, meditation, and any endeavor necessitating commitment, writing these entries can be a mundane practice. There are days when the flow is not there to deliver rivers of insightful revelation, clever words flipping off the tongue, or sparks of delightful references and analogies.  But one starts about anyway, hoping the force of pushing through it doesn’t also run right over the grace of creativity, leaving a corpse of tired, ever-embarrassing, revealing remnants of a self that cannot transcend self.

The same weekend, for a friend’s 70th birthday, a group of us went birdwatching in some of the most beautiful land in the Bay Area. There on the same, short jaunt, one can easily traverse through lemon-green meadows, water-logged swales, arid oak chaparral, and fern-laden woodlands with sentinel sequoias.

Our stout and serious group leader, a veritable General of birdwatchers, started the walk with what amounts to a Holy proclamation of a birder’s Grail: In the same territory she had just spotted Lazuli Buntings on their migratory way through the area. I knew by the reaction of oohs and ahs that none of us seasoned birders had that bird on our life list.

So it was with this exotic expectation burning lazuli blue in my mind that a frustration began to foment as the General took us around every inch of perimeter of a concrete parking lot, bordered by cyclone fence.  She would call out, “Junco at one-o-clock!” as if we should align our bayonets. “Straight ahead is a Robin.” I pretended to take a picture so as to not appear bird-snobby about these usual, tedious suspects. But at one point I couldn’t cork a chuckle as she declared militantly the presence of a dawdling mourning dove ducking into the weeds.

The walk finally ventured away from cars and concrete and chain-link barriers, though we never left a paved trail and the evidence of man’s obtuse intrusions on nature. It was clear that our General was carrying out a warfare not concerned with an immersion in wilderness, but the sniper-like calculation of species of birds sighted — however mundane the species, however bleak the context. My friend even whispered to me (so as to not get chastised again by the General for distracting her from bird calls) that she sees more birds in her frontyard.

With only a few minutes left on the hike, I resigned to an unremarkable, albeit lovely day robbed of solitude (as we were in a bustling group), void of an escape into nature (cite the parking lot above), deplete of silence (hear the General’s commands?) and amiss of a rare and exotic bird sighting (the buntings are undoubtedly in Canada by now).

I was returning to the car when a Pacific Slope Flycatcher overcame its usual shyness to flit from a tree, snatch a meal of unsuspecting moth, and bravely perch a few feet in front of me. We both took pause in the time that Celan calls a breath-turn. A beady black eye gazed unabashedly into mine – and we greeted each other knowingly.

This tiny Flycatcher has made perilous trips from Mexico to its breeding grounds somewhere in Canada, while I am sheltered in my disdain of the predictable. Perhaps the Flycather has crossed paths with the Lazuli Buntings I might never meet, who knows.

And so it seems fitting that along this trip I learned the pair of eagles who began a nest along my hometown reservoir has abandoned their purpose. They disappeared on Earth Day, which leaves a note of irony hanging in the air, along with the humility I imagine their watchers leave behind as they fold up their scopes and head home. I hear George Steiner describe this unfolding of events:

“As if the music played… could turn on its composer and ask: Why did you make me?”

Surely, something beyond us is needed when we question the meaning of coming to be and passing away. At the end of such vigils, whether of writing or birding, one can only surrender a respectful adieu. À dieu.

Today’s Advice: And so put, we must acknowledge an answer to it with which life is inescapably haunted, namely, some kind of parting.” Henry Bugbee

“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. Wittgenstein, “Tractatus.”

21 Saturday Apr 2012

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Almost at the ocean edge, I look back up the hill, over the martian landscape to see the miles of frozen stone rivulets, overlapping and intertwining upon themselves, blanketing anything that ever had been there. It is dark, hardened lava which was at one point molten and seeping from wounds in the earth, crawling down the topography according to gravity, until it slipped into the ocean with a burst of steam cloud.

I cried unspeakably when I first saw this, at Kilauea. At first I thought I was responding to the experience of primeval vastness – a meeting with an uncompromising, prehistoric force. Or maybe because it was humbling to be in the presence of the beginning of land, the birth of earth.

For some reason, this is the image that comes to mind as I ponder why I have inexplicably taken a break from writing here.

At some point my philosophy mentor mentioned to me that it is best not to overwhelm the writings or artworks of others with my own subjectivity. It is a balancing act to read the work of others and engage in dialogue, to make comparative study without projecting too much of my own material and subsequently dampening them. To listen without talking over them.

In the last few weeks I have been reading hyperactively, but in a way also bordering on attention-deficit disorder. From Kierkegaard’s crowd of untruth to Anna Akhmatova’s poetry of personal truth amidst a  crowd of censors. And there is George Steiner’s grammars of creation, eruditely nostalgic for the messianic, and Wittgenstein’s language games of lost faith. I have let the writings of these thinkers run over me, perhaps not unlike the rivers of the slow moving, but nihilistic lava, making its way to a border of another prehistoric vastness – my ocean of ignorance. While the writings have been resonant, elegantly constructed and provocative, they are opaque. And maybe it is best to let them do their work before I attempt to crash in with my callow response, my impediments, my convictions.

In short, to let answerability take the form of silence.  However, for those of us who know the therapy office, the dead end of a conflict, or know the time in front of one’s own intransigent painting or sculpture, there is a silence that is laden with an almost perceivable din, however healing it may be. And then there is a silence of a higher order, of untranslatability.

Schopenhhauer said, “Were the universe to perish, music would endure.” And in the moment of pondering the lava field, where seedlings somehow sprout in rock, and liquid rock in its extension of earth annihilates life — creation meets destruction. Artists and writers might want more to be mediators of where sound meets silence, and form meets formless. Paul Celan’s breath-turn. In the end, if I were in that lava field, facing the force that we all perish by, I may be trivial and sentimental, but I would want to hear Olomanu’s plaintive slack key guitar and the lyrics of a homecoming: “Last night I dreamt I was returning. And my heart called out to you: To please accept me as you’ll find me. Me ke aloha ku’u home o Kahulu’u.”

Today’s Advice: “It is through words that words are to be overcome. (Silence may only be the tying of the tongue, not relinquishing words, but gagging on them. True silence is the untying of the tongue, letting its words go.).” – Stanley Cavell

“…those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.” Albert Camus

28 Wednesday Mar 2012

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It was clear to everyone at the hospital I was a mess. Because of indescribable back pain, I received an epidural before I was dilated past a centimeter, and therefore my labor progressed at a crippled and wayward snail’s pace. Sometime through the night, I began to shake uncontrollably and a wave of general anxiety overcame me, which I attributed to the drugs; but the nurse on duty said it was mental. The next day, my friends and family took turns rubbing my legs because after a day on an epidural my lower half felt irritatingly restless and paralyzed at the same time. One of the labor and delivery nurses struck up conversation with me, probably because she saw I was floundering. The more we talked, the more my labor picked up, and my dilation progressed.  She seemed to recognize this, too, and felt a sense of ownership over her “project.” It began as chit chat, but at some point it became, as my friends kidded, unsurprisingly philosophical. And I don’t remember how, but it turned to Kierkegaard, as I blurted out to the nurse that during my pregnancy I had struggled with faith — a faith that everything in my pregnancy would be ok. I don’t remember exactly what she said, but she said something exactly wise, and it implored my confession of a previous  miscarriage – and that I would never know why it happened. That unanswerability undermined my willingness to “leap to faith,” even though I knew my faith, or lack thereof, had no bearing on how the Fates would knit together the outcome of my current pregnancy. Something so utterly close to me so as to be part of me, indeed sharing my blood, was outside of my control. This realization seared me like the pain that both rends and joins, and the nurse feeling her own limits looked out the window as I wiped a tear away. But she came back from her momentary distance and said, I bet you just reached the transition stage of labor – every woman I know has a revelation when she reaches the utmost extent of dilation. Exertion.

—

Over this past weekend in a light conversation with my studio mate, I threw around the word absurd to describe similar artworks from two artists, both who crochet and knit onto their treasured but precarious subjects. After hearing my studio mate’s response that she liked absurdity in art, I realized, despite my sophomoric passion for philosophy, that I was using the word unnecessarily in a negative way.

(Annette Messenger, “Les Repos de Pensionnaires,” aka “The Boarders.” 1971-72)

Both Camus and Kierkegaard philosophize about the absurdity that every human being faces – that we sense our life has some significance, some meaning; but as Camus put it, we are met with a cold, uncaring universe. We are saddled with the paradox that we are called to care with all of our might for the most vulnerable amongst us (especially ourselves) — yet we have in the end a limited bearing on what becomes of our fledglings.  (And somehow an acceptance of this allows our circle of caring to expand.)

Yesterday my mother, my son and I reach the spot where from across my hometown reservoir, we could see the faint outline of a large, dark bird with a tell-tale, beacon of a white head and tail, perched on a dead pine. Nearby, we could barely make out a nest occupied by his mate, mid-story in a moss-laden pine.  But the small smudge in our binoculars amounted to an extraordinary image in our minds. Thought never to emerge from the point of decimation by DDT, it is a nesting pair of bald eagles — the first in the Bay Area in 100 years.  We joined a small group of other enthusiasts, all sharing an inexplicably warm communion as witnesses to this scene. Somehow we are the faithful because we know doubt, tragedy even. And it makes these little glimpses like this, of heart-warming good in the world, seem precious in this painfully but poetically absurd world.

Today’s Advice: “[D]oubt is conquered by faith, just as it is faith which has brought doubt into the world.” Kierkegaard

“Nothing lovable is eternal or sempiternal or deathless…. But the poem is bright.” – Leo Strauss

17 Saturday Mar 2012

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I found myself awakened to the point of tears today in front of a work of art. Despite the onslaught of art in which I have been exposed to in the last few years, you’d think this would happen more often. But the instances when art suddenly uncoils something within, melts a mundane frozenness, or leaps me into a moment of being – unfortunately, these moments happen less and less.

But today, I stood in front of a series of photographs by Rineke Dijkstra, and tried to hide the welling up that seemed so awkward and inappropriate in a sterile, brightly-lit museum environment.

We are of a time when photography is so facile as taking your phone out of your pocket and clicking it, and so mechanical as to overlay an algorithmic alteration to a photo with the push of a button, and so ubiquitous that even my mother (a monk, no less) captures and broadcasts photos of her grandson on her slick iphone.

Yet, Dikjstra’s meditative work solicits something missing in the accelerated onslaught of photography everywhere else. It is found in a realm of expert photography that cannot be mechanized and is all too elusive – the expression of an untranslatable but no less palpable human interiority creeping out from under a futile veneer. And such excision and study of this interiority necessitates a compassion for the subjects but also recalls one’s own vulnerability – places where we don’t admit that we could use compassion towards ourselves. This is Dijkstra’s poetry. As my friend said to me on the way out of the exhibit, you don’t think this is photography, her work transcends the photograph.

But that is not the main reason I was so moved today.

Within this series taken over 3 years, bearing witness to what time does to a young man entering adulthood, there are flashes of atemporality — 8 images sliced out of time and forever frozen in the present tense. Moreover, if you come to love him, like I did, you can sense something unchanging, a steady center at battle with the hard world. The minimalism of these works makes plain what he so arduously introverts at each point in time — plaintive lips curled to the edge of a cry, a stoic brow hovering over deeply questioning eyes, cheekbones hardening over the softness of youth.  I am delivered to a heart-rending moment when one opens to the particularity of his experience and rediscovers qualities that are irrevocably and universally human.

How could I not think of my own son, and not mourn all that has already passed and changed in him? How could I not grieve that one day I will not exist to see him and his evolution? That even as much as our lives are intertwined now, there will be a great deal of his life unfathomable to me, completely unreachable. How could I not be flooded by the pain of loving something so fickle as a life – and so overwhelmed that if I didn’t push it back a little, I would be a blithering mess, in a sterile, brightly lit gallery of the MOMA. It was a moment in the day-to-day delusion that all remains safely the same, when I am suddenly awoken to the inescapably temporal. And from there, flowing in the rhythms of temporality, I can come to relish one exquisitely measureless, timeless beat.

Today’s Advice: “He who to himself binds a joy/Doth the winged life destroy/But he who kisses the joy as it flies/Lives in Eternity’s sun rise.”  — William Blake

Today’s Issue: “Freedom toward death.” Heidegger

06 Tuesday Mar 2012

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Cranes in Cage in Field

Maybe a break in the silence can restore a more profound silence within me. This is one of those times when I just need to set out on a writing and not worry about where I’m going, or why. Reckoning the losses that seem to be happening around me, making sense of permanent absence, of the violent changes in my midst — the act of setting out to wander seems appropriate. Accepting an unknown destination is congruent with the humble futility where there was once security in my beliefs, logical understanding, the irritating predictability within myself. This couldn’t be more different than the trite journeys, the banal distractions of these times.

Wandering necessitates a field, preferably one abandoned to nature. I’m not even sure it’s a particular field. It could be the fields through which Heidegger has us roaming, on a woodcutter’s path. One tree opens up a new clearing with another tree to fell.  For Heidegger, a clearing on the woodcutter’s path is also a lighting. It is where inspiration occurs to me, where an idea or thing can be unconcealed, even if it is for a fleeting moment. It is where, “the lighting middle itself encircles all that is, like the nothing we hardly know.”

Or maybe it’s the field where Paul Celan, influenced by Heidegger, finds his path. On his path, where language meets meaning, I am lost, but I am also found: “Yet, among how many other paths, they are also paths on which language gets a voice, they are encounters, paths of a voice to a perceiving Thou, creaturely paths, sketches of existence perhaps, a sending oneself ahead toward oneself, in search of oneself… a kind of homecoming.”

Perhaps it is the field that John Berger ventures into, where he is at first disinterested, but then something shifts. One’s awareness of self becomes displaced: “The field that you are standing before appears to have the same proportions as your own life.”

Berger’s fields flash before my eyes: The fields above Yosemite where I heard the delicate cracking of ice as the river intimated its willingness to the next season. The fallow cornfield of 60,000 geese pixelating into not-geese, into a deafening drone of warning calls upon my advance. The open tundra overlooking my native coast where my knees failed the moment she kissed me.  The grassy expanse where I found two abandoned eggs, left by the fretful killdeer fleeing my footsteps the day before.

Finally, Mary Oliver tells me where this field is, without knowing exactly where it is at all:

There is a place where the town ends

And the fields begin.

It’s not marked but the feet know it,

Also the heart, that is longing for refreshment

And equally, for repose.

[…]

Where is it? I ask, and then

My feet know it.

One jump, and I’m home.

—

I have picked up my exhausted, cranky self, and have taken off into a field. Where there is a field and its itinerant endless paths, there is an opening for a homecoming.

Today’s Advice: “Rather, one should step into the circle of language and experience which are vitally and intensely tied together, and listen belongingly (gehoren) to the sound of silence which constantly emanates from the depths of the indescribable, and continue to let this be the source of one’s own language.” Heidegger and Asian Thought, Graham Parkes

Today’s Issue: “Do not count on death — on your own or on universal death — to found anything whatsoever, even the reality of this death. For it is so uncertain that it always fades away ahead of time, and with it, whatever declares it.” — Maurice Blanchot

17 Friday Feb 2012

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A friend treated me to the MOMA exhibit of Francesca Woodman’s photography today. Her photographs are emotionally grueling as much as they are poetic and otherworldly — a startling oeuvre for an artist who killed herself at 22 years-old. Amid her reckless vulnerability, guileless experimentation and the prescience of her deadened gaze, it’s hard not to notice clues of a yearned-for redemption. Therein her photographs lies an openness to the other that occurs in a blinding blast of exterior light, a haze of translucent corporeal form as it moves during long exposure, and the compositional beauty of shapes in a beauty-less squalor. When I encountered the images which captured her in a morbid dance with her dead grandmother’s belongings, I heard instantly the song echoing in my own heart: my own missing grandmother.

My grandmother and I saw each other completely and despite this, loved each other wholly. It also helped that she spoiled me unabatedly, but that’s the providence of a grandmother. She has been dead almost 15 years, but her absence is as fresh as it was the moment her eyes beseeched mine in her final suffering — the moment I abandoned her, glancing away in my callow inability to reckon the totality of loss.

She bore only one son, who bore only two daughters — and the Lee lineage, with now dead branches of ancestors from roots undoubtedly in antiquity, is a felled tree. Yet she loved her grandaughters not just all the same, but perhaps even more so because of her own experience as a female in an overvalorized patriarchal prison of a culture.

Two years ago I bore a son, who, because of circumstances way outside my grandmother’s understanding, will carry the Lee name.

A year ago, I was putting my then 7 month-old son to bed. When I entered the bedroom, a portrait of my grandmother caught my attention in a way that doesn’t occur with belongings one lives with for years, photos and mementos that over time become as invisible as they are fixture. But on this night, her photo struck me as having a new punctum, that this old image existed suddenly in the present tense — a realization that my grandmother had been of life, incredibly overwhelming the sum of the lifeless ink and paper that represented her as such.

As quickly as that photo caught eyes with mine, I put it aside, and put my son to bed. As he fell asleep, a shadow whisked down the hallway outside. I assumed it was my partner, and when it was clear that it wasn’t, a primitive fear prevented any deep consideration and propelled me out of the bedroom and upstairs like a child fugitive of the dark.

When a rationality returned, I returned to check on my sleeping boy, and when I drew near him, I took in a startling sight — a security blanket had been tucked under my son’s chin, his arm embracing it, with the blankets wrapping him in the way I had left them. Incredulous, I sought my partner for what would be an easy explanation: Did you cuddle his security blanket under his arms?

What are you talking about, I’ve been up here the whole time.

When I showed her the sight of our son, somehow having found his “lovie” left nowhere near his sleeping body, tucked in his arms like only a loving guardian would do, a shockwave of love and gratitude for my grandmother flooded in, just as an equally terrifying openness to the utter unknown seized me — the magnitude of an untranslatability — which would never let me speak of it again.

Today’s Advice:  “And yet – beyond what is, not away from it but before it, there is an other that occurs. In the midst of beings as a whole, there is an open place. There is a clearing, a lighting… This open center, therefore, is not surrounded by what is; rather, the lighting middle itself encircles all that is, like the nothing we hardly know.” — Heidegger.

Today’s Issue: “Then, Love, I beg, when thou tak’st thy bow, Thy angry shafts, and dost heart-chasing go, Passe Rascall Deer, strike me the largest doe.” Lovelace

13 Monday Feb 2012

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I’m not sure he knows he is on his death-bed, 88 years old, DNA betraying his spine, his brain, his heart. But then again, I am not aware that I’m on my own death bed, as we all are, from one moment to the next. Moreover, as Eleanor Ross Taylor writes, “just waking up can kill you.”

He is not always cogent these days, but like the same man who supported me from the ballpark bleachers 25 years ago, I heard before the last turn, he read my posts, and the same skinny, gawky girl receives yet another gift from him, recalling every grandfatherly thing he did for me. Even if he was not indeed my veritable grandfather, he was my only grandfather.

Though I don’t know I can do the same, I hope he finds some sort of peace as he faces the abyss. At the very least, as he recounts memories with his adoring, twilight visitors, let him feast upon his life. Heartily.

Love After Love

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

(Derek Walcott)

Today’s Advice: “Nostalgia is another name for one’s sense of loss at the thought that one has sadly gone along happily overlooking something, who knows what.” Lyn Hejinian, “Happily”

“Let it dazzle and confound you.” Ionesco, Exit the King

08 Wednesday Feb 2012

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I confessed to my philosophy mentor last week that I am not interested in painting or sculpture right now — just words. He responded by saying that he himself left making for writing many years ago, but maybe he would return to drawing, who knows. Words, he said are so close to us, you just say the word elephant and in a moment the image is there. And words can also in a moment reveal themselves as just words. They are only a thin veil between us and the abyss of meaning and meaninglessness below.

A scene lurked in my mind. A few years back, I was traipsing through San Miguel De Allende, uncoincidentally on a painting retreat. On a break from the studio, I wandered to a cobbled churchyard, where from a humble, wooden bench in the shade, I saw an epic tree, unusual for the area. In its wrangled branches were surrealist swaths of pure white, which to my delight were tussling and preening and honking — egrets. As I moved under the tree, I said good morning to the weathered, bent, workman washing the stones in the nearby driveway. This welcomed him to stop his toil and commune in the sight of hundreds of birds and their nestlings crowded onto this one tree, this cathedral of bird life, hymnal bird hums, and unreal feathery white light.

On the ground at my feet was a grey lump, a dead baby egret whose coarse feathers were just emerging from fluffy down, with a twisted neck terminating at a beak open in an eternal gasp. The man saw my tragic discovery, and since Spanish is unavailable to me, I uttered impotently, “bébé mort.” With eyes that have understood much more about life than mine, he faced me and offered plainly, “Que vida.” Not quite sure what it meant, I answered him, but now know I will never fully comprehend it: que vida.

And though I tried to paint the pathetic little creature back at the studio, perhaps because of my technical shortcomings, it never matched the man, the tone in his foreign words, the moment, the elusiveness of “que vida.”

A somewhat well-known, poet, Wislawa Szymborska, dedicated to “que vida,” left life itself this week, and I am on the trail of her lifelong attempt to put it all to word. In her 1996 Nobel Prize Speech, she paradoxically leaves me with a striking image:

“The world — whatever we might think when we’re terrified by its vastness and our own impotence or when we’re embittered by its indifference to individual suffering, of people, animals, and perhaps even plants (for why are we so sure that plants feel no pain); whatever we might think of its expanses pierced by the rays of stars surrounded by planets we’ve just begun to discover, planets dead, still dead, we just don’t know; whatever we might think of this measureless theater to which we’ve got reserved tickets, but tickets whose life span is laughably short, bounded as it is by two arbitrary dates; whatever else we might think of this world — it is astonishing.”

Somehow she tells me it doesn’t matter what tool or tongue I use to insert an image or two of my own into this “measureless theatre.” I don’t know the ending: Just enjoy the show.

Today’s Advice: “The next day
Promises to be sunny,
Although those still living
Should bring umbrellas.”
– Wislawa Szymborska, “The Day After –Without Us”

Today’s Issue: “The opaque and empty opening on what is when there is no more world, when there is no world yet.” (Blanchot)

01 Wednesday Feb 2012

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What a better way to spend a sunny weekend day than to read Susan Sontag’s “Regarding the Pain of Others,” and then to “enjoy” subsequent evenings full of nightmares stemming from her war photography imagery.

What allures me to Sontag is an analysis that concerns all artists — how is art, in this case photography, received amidst the unprecedented onslaught of attention-seeking images and information people are bombarded with.

I followed Sontag eagerly on her beautifully written essay, wholeheartedly compliant to her assumption that it is the consumers, including myself, who are blunted by habituating news of atrocity, and how easy it is for an elitist, educated population in the richest part of the world to become cynical. Yet, she finds, almost fortuitously, there persists images that do not lose their power on the viewer, despite the improbability of such resilience.

Before I could ponder why such images persevere, I happened upon a writing: A speech not directed at the public for its lack of awareness or state of distraction, but rather at one’s contemporaries; other artists, writers and poets — to call them out for being fearful (and therefore meaningless) in a most fearful time:

“Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.

“He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed – love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.

“Until he relearns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.”

This was William Faulkner’s speech at the Nobel Banquet at the City Hall in Stockholm, December 10, 1950, when the number of lives obliterated in the middle of their daily habits were still being counted — the aftermath of the U.S. atomic bombing on hundreds of thousands unarmed, Japanese civilians.

But somehow we need both impulses: Sontag who calls our attention to the suffering captured by art in order to remind us of the atrocities we are capable, sometimes enthusiastically, of; and Faulkner, to take us out of that paralytic grief, to summons everything forgotten in those acts of inhumanity, and despite the heaviness, to lift our hearts.

Today’s Advice:   “To think, to write a poem, is to give thanks for whatever measure of homecoming to Being is open to mortal man.” Steiner on Heidegger