In her book, Radius, El-Rifae tells us that the motto printed in Arabic on the t-shirts of “Opantish” volunteers was “A Midan Safe for All;” midan in Arabic means traffic circle and public square. From my early years in India, I know the word maidan, meaning a public open space. I’m using maidan here as both physical public space, for example a field, a square, a street; and the public sphere of culture and politics, as expressed in language, image, gesture, and governance.
     The notion of a maidan safe for all reminds me of the “Meet to Sleep” initiative by Blank Noise in India which organizes women to sleep together in public parks. Blank Noise and Meet to Sleep aim for the “right to be defenseless” — in public. On Blank Noise’s website, a Meet-to-Sleep activist is quoted: “When my 11-year-old daughter was hearing the adults share, she kept whispering back to me, “what is the big deal about sleeping in a park.” While she may be too young to understand this, my hope is that with movements such as these, she would continue to ask this question even as an adult woman living in India.”
​     Opantish — Operation Anti-Sexual Harassment and Assault — emerged in 2012 as sexual assault of women protesters in Cairo’s Tahrir Square increased in frequency and severity. El-Rifae, a founder of Opantish, introduces her book, Radius,  with a mild New York city literary dinner anecdote: “A famous writer and his wife … ask me what my book is about. I say it’s the story of a group that fought circles of men that attacked women over and over again while a revolution struggled to survive. The man, the writer wants to know how this could happen, why. The woman looks at me closely and says, “It’s not the same, not the same at all, but I’ve felt something like that. At parties and dances, even back at school. Suddenly something would shift, you’d feel a circle forming around you, and I don’t know, it’s not the same, but there would suddenly be this menace, this threat, grabbing.” The cover description of El Rifae’s book summarizes Opantish’s work as “[racing] to develop new tactics, [struggling] with a revolution bleeding into counterrevolution….”
     I have not felt threatened at protests, but did feel threatened while canvassing for Zohran Mamdani at the Upper West Side farmers’ market in New York a couple of weeks ago. Around noon that day, I felt physically threatened by four men though not sexually in an obvious way. One pair, in identical black clothes, didn’t speak, but menaced past me in a walk-by. In another incident shortly after, one man leaned into verbally assaulting me while a younger man walked by and turned around to glare at me threateningly; I’m not sure their actions were coordinated ahead of time but their actions consciously connected, with eye contact and expression, on one side and the other of me. Mind you, quite a few other people — women and men — responded to my opening smile and question “do you vote in the city?" with very brusque and even angry “Not for that man!” “anti-Semite!” and so on. Not friendly, sometimes even angry, they expressed aggressive opposition but I did not feel physically threatened by anyone apart from the four specific men mentioned above. From them I experienced physical intimidation, and I experienced their intimidation as gendered.  Their menacing behavior was intended to shut me down, and cumulatively it did, not outwardly in an obvious way, but inside me a part of me shut down.
     Soon after, I saw an opinion piece titled “How Women Destroyed the West” (David French, NYT, Oct. 23, 2025). Of course I had to read it. I braced myself before starting, but it turned out not to be upsettingly tendentious, at least not for me. In the article, French discusses a speech on “Overcoming the Feminization of Culture” — described as “electrifying” and “incisive” on the political right — presented by a Helen Andrews at a National Conservatism conference in September 2025. In an unremarkable coincidence, around the same time that French’s article was being published, a woman sitting next to me at my neighborhood bar in New York city spoke to me about the “emasculation of men by Women’s Lib.” 
     None of this — the backlash on gender issues, gendered vulnerability, reactionary forces, the counterrevolution, and so on — is new. Indeed, gender-sexual conservatism has been a cornerstone of political conservatism in many parts of world in the post-colonial era, having already been present in one way or the other throughout history. That too is commonly known. Power and the law start in intimate relationships, and the family.
    And so, for me, from my perspective and experience as a woman, the question linking power and  (gendered) violence still begins with masculinity, more specifically heterosexual masculinity.
    In the spring of 2024, The Point had an issue I’ve referred to before on the question of “what are men for?” A couple of highly educated and earnestly contemporary, young, evidently-heterosexual men — I daren’t call them liberal or feminist because I’m not sure they would describe themselves thus; I get the impression they prefer to be known as alarmingly intelligent — describe their struggles with the feminization of our US culture. The issue begins with a personal and very thoughtful letter titled, “On the Crisis of Men,” by an evidently heterosexual young founder-editor. He starts by describing his experience of taking his toddler to a toddler event: “Looking at other men is a somewhat novel experience for me. In my former life as a non-father, if I took any notice of another man in the same room, it was probably to appraise him physically, on the off chance that we were to become locked in some form of primitive combat. (Would I be able to beat him in a race? How easy would it be for him to strangle me?) As a father, however, I find myself looking at other men — at other fathers — all the time, and not at all as competition. Often they look back, just as quizzically, at me. I think we are trying to figure out how we should look, how we should act, how we should deal with the perennial awkwardness of being a father in public.” Later he says, “I grew up in the age of the crisis of men,” meaning the early 2000s. 
    Parenthetically, the loveliest article in that issue, at least to my highly feminized sensibility, is one titled “The Failed Man.” I am not able to summarize it in a way that conveys what is impressive and beautiful about it, so if you are curious, do read it. The whole issue is worthwhile.
     In the political turbulence of the United States today, in Trump’s 2025, two tropes of masculinity dominate: the disaffected working class man; and the gluttonous and venal oligarch and his wannabe successors who want to become him. One important perspective on our current, and past, conservative ecology has focused on capitalist economic greed and exploitation; from that perspective, gender has typically been a separate question, often secondary but not always. In Sheila Rowbotham’s 1960s, class/economy trumped (in the old sense of the word) gender equality. In El-Rifae’s experience of Tahrir Square, many left-leaning activists effectively said, “this isn’t the time for women’s issues.” In the US today, many higher-income gender equality allies shy away from addressing the structures that reproduce and exacerbate poverty. (right now, food stamps?!)
   Regarding the emasculation of men by Women’s Lib, I countered my bar neighbor with something like “men have to change, they have to figure this out.” She responded with something like “we haven’t parented them to do that.”
    So then, in yet another unremarkable coincidence, in this concurrent recent past I was reading Edward Said on Jean Genet (in On Late Style) and he writes: “It is curious, however, that both Le captif and Les paravents end with affirmative recollections of a mother and her son who, although dead or about to die, are reunited by Genet in his own mind…. ...Genet also wants to retain for his own purposes the priority and affective comfort of the relationship between an almost savagely archetypal Mother (who is not named but referred to simply as “la mère” in both books) and a loyal but somewhat aloof, often harsh Son. Aside from the perfectly obvious absence of a threateningly authoritative Father, Genet’s imagination articulates an arguably final moment in what are for him transposed terms: both mother-son pairs are people he likes and admires, but neither in the play nor in the memoir are he and his mother present.” In both Genet’s work and Said’s commentary, gender is imbricated with revolutionary politics in the public sphere. The specific articulation in this excerpted part of Said’s essay, led me to mull, inevitably without conclusion: if the son lives, he becomes the Father. If you don’t want the Father — in this case, meaning the threateningly authoritative Father — what other plot lines are possible? And what happens when the Mother leaves? These are favorite ponderables of especially Western gender lore. They remain interesting but their clarity is further challenged as the idiomatic and practical field of gender expands. New plot lines form, meander, and lose themselves in the living.
     Meanwhile, back in the “what are men for?” issue of The Point, which to be clear is not just by or about conventional heterosexual men, there is a collection of surveyed responses from an ordinary range of people of different ages and genders. Several responses tilted my head in the “aha” of something uncovered and recognized. In response to the question, “How did you learn what it meant to be a man?” Samuel, a man in his mid-twenties in California, said: “My Dad and I always physically fought (somewhat playfully, somewhat not) when I was a kid. The goal was to make the other submit, something I achieved much to his shame when I was fourteen years old. That permanently altered our relationship, and it led me to treat him less like an authority than an equal. My dad recently confessed that he had found that fight emasculating. I remember distinctly feeling virile in that moment. If I were to abstract away what I learned, then, it’s that to be a man is to compete with and defeat other men.” Samuel goes on in response to other questions: “The biggest hurdle men face today… would be finding a social narrative that (i) guides them, (ii) gains purchase among men and (iii) is in harmony with the social narratives of other genders. I think men look to their gender identity for normative guidance and confidence, and they look to other men to see whether they are performing their gender correctly. But the performance of male gender is an utter disaster… …. There are a lot of pains associated with failed gender performance that are difficult to understand if you haven’t been policed for failing to perform that gender.”
     With my tilted head I reflect that over the last century or two, certainly in the US but also in other places albeit with different rhythms of movements and effects, failed gender performance for women has often been associated with expanded opportunities and choices. For me, being less conventionally female opened up worlds of exploration and action. I’m gathering in a distant, inarticulate way that for many heterosexual men “failed gender performance” has meant a narrowing, failure: in providing; in finding a mate; in competing with other men; in being respected by self and others. What can I do with this? At this point, probably nothing more than opening this up further for myself and others. 
     Another man, in his late forties in Alabama, said in response to the question, “What are men for?”: “Men are also responsible for making other men—only they can make that happen.” My head tilts again. 
     A thread weaving both lived experience and meaning systems connects Jean Genet, Opantish in Tahrir Square, and current gendered politics in the United States. Today, young people of all genders, and in many if not all parts of the world, are expressing themselves in the public sphere. Many are openly seeking and insisting on safety for all in the maidan. Of course, and this is also important to say at this fraught time, gender is a major but not the only source of vulnerability. Socio-economic class is always a big determinant, as is military power. In the United States, race and color often determine one’s degree of vulnerability. In the United States and my country of origin (India), immigrant status and religion may be major sources of vulnerability. In India, traditionally caste has been a major source of vulnerability. All these and more are linked and layered determinants of power and vulnerability, along with and beyond physiology, intimate relationships, and the family. In the end, safety in the maidan includes the safety of equality of opportunity; equality of access to the components of wellbeing (healthcare, food, shelter, education, green space, and so on); equality of access to beauty; and equality of access to voice in how we are governed and for what purposes. The maidan is not just the physical open field, though violence, as physical violence, is most palpable in physical open space.
     There is no end.

Fittingly, just as I finished this essay, I received a book (Aisha Sabatini Sloan’s Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit) which opens with this epigraph:

Always two sides to every question.
But what’s the fucking question?
I didn’t hear it?
Does it peel away like an onion?
On and on and on until there’s nothing?
Does it melt like ice until it’s some kind of invisible something?
— Pope.L

     I drew my question — what do I not need? — from my reading of Andrey Tarkovsky’s Sculpting in Time (henceforth Sculpting). His book was completed shortly before he died of cancer in his late fifties. I am writing in my mid-sixties. At any age, we may consciously attend to and problematize the phenomena of aging and mortality. As we grow older, however, aging and mortality are often the very rhythm of our living, of our listening, writing, hearing-not-hearing, seeing, eliding. So it is with my reading and writing at this time.
    In Sculpting, Tarkovsky writes about his filmmaking, stretching the multidimensional fabric of his living-creativity through the palpability of practical time; through the moral or ethical intentions that come from his individual but always connected and collectively formed “soul“; and on to “love” and a kind of dipping into, and billowing out of, what is not known. His leaning into love, mysticism, and a search for a reality or a truth — which he would call the truth —  while acknowledging the inevitable condition of not knowing, and yet so confident of what he feels, thinks, and has to do, reminds me a lot of Simone Weil’s powerful and neurotic weaving of soul, intention, and world. Both Tarkovsky and Weil substantially draw their conceptions of love and sacrifice from the ethos and affect of Christianity. 
     Tarkovsky’s book was written over many years, his thinking and writing evolving as he made films, travelled, and fell ill. In the penultimate chapter of the book he offers a meta-narrative of his last film, The Sacrifice. He tells the story of a man, Alexander, who gives up everything, including his family, including burning down his home.  About filming the burning scene, Tarkovsky writes: “Perhaps other scenes — the dream sequences or the barren tree scenes — are more significant from a certain psychological point of view than the one in which Alexander burns down his house in grim fulfillment of his vow. But from the start I was determined to concentrate the feelings of the audience on the behavior, at first sight utterly senseless, of someone who considers worthless — and therefore actually sinful — everything that is not a necessity of life.” 
​     This question — what is (not) needed? — is often lived and described by men in relation to spouses and children, worldly goods, and status. A prime example is the life and story of Prince Gautam who came to be called Buddha. Female mystics, by contrast, often don’t have spouses or children; traditionally in many societies, especially Indo-European, whatever their inherited social status, as girls and women their personas were also more regulated, and ideally they embodied the absence of masculine assertion. Indeed, in Tarkovsky’s Sacrifice, the protagonist Alexander realizes the question of “what is not needed” by way of intimacy, sexual and otherwise, with Maria, a “modest, timid, perpetually uncertain of herself” maid in his household and also a “witch.” Here the word “witch” has a positive valence.
     For Tarkovsky, the 20th century world was increasingly mired in materialism and technology and desperately needed spiritual regeneration.
     From my experience of life, the world is always in crisis and always needs regeneration, but in the human-occupied world, too often the crap of crisis is heaped upon those who are socio-politically weaker or forced into weakness. This has always been the case. The difference in 2025 is the magnitude of everything: populations, industrial production, pollution, greed, waste, environmental degradation, destructiveness of weapons, technology-fueled fantasies. The difference in 2025 for people like me is that the crisis is in our backyard and we can’t easily turn away.
    In Small Things Like These, Claire Keegan tells a similar story to The Sacrifice. Keegan’s story is also about a sacrifice of sorts, also has a male protagonist with a family, but the rot and regeneration in her Irish story are lived in ordinary life. [SPOILER coming up] In Keegan’s novel, Bill Furlong has no known father, is himself the father of five girls, runs a coal business, and ends up rescuing a young outcast girl from a self-righteously predatory institution, meaning people-institution-people, in this case Catholic. The girl is also a mother. We are never told what happens to the girl’s child. There is no intimacy between Furlong and the girl, except as empathy or recognition. Furlong does not leave his family and does not burn down his house, at least not physically, but he does give up the safety of convention for himself and his family, and sacrifices peace of mind for himself and his family. We aren’t told how much he will lose. It is not a small sacrifice.
     Reading Small Things side by side with Sculpting, I struggled with the question of “sacrifice” and toggled back and forth between the notion of sacrifice and the question: what do I not need? Answering the question was easier than being abstract.
     I don’t need judgement, of self or other, except when I do. I don’t need to be right. I don’t need you to be wrong. I don’t need to sacrifice, except when I do. I don’t need to win, except when I do. When I do: when there is expanding dishonesty and unkindness of spirit and action; when there is malice and harm done; when there is promise of more meanness of spirit, more injury. When is “when,” and what is “more?” That is subjective responsibility. Alexander makes his decision, and Furlong makes his. 
     In this time of heightened strife, open cruelty, ripe lies, delusion of selves and others, strident calls for change, and bursting need for regeneration, both books have led me to reflect on subjective responsibility. 
    With a kind of steadfastness, Furlong lives in the middle ground between the shattering apocalypse-revelation of Tarkovsky’s Sacrifice and the grinding epochal change that is traced in history books. He lives in the middle ground of the everyday, as I do, as we all do, whatever the piping or trumpeting grandness of our vision or voice, however our actions contribute to revelation or change. In that middle ground, while Tarkovsky, Weil, and many others write about love, or soul entanglement with the world, as an immanence or a calling, Keegan’s Furlong lives it as a mundane practice: working to feed, clothe, and shelter his family; noticing others’ need and giving a little without reducing care for himself and his family; until one day giving a little isn’t an option. He can either turn away, or has to give (up) a lot.
     Living my Furlong life, I don’t have an obvious person to rescue, as he didn’t, until he did. Nor do I feel a shattering revelation. What does stretch and spill out of the boundaries of my thought is an eerily repeated world. So much is present, so much repeated, all alive.
     Thankfully, so many others are also thinking, feeling, deciding, acting, and giving up their peace of mind, again and again. For those of us who are still fortunate, wellbeing and peace slip back with late summer flowers, or music, or laughter, until, again, we are faced with caring, or not. In our world, caring risks peace of mind at the minimum. 
    To close on a sweeter note: while I was finishing the two books, the Jewish High Holy Days began. 
    On Rosh Hashanah, Zohran Mamdani, the NYC Mayoral candidate whom I support, posted a greeting to Jewish New Yorkers that is worth listening to, even if you fear it’s just political theater. Mamdani’s greeting ends with : “Yom Kippur will soon follow. On this holiest of days, Jewish New Yorkers will pause to reflect, to atone, and to do the hard work of looking inwards. It is a tradition we would all do well to emulate, to build a city that feels sweet, and learns from what did not work in the past. Where we are not afraid to admit to our failings and grow accordingly. And where, above all, every New Yorker is cherished by this city they love.” Political theater or not, the words express an aspiration that I/we could hold for reflection on the past, action in the present, and intention for the future. Definitely for NYC, beloved city I share with Jewish New Yorkers and Zohran Mamdani, but also for our world.

What do I not need?
What comfort of mind do I sacrifice?
What is my aliveness in this world?

​I.
     A little over 10 years ago, I started this blog. I had just started calling myself a writer, a step up from “trying to be a writer.” However, I still feared putting my writing out into the world. Before putting it out, I wanted to know that it would be loved. Of course that meant that my writing lived mostly in a stultifying cycle of self-indulgence, self-pity, hubris, and shame. The blog was my decision to go “loud and proud” as a writer and thinker. It was hard to “publish” and leave those first pieces out there. What would those people think? Of course, most of those people didn’t read my blog. 
     Why don’t you submit your work for publication, I was asked. I did, with distressing lack of success and often felt that what I wrote and the way I wrote didn’t fit most publications. And I didn’t want to write what fit; when I tried to write what fit it felt as if I plastered my face and gave you the cast to kiss rather than my cheek. (Admittedly, you may not want to kiss my cheek! And I may not want you to do that.)
     So in the first place I pushed out the blog as a kind of “exposure therapy.” More significantly it became a place where I could write what I want to write, in my way, rigorously. I shared my blog posts with family and friends and posted the links on Facebook and Twitter.* Always, I engaged with something outside me from deeply within myself. I wrote about art, politics, the Covid-19 pandemic, grief, and other things in very personal, but also analytical and critical, ways. 
     About a year or two ago, even as I was starting my fourth work of long fiction, I publicly named, for the first time, my blog as a body of work. I hesitated because it has only a small readership, and has never had any official imprimatur by an editor or publisher. However, over the last year, I have become confident and proud of this corpus. My public journal, now ten years old, is a record of an extraordinary time as witnessed and lived with mind and heart, and aging body. 
     My first post was “Moira.” The name of today’s blog post comes from it.

II.
     A little before my 65th birthday, I spent the evening at The Point’s “What is violence for?” celebration at the KGB Bar in NYC. See below for my IRL not-so-spying.

III.
     Why did I come to this? Packed room. Average age, maybe 45? Hard to tell in the dark. Maybe three other people closer to my age. Maybe four other people who are not of predominantly European origin. Why are these demographics important? Because Moirae come from all parts of the world. Moirae grow older, younger, older. Stories change.
     Here the story looks the same as it might have in the 1980s, the 1950s, or longer-ago perhaps. Thoughtful, eager Americans, yes mostly of European origin, yes mostly young, intellectually inclined, very well educated in the high-cultural European-American sense, and, yes, did I already say eager?
     Luckily the young ones clustered around the door so I found a place at the far end of the bar and started writing this, in my mind’s eye remarkably like an old witch spinning. 
     There is great pleasure in this practice of sitting in an eagle corner: watching, curious about this place and these people, ignored for the most part — thank god! A constant VERY LOUD beat keeps us nodding, and I’m relieved I don’t have to chat with anyone. I wouldn’t be able to hear them.
     But what does all this have to do with Moirae?

IV.
     It’s a settling into a past, eyes popping out, it’s not the past. They are trying to do something different, still in the past, but different, definitely intelligent, meaning not simply frivolous, definitely urgent, so earnest. By the way, this is almost a perfect place to write. Each jab of my pen synchronizes with the beat.
     They stand in the middle, between my colonized past and my colonized present. They tread that middle ground between head-head-head, did I already say head, and heart. Intelligently limited, knowledgeably blinkered, broadly blinkered, is there such a thing?
     The bartender is good. That may not go into this blog post. Too unserious. But the Moirae spin. They spin towards, away from, towards, away from, the real, meaning the truth, meaning the lived.
​

​​     It took me this long to realize I’m at the KGB Bar. Of course, I knew I was here, I had looked up the directions on my Google Maps. Why settling again on “KGB?” Well, because my morning began with Tarkovsky. And KGB is a false friend. Tarkovsky, KGB, red, movie-old high ceiling, man on poster with Russian (or maybe Ukrainian?) writing. No doubt the man was Russian (or maybe Ukrainian? maybe just say Cyrillic letters; he could be anyone European-ish; he could be Uruguayan, random plausible pick). The bartender doesn’t know, Google doesn’t know, someone knows, does it matter? The story spins off, a jumbled fantasy.
     I am pinned down here. I think the founder (a co-founder?) stands blocking my corner with his back. I will leave soon. The beat is more frenetic now. I am too short. I won’t be able to hear what they say. I feel like one of Tarkovsky’s inept characters, meaning foolish, irrational. Ha, this is what somewhat-mystical looks like on the inside. Short and foolish. In my case, also aging, shrinking, losing my hearing, spinning.
      It’s a young person’s thing. I do not begrudge them this, oh, I don’t. I did it too, as squawkingly different then as I am now, but I tried harder then.
     I see someone like me, like me when I was young, but much more beautiful than I was. She is trying to hear what the man is saying, leaning in, trying to hear what the other women are saying in response; she’s trying to hear the man who has no problem talking and showing his teeth. She’s trying to join. So far not successful. Not different.
     I’ll leave this lower red room now. There’s a different world out there, a different world from this one in here. Everyone here knows that. Let them have this respite. And thanks to my corner, sheltered by the big back, I had my witchy respite too.
      Can I get out without explaining myself?

V.
     The storytelling goes on, sometimes spinning backwards, sometimes spinning off disconnected, inconclusive. Always it is present. 
​
The Moirae spin the present, over and over.

Post-script: a verse for our times and for this post

Tell me a story.
In this century, and moment, of mania,
Tell me a story.
Make it a story of great distances, and starlight.
The name of the story will be Time,
But you must not pronounce its name.
Tell me a story of deep delight.
​
(from Robert Penn Warren’s “Tell Me a Story”)

* Several years ago I left Twitter and stopped being active on Facebook. 
     

A few days ago, I joined a writing group to co-write and raise funds for aid to Palestinians. Two prompts, one after the other, were offered by two different writers who drew from works by Mahmoud Darwish, Sarah Aziza, June Jordan, and Lena Khalaf Tuffaha. We did 15-20 minutes of writing after each prompt.

Prompt one, based on quotations from Mahmoud Darwish’s “Silence for Gaza," and Sarah Aziza’s work
​Prompt: Writing with no: wild, impractical, and uncompromising rejection
“What if the first word hope utters is no? … … What if this word is not just negation but an opening?” — Sarah Aziza (I did not note down the source work so cannot cite it or, indeed, check my note-taking accuracy)

Prompt two, based on quotations from June Jordan’s and Lena Khalaf Tuffaha’s work
Prompt: Repetition, and empire (repetition is a feature of the Palestinian experience)
“I do not wish to speak about … … I need to speak about” — from June Jordan’s poem “Moving towards Home.” 
In her poem “To be Self-Evident,” Lena Khalaf Tuffaha repeats the phrase, “every empire.”

The prompts are connected in many ways. I wrote the piece below in response to one prompt and then the other. Some supplementary information and thoughts follow.

No, empire 

No

The first thing that comes is no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no …
Like dhi, dhi, dhi, dhi, dhi, dhi, dhi, dhi, dhi, dhi, the last syllable of the sword that slices away delusion

No.
I will hide myself, I won’t read this
No, you will not know this person
No, of course you know this person
Who are you to say no?! To refuse this

I cannot talk to you.
There is no further story.

And yet I am still alive. What do I do with this body? Touch me. Please hold me. If you see me, just don’t kill me, for real, or in your mind.

No! You don’t see me. I’m just dots on your screen. I fooled you. That wasn’t me.

No! I didn’t die. And I didn’t die again.

No, I don’t want to know you. You’ve lost me. I didn’t even have a chance to lose you. You were never tender, never mine, falsely tender, falsely mine, lying not-tender, lying not-mine. Who are you, you?

Negating me as Beloved, are you the negative of Beloved?

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, …. 

empire

I.

I do not want to speak about
death and life
death and joy
death and achievement
death and cruelty
complexity, on and on
grief

I need to speak about 
death and life                        love
death and joy                        myself
death and achievement    what I love, who I love, wanting love
death and cruelty                 life
complexity, on and on        life beyond my skin
grief                                             what lives

beauty
cruelty AND squash it! No!
complexity, on and on
so much. I cannot.

II.

As Tuffaha writes, “every empire sings itself a lullaby.”

I cannot do this. My empire, small, sorry flesh, is my body. My empire, small, sorry time, is my life.

Little one, you can’t say that. Empire, sorry greedy frightened empire took empire away from you. They weren’t able to though, were they? You are whole. You are whole every babbling shitting crying moment.  

Breathe with me beloved. I will kiss each eye to sleep. Let me wrap this shawl around you.

This pot. I still have this pot. 

this pot is so empty
full of the dust of memory
spilling to be filled

No. 

No, I cannot write about that empire. These moments are ours. Dhi, dhi, dhi, dhi, dhi, dhi, dhi, dhi, dhi, dhi, dhi …

What is empire?
You, what is empire?

_______________________________________________________
Supplementary information and thoughts

The situation in Palestine and Israel is about numbers and is not about numbers. Here are somewhat current numbers reported in the recent (August 13, 2025) Ezra Klein and Philippe Sands discussion on “When is it genocide?” in the New York Times. Klein opens the discussion with:

“In the days after Oct. 7, President Joe Biden tried to help Americans touch the size of Israel’s horror and grief by translating it into the terms of our own tragedies.

Archived clip of Joe Biden: Since this terrorist attack took place, we’ve seen it described as Israel’s 9/11. But for a nation the size of Israel, it was like fifteen 9/11s.

Imagine what that level of trauma would do to us. Imagine what that level of loss would do to us.

We are almost two years on. The death toll in Gaza is now estimated to be more than 61,000 people. There are a little over 2 million Gazans. The leaders in the U.S. government are not spending much time trying to help Americans grapple with that scale of grief and loss. But that would be, for our population, like 2500 Sept. 11s.

I know people want to cast doubt on the death toll. We’re told it’s from the Hamas-run ministry of health. And that’s true. But when The Lancet, the medical journal, tried to fill in gaps in the data by adding in new sources, they concluded that the true number, the real death toll, was far higher.

Gaza is a strip of territory about the size of Detroit. Since Oct. 7, Israel has dropped more than 100,000 tons of explosives on this tiny sliver of land. That is more tonnage than was dropped on Dresden and Hamburg, Germany, and London combined during World War II.

Aerial photography of Gaza shows absolute devastation. It’s estimated that 70 percent of all structures in Gaza — homes, hospitals, schools — are severely damaged or destroyed. You cannot drop that many bombs on such a densely populated strip of land without mass casualties.

But it is not just the casualties. Israel has also been restricting the flow of food into Gaza. Aid organizations have been warning all along of growing hunger, of the possibility of famine. In March, Israel blockaded aid into Gaza for 11 weeks. Then it largely ended the existing aid infrastructure the U.N. had built and replaced the hundreds of sites of aid distribution with four sites run by inexperienced American contractors.

Famine is spreading across Gaza. People are dying of hunger. The images, the videos, the stories here — not only of the starving but of the people, the children, bowls out, begging for help, lining up to get food, hundreds having been killed at these aid distribution sites — is beyond what I can imagine. What would it be like to not be able to find food for my children, to not be able to feed them, to lose their mother or their uncle or me because we went to get food for them?

The idea that this is made up, a concoction of Hamas or anyone else — just listen to the aid workers who have been there:

Archived clip: People have been hungry for months.
Archived clip: We are seeing this starvation is widespread nowadays.
Archived clip: Famine is unfolding. It’s not pending anymore. It’s happening. People are starving to death as we speak. Children are starving to death as we speak. And I want to be really, really clear: This is not a drought situation. This is an entirely preventable famine that we are witnessing in front of us.
Archived clip: The parents are writing on the social media, and they are thanking God for the loss of their children who have been killed in a certain time of the world because of the bombardment or the invasion. They are thanking God that they have lost their children to not reach to this stage while their children are asking them to feed them, and they didn’t have any capacity or any ways to just fulfill the needs of their children. So this is beyond description and even unimaginable, to be honest.

If it really isn’t that bad, if this is all propaganda, Israel could prove that easily: Let reporters in. Let independent inspectors in. But they won’t do that because this is not a trick. This is hunger as policy. Hunger as a weapon of war. This is a siege.”
From the transcript of Ezra Klein’s opening to “When is it genocide?”

….........
Stopping massive death and devastation in Gaza is the urgent need of the present, but stopping the war in a way that only allows some people to live on with their devastation is not enough. Please hold on to the equally important long term questions relating to land, peoples, reparation, reconciliation (such a hard word), and future. It's complicated and it isn’t complicated. This is not a 2000-year-old religious war that we can’t get our heads around. There are religious differences and drivers, but they are not the core.

Poets and writers engage differently from lawyers, journalists, politicians, and bureaucrats. They engage with the desires and palpability of bodies; the rhythms and sensations of feeling; the dissonances of life, pain, love, death, and joy; the harmonies and (dis)integrations of matter; and so on.

If you want to know more about Palestine and Israel from the perspectives of poets and writers, one place to start might be my blog post Conversation among poets and writers (December 2023). There are many more poets and writers than those quoted in that blog post but my blog post, though dated, could be a start. Two other blog posts I’ve written on Palestine and Israel are It’s about the children (December 2023), and Two Flags (April 2025).

Below is a very brief recounting of January-June 2025 as I experienced them. Those months were heavy for me in ways different from severe personal loss, empathy for the losses of others, and regular awareness of and efforts to change unfairness and cruelty in our collective structures and actions. This year I’ve felt a deeper, sharper dissonance between, on the one hand, beauty in my everyday life, and, on the other hand, collective structures around me that are bending towards capricious authoritarianism and deliberately unfair and callous treatment of scapegoated and already vulnerable people. This sharp dissonance in what is likely to be the last third of my life casts me into heavy foreboding and hopelessness. But then the foreboding and hopelessness themselves are constantly undermined by the beauty, love, strength, and hope showing up again and again in my life, and then this undermining in turn deepens the dissonance. I think life is always this way. This year I’m  more conscious of it and feeling it in my body more.

January 2025

     I remained numb from the 2024 election results. In retrospect I was in denial about what could happen. I flew to Bonaire to scuba dive. In an underwater world in hot, sunny Bonaire, purpose, effort, and care for self and others seemed simple. However, dive after dive I still felt very much a novice and decided that I can’t afford these dive trips and purpose lay elsewhere. During the last of my dives, I had acute pain in my upper right molar area from either a tooth squeeze or a sinus squeeze and then I picked up a sinus infection which, exacerbated by NYC’s dip into really cold weather and the beginning of the Trump administration, sapped my energy. 

February 2025

     A sullen heaviness settled into my brow and head over this month of snow, ice, and salt-dust air, while the Trump Administration swung from one erratic, cruel, destructive, and potentially lawless action to another. Marietta, I hoped you were right. You were not.
​     I oscillated between a life of engagement with beloved family, friends, colleagues, and community; and an inverted life huddled away from the cold and salty outdoors while exposed to bursts of searing news. Every morning I was grateful for the peace and warmth of my apartment. Many nights my fears grew more numerous and more grotesque.  

This year I turn 65. From one moment to the next, I’m getting old, not just older. I’m trying to live the world I want. Less plastic, less plastic, less plastic. Use less, separate, compost without plastic! And so much else. And how shall I fight, how shall I fight without fighting?

    On a cold evening, not good for my sinuses not at all, I dove back into a deep reminder of Public Conversations Project’s long and illuminating 1990s dialogue work with pro-life and pro-choice leaders in Massachusetts. I met young representatives from Mormon Women for Ethical Government (MWEG) and Builders. That evening I remembered forward. Digging into the granularity of dialogue again I recommitted to curiosity and listening but also resolved to speak more. I recommitted to honesty in my speaking, unharming to myself and others, or satya and  ahimsa, recently re-encountered  in the yoga teaching of Rolf Gates.

March 2025

    Hope and grief, again, with No Other Land.
    I moved into this specific home six months ago. Community — essential to my life and especially dear in this time of personal vulnerability and battered structures — is still a work in progress. Pies and conversation — warmth and delight — on pi day in a wintry month that was still salty when dry. New friends mixed with old thoughts, old friendship.

How do I do more in my local community? How can I know more people? Who do I want to invite? How do I want to invite? How do I want to contribute?

    Meanwhile, "freedom, ideally, is being able to choose your responsibilities. Not not having any responsibilities, but being able to choose which things you want to be responsible for.” (Toni Morrison) I rolled those words around in my head, exploring intimacy with myself and the world.

I don’t know.

Living — knowing-not-knowing, again and again — is all I can do. Ardently living.

     Land Day. The heart of living, for everyone.

April 2025

     The salty winter is gone! Desperate joy at the puffy buds, the daffodils. Winter is hard, even brutal, but has no malice. 
     Hands Off in the rain, with tens of thousands. By happenchance and in separate encounters, I met new neighbors.
     
This is also the world. 
This is also the world comes back, or I look for it. I saw, I felt, not just once, not just twice, this is also the world.

     And I found a good dentist not far from me!
     Hope in the middle of loss, loss, loss. Normalization, or we have to live this, with a heightened awareness of all that is “good” and all that is “bad.” Kindness and beauty reverberate through me; anger, pain, and fear reverberate through me.
     I learn heart and stillness from people who know the body, know mind, indeed know soul as they seek to better serve trauma-affected and neurodiverse youth, especially young men of color. This is also the United States, this is also the world.
     Chatting with family; eating with friends; being enchanted by adolescent night herons who are hunched and glum among preening and turning adolescent egrets. This is also my life, this is also the world.

May 2025

     Wild swings from the pleasures of late spring to disbelief and dogged reading of the news. I read the news for 10, 20, 30 minutes, no more than that in one sitting, often no more than that in a day.
     Color-splatch moments of recognition and intimacy with dear ones and strangers. Such moments gentle my soul.
     My reactivity, as well as the hedging of myself to avoid that reactivity, ages me.

 What can I do? What will change in my lifetime? 

And yet I know we are not doomed. What exactly that means I’m not sure. We are not doomed is a real thing, a sorta-kinda cloud of history, evidence, conservations, cycles, but if I look too closely everything shifts and meanings change their shape. Nothing disappears; I just can’t martial all of it. I can’t throw a cover over it and hold it all, subdue it, and then order it. Of course I can do that — hold it, order it — for limited purposes and periods, of course I can, but not for the lengths and breadths of not-doom.

June 2025

    The first New York cherries, the first local blueberries! 
    The light and air and food of early summer, along with:

• continued erratically violent implementation of erratically cruel immigration-related directives; 
• continued threats to dissent; 
• continued lies;
• continued erratic foreign policy; 
• continued yes-sing of the Republican Party and Supreme Court majority; 
• continued erratic nothing on Palestine-Israel, Ukraine-Russia. 

     Let people die, fill your coffers, strut around. NO KINGS.
    Beautiful summer days, visiting children.
    Repeated encounters with young people provide an antidote to simple endings. Young voices in politics. Young people will turn this. 

     Zohran Mamdani. I hope he holds on to honesty, principle, partnership, and engagement. These are what he brings as much or more than his policy ideas. Will he be allowed?
   I ended June with a covid-19 infection, not so novel any more but still an unfolding mutation and an alarming resonance. 2020-2025.

It hurts to try to comprehend — to feel in my body — my experience of all the good in my life and the layers of threat, struggle, and pain around me. It’s easier to feel just the good. Or just the pain.

We’re halfway through 2025, a quarter through this first century of this second millennium in our Gregorian calendar. I’m aging, with history in my body.

     Carville is a metaphor. I’ve grown to dread text and email messages that bear his name, purport to be in his voice. This kind of panic-invoking messaging had an effectiveness once, maybe. That effectiveness is now an old horse which the nameless-thoughtless of the Democratic Party are beating to squeeze out the last little bit of life, hoping perhaps that this dwindling horse will leap forward once more, with pain and fright if nothing else. The Carville messages are among the shrillest expressions of the Democratic Party’s still dominant strategy of pandering and fear-mongering, variations on: we’ll say what we think you want us to say — you there; actually, no you there; you also! — and, by the way, don’t forget that they will destroy everything good. I’m exaggerating of course, and of course this isn’t necessarily about the real Carville. In fact, I would not be surprised if some of the slightly deranged messages that come in Carville’s name are falsely associated with him and the Democratic Party, but so, so many messages that undoubtedly come from Democrats have a similar tone. I’m not the only one who wants that tone to change.
     In our so far two-party system, I am much more aligned with the Democratic Party, even at their most neoliberal than I could ever be with the Republican Party at their most sensible-moderate, BUT the old Democratic Party — and by old I mean old — is stultified and has outdated tools. I am deliberately not using the word “corrupt” because the scale and scope of political corruption has changed so enormously in recent months, in magnitude, texture, and spread. The spread includes our increasing familiarity with a kind of bystander micro-corruption which is the tacit legitimizing of corrupt actions by looking away, forms of which we see among both Republicans and Democrats. 
    The strategy of pandering and fear-mongering in packaged messaging is no longer very effective, if it ever was. We’ve seen this for several years. Most of us know this. We need more honest and riskily direct speaking from genuine experience and commitments rather than simply media-trained voices using scripts created in response to focus groups and polls, and drawing on touching stories collected and deployed for manipulative purposes. And we need Dems to learn how to use social media, not just in packaged manipulative ways, but to be heard as real life voices of real people expressing hopes, concerns, leadership, uncertainty, commitments, competence, etc. Regardless, or perhaps even more because, of AI and the common performativity of social media posting, we need real voices, and they will be heard. We ceded that space to the Republican Party and their most extreme supporters, but not for much longer!
​     Among older politicians, Cory Booker and Tim Walz have started moving in that direction but they have very little party and strategy behind them. David Hogg (DNC Vice-Chair, so far) is very interesting. In my view he has the right instincts, but he’s not a good communicator. Even I, who agree with him on a fair amount, feel jarred and slightly repelled by his certainty. He is a very valuable strategist but he’s not a good voice of the party and he’s evidently poor at building consensus. He and Ken Martin could do fabulously working together but looks like that will not happen. Meanwhile, I’m noticing some really good communicators, who are bold, assertive, engaged, and engaging: Jasmine Crockett (Congresswoman from Texas), whom Hogg likes, and two Gen Z candidates Kat Abughazaleh (Michigan) and Deja Foxx (Arizona). A little older and more experienced than Foxx and Abughazaleh are Mallory McMorrow (Michigan) and Jake Rakov (California). I’m excited by these much younger-than-me voices, that sound much more attuned to life as it is today, and much readier to let go of the tired cliches and strategies of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, much more willing to go with the urgencies of our time. 
     I’ve been reflecting that a  very important role of older people is to express knowledge that life cycles, everything cannot be forced, change happens.  The lives of younger people are woven with but also extend well beyond ours. Perhaps their most important role is to be the flesh and blood meeting places of their pasts and their futures,* and, in our current moment, to get us out of an epochal rut. Abughazaleh, Foxx, McMorrow, and Rakov may not win their races and may fizzle out but voices like theirs — “Democrats need to stop reacting to Republicans and just get back to basic humanity. We should all be agreeing, both parties, that the baseline is housing, groceries and health care with money left over. It's just common sense that, in the richest country in the world, in what many consider the greatest country in the world, that we should be taking care of our citizens” (Abughazaleh) — can, will, and must change the Democratic party and the sooner they converge into a broad band of thinking, speaking, and action, the better. Meanwhile, we older folk need to learn and show that we know when and how to step forward and, crucially, when and how to step back!
      So once more, I’m adding my voice to the many voices that have been saying, over and over again, versions of “the Dems have lost the plot.”
     It’s a complicated plot and I lean towards one side of it, founded on social commitments of the kind Bernie Sanders and AOC express, though they express these more stridently than I do. Within me, these commitments are woven with a longing for and experience of a kind of grounded and startling respect, not to be confused with politeness; a recognition of familiarity and strangeness in an encounter with another human; a re-seeing — the root of respect — that opens a profound, even if momentary, shift in perspective and at least a glimpse of connected living for both the seer and the seen, regardless of party, politics, color, religion, whatever. In the best cases, the glimpse stretches into constructive possibility and action for and with each other. While this sense of re-seeing has long interested me, I draw my current particular language of recognition from Isabella Hammad.
     Isabella Hammad gave a talk in September 2023 that has now been published as an essay: Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative. In it she writes: “Individual moments of recognition are repeatedly overwhelmed by the energy of a political establishment that tells the onlooker: this is not what it looks like. It is too complicated to understand. Look away.” She is writing about moments of recognition in Palestine, Israel, and elsewhere in relation to Palestine and Israel, but she could be writing about contemporary politics in general in the United States, she could be writing about the Democratic Party.
     One difficulty is that individual moments of recognition are rarely strung into effective institutional politics. We’ve seen them strung into effective political movements, for example for civil rights, independence from colonization, removal of authoritarian governments, and dismantling of apartheid in South Africa. Institutions, however, are fundamentally bureaucratic and often insulate themselves from individual moments of recognition in aspiration of objective fairness and efficiency, while institutional politics — indeed flesh and blood politicians themselves — accrete layers of “strategy” and mutual self-interest until all of it feels like a disingenuous cloud of politicking above us the citizenry, with “branding” and “messaging” that is increasingly canned, repackaged, reactive, and self-promoting. Of course, there are genuine voices but they are thinned and marginalized by the weight of old patterns. I invoke Carville’s name as a summary metaphor for the old patterns that have increasingly weighed down the Democratic Party and Dem politicians over the last few decades. I don’t want to see Carville’s name again. Disclaimer: the real Carville may be a genuinely engaged person and unconnected to many of the Carville messages I receive.
     The Democratic Party — supported by us; by our cleverness, data, and technocracy — has relegated moments of recognition to art and poetry and quaint activism that is shut out from real decision-making. When Bernie Sanders, though institutionally entrenched and strident, made himself heard in the 2010s, we feared he couldn’t do it. We feared he couldn’t lead the changes he called for. And many of us in the ranks of “neoliberal alternative elites”** feared he would destabilize a system that served us well; we wanted more fairness, but also deeply wanted to protect our comforts. In terms of the gender politics of that time, many of us were also put off by perceived and experienced misogyny in the political system and from Sanders' campaign.  But, to give him his props, he spoke out, political risks be damned. He lost. He voiced an incipient movement but he could not withstand the weight of old institutional patterns and relationships. Now those patterns and relationships are in crisis; they continue but fragmented and flailing on the inside and unconvincing on the outside. This is a time for more Sanders, but not just Sanders. More cowbell, less bullshit. And more young people who don’t just protest from the outside, but also take responsibility for the re-shaping and effective activation of democratic process and institutions in and for our messy and complex country and world.
     Change is sorely needed, change will happen, and I do not know what change will bring.
     Now is a time for individual moments of recognition, for us here in the United States as for Palestine and Israel. Now is the time for those moments to be strung into aggregated and effective change movements. These movements will likely not be led by career politicians; politicians who keep throwing us versions of old moves or looking for “new moves” will prolong our time in this mess. It will take nothing short of a real moulting for old (-style) politicians to be agents of positive and sustainable change. Meanwhile, we will get new politicians from the change movements, able to knit the insights of their movements and individual moments of recognition into strategies and institutional process. That work of knitting is not for everyone and the weight of bureaucratic conservatism and disingenuous politicking will grow again.
     Yes, life cycles. But let’s take one step at a time. Let’s seek and amplify moments of recognition; let’s support and hold up movements that string them together. Let’s neutralize the sour rain of pandering and fear-mongering.
      In practical terms, you already know about showing up at public demonstrations, donating, supporting efforts to ensure legal and due process, and supporting efforts to hold back cruel government actions. Now it’s time to increase attention to the primaries and November elections of this year; inform yourself on activity directed at the 2026 midterms; amplify fresh and promising voices; notice, document, share, and act on precious new moments of recognition.
      In addition to the above, here is another suggestion drawn in part from Hammad and a book she quotes: "I draw from Yasmin El-Rifae’s brilliant book Radius about a militant feminist group protecting women from sexual assault in Tahrir Square toward the end of the 2011 Egyptian revolution. El-Rifae ponders the analogous issue of women appealing to or trying to educate men about misogyny and patriarchal violence. ‘Rather than wondering about the efficacy of addressing men,’ she asks, ‘can we think of breaking into their awareness as a by-product of us speaking to one another? Can we focus instead on our own networks, on thinking together, on supporting one another — openly?” While Hammad relates El-Rifae’s thinking to shifting the discourse and action on Palestine and Israel, I find the idea very relevant to any movement for social change, where part of the effort is to make both the movement and the change ordinary. It’s also a practice that has appeared in political and social movements of the past.
     Speaking to one another on the same “side” may seem easy, obvious, and commonplace. However, not only have I experienced the centre-left getting mired in and paralyzed by fine-point arguments, as a country we’ve largely lost a sense of ordinary living in community and shared public spaces. While experience of such social disintegration is particularly sharp and alienating in rural and economically depressed areas that remain strongholds of Trump supporters, it shows up in our centre-left lives as well, within and across segregated socio-economic, racial, and cultural communities.
     In today’s (June 9, 2025) New York Times, Arlie Russell Hochschild quotes a man in coal-country Kentucky who offers advice for Democrats: “I think Democrats need to … initiate a campaign of grand civic re-engagement,” Mr. Musick said. Federal funds could support the best local initiatives, he added, and help start ecology, drama and music clubs — “good local things that lack funding.”
      Warning: this can,  and must not just become another glib Dem talking point from far away. 
    It can be different. And, as El-Rifae and Hammad observe, we can start with ourselves. We can talk among ourselves in ever-widening and multiplying circles about our experiences and hopes, without rushing to be “right.” Our hopes and concerns arise from experiences in shared contexts. Political discourse and strategy will catch up as interest in new ethics slowly permeates ordinary conversations. So let’s talk about our lives and ethics; about fairness, kindness, and cruelty; about democracy and governance; about hopes and self-doubt; about humanity and ecology; about public discourse and renewed public spaces; about community; about our differences; about moments of recognition; about our parents and children; about the food we like; about this dissonance, that old tree, this tenderness, and the return of that bird. Let’s talk from the reality and sensations of our lives and listen for the reality and sensations of others’ lives. Let’s uncover, amplify, and act on shared needs and values. Does this mean that we cannot be angry at unfairness, cruelty, lawlessness, and manipulation? No! Does this mean that we can’t protest? No! But anger, as I’ve understood from Audre Lorde, is at its best when inviting attention to what is important, but not denying and excluding someone else’s subjectivity; when it communicates and both demands and allows communication in response, rather than excommunicates.

** I draw this phrasing of a meeting place between past and future from John Berger’s reading of Iraqi poet Abdulkareem Kasid, as offered in Confabulations, Berger’s collection of late essays.
** I am putting this phrase in quotation marks to acknowledge that this phrasing has been used by others, while at this time I don’t know who has used this exact phrase. What did influence me recently was John Berger's 1979 Preface to his Selected Essays (edited by Geoff Dyer), in which he scathingly says: “Liberalism is always for the alternative ruling class: never for the exploited class.” There is substantial historical evidence that a sustained and sustainable government system cannot be based on this insight (in other words by institutionally preempting the structural formation of a ruling class), but ignoring or denying this insight dangerously inflates both personal and structural blindspots, potentially to the point of self-delusion, hypocrisy, and incoherence.

     It’s early spring. I walk up the hill to a favorite lookout point. Through and past thin branches with peeping leaf buds, I see the joining-parting of two beloved rivers, the Harlem River and the Hudson, fresh water mixing with salt water in each. 
     In this confluence at the point at the top of the contemporary island of Manhattan, there is movement up and down; shifting chemistry, environments and ecologies; mud and easily stirred muddiness under the water; and water movement below the muddiness and the mud. Why am I starting with this? In large part because I love this view in this season, before summer leaves fill the gaps between the branches. I love the chaos of the rivers coming together as the tide rises, and then diverging as the tide falls. It also is a potent metaphor. The potency of the metaphor is for you to judge. If I were able to describe what the metaphor conveys, I wouldn’t need the metaphor.
      In an interview presented by the Louisiana Channel, Svetlana Alexievich distinguishes between the rule of law — what she calls rules — and a (prison) code based on survival, suspicion, betrayal, power, and patronage. She describes a complex flow, and not just in one direction or dimension, much like the confluence and flow of the Harlem river and the Hudson that I describe above. She moves unerringly — sometimes chronologically, sometimes not — through the fashioning of a world in which torturers and their victims stood in queues together, WWII and its effects, education of citizenry in the Soviet system at its best, the prison-like life of neighbors-as-informants, the code of power and patronage, the cruelty of the gulag, the “vegetarian times” and simplicity after the labor camps and “extermination of the cossacks and kulaks,” the yearning for ‘socialism with a human face,’” the suspicion of capitalism, the Christian roots of a cultural understanding that “good and evil were mixed together,” the seduction of money, the decreasing levels of education, the frustrating emptiness of money for the oligarch social climbers, and “corruption… an internal enemy … in all of us.” 
     “Freedom,” Alexievich says, “… it means life, human community — built up based on laws, which are there in everyone’s interests.”
     This interview took place in August 2017, about six months after Donald Trump became President for the first time. “Take, for example, Donald Trump,” she says. “Is he a danger to the US? And yet everyone understands — that Trump doesn’t have the same capabilities as Putin. Because he will definitely get into a fight with the social organism. He already started to fight the old democracy, which everyone grew up with. And no one knows who is going to win or what the world will look like then.” About her own head of state in Belarus, she says, “But here, he can be called General Secretary or President, but he’s still a real old Tsar. Everything must be as he commands."
     That interview was eight years ago.
   I found and watched this interview because, in a conversation with Joy Reid, Anand Giridharadas quoted Alexievich as he raised a question both for himself and for Reid about the role of writers in intensely polarized conflict where one of the sides is increasingly harmful and authoritarian: “I feel like the times we live in push for a kind of certitude and taking a stand and saying it. But I also feel at the same time that’s it’s like bad for your brain and your heart. And I feel that in myself. Svetlana Alexievich, Nobel laureate writer has this great line that the barricades are a dangerous place for a writer…. What she means is being on the side of like these people good, these people bad. It’s like, it makes you bad at art. It makes, it’s bad for a nuanced, complicated mind. And yet it often feels like the moral obligation of this time… … How do you think about the effect of, kind of, the corrosive power of certitude in an age that, that, that makes that kind of clarity important?”
     What Alexievich said: “I looked at all that, at their glittering eyes, and I thought, ‘No.’ I don’t want to be a writer who enjoys the sight of human blood being spilled. Barricades are a dangerous place for an artist. You don’t see human beings. What you see is a target. Good guys, bad guys.”
    I am in the place Giridharadas and Alexievich conjure up: building a barricade, looking around the barricade, questioning the barricade, dismantling the barricade, stacking bricks up again, and so on. If you are reading this, you are likely in that place as well. 
    Reid pragmatically, politically, (and humorously!) responds: “You know, and I think this is the difference between a liberal and a conservative, right? I feel like the difference between a liberal and a conservative is that conservatives are certain that they’re right. And liberals are certain that they that they are probably wrong, and so they just keep looking for the answer and sort of looking at, beating their own brains out, going why am I always wrong?”
     Around the same time as Alexievich’s Louisiana Channel interview, I wrote about about the excellent, and very funny, conservative bumper sticker about liberal minds being so open that everything falls out. It’s true in a way that resonates with Reid’s response to Giridharadas's question. It’s funny and there’s a lot of truth to that barb, but that very self-doubting openness is a core strength of the left-liberal-what-you-will (LLWYW) at its best. That self-doubting openness also dissipates energy and disintegrates strategy. 
     I’m with Alexievich’s rejection of the binary good-bad universe that is expressed and often produced by the “barricade,” even when the barricade is set up as a desperate structure to protect vulnerable selves and to change the course of history. I share Giridharadas’s struggle to remain attentive to complexity — human, collective, ecological — in the face of escalating authoritarian actions, often cruel, crossing into lawless, and undermining institutions that, at least in principle, serve “everyone’s interests.” NO is the sound of the barricade. And I strongly join the implication of Reid’s response that meeting certitude with self-doubt in a time of deep moral crisis risks more harm — more extensive, more structural, longer-term, and more cruel — to the vulnerable and eventually to any who dissent. 
     The question Giridharadas raises, drawing on Alexievich’s comment on writing at the barricades and in turn drawing out Reid’s very pertinent response, comes from the crazy-making effect of dissonance especially when one is under threat. In our current time, with repeated evidence of urgent short and long-term harm, the barricade is very attractive. 
    The barricade is building up in my mind, and I know if — providence forbid — we come down to the need for a real barricade I will choose a side, though like Alexievich I don’t want my eyes to glitter at “the sight of human blood being spilled.” I also know, have already seen, that even the sides I would like to choose are messy; there are potential barricades dividing each side, over and over, in smaller and smaller definitions of valued “this-es” and rejected “thats.” Art comprehends the messiness, at its best holds it with the tenderness, rage, love, fear, open vulnerability, and, yes, shifting internal barricades of the artist navigating phenomena, meaning, emotion, and vast areas of not-knowing. But when the artist is on the ground of living, politics, what happens?
     Alexievich, Giridharadas, and Reid approach writing and art with their feet on the ground. They live, politically.  Social living is political. Yes, the artist potentially holds the universe, with a view that potentially goes below, beyond, and all around the surface of things, indeed below, beyond, and all around words, institutions, everything centered in and swirling around body and sensate living, integration, entropy, and emergence. Yes, the artist is potentially everything between universe and singular heart or singular cell. AND the artist also expresses and shapes ethos, which is never a personal ethos; we are all and always collective beings, nothing from me comes just from me.
     Alexievich, Giridharadas, and Reid, all three, live, politically; each in her/his way expresses and shapes ethos. Alexievich shies away from the barricades but illuminates messiness and ethos. Giridharadas questions the lure and risk of the barricade. Reid says, in essence, that this, right now, is neither about art nor the barricade, it’s about effective strategic action in a democracy. 
    How then do I (and you?) get through complexity and dissonance to strategy, decision, and action? To a fair degree, I am guided by clarity about what I don’t want (cruelty, exploitation, inequity, disingenuousness/dishonesty). Now I am trying to build and express more clarity about what I want more of: honesty that is non-harming to self and others; structures that support fairness and wellbeing; relationships of respect, reciprocity and care; clean air and recurrently beautiful spring, without plastics — in other words both ethos and physical wellbeing. I want to support and encourage movements and politicians who would understand what I want, but I don’t want to have to fight those who seem not to want these things. I want to dismantle the barricade, I want a democracy. And, when we can get back to it, I want a more effective and fair democracy.
     Democracy gives me and others more room to explore the messiness of living/politics, less need for blocking, barricades, fighting, and bloodshed. It’s not avoidance. When I read something like Karl Rove’s article in the WSJ a few days ago, I want to read him as a voice of the opposition party, with the (limited) generosity I can offer that voice. I don’t want to hear him as an apologist for a ruling party, trying to claim sanity for a party that currently looks insane to me. The barricade is definitely going up in my mind, bricks are being laid. I take some down to peer across. They go up again.
…
​     Sometimes I just need to forget about barricades, be simple in relation to life. I feel that need right now at the end of this essay. Spring — desperately beautiful after a long dreary winter — evokes that immediacy of sensate living. So I close with the photo below of a magnolia in full bloom that daily gives me respite from thoughts of politics and barricades, as I, living, engage with it, living.

​     I have no Palestinian friends. I have Palestinian colleagues and acquaintances whom I like and respect but I have no Palestinian friends. I have many Jewish friends and some Israeli friends, most of them left-leaning, some left-leaning and Zionist, some even hawkishly Zionist, and all of them sensitive to anti-Semitism and aware of the preciousness of a home country for the Jewish people, given Jewish history. Many have heard me express my questions and concerns, some since the 1980s, about the dispossession and second-class status of Palestinians but I have not been a vocal public advocate for Palestinian lives, rights, and sovereign status until the beginning of the war on Gaza in October 2023, in part because I was conscious of the deep collective hurt suffered by Jewish people from mainly European anti-Semitism, culminating in the Holocaust, all of which drove Zionism and subsequently the creation of the state of Israel in 1948.
     The war on Gaza started in response to the horrific violence, killings, and kidnappings by Hamas and associated militias on October 7, 2023. Why then, you might ask, did I not offer unambiguous support for Israeli “defensive” action? Because the violence against, and dispossession of, Palestinians has had a long history — too long — that is so much more than a defensive war against Hamas that started in October 2023. Witness, for example, increasing settler encroachments and violence in the West Bank, plausibly called settler terrorism, from well before Oct 7, 2023 and escalating with impunity in parallel with the war on Gaza. Regarding the war on Gaza, anyone who cares about that part of the world knows the massive death and destruction suffered by civilian Gazans at the hands of the Israeli army, a more than thirty-three-fold collective punishment whipped up and orchestrated by an incompetent, corrupt, manipulative, and cruel leader. I am no apologist for Hamas, but anyone who knows the history of the last 15 years in Israel knows that the elected governments of Israel have done more than their share to contribute to the current destruction of Gaza and the mutual fear and distrust of Israelis and Palestinians, much of it fueled by the policies of and military support from successive US governments.
     If we, as citizens of the United States, must hold ourselves accountable for our elected governments — even if we did not vote for this or that President or this or that legislator — and Gazans are held accountable for Hamas, surely Israelis must hold themselves accountable for their elected governments!
    But what does all of this have to do with two flags? Well, as part of doing more public advocacy for Palestinian lives and rights, I joined the Land Day demonstration in New York city on March 30, 2025. There was a very large number of pro-Palestine people in attendance, and a few pro-Israel people. I stood with the demonstration for about an hour. During that time, while I heard no one from either side explicitly calling for the killing of people on the other side, I did hear aggressive words from a few people, both pro-Palestine and pro-Israel, that proclaimed the other side as an enemy to be excluded from the speaker’s ethical or moral circle of reference. These angry and bitter words, coming as they do from fear, frustration, and grief, take a toll on the speakers and the listeners. When I heard these words from pro-Israel protestors, I compartmentalized, and mostly ignored the words and the speakers. But when I heard very strident and adversarial words from pro-Palestine speakers, I felt ambivalent, confident in my decision to be part of this public advocacy, but some of those words did not represent me.
    I strongly believe that at this point — when President Trump speaks of shipping Gazans off to some coerced or bribed place, and building luxury resorts on their land; when pro-Palestine voices are silenced in multiple unfair, cruel, and murky ways — those of us who care for Palestinian lives and rights must show up publicly. But I am not against Israelis or Jewish people, not at all. I do believe that the Palestinian flag must be able to fly as freely and proudly as the Israeli flag and I do believe that the Israeli flag must be able to fly in safety and friendship with the proud and free Palestinian flag. You do not have to tell me all the ways this imagined future would be hard, hard, hard to get to. But they have to figure this out — Israelis and Palestinians — and from the Palestinians and Israelis I know, I believe that they have the capacity despite their deep fear, distrust, anger, and grief. Certainly both sides know fear, distrust, anger, and grief, know how each of these feels! At this time, however, Palestinians have lost a lot more — have suffered at least a factor of 30 more casualties of children, women, people, homes — and Israelis have grabbed a lot more. An honest and fair give and take will be hard, hard, hard.
     At the demonstration, pro-Palestine demonstrators carried Palestinian flags, pro-Israel demonstrators carried Israeli flags. I had a watermelon slice pin on my bag. Could I have put a blue Star of David next to it? No. At this time, the extreme asymmetry of power, influence, constraint, and suffering, dictates that I must unambiguously show my support for Palestinian lives and rights. 
     Perhaps one day I can wear a slice of watermelon pin or a Palestinian flag pin proudly next to a blue Star of David pin or an Israeli flag pin at a celebration of a fair and viable peace, in which the next generation of Israelis will know Arabic in addition to Hebrew and read the poems of Mahmoud Darwish, and Palestinian children — already often bilingual in Arabic and Hebrew — will analyze and understand the history of their region not only through the work of Palestinian writers but through the novels of Amos Oz and David Grossman. This is a dream that is realizable.

​
​     In Kairos (2021), Jenny Erpenbeck (translator: Michael Hofmann) writes through, and of, her character, Katharina:
     "Wolfgang Mattheuer, Sculpture, “Step of the Century.” Heil Hitler with the right, clenched-fist salute with the left, equal parts goose step and genuflection, or is the distorted figure collapsing? The center has given way, the head slumps. The giant scrawny figure takes a great leap forward and at the same time he falls back. Just as she’s feeling now." 
     I knew nothing about Step of the Century — Jahrhundertschritt by Wolfgang Mattheuer, first exhibited in Leipzig, East Germany in 1985 — until I read Katharina’s note on her visit to the Tenth Art Exhibition in Dresden. Erpenbeck’s novel, set in East Berlin in the late 80s through the fall of the Wall, courses through longing, abasement, exploitation, and beauty in the dialectic of the two main characters — Katharina, enthralled by Hans. The brilliance of the novel lies in how well Erpenbeck uses their wearying relationship as the warp on which to weave personal and social history meeting prophecy.
     This phrasing of history meeting prophecy is drawn from Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass (2013) which couldn’t be more different from Kairos. They don’t even share a similar sorrow for the beauty and degradation of life. Beauty in Kairos appears despite the degradation, somewhat like the moments of grace in Wim Wenders’ (West German) film Wings of Desire (1987), in both cases tracing the persistence of living in broken, divided Berlin with its broken relationships, ruined buildings, betrayals, dead bodies, shrapnel of history, shame, desire, daily life, and aspiration to love. Erpenbeck quotes Friedrich Hölderlin* through Hans through Katharina, “once I lived, like gods, what needs there more.” Erpenbeck’s Hans, or Hans’s Erpenbeck, points out the commas to propose, “not a comparison with any idealized divine life, but the question whether being alive is what makes a god.”
     Living itself is where Berlin meets the profoundly alive environments of Kimmerer’s beloved world of complex ecologies and natural reciprocities. Mind you Kimmerer, looking to repair earth and humans, is openly aware of the dispossession and brokenness that pock the foundations of contemporary ecologies and their human societies. Her scientific and spiritual narrative seeks to restore symbiosis and reciprocity between human and non-human nature, calling for one retouching of the earth at a time, one renewed relationship at a time, one cycle of reciprocity at a time. At this time of increased strife and threat, with potential for extensive conflict and environmental damage throughout the planet, reading Sweetgrass is nourishing for me. While Kairos pushed me to question and see — judgement-no judgement-yes-no!-yes — Sweetgrass invites me to hope and to touch.
     Each book has a deep ethos of paying attention to, and valuing, non-consumerist living: in Kairos with attention to the richness of the human mind, the desires of the human body, and the complexity, even beauty, of human longing and comprehension especially as expressed in art and in Katharina’s and Hans’s relationship; in Sweetgrass with conscious recognition of and gratitude to sources, and open joy at touching what is alive. From Kimmerer I learned to touch the wood of my chair, thank the tree from which it is made, recognize that the tree gave up its life for the objects I and other humans use, and to ask myself what do I give in return. Like Kimmerer, I am a bit stymied by plastics.** Quite apart from the toxicities of the manufacture, use, and disposal of plastics, their natural provenance — which has implications for paths of reciprocity — is unclear, though Kimmerer does make an effort to see and acknowledge “the diatoms and marine invertebrates who two hundred million years ago lived well and fell to the bottom of an ancient sea, where under great pressure of a shifting earth they became oil that was pumped from the ground to a refinery where it was broken down and then polymerized to make the case of my laptop or the cap of an aspirin bottle — but being mindful in the vast network of hyper industrialized goods really gives me a headache.” A Black Ash basket provides a simpler example. She quotes John Pigeon, a Potawatomi basket-maker instructing aspiring basket-makers: “slow down — it’s thirty years of a tree’s life you’ve got in your hands there. Don’t you owe it a few minutes to think about what you’ll do with it?” Pigeon’s question gets me thinking about the two million years behind the plastic of my refillable fountain pen.
     When, earlier in this essay, I used the phrasing of “history converging with prophecy” I mentioned that I took the phrasing from Sweetgrass, and used it with reference to the agonistic 20th Century in German/European/World history as expressed in Kairos and by Step of the Century. Kimmerer uses the phrasing quite differently. Drawing on the words of Anishinaabe elder Eddie Benton-Banai, she tells us the first work of First Man Nanabozho was “to walk through the world that Skywoman had danced into life… in a such a way ‘that each step is a greeting to Mother Earth.’” She adds: 
     "In the way of linear time, you might hear Nanabozho’s stories as mythic lore of history, a recounting of the long-ago past and how things came to be. But in circular time, these stories are both history and prophecy, stories for a time yet to come. If time is a turning circle, there is a place where history and prophecy converge — the footprints of First Man lie on the path behind us and on the path ahead…. Nanabozho did his best with the original instructions and tried to become native to his new home. His legacy is that we are still trying."
      Wolfgang Mattheuer writes about the same man, differently. Referring to Step of the Century, he says:
     "This nightmare figure, as the embodiment of absurdity, is ‘that conflict between the longing mind and the disappointing world,’ it is ‘… homesickness for unity, this fragmented universe, and the contradiction that connects both’ (Albert Camus) and which all too often erupts into aggression and destructiveness, as a centrifugal force that tears the individual apart. No attempt at self-discovery is successful anymore." (Mattheuer in Wolfgang Mattheuer (1997) Ursula Mattheuer-Neustädt (ed.). Bilder als Botschaft – Die Botschaft der Bilder, as quoted and cited in the Wikipedia page — as available on February 26, 2025 — on Step of the Century)
     Contrast Mattheuer’s image, resonant in Erpenbeck’s Hans, of the agonized individual pitted against the “disappointing world” and “fragmented universe” with the fundamentally social First Man who is enjoined to live in respectful relationship with Skywoman’s creation.
    In Erpenbeck’s and Kimmerer’s works there are different ontologies — theories of being — at play: one animated by an agonistic dialectic of domination-submission-learning, as lived out in unrelenting detail in the relationship of Hans and Katharina; and the other weaving pragmatic material reciprocity with conscious attention to and gratitude for respectful and sustainable relationship, for example (even) between hunter and hunted or forager and foraged. One could suppose Donald Trump and Elon Musk are conscripts in an agonistic socio-political dialectic. Through their domination there will be change and learning, at great cost. Meanwhile, the voices of gratitude, respect, and sustainability tend to get lost in our complex anthropocene world that slips in and out of the delusions of machine learning. But we are not simply handlers of intelligent machines and to live as humans we — some of us, some parts of us — must and will return to sensing and expressing gratitude, respect, and sustainability in relationships with each other and with the non-human natural world. While recognizing the drive and pull of the agonistic, indeed not denying or shying away from it, how do we keep alive and amplify the sound of  positive mutuality? 
     We are in a time of dire change. The change will happen. We are not going back: not to the golden past of MAGA dreams; not to the old institutional stability of late 20th Century democracies, international trade, and international law; not to what we hoped might become a straightforward moral path to fairness and kindness. We will draw on the roots and lessons of the past, yes, but already we are building the future. As we push back against the excesses of the Musk-Trump-Vance government, how are we shaping what comes next?
    Kimmerer retells a story she heard from Sakokwenionkwas, also known as Tom Porter, a member of the Mohawk Bear Clan: 
     "The twin grandsons of Skywoman had long struggled over the making and unmaking of the world. Now their struggle came down to this one [gambling] game. [If one twin won] all the life that had been created would be destroyed. [If the other twin won] the beautiful earth would remain. They played and played and finally they came to the final roll. The twin who made sweetness in the world sent his thoughts out to all the living beings he had made and asked them to help, to stand on the side of life. Tom told us how in the final roll… all the members of Creation joined their voices together and gave a mighty shout for life. … The choice is always there.”
     Of course, few of us, if any, are just one twin or the other.
     And the twins are still in here and out there, playing for high stakes.
    In Trump’s and Musk’s 2025 United States, I read Katharina’s interpretation of Step of the Century as an uttering of history and prophecy — looking back from 1988 to (1920s) man staggering between left and right, looking forward from 1988 to (the present) man staggering between right and left. But, I remind myself, right and left are not just one point or a straight line. Right is a wide 180° angle and left is a wide 180° angle.
     Before closing, a comment on the number of men in this essay (that draws primarily on two books by two women). I grew up questioning the evident primacy of men as writers, speakers, and characters with agency. Though the stories and histories I grew up with were always more complicated than the apparent primacy of men, I learnt that the structures of primacy have deep linguistic roots, and draw sustenance from language. While the effects of structures of primacy are sometimes benign and even very positive for some people, we know that, unquestioned, they can become scaffolding for layers of inequity, hence this noting of the recurrence of men in this essay.
      Several times “men” show up in this essay -- especially with reference to Erpenbeck’s and Mattheuer’s work -- leaning in the direction of “toxic masculinity." Mulling “toxic masculinity,” especially today, is a rabbit hole. After trying several times to write some of the mess of my thoughts, I find myself tied up in knots that I can untie concisely only with something platitudinous like: even in Erpenbeck’s work and certainly in Kimmerer’s, men, indeed all of us, are gendered beings (and, I would add, not just binary and heterosexual!) and also human. We are all Nanabozho, we are all Skywoman, we are all taking a step, all potentially falling into a need for creativity: but differently. 
     Step of the Century is not the end of the story.
     Nanabozho kept trying. We keep trying.

*Friedrich Hölderlin was a German poet of the late 18th and early 19th centuries who, among other things, had his hopes for a new society dashed by the excesses of the French Revolution, as discussed by Erpenbeck’s Hans and his therapist. I mention this because in Erpenbeck’s book, as in Sweetgrass but differently, every narrative turn in Kairos spirals to that meeting of history and prophecy, curling into past, present and future for man, human, collectivity, life.
** While stymied by plastics, Kimmerer is defeated by Ding-dongs and Cheetos, which she calls “an ecological mystery.”