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.