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.

     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.”

#midwinter 
Or Nature’s Plotlines (from Jenny Xie, through Latif Askia Ba)

    Some mornings ago when I started writing this essay, it was 9 degrees F (-12.7 degrees C) in New York city. President Donald Trump’s government was unsurprising. 
     Friends and commentators began predicting the end of the global order “as we know it,” of multilateralism with the dominance of the United States, surrounded by its circles of allies, the closer and more stable allies tending to be European and richer, and outer circles a motley crew of more recently independent states some of them with democracies rendered precarious by Cold War games. Multilateralism built a 20th century web of relationships, interdependencies, and “international law.” Over the course of the 20th century, especially after WWII, international law got more specific and codified than in the past, crafted multilaterally by and for apparently sacralized “nation-states,” whether these were states formed in earlier centuries by increasingly centralized and high-language governments that pulled together contiguous communities with related dialects and customs, or states formed more recently with the breakdown of monarchies and empires. Relatively free trade, under the economic power of the United States and its allies and economic partners, flourished in this world of nation-states and multilateralism.
​     Entwined with this multilateralism, international law, and free trade, was the dominance of democracy as a form of polity and governance, mostly based on the evolved European model, but also drawing on local forms and practices. Over centuries people in different parts of the world struggled to get “democracy,” a system in which the will of many replaces the power of a few. Increasingly the promise of democracy swelled to a system in which, aspirationally, ordinary people can participate in choosing and changing their leaders and the policies to which they are subject. In the 21st century, especially over the last two decades, with the rise and successes of populist leaders and governments in many parts of the world, diverse observers — including “experts;” ordinary people like my octogenarian mother; and people like the romantic and somewhat anachronistic Curtis Yarvin — have rung the alarm for a crisis of democracy. Mind you, people are ringing the alarm from and in different directions.
    Reflecting on the two phrases — “end of the global order as we know it,” and “crisis of democracy” — draws my attention to structural flaws in these interlinked systems despite their many good intentions and positive effects, both potential and realized. While democracy in general is likely to be more fair than the dice-throw of effective-to-ineffective benevolent despotism or efficient-to-ruthlessly-uncaring authoritarianism, from its beginning it has leaned to protect the interests of the better resourced in wealth, power, and education. And the global order as we know it — meaning the post-WWII global order that was initiated primarily by the winning Allies headed by the United States to stimulate recovery and prevent another world war —  has similar structural flaws to democracy. Indeed, in both cases the flaws are recurrent through history; the larger a state or polity, especially in terms of population, the more vulnerable it is to these structural flaws. 
     Over the decades, the post-WWII global order has served the wealthy, powerful, and academically educated more than the less resourced or other-skilled, whether in the “global south” or “south in the global north,” the last referring to the socio-economically vulnerable in the “global north” whether immigrant or not. There were murmurings of crises in the global order in the critique and defense of “globalization” but, by and large, for those who fear the end of the global order of the late 20th century, the order was a decent, rational, and corrigible frame for “progress.” I weigh down all these words with quotation marks to reflect how they are weighed down by ideological and partisan meanings that have accrued over decades; these and other potentially tumbleweed words have become widgets in the technical minds and language of “experts,” and signals in the common language of like-minded people.
    Through the crisis of democracy, not just in a single nation state but as a dominant form of governance in a globalized world, the chaos of (potential) breakdown of same-old democracy in individual states connects to increasing cracks in global order. Now the turning of the United States to nativist populism under an egotistical, erratic, and amoral man shoves a chisel into the biggest fault lines and pries them open. The breaking of order restricts and kills people, gives larger license to unfairness, and pollutes our planet potentially more than these things were already happening. Vulnerability rises up socioeconomic strata.
     So, what do we do, where do we go now?
     These days, in response to our new government’s strategy of unrelenting shocks and distraction, I’m here, I’m there, I’m going around and around. Resist here, support there. The crisis of democracy and the breakdown of the global order as we know it makes us all vulnerable. Some of us feel more vulnerable than others. Some of us feel bully pride — fuck yeah! Yes, I’m including all of us.
     At this point, will harking to the premises and rules of democracy and multilateralism work or is the rot too deep?
     And what does all of this have to do with ducks in midwinter and “nature’s plotlines?”
     I could start (again) in at least three different ways.


     Midwinter. 
     When it’s 18 degrees F (-7.78 degrees C) or less in the middle of the day, the ducks curl themselves in and wait in the middle of an inhospitable pond. What predator could retrieve them there?


OR


     Don’t be surprised if the end of the world isn’t great, or rather Do not expect too much from the end of the world: Radu Jude’s brilliant movie about Romania, about being less powerful and fucked.* About sticking it to them nevertheless, in the process profanely laughing, finding beauty, even protecting, even sharing, even loving. 
     Green on each side of that long road, cross after cross after cross; that’s the only green I remember in the movie, minute after lonely minute — why is it taking so long?! He needed a better editor! Not. The green surrounds old crosses, new crosses, new crosses, new crosses, new crosses. People who died on the road, who keep dying on the road. It did not need better editing. Cadence is perfectly calibrated: speed, thumping, obliviousness, and grass growing around those crosses, a poem so to speak, splashing the eyes with the sense of

            All this gaining
            and letting go
            honed along
            the sharpest edges
            of this life’s perimeter.

            (Jenny Xie “Postmemory”)

Xie’s words bring back a sentence from HBO’s True Detective Night Country (2024), situated in Ennis, Alaska: “And Ennis is where the fabric of all things is coming apart at the seams.”
     I’m not done with Jude’s end of the world. After all it comes from Romania, which right now is caught in a curious experimental drama of democracy (and TikTok). Voted in, not voted in; Russia, not Russia; EU, not EU; propaganda, propaganda; law, whose law? I’m not going to tell you the details. Look it up. It’s an interesting twist to the crisis of democracy, the end of the world order as we know it.
     Radu Jude looks at the global order from above and from below and we’re never quite sure what’s up and what’s down. A developer making luxury flats can’t have his wealthy buyers look at graves while sipping their morning coffee, so let’s move the graves, shall we, we’ll pay for it all, the exhumation, the new plot, everything. And by the way, the boss apologizes for not being at the meeting, he’s doing his mindfulness thing (which, somehow, reminds me of lululemon) And, then, less mindfully, or perhaps every bit as mindfully we have Bobita’s filtered TikTok videos: irreverent, sometimes obnoxious, always deliberately and shockingly profane, sticking it to my mindful mind, sticking it from below. Hmmm… a distant, filtered MAGA (without the first A of course, mostly without the G as well — just MA, making again and again? — turned upside down, back up, down again, I don’t know what’s what. You’re never bored. Well, except maybe for the long stretches of road with green and crosses on each side.
     It’s striking how mindful the bosses are, invoking the Way along the way.
     There are two narratives in the film that converge in the end. Angela in the past — from a real movie in the real-life past — is a taxi-driver. Angela in the present is an assistant in a film production company. The two Angelas meet in this film’s present, both more-than-surviving from below.
     The young Angela — also Bobita, the maker-star of the TikTok videos — rushes around for the production of a worker safety video for an Austrian company, evidently a logging company. She picks up and drives around the Austrian marketing executive, Doris Goethe, who is overseeing the film project. Yes, she’s a blood descendant of the Goethe Doris tells us shruggily, though perhaps because it’s family she doesn’t really read him. Angela asks her if she cares about the cutting down of forests that her company does. Doris responds by invoking the Taoist Way: she just needs to do her job as marketing executive, she says, not know or care about how her company is cutting down forests. And, she adds, in any case the Romanians allow it to happen, it’s up to them.
     I’m upside down. I too am mindful and invoke the Way. 
     Overthinking. Real people are under real threat today. More threat is likely tomorrow. Defeatist, poetic nihilism gets us nowhere.
     Jude does the trapeze with the Way, swinging this way, turning that way, upside down, inside out, amazingly light, agile, and alive. And then he quotes haiku in the credits.

in this world
we walk on the roof of hell
gazing at flowers

(Kobayashi, translated by Robert Hass, and displayed with the credits in Jude’s film) 


OR


     I could start with nature’s plotlines, drawn from Jenny Xie’s poem “Postmemory” and quoted by Latif Askia Ba in his interview with Brooklyn Poets. His new book of poetry just came out: The Choreic Period. Look it up. I didn’t know the meaning of choreic. I’ve bought his book.

            Nature reuses
            plotlines
            not wanting
            to waste
            a thing.

            (Jenny Xie “Postmemory”)

    At this point, can I add anything? What else can I write? Do I have to write any more? Some of you would say no. I waste so much. Everything is done already, experienced already, written already, known already, dead, resurrected,

            And so we get sewn
            back into
            our origins

            (Jenny Xie “Postmemory”)

And yet, it’s fresh again, it’s new again! Read The Choreic Period, read “Postmemory.”

            The deeper
            textures.
            
            (Jenny Xie “Postmemory”)

     If you’ve read any of my work or know anything about me, you know I’m much older than Xie and Askia Ba. I’m still stumbling alive with each fresh turn, still pulsing to receive and give, seduced by the deceptive eiderdown of comfortable age, still agile, still sensing, still writing, still steady. I still care.
     Democracy is in crisis. Many — including my now-deceased and most ordinary mother — have declared that. Curtis Yarvin (you could look up the NYT article) declares it. His solution is the mythos of the strong man, which by the way my old mother might also have considered as a solution. It’s a romantic solution, a yearning for the strong father. It serves those who believe in and obey the rules of the father. For the rest, they’re impure, lower, chattel, or enemies. I don’t really need to say more about this. Most people who read me would not be interested in a Yarvin-style solution, and those who are would not have read this far. My question — still holding hope for democracy — is how do people broadly like me live together with people broadly like Yarvin in a democratic system? Heather Cox Richardson, a historian of the United States who has a very large substack following, might say we have, we can, but right now — I say, she might say, many of us say — we are in a dangerous place. Crisis and disorder.
     Democracy is flawed. The global order as we know it is flawed. If your forests are being chopped down, it’s because you are allowing it. And, by the way, if you are not allowing it, you are probably breaking the law. The law can be bought. The law can be changed. But not always. Meanwhile, I can be mindful. I can be mindful. Mindfulness has many shades and textures.
     There is no way out of this. There is no way out of this. This is the one plotline — life comes back to Chernobyl, so to speak — which you can see as the inherently corrupt beauty of life, or the gloriously messy complexity of the Way,

     or work to be done now.
     Let’s get to work.

If you don’t know where to start, Jamyle Cannon from Chicago has superb advice.
https://www.instagram.com/p/DFHEpz4R4CG/
In case the link doesn’t take you to the exact reel, it’s one of the videos posted on January 22, 2025. And in case you are raising your eyebrows at our use of Meta, hey he uses us, we use him.

Another excellent resource is this post on dodging the firehose by David Litt.

Meanwhile:
— Stay informed, read various sources to check your information and assumptions
— Avoid jumping reactively on and off their carousel of big and bigger threats
— Hug someone or smile at someone at least once a day
— Support one initiative, small or big, that does what you want to see more of in the world. I just supported Word Up with a donation and purchases
— And, ok, I would not follow Bobita, but allow yourself to laugh!

*Trigger warning: it’s very long, it’s very irreverent, it’s very odd (and it’s brilliant).