Artemisia Bush at Segesta, Sicily. Charcoal on toned paper, 8.5" x 5.5".
I'm drawing: small charcoals that would like to become big ones. This work feels like my bastion against what's going on in the world: this week we've heard about an Icelandic funeral for their first glacier to disappear; the forest fires in Brazil, devastating the rain forest, the lungs of our planet; and the insulting suggestion of buying Greenland, which may in fact be exploited in the future by the U.S. or Russia. The heat and the extreme weather in many parts of the world this summer are part of all of this.
But underpinning these catastrophes are the male aggressiveness, bravado, greed, competitiveness, and desire for domination at all costs that have driven our world since the beginning. I feel like I've been in mourning all summer. In July I re-read Tolstoy's War and Peace, in which he despairs about the human carnage and destruction caused by the Napoleonic wars, showing us, through masterful depictions of human lives, how characters of differing personalities deal with being caught up in war. I followed that with Isaiah Berlin's famous essay on Tolstoy's theories of history, "The Hedgehog and the Fox." I've also been thinking deeply about the Iliad, and Susan Sontag's essay about it titled "The Poem of Force," as I draw and paint places where the ancient Greeks once lived. My thoughts are starting to coalesce.
Where do we find freedom in such a world? And by freedom I also mean fearlessness. Is it even possible? I think we must begin by sitting in silence, developing our own inner life, and sharing thoughts with a few friends.
The problem is both macro and micro, both "out there" and personal, both structural and more amorphous and insidious: it is the very air we breathe. Every day we hear bullying language and hate speech from the most powerful leaders and from right-wing media; we see women who disagree -- from the strong women in Congress to activist Greta Thunberg -- castigated, ridiculed and attacked to the point of suggesting they should be maimed or even die. There's an increase in aggressive rhetoric not just from the right, but from the left. And it affects all of us.
Because, like prisoners in concentration camps, or victims of torture, we are, in fact, imprisoned and tortured by forces that we cannot control. It is natural to want to fight back, to fight aggression against oneself by being more aggressive, more self-protective, more tribal, but this is not and has never been the solution. Neither is it a solution to anesthetize ourselves through alcohol and drugs, consumerism, online games or social media, or escape by going about our lives as if nothing is happening. The most sensitive and thoughtful people among us see what is happening, and have seen it for some time. I am not talking about naive liberals who think that electing a woman is going to turn everything around, or that by eliminating plastic from our kitchens we're making any significant difference -- not that we shouldn't all make that effort. As Tolstoy pointed out about Napoleon and, to a lesser extent, the Tsar, one single man, no matter how charismatic or powerful, cannot gain that power unless he taps into broad undercurrents of belief already present in the population. The systemic violence, greed, racism, misogyny, homophobia, and exploitation that feed everything from war to genocide to climate change run very deeply and broadly; what Walter Wink called "The Powers and Principalities" have been operating since human societies began. By and large these systems have been dominated by white males who have believed in their right to supremacy over people of all other races, as well as over women. Even today, with all of our progress, women of every race are still below men in nearly every measure except life expectancy. And even the most intelligent and well-educated of us are often in positions where, to help families and institutions function, or in order to have some influence, we end up serving the men who actually hold the power.
I'm trying to think it through as a woman, and yet transcend anger, bitterness, frustration, feelings of impotence, to see how these violences and constraints could perhaps be gifts that can make me (and members of other marginalized/dis-empowered groups, as well as all people) actually freer than those who are caught up in turning the wheels of domination.
In order to do that, I see that I have to get off the wheel myself. One example: being largely off social media this summer has thrown what's going on there into sharp relief; I see it much more clearly. I have limited my consumption of news to a brief read of The Guardian and the front page of The New York Times every day. I don't watch television, but I've been reading widely, and choosing what I read carefully. I'm trying to get back into a practice of daily meditation and mindfulness in order to deal with my anger as well as my grief about what is happening to the natural world and our socio/political systems. I'm assessing all the ways I have been giving too much and allowing myself to be used, and considering how to be more effective with the energy, abilities, and yes, privileges, that I have.
Stepping away from time to time is part of the practice of nonviolence, which is made up of two sides of one coin: Action, and Contemplation. As Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Desmond Tutu, Jesus and many others practitioners of nonviolence have taught us, these are not dualisms, but integral parts of one continuous whole; neither can exist without the other. For me, the contemplative practices of art, music, journaling and being in nature are part of this path, and so is silent meditation, especially in a world that has become cacophonous to the point of damaging our very ability to speak effectively to one another or listen to what is said. On the other side of the coin is Action, but action (of which speech is a part) must proceed from a centered, calm, free, and deeply considered place in order to have any power against the forces that threaten everything we hold dear.