Overdue and over-revealing letter: PLUS, a self-care workshop from the bathtub of my mind
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Dear Courageous One, Oh, I hope you are finding and keeping your courage! Before I forget, and continue this Too-Much-Information letter below, let me share this: I’m hosting a (hopefully) enjoyable and edgy Self-Care workshop for writers and other creative types on WEDNESDAY, Feb. 21st, yes--tomorrow--at 1 pm EST. That's right, DURING THE DAY. You are invited. It comes with a price tag $25 C., unless you are a member of the CNFC, the Creative Nonfiction Collective—it’s free for members. If you’re a nonfiction writer, it might be worth it to join ‘em, and join all their webinars for free! They are good people . . . Please forward this email to anyone who might be interested in the workshop and not shocked by the humanitarian confusions I share below. Click here for the info (and the payment link). I’m late announcing this offering because---my energies have been otherwise engaged. I have MORE to tell you about and I'll save it for another newsletter. Soon, not two months from now. Being alive at this time in history is, uh, intense. (High pitched laughter here). As you may have noticed. Thus, being alive is a good reason for taking care. A friend of mine recently shared that he'd had triple bypass surgery last year (which means three different blockages had to be removed from his coronary artery). Why? Basically because he hadn't been able to take care of himself, in the pressurized busy-ness of his work life. His brain, body and spirit were the last items on his To-Do list--almost literally the last-ever items. So. If you would like to spend a couple hours DOING self-care (I'm not throwing up slides for and talking in a monotone, I'm going to engage participants in the THING!) "Self-care" is often imagined as . . . a woman having a bubblebath. Huh. Me on Wednesday . . . Kidding. I will not be in the tub with a martini . . . However, for me, humour is FUNDAMENTAL to our health. Also, otherwise, I might go crazy. I use that word clinically, metaphorically, seriously AND jokingly. Because one word has many different meanings . . .
To be honest, I’ve found it hard to write this letter. I’ve tried, numerous times, and stopped. Perhaps you’ve noticed how quiet I’ve been lately. The continuing violence in the world stunned me into silence. Terrorism, the unfolding truth of the horror of the Hamas assaults. Then the mounting counter attacks on the attackers, and the bombs, snipers aiming at . . . wait, I guess they had targets, to begin, but then . . .they aimed, increasingly, at everyone, everything, kids, families, schools, horses—did you see that video?--and the bombs blew up apartment buildings with families in them, community centres, universities, hospitals. Hospitals? All 36 hospitals in Gaza have been bombed or rendered significantly non-functional. I fell in slow-motion into the bottomless pit . . . of . . . my . . . phone. I began writing other letters. I took it as an an act of witness, to begin to observe the reality of the young people of Gaza, who are actively recording their own destruction on Instagram and Tiktok. (The old people and middle-aged people, unless they're journalists, have had less inclination to do this. As you may know, it's a generational thing.) The weeping grandmothers and mothers. The surgeon's white face, after he had amputated his daughter’s leg without anaesthetic. The father carrying pieces of his children out of a building in plastic bags. His face. The crying, screaming-in-pain little kids. The world is mad. And we know this. We do. We have seen madness and bloodlust before. This is the incomprehensible kind of animal we are, or can become. I've been reading my Primo Levi (as usual; have I ever stopped reading him?) This from The Drowned and The Saved, on the nature of the SS: "They were made of the same cloth as we, they were average human beings, averagely intelligent, averagely wicked; save the exceptions, they were not monsters, they had our faces, but they had been reared badly. they were, for the great part, diligent followers and functionaries, some fanatically convinced of the Nazi doctrine, many indifferent, or fearful of punishment, or desirous of a good career, or too obedient . . ." There is a difference, here; we have not had so many war crimes (or acts of genocide, or whatever you prefer to call the madness and bloodlust) recorded by kids and young adults. On their phones. Video footage. Techno-progress is not, at least, an illusion. But I do think the need to shoot pictures is not unlike the need to shoot guns; it's built in. The soldiers shot the beautiful Arabian horses running across the fields. Bizarrely, it was the soldiers who recorded this, because, like us, they are totally addicted to their phones. (They are recording their own human rights abuses; this is not new, but there is just so much of it.) I keep thinking, pointlessly, of the terror of horses. Why did they shoot them? And how did I see it? Why don’t the CBC NBC CNN ABC mention the 20,000+ orphans, the tens of thousands of amputees, the number unpinnable, as it grows every day. There are things no one should see. Or: there are things we must see. Which is it? The children, refugees now, carrying their cats in their arms. If they still have arms. (I wish such a dramatic phrase were only for effect, but--no.) One girl carried her cat in her arms, yes, but she was in a wheelchair, and had no legs. I'm struck by the animals because they are our familiars, too, our own household gods . . . (Yet, why does this matter to me enough to remark upon it here? I haven't quite figured it out. Your thoughts are welcome. Though please do not write if you are going to swear at me or call me, as numerous people have, an antisemite. That's one of the more polite terms. Good lord. And I thought being called a "Karen" was bad! Good thing I've had so much practice being called names . . .) Reading, reading, reading. Who has made sense of any of it, ever? I go to the poets, naturally. To Anna Akhmatova, waiting outside the prison gates with the other women, one of whom asked her: Can you describe this?’ And I said, ‘I can.’ Then she did, in Requiem, using that encounter outside the gates. I also think of the taciturn, chillingly funny Nobel prize-winning Polish poet Wislawa Szymborksa, in The Century’s Decline, -uh, the 20th century, by the way: A couple of problems weren’t going / to come up anymore: hunger, for example, and war, and so forth. There was going to be respect for helpless people’s helplessness, trust, that kind of stuff . . . Anyone who planned to enjoy the world is now faced / with a hopeless task . . . God was finally going to believe in a man both good and strong, but good and strong are still two different men. “How should we live?” someone asked me in a letter. I had meant to ask him the same question. Again, and as ever, as may be seen above, the most pressing questions are naïve ones. * Good and strong are still two different men . . . The most pressing questions ARE naive. And I keep asking them! I started following a nine-year-old on Instagram, Lama Jamous. Gaza’s Anne Frank, she is called by some. Then I followed some teenagers. Then, somehow—one click leads to another click, as you know--a teenage journalist. And Motaz Ataiaz, who just turned 25 years old. And Wizard Bisan, a young woman film-maker. One of the young musician-comics-suddenly-war-journalist I was following: one day he was posting; the next day he was dead. This had a disturbing effect on my equilibrium. I cried; and then thought of his family a lot. The count now is over 100 journalists. Over 300 doctors and nurses. Many teachers and scientists (some of them prize-winning professors, considered the best in their fields, who chose to return to Gaza University to teach young Palestinians). Then Refaat Alareer, a Shakespeare scholar and professor, a poet, and teacher whose work I’ve read and admired for years, friend to various here in Toronto. He was bombed, too, obliterated--there were no remains to find, the explosion was so bad--together with his brother and sister and her four children. (He had left his wife and kids in another place, knowing he was targeted. Their whereabouts are unknown.) When we recognize a face, why do we feel connected to the person? I’ve never met Refaat. And yet, I knew his face. And his face disrupted my silence; I found my voice after knowing that he, too, had been murdered. The Holocaust survivor and ethical philosopher Emmanuel Levinas wrote that to see, to really see the face of the Other is to bear responsibility for that Other. To see someone’s face is to become indebted to them in gentleness and humanity, to recognize the verity of the commandment, Thou shalt not kill. Eyes to face, face to eyes. What every baby searches for within moments after birth: the face of the mother. (They used to think it took longer, but that face-searching hunger is now known to awaken as soon as the new eyes adjust to the light outside the womb.) Levinas’ writing about the face is intriguing to me because of the kind of healing work I do. I work directly with people’s brains by watching their eyes, micro-expressions, and by tracking and sometimes guiding eye movements. I watch people’s faces hour after hour, day after day . . . Look at your extraordinary face! I have always loved faces. Maybe that's part of the reason I became a therapist. A serious, youthful face, Refaat's. He was 44. Here is the poem he wrote in November ’23, already knowing he was targeted by the state of Israel. Less than a month later, its prophecy was fulfilled. If I Must DieIf I must die, Let it be a tale. He founded the important writing project for young Gazans called We Are Not Numbers, in which new writers wrote about their experiences as a way to affirm their own joyful, rightful existence and to tell the stories of their lives in Gaza. He taught them how to write in English, so that more people in the world might hear their voices. Loving tales—being a writer myself, after all—my latest blog is a true story about visiting the West Bank over ten years ago (gotta look up that date!). Mostly, though, it’s about dancing. Watching Palestinian modern dancers in Ramallah, the West Bank, then going back into Jerusalem and dancing much older steps. Hasapiko: the cutting steps, in Greek. There are historical links, say the archaeologists, between Greece, especially Crete, and Palestine. One of the places that connection asserts itself with ease is in dance: I felt at home with my gracious Palestinian hosts for various reasons: one reason was because the music and the movement, together, surprised me with their familiarity. I had expected strangers . . . Charlie got down on one knee and swayed and clapped, as enthusiastic onlookers do in Greece. Sometimes we turned back-to-back, aware of each other but not touching, the masculine and feminine heightened by distance. The tension of the dance is to be very close and to never touch. To speak intimately without uttering a single word.
Eventually, I had them everyone up, even the Americans! I wanted them all to dance. I called to them, as Charlie had called to me. Yela yela, come, we will dance, move in time, through time. Time, that we cannot resist. The night came on. The cat darted back and forth . . .
Click here to read about dancing in Al Quds. Time, that we cannot resist. The Courageous Writers' Academy in April, Greece in September . . . (Hopefully, unless Israel incites Lebanon to a full-out, still-more disastrous conflict, which would--well, let's remain in the present, and breathe in and out slowly.) Remember, self-care also involves . . . breathing. Come out tomorrow for some self-care. YOU could watch from your bath-tub. The link is at the top of the email. Bon Courage, Karen |