July 28th, 2023 The artwork has been posted
Translation
“To think in terms of zoe [life], which is borderless, is not to ignore citizenship or its borders, but to enter a contact zone where everything is translation…. If translation suggests a movement between human cultures and an opening into the unknown, the current ecological crisis requires that this unknown also encompasses the non-human.” Zoe Skoulding
“For we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us.” Audre Lorde / The Cancer Journals
“He cried all night. In the morning everyone was on the same level. It was easier to talk to the stranger, so the king welcomed him into his kingdom.” Kjell Ringi
Today’s post refers to a variety of things like: Audre Lorde’s book, The Cancer Journals / Τα Περιοδικά / Ημερολόγια του Καρκίνου; a children’s book by Kjell Ringi with the title The Stranger / Ο Ξένος; a podcast in which Dr Judson Brewer talks about how developing the habit of being curious can decrease anxiety, a recent Being Well podcast in which Dr Rick and Forrest Hanson and Dan Harris talk about a lot, including anxiety, mindfulness and (self) compassion meditations; an extract from a post by poet Zoe Skoulding, and finally, four new drawings.
The idea to write about these two particular books came while I was in town a few days ago. First, a children’s book with a minimalist type of illustration on a book stall outside a bookstore caught my attention, and then, an incident in a shop brought to my mind The Cancer Journals.
“What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence?” Audre Lorde
Audre Lorde was a Black writer, speaker, feminist and civil rights activist born in 1934. The Cancer Journals contains entry journals and essays written in 1978, 1979, and 1980. The book was written over four decades ago and is situated temporarily and spatially, but aspects of it seem universal and elevant today.
Lorde begins by saying that “Each woman responds to the crisis that breast cancer brings to her life out of a whole pattern, which is the design of who she is and how her life has been lived. The weave of her every day existence is the training ground for how she handles crisis.” She argues that some women bury themselves in busyness, others go into denial and numbness, and suggests a different stance believing that our feelings need voice in order to be recognized, respected, and to be of use to others because imposed silence about any area of our lives becomes a tool for separation and powerlessness. She does not want her anger, pain and fear about cancer to fossilize into yet another silence, nor to rob her of whatever strength may lie at the core of this experience when openly acknowledged and examined.
In the book Lorde writes that she has tried to voice her feelings and the pain of amputation, her confrontation with mortality, the power of community, the power and rewards of self-conscious living, and also, state her ideas about the function of cancer in a profit economy. She describes the impact of the anesthesia on her abi;ity to think clearly and remember. She writes: “Part of this was shock, but part of it was anesthesia, as well as conversations I had probably absorbed in the operating room while I was drugged and vulnerable and only able to record, not react.” She notes both the commonality of women’s experience of breast cancer and mastectomy and the different ways that each women will in the end navigate this journey. But she believes that what is most important to us must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood, and that every woman has “a particular voice to be raised in what must become a female outcry against all preventable cancers, as well as, against the secret fears that allow those cancers to flourish.”
An extract from the book:
“In becoming forcibly and essentially aware of my mortality, and of what I wished and wanted for my life, however short it might be, priorities and omissions became strongly etched in a merciless light, and what I most regretted were my silences. Of what had I ever been afraid? To question or to speak as I believed could have meant pain, or death. But we all hurt in so many different ways, all the time, and pain will either change or end. Death, on the other hand, is the final silence. And that might be coming quickly, now, without regard for whether I had ever spoken what needed to be said, or had only betrayed myself into small silences, while I planned someday to speak, or waited for someone else’s words. And I began to recognize a source of power within myself that comes from the knowledge that while it is most desirable not to be afraid, learning to put fear into a perspective gave me great strength. I was going to die, if not sooner then later, whether or not I had ever spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you…… We can sit in our corners mute forever while our sisters and our selves are wasted, while our children are distorted and destroyed, while our earth is poisoned, we can sit in our safe corners mute as bottles, and we still will be no less afraid.”
The Stranger by Swedish writer and artist Kjell Arne Sorensen Ringi (1936-2010), first published in 1968, is a modern fable for young children and people of all ages around xenophobia, the fear of the Other and the use of different forms of violence.
One day a giant stranger arrives unannounced in a peaceful kingdom and spreads worry and fear. At first the authorities decide to guard the stranger but without any result. Then they sent diplomats and messengers. Again nothing happens. More forceful suppression mechanisms are then activated. The army arrives with weapons, but still nothing happens. Then they use a cannon ball and the giant alien is wounded. He starts weeping and his tears create a sea……
Cultivating curiosity at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCW9lEg8UZ8
In this podcast Dr Brewer talks about how developing the habit of being curious can decrease anxiety, and distinguishes between deprivation curiosity and interest curiosity. The first is when we lack information and it can be linked to feelings of uncertainty, uneasiness, and non safety. When we don’t have information our brain fires like when we don’t have food. It’s different from the second type of curiosity, which is connected to joy, openness, wonder, learning, interest. He refers to the fact that society has not, thus far, highlighted curiosity as a strength. He also explains how subjective bias both saves cognitive energy and leads to false conclusions and things like sexism, racism, and ageism, and so on.
Mindfulness, Fear, and Love Without the Cringe at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjKuKl1pM2k
On the Being Well episode this week Dr Rick and Forrest Hanson and Dan Harris talk about Dan’s history with panic attacks mostly arising from public speaking and claustrophobic responses in places like elevators, exposure therapy and meditation practices; compassion and self-compassion and the experiences of mindfulness both in a secular frame and in moving away from a purely secular frame. They also explore concepts and experiences like love, kindness, caring, sharing and wise selfishness, as well as, the importance of marking our virtuous moments when they occ and recognizing personal changes as they happen one step at a time.
Finally, I’d like to share something I read by poet Zoe Skoulding at her website: https://www.zoeskoulding.co.uk/2020/10/10/from-underground-rivers-notes-towards-a-zoepoetics/
from Underground Rivers: Notes Towards a Zoepoetics, posted on 10 /10/2020
“The first word I remember writing was, unsurprisingly, my own name: Zoë. The Greek term zoe, as the widest definition of life itself, has always interested me, and I grew up knowing its Biblical interpretations, ‘eternal life’, or ‘life in all its fullness’ thanks to my clergyman father, who also tried to teach me when I was far too young to write it in Greek, ζωή, the strange forms of the letters escaping into unfathomable loops and scrawls of crayon across the page. …… It was much later that I came to Georgio Agamben’s account, particularly relevant to the current state of exception, of the unstable distinction between the bios, the politically qualified life of the citizen and zoe asthe state of ‘bare life’, a non-human status excluded from the body politic. Zoe, in his account, is life in its most vulnerable form, subject to the sovereign’s power over the embodied subject. More recently, Rosi Braidotti …… [has argued] for an understanding of zoe / life as a generative force, and for a ‘zoe-egalitarian’ politics.”