Filter by Category : Tag : Date

Filter by Category : Tag : Date

Filter by Category : Tag : Date

    Search results for

hunger

Hunger

When I was young and impressionable I had to read a book titled Hunger by Knut Hamsun. Why they would serve us literary fare by a Norwegian Nazi remains a mystery. Maybe my German high school teacher was as enamored by the Nobel Prize author as were many others, more famous people: Maxim Gorky, Thomas Mann, and Isaac Bashevis Singer. The book explores the psychological decline of a pretty asocial character who is driven almost mad by hunger, but as a consequence of refusing available food, fully in line with Hamsun’s celebration of individualism and freedom to choose. In the end the protagonist escapes his woes by hiring on to a ship and sail the seas, being fed, presumably, three meals a day. It felt odd, even to a 15-year old, that hunger was not presented as an inescapable scourge for the many who lack access to food, but as a choice. Some of my thoughts on the issue of food insecurity you’ve read in earlier blogs.

Decades later, I came across this:

Hunger Camp at Jaslo

by Wislawa Szymborska

Write it. Write. In ordinary ink 
on ordinary paper: they were given no food, 
they all died of hunger. “All. How many? 
It’s a big meadow. How much grass 
for each one?” Write: I don’t know. 
History counts its skeletons in round numbers. 
A thousand and one remains a thousand, 
as though the one had never existed: 
an imaginary embryo, an empty cradle, 
an ABC never read, 
air that laughs, cries, grows, 
emptiness running down steps toward the garden, 
nobody’s place in the line. 

We stand in the meadow where it became flesh, 
and the meadow is silent as a false witness. 
Sunny. Green. Nearby, a forest 
with wood for chewing and water under the bark- 
every day a full ration of the view 
until you go blind. Overhead, a bird- 
the shadow of its life-giving wings 
brushed their lips. Their jaws opened. 
Teeth clacked against teeth. 
At night, the sickle moon shone in the sky 
and reaped wheat for their bread. 
Hands came floating from blackened icons, 
empty cups in their fingers. 
On a spit of barbed wire, 
a man was turning. 
They sang with their mouths full of earth. 
“A lovely song of how war strikes straight 
at the heart.” Write: how silent. 
“Yes.” 

Translated by Grazyna Drabik and Austin Flint 

I know, it’s the week of Christmas. Visions of food associated with the occasion, pungent smells permeating houses, meals shared with loved ones, unusual things like goose or carp (if you are German,) gingerbread and Stollen (a baked Marzipani concoction of about a million calories per slice,) all mouthwatering and sweet. Now why do I have to ruin that by reminding us of hunger as a weapon, an instrument of torture, a tool of extermination? Yes, a whole region of Jews were killed by being driven into a corral near the town of Jaslo and refused food and water. Can’t we let the past rest, at least during this week of celebration?

I would, if it were only the past. Just as Szymborska exhorts us to keep the memory alive – Write it. Write. – I cannot but say it, say: we are faced with hunger by design, here and now, in our American Prison system. There a few who bear witness. Last week this singular report was published by the ACLU of Southern California in cooperation with various other organizations. It “combines testimonies from people who were incarcerated in the Orange County jails during the pandemic with public records. Nutrition facts, menu items, and budget information gathered from the Orange County Sheriff’s Department through Public Records Act request.”

For almost two years now the thousands of inmates in this system have not had a hot meal. The three meals they get are mostly inedible sack lunches that contain moldy bread, spoiled slices of meat, and an occasional apple or orange. It is not enough food, particularly if you cannot eat it if it’s rotting, and it is so unhealthy that food-related illnesses have skyrocketed. Food poisoning from the spoiled food is one thing; the high sodium and carbohydrate contents have increased heart disease, diabetes-related problems, and circulatory system illness.

The situation has gotten so bad, that even the Board of State and Community Corrections asked the jails to add hot meals after their inspection revealed the horror of the situation. What happened? Hot cereal was added to breakfast, but soon after refused again. Soup was added to dinner (high-sodium broth with floating onion and tomatoes to be found with a magnifying glass.) However, the soup was put on the floor in front of the cells, often only accessible after an hour when it had become cold and by now detected by bugs that live in the shadows of the prison hallways, equally desperate to improve their food intake.

Kitchen closures where justified with Covid-19. The closures saved a good amount of money to the prison system, none of which has been re-invested into better nutrition for the inmates. In addition, the system has made a significant amount of revenue on items that incarcerated people can purchase through commissary (some $10.000.000 a year.) That kind of food might be more edible than bug-infested soup, but it is also not healthy, like most items that come out of dispenser. Medical and religious diets have been denied due to Covid restrictions, or so it is claimed.

“If a budget recipient spends less than its predicted budget, the surplus rolls over or goes towards other department expenses. That means that when OCSD receives a budget for food services and ultimately spends less than was budgeted, the remainder rolls over and can be used for other expenses like staff salaries. That is what happened when OCSD shut down the hot kitchens.”

These are the numbers that show the development during the Covid years, all on the backs of the inmates.

I”n 2018, OCSD rolled over just $72,000 from the food budget to use on other OCSD expenses; in 2019, OCSD rolled over $90,000. In 2020, after OCSD stopped serving hot food, they rolled over $963,013. In 2021, OCSD is on track to rollover $656,472.”

You can find all the details and art work and experiential testimony by the inmates in the report. Images today were created by the prisoners.

I do not know if the situation is any different in Oregon. But I do feel that we are ignorant of all of it unless we happen to have our noses pushed into it. Without knowing, of course, there will be no memory, no transmission of the horrors of one’s times to future generations as a warning. And poets will have to dig up a past that we failed to change in our present. Spread the word, if you can. The link to the report, again, is here.

Music by Bob Marley.

2 Comments

Trauma handed down through Generations

We will never know the exact number of children traumatized in today’s world, with its wars, environmental catastrophes caused by climate change, hunger, disease, and violence empowered by entrenched racist and caste systems.

Artists have taken on the task of drawing our attention to the plight of these children in ways that make it possible to confront the horrors without being fatigued by pure statistic or scared by sensation-seeking news reports. One of the artists I most admire in this regard is JR (yes, he goes by initials only) who has created work that registers emotionally, makes us think about facts, and also generates income that he is donating to funds helping children afflicted by war.

An early series of his was Déplacé·e·s, a collection of super large images of refugee children that were shown in places that housed refuges who had fled from war, famine or social instability. Aerial photographs of 170-foot-long banners—carried by groups of people around the camp or a city—depicted the full image of a child. The project generated a lot of awareness about how many millions of refugees are currently on the move or settled under horrifying circumstances, in many cases.

Currently, the artist is exhibiting a different way of displaying photographs of kids in refugee camps across Rwanda, Ukraine, Greece, Mauritania and Columbia, among others.  Les Enfants d’Ouranos shows images that are photographic negatives transferred directly on wood, producing ghostly figures in a reversal of light and dark. The children, now anonymous silhouettes standing in for all of the displaced rather than an individual child, are bright, luminous, carriers of hope. Ouranos was the Greek God of the sky, creator of the Titans, and I wonder if his fatherly role, alluded to in the exhibition title, is that of punisher or protector. These kids are seen primarily running – away from something or towards something? Did this primordial God unleash the disasters, or is he in charge of shelter? Some of the work can be seen at the facade of the Parrish Art Museum in Waterville, NY, until the end of May. (All images are work of the artist.)

I want to talk today a little bit about what we know of what might happen when these children who lived through traumatic events have children of their own. My field of psychology and also the area of psychiatry has seen an increasing research focus over the last 40 years on how trauma is handed down through the generations. I will relate the story at the most basic level, leaving out most of the specific scientific details, because it matters to me just to get the idea across. For an in-depth overview, go here. That article will also refer you to many other sources, for investigations of specific traumas or ways of transmission.)

What we know: children of survivors of traumatic experiences are more likely to have behavioral or mental and physical health problems than children of parents, otherwise matched for age, education, financial status etc., who were spared tragedy in their lives. These can be externalizing problems such as hyperactivity, impulsivity, aggression, and rule violation, or internalizing problems that are characterized by worry, anxiety, depression, and social withdrawal. They can be bodily ailments like immune system deficiencies, asthma, autism-spectrum diseases, obesity or the propensity towards diabetes and heart disease, presumed to be modulated by the way stress affects the second and third generation.

The original traumatic experiences that were studied in humans range from the Holocaust, the Japanese Internment experience, the Vietnam War, the Cambodian and Armenian genocide, European and African hunger epidemics, slavery, the participation in Israel’s war in 1973, Palestinian displacement, to the exposure of an individual to repeated, serious childhood abuse or being victim to a sexual crime. Animal models have also been used to push our scientific knowledge further. Many researchers agreed that some of the effects of trauma on the next generation (intergenerational trauma) or even subsequent generations (transgenerational trauma) could be related to how generation 1’s experiences affected their own behavior, subsequent adjustment problems, including addiction, violence or suicidal ideation, as well as their parenting styles, aloof or overprotective, leading to problems with attachment for generation 2.

Yet scientists were curious if something else was going on in addition to what happened in the direct, day-by-day interactions between survivors and their children, interactions that of course shaped the lived experience of the children. This triggered a flurry of research into epigenetics, the study of how external factors can change or affect the ways our genes work.

Remember that we inherit our parents’ genes, with the DNA from the male carried in the sperm, and the DNA from the female carried in the egg. When sperm and egg merge they form a single cell, which then multiplies to supply us with all the different cells required to live. Throughout this process, every single cell in your body has the same genes, the same DNA. However, in each cell, some of the genes are activated and some are not; that’s how a single configuration of genes, shared by every one of your cells, can function differently in different locations and at different times. What’s at stake here is called “gene expression” – with the pattern of gene expression in your liver cells making sure those cells function as liver cells should, with the pattern of expression in your nerve cells making sure neurons do neuron things, and so on. One catalogue of genes (i.e., one “genome”) throughout, but different expressions of that genome governing the function of the DNA in each individual cell.

What governs gene expression? Basically, it’s the immediate chemical environment of that specific cell, which in turn is governed by a variety of other factors, including factors in your environment. In other words, your environment has a powerful influence on gene expression, and so your environment has a powerful influence on how your genetic material operates.

But now we add two further steps: First, it’s crucial that, when the DNA is passed to the next generation (through sperm and egg), the DNA molecules that are passed onward are (like any DNA molecules) molecules with a particular pattern of gene expression. In other words, in the DNA that’s passed to your offspring, some of the genes are currently “switched on,” and some of the genes currently “switched off.” In this way, the pattern of your experiences (which – again –  influences gene expression) can literally alter the specifics of the genetic pattern you pass on to your offspring. 

Second, trauma turns out to be one of the experiences that matters for gene expression, basically changing how someone’s DNA functions. In particular, trauma changes the expression of genes important for glucocorticoid function – a body chemical that’s crucial for how someone responds to stress. The result? The person (because of this change in glucocorticoids) may be overreactive to stress, and may have unhealthy cortisol levels.

Putting these pieces together: Trauma influences gene expression, and (part of) the pattern of gene expression is transmitted to your children, through your DNA. As a result, parents who have expressed trauma literally change the biology of their children. And, again, this is a purely biological, genetic transmission, in addition to whatever ways the behavior of (previously traumatized?) parents can alter the lived experience of the children raised by those parents.

I am not a biologist, so a lot of the details go beyond my comprehension. But I did learn that multiple variables correlate with different outcomes. So, for example, both maternal and paternal trauma can affect gene expression that then gets inherited by the next generation. It matters how old survivors were at the time of trauma, it matters what gestational phase the fetus is in, if the trauma occurs during the pregnancy and not before. Boys and girls are differently affected. Some studies (with very small sample sizes, so caution) say that the effects of gene expression are even more detrimental in the 3rd compared to the 2nd generation.

What conclusions are drawn? “At the present time, the field has not sufficiently grappled with the meaning of the intergenerational transmission of trauma effects for the offspring. It could be argued that this transmission is indicative of increased vulnerability. On the other hand, this transmission may extend the adaptive capacities of offspring through a biological preparation for adverse circumstances similar to those encountered by the parent. Ultimately, the potential utility, and possible stability, of an environmentally induced trait transmitted to an offspring will depend on the offspring’s environmental context.”(Ref.)

Honestly, that seems a bit bland and falsely comforting by not confronting the fact that so many trauma survivors are part of a multi-generational system. When you think about the historical backdrop of Jews’ experiences across time in this world, or that of Blacks, or the inhabitants of the Republic of Congo, or large numbers of Ukrainians, or Palestinians who have been displaced, killed and oppressed for many, many generations, increased vulnerability through a lineage of multiple survivors is likely to trump adaptive capacity.

We know how war and famine have immediate horrifying effects for those experiencing them. Captivity, whether as a hostage, a prisoner of war, or a human being fenced in a concentration camp or a strip of land with closed borders, with death looming above you or raining down, will do irrevocable, life-long damage to those who survive. Starvation, whether through natural famines, or the intentional withholding of food, during Stalin’s purges of Ukraine or the Israeli war cabinet’s decision to cut off food to the Gazan population, will change the health status of several generations down the line.

Terror and war are, as we now know, generating wounds for those in the future, generations of children who will be affected by the suffering of their parents and grandparents and great grandparents, with gene expression turned on or off in ways detrimental to their health. It will potentially feed into new cycles of violence, perpetuating trauma.

Music today is a contemporary song about refugee children.

Also a modernist’s reaction to war: Richard Strauss’ Metamorphosen.

2 Comments

Ecocide

In February 2022, Russia blockaded Ukraine’s Black Sea ports through which all Ukrainian bulk exports were being shipped, part of an ongoing attempt to wage war on global food security in the context of its invasion of Ukraine. In addition, the ports, through which mostly grain is exported, were mined. The Atlantic Council estimated then that globally about 47 million people were threatened with starvation due to these actions.

The likelihood of a hunger catastrophe has now stratospherically increased because of what happened in the early morning hours of June 6th, 2023, concurrent with the start of a Ukrainian offensive to push back against the Russian invaders: the Nova Kakhovka dam at the river Dnipro and connected power stations were exploded, leading to a flood of biblical proportions. For the last 15 months Russia have been killing Ukrainian civilians and destroying civil infra-structure. At the time of the explosion, which could have only worked fron the inside of the physical structure, it was in control of the dam. Destroying it brings only advantages to the Russians, not the Ukrainians – either to block a Ukrainian offensive or to cover up a retreat, or progress to a strategy of scorched earth. The desire to wipe Ukraine off the map, whether by occupation or destruction, has been expressed often enough. Locals reported an unusual accumulation of Russian troops directly adjacent to the dam and the power station the night before.

It is a war crime, and one of epic proportions. Tens of thousands of people are threatened right now and need to be evacuated, with longterm damage to their towns and villages, some irreparably ruined, and no clean water for years to come. It is not just the flooding, and the flooding with water that contains poisonous chemicals (they expect up to 400 tons of engine oil from the plant alone are mixed in the floods), there are also mines carried by the floods that now dot the landscape.

It would already be a disaster of major proportions in peace times. Ukrainian forces and international rescue organizations are, as I write this, evacuating people in the affected region under ongoing Russian shelling. Some 80 villages with almost 1000 houses are already submerged. Further South, the grain basket of Ukraine will not only be flooded – watering systems will be destroyed that leave the land parched for decades to come, making agriculture impossible. Almost half a million people will potentially lack water that is safe to drink in addition to the effects on their livelihood, agriculture.

About 150 km upriver is the Russian-held Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, which relies on cooling water from the now emptying reservoir. So far the IAEA says there is no immediate concern for a melt down, but the danger has to be assessed on an ongoing basis.

As so often, some small details captured my attention that really made the tears flow. It was not the mention of all of the animals (but the swans and ducks) drowning in the Kherson city zoo. Rather one environmental report stated that it is the worst time for animals in the wild to have been exposed: countless spring-born rabbits, foxes, fawns were too young to escape the flood wave of 11.5 feet (3.5. meters) and ground nesting bird nests were destroyed by the water. It is truly apocalyptic, comparable to the Chernobyl disaster in 1986. Maybe it is because you can imagine a drowning fawn and the compactness of that moment of death for a whole region, literally thousands of fawns, while your mind refuses to wrap itself around starving children across the continents, little by little dying from hunger. Refugee waves from hunger zones that will be accosted and returned at the borders if their faces are not white enough. A small country, Ukraine, that lost a high percentage of the generations actively involved in military defense. A country that will be flooded by maimed soldiers for decades to come. The trauma of Ukrainian children who have been growing up under constant threat of death all around them not just the battle fields.

There is historical precedent. In 1941 the Red Army exploded the Zaporizhzhia dam to stop the advance of Hitler’s army. At the time a wave several meters high descended on the Dnipro valley, killing 10.000s of people, some say over 100.000, even though the Zaporizhzhia lake contained far less water than the Kakhovka reservoir today (it had more than the Salt Lake in Utah.) The disregard for life, human or otherwise, from flooding or starving a people into submission, like Stalin did with the Holodomor, a man-made famine that convulsed the Soviet republic of Ukraine from 1932 to 1933, is just incomprehensible. Let us not forget, though, that the U.S. is no stranger to those actions. According to the Times of Israel, on March 6, 2017, a covert United States military unit reportedly targeted a massive dam (Tabqa Dam) in Syria controlled by the Islamic State with some of the largest conventional bombs in the army’s arsenal, despite the levee being on a “no-strike list” given that flooding could put the lives of tens of thousands at risk. Apparently a catastrophe was avoided because some of the bombs did not explode.

Looks like similar luck did not extend to the Crimea and the poor people of the region and city of Kherson.

Music today: The Ukrainian anthem is called ‘Ukraine is Not Yet Dead’, composed in 1863 by Mykhailo Verbytsky to a patriotic poem by ethnographer Pavlo Chubynsky. It was the short-lived anthem of the Ukrainian National Republic in 1917 and restored as such after the restoration of independence in 1992.

I VERY much recommend listening to Yale Professor Timothy Snyder’s lecture series the Making of Modern Ukraine which is an analysis that puts the daily horrors events of this war in a historical context.

3 Comments

Staying connected

Valentine’s Day has come and gone, but I am still thinking about it. That is partly because my inbox yesterday contained a moving essay about the historical origins of the celebration and some associations to the war in Ukraine by Timothy Snyder. The thought of loss of life and loved ones in war feeds into a question the day always poses for me: what is harder, feeling isolated in a world where romantic love, or love of all kinds, is celebrated when you don’t have a longed-for partner, being single or a widowed, for example. Or is it worse to actually have a love in your life but be unable to connect to them, because you are locked away, be it through pandemic lockdown, exile, displacement or prison.

Which brings me to the actual thought-provoking issues that I recently learned about. (I am summarizing an article by KERI BLAKINGER from the Marshall Project who provides sources; a shorter version can also be heard in a podcast here.)

The number of contraband cellphones has exploded in US prisons, particularly since the onset of the Covid epidemic when incarcerated people were basically left to rot and die in our prisons, with no protective measures and little if any medical care. It is almost like they felt they had nothing to lose if they were potentially culled by the disease and wanted to stay connected to their families and friends during times were supervised prison visits were no longer available due to the pandemic.

Possessing electronic devices other than those regulated by prison administration is a crime; they are assumed to be used for illicit activities like trafficking drugs, making threats and running scams. Being caught with them makes, at a minimum, for losing privileges, more likely being put in solitary confinement, and in some cases producing new criminal charges. Never mind that in almost 100% of the cases contraband cellphones have been brought in and sold for a steep prices (up to $6000) entirely by staff, and not by visitors who have to undergo electronic searches before meeting their loved ones. Occasionally there are drop off’s by drones into remote corners of the prison areas, but those, too, happen under the “blind”eyes of the supervising and bribed wardens.

By all reports the biggest usage is reserved for connecting to those you left behind in the outside world, literally zooming with mothers on deathbeds, or seeing your children grow up.

Other uses are equally upsetting when you think about the implications. Cellphones are used to make videos depicting the inhumane conditions of our prison system from the quantity and quality – or lack thereof – of rotten food,

to the medical conditions of those who are refused medical care, to the sickening conditions of the cells, full of mold and walls left covered with vomit and feces. ( I have previously written about the hunger in prison catastrophe here.) Grievance procedures have been helped with these videos, as has a DOD law suit against the state of Alabama over prison conditions. (The prison administration has acknowledged the ever deteriorating conditions but claimed they do no violate the constitution.)

Cell phones allow incarcerated persons to earn money, by selling artwork on line, or publishing articles, or doing gig work. They are also an enormous help in gaining an education. Some incarcerated people in Georgia, for example, run a computer science course on a group messaging app. Some 300 participants, across states, are using Harvard’s CS50 materials which are all on-line, for a class that is self guided and self graded, and of course, illegal in a prison system that values punitive over rehabilitative actions.

People also learn medical procedures from the internet when the prison infirmary fails them and even order contraband antibiotics with these illegal devices to save the lives of their mates.

Here is a stunning fact, though. Contraband cellphones are most predominant in the worst of prisons, which might correlate with the presence of gangs there, who provide a structural network for the acquisition of these devices. It might also have to do with the fact that those human beings put in cages in these hellholes have no longer much to lose. However, it seems an entirely male thing. Women prisons have not seen any of the recent proliferation of illicit devices.

Why, you ask? Or I asked, wondering. Incarcerated women, 80% of whom are mothers, do not want to risk losing access to their kids, with visitation rights immediately endangered if they are found out. A sliver of connection not willing to be sacrificed for daily contact that might bring about a punishment of permanent loss. Let that sink in, the day after Valentine’s Day.

Photos today from a pre-pandemic visit to one of Oregon’s prisons.

Music today is an album by incarcerated persons, “Tlaxihuiqui” (pronounced tla-she-wiki), which means “the calling of the spirits” in the Uto-Aztecan language of Nahuatl — it was recorded over four days and released by Die Jim Crow Records. I am linking to it here – you need to scroll down and click on the individual tracks. They are as distinct from each other as they come.

3 Comments

Henk Pander – The Ordeal

Ordeal: any extremely severe or trying test, experience, or trial. Synonyms: agony, anguish, calamity, distress, nightmare, torment, torture, trial, tribulation – Thesaurus.com

Here’s the funny thing: when you look up the definition of ordeal, the word judgment is entirely missing from the dictionary listing, and yet that is the etymological root of the term: in Old English it was ordāl, in Dutch oordeel, and in German Urteil.

Why do I care? So many thoughts emerged about the concept of judgement after visiting an exhibition, titled The Ordeal, of recent paintings by my friend Henk Pander in the Alexander Art Gallery at Clackamas Community College. Let’s disentangle them one by one.

First of all, as a friend I cannot objectively judge the artwork, but I can certainly describe my reactions and put them in a context of what I know about the artist, which might help to understand what propels the art. Then again, it might be pure speculation, but that is the bread and butter of the critic. I certainly hold with Oscar Wilde’s notion, expressed in his preface to his 1891 novella The Picture of Dorian Gray:

“The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things. The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography.”

Henk Pander photographed by me in his studio in 2017 during a double portrait session

Experience first.

The college’s Alexander Art Gallery, located in the award-winning Niemeyer Center that opened several years ago, is a windowless, effectively lit space that reminds of a sheltered cove, an impression fostered by a brown, highly reflective floor which resembles the surface of water mirroring the paintings on the wall.

It is a place of calm, until you lift your eyes and look at the walls: then all hell breaks loose.

The power of fire and brimstone, skeletons, skulls and wrecks, mythological creatures bent on destruction and barely human figures dancing on the ruins, all in intensely saturated, vibrant colors momentarily takes your breath away.

Henk Pander Rising Water (2015)

I was familiar with many, perhaps the majority of these paintings, having encountered them in the artist’s studio. The effect of seeing them grouped together, undistracted by any other visual input, precisely and mindfully lit, sequenced in a way where all are directionally anchored in relationship to their neighbors, elevates the work to a whole different dimension.

The exhibition consists of 8 enormous oils on linen, and 6 large pen-and-ink drawings which thrive on the contrast between their size and the pristine executions of small strokes, thin lines and subtle markings.

They also provide material for teaching about artistic practice: some of them are studies or just alternate versions of the oil paintings. Here is one example (referencing Rembrandt’s Night Watch, linking to art history as well).

Henk Pander Dawn (2017)

Thoughts next.

What drives a life-long preoccupation with apocalyptic scenarios and mythological narratives that predominantly reference death and destruction? Why remind us of threats to nature, of plane disasters, with pilots deliberately drowning themselves and their plane’s human cargo, or warmongers shooting planes down? Why dwell on the violence of man killing man, or mythological creatures symbolizing sudden, inevitable harm? No matter how expertly painted, how creatively crafted, how defiantly clinging to beauty in all its visual instantiations, these paintings are about horror, that which is unleashed upon the world by evil forces, that which is experienced by the subjects of the painting, and that induced in us who view the cruelty on hand. Or so one thinks at first glance.

Henk Pander Abyss (2015)

A possible explanation could be guided by the very first painting in the round, if you start with a clock-wise exploration of the art on display. The canvas unveils an autobiographical scene from the artist’s childhood, being shipped off to a region of Holland where food was still available during the hunger years under Nazi occupation. The existential horrors of war and deprivation, imprinted on a young child that saw death on a daily basis and witnessed the fear, despair and other intense reactions from the adults in his life, might guide an artistic exploration of the topic. Given the continuing abundance of existential threats to individuals and/or our planet, the sensibilities of the adult artist might be used to draw parallels.

Henk Pander The Skipper’s Wife (2015)

I believe there is something else going on here, though. For one, Pander was raised in a rigidly Calvinistic culture, a religion he long left behind with his emigration to the United States so many decades ago. Dutch Calvinism might have embedded parts of its philosophy deeply enough to exert continuing influence, if only in explicit rejection. Secondly, the artist’s formative years were spent being educated by the premier art teachers of his time in the Dutch academy, infused with the tenets of Dutch art history starting with the Golden Age of the 17th century. These two factors interact, I want to argue, producing work that is not about the witnessing of horror per se, but the fragility of our existence, caught in the very moment where something irreversibly changes, never to be the same again, raging at the claimed inevitability of it all.

The Dutch have a name for that circumstantial reversal, staetveranderinge, a term derived from the Greek word peripeteia, and a concept embraced in Dutch paintings since the 1600s. The change could be in any direction – from anguish to praise, like in Rembrandt van Riijn’s versions of The Angel appearing to Hagar, but most often captured when circumstances shifted irrevocably to disaster, like Jan Steen’s Esther, Haman, and Ahasuerus.

Jan Steen, Esther, Haman, and Ahasuerus, c. 1668, Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland.

The preoccupation with “state change” corresponded with the rise of Calvinism, a religion that dominated the Dutch provinces and led to long religious wars against Catholic nations but also to boundless prosperity, shaping the evolution of commerce and empire.

Henk Pander Don’t Look (2015)

I’m obviously oversimplifying, but one of Calvinism’s tenets was about judgment and inevitability: the doctrine of predestination, which implied that G-d had already decided everyone’s eternal fate before he created the world. Some, then, were destined to thrive and find salvation, the rest were not. Election was by the grace of G-d, reprobation, on the other hand, the judgement of a G-d bent on just punishment. Calvin himself is cited: “The praise of salvation is claimed for G-d, whereas the blame of perdition is thrown upon those who of their own accord bring it upon themselves.” I will, to the end of my days, not understand this logic, somehow it’s our own fault if we are bad, all the while being predestined to end up in hell. Riddle me that. In any case, things were inevitably decided from the start.

Judgement didn’t stop with the authority on high. Calvinism had judicial assemblies composed of the church’s ruling elders and the pastor, who watched over, regulated and judged the issues of the congregation. In fact there are historians who claim that the social control of Calvinism reached all the way into the social lives of the Dutch: their windows, even on street level, have no curtains so that everyone can look in (a custom that disappeared only during the last few decades). The cultural quirk was rooted in the concept that a praiseworthy Christian had nothing to hide.

Henk Pander Harpy (2015)

Cherished protestant traits like hard work and frugality, and the eagerness to spread the gospel of Calvinism around the world, helped establish colonial empires (never mind resource extraction and slave labor and trade). The 17th century United East India Company (VOC – Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie) prospered from the East Indies (Indonesia) to Ceylon (Sri Lanka) to the Cape of Good Hope (South Africa), bringing untold riches home to the Netherlands, as did its later sister company trading the Atlantic regions, the West India Company (WIC.)

That wealth spread among a relatively large new middle-class, highly educated and willing to spend some money on the arts – they had plenty of master painters to choose from. The philosopher G.W.F. Hegel lectured in his Ästhetik:

“The Dutch painters also brought a sense of honest and cheerful existence to objects in nature. All their paintings are executed meticulously and combine a supreme freedom of artistic composition with a fine feeling for incidentals. Their subjects are treated both freely and faithfully, and they obviously loved the ephemeral. Their view was fresh and they concentrated intensely on the tiniest and most limited of things.”

This was written 200 years ago, about painters from 200 years earlier still. Applies to Henk Pander’s work across various media as well, with the cheerfulness restricted to water colors of floral assemblies and landscapes, the focus on ephemera ubiquitous in his oil paintings. But he also captures the vision that his artistic forbears were so keen on, the point of no return when the plane drowns, the earth floods, violence arrives in its devilishly incarnation, the sharpness of the Minotaur’s skull echoed in the thrust of erection, the Harpy harbinger of the fall of towers.

Henk Pander The Minotaur (2015)

Is the depiction of all these ordeals and threats, over and over again across his artistic lifetime, a nod to the inevitability of our fate? Or are the paintings, in contrast to and in rejection of religious determinism, a warning? Do they imply the possibility that there are ways to prevent catastrophe, escape harm, make the world a less violent place if we abdicate our lust for power or our addiction to materialism? Is the work about agency rather than inevitability, the possibility of change rather than a set fate?

Are the increasingly thick slathering of paint and the choice of – yes – occasional garish colors signs of the artist’s smoldering rage at the futility of his warnings? An outcry that no-one heeds the predictions of yet another prescient artist putting the writing on the wall – or the marks on the canvas, as the case may be?

Henk Pander Excerpts from Native Soil (2015)

I do know that people tend to look away, despite the awards and accolades Pander has accrued across a lifetime, with works included in the collections of the Rijksmuseum (Amsterdam), Museum Henriette Polak (Zutphen, The Netherlands), City of Amsterdam, City of Portland, Jet Propulsion Laboratory (Pasadena), Portland Art Museum, Frye Art Museum (Seattle), Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art (University of Oregon), and Hallie Ford Museum of Art (Willamette University), where a fifty-year retrospective exhibition of his work was shown in 2011.

The avoidance is not so much in judgment of the art, but likely an act of self preservation, not wanting to disturb our already fragile equilibrium. More agony, anguish, calamity, distress, nightmare, torment, torture, trial, tribulation? Bad news sells in the media. In the arts, not so much, unless they are a particular contemporary darling of the art world. Historically, art that defied the powers that be or let us in on their malfeasances was censored by church and state alike. These days, free market mechanisms are all it takes. If people are avoiding that which troubles them, commercial galleries or museums who depend on sales and visitor numbers, respectively, are not rushing to put us through the ordeal of witnessing. It’s a judgement call, they say, with varying justifications, but a clear view of the bottom line. More power to educational institutions, then, that provide access, in an environment that does the work justice.

You have a chance to judge for yourself. There is an urgency in the paintings that deserves our collective attention.

Henk Pander Excerpt from Water Rising (2015)

The exhibition is free and open to the public until the end of the month, with an artist reception this Thursday Jan. 19, 2023, noon-1 p.m. Henk Pander will speak about his work at 1 p.m. There is plenty of free parking in front of the ADA accessible building.

Niemeyer Center at Clackamas Community College,

19600 Molalla Ave.

Oregon City, Oregon 97045

Monday-Friday, 9 a.m.-5 p.m.

Here is another review from Oregon Arts Watch.

6 Comments

Dirty Laundry

When I came again across Helga Stentzel’s whimsical laundry lines this week I thought of one of the very first blogs I had written here some 6 years ago with a message that deserves recycling.

It was about “The Right to Dry,” the name of a movement that fights against state laws and community bans on drying your laundry outside. “Officially more than 60 million Americans are prohibited from hanging their laundry outside, in their own yards or balconies and porches. This 2 minute video clip is a poignant introduction to what served the interest of the electricity industry (with former President Regan and Nancy as their spokespeople!) and those selling dryers.” 

By 2012 the ban was voided (or made it unenforceable) in 19 states (including Oregon) by referral to solar access laws. Many of these are from the 1970s and comprised of hidden clauses in state property laws. A 1979 Oregon Law, for example, says any restrictions on “solar radiation as a source for heating, cooling or electrical energy” are “void and unenforceable.” Clotheslines appear to fit under the umbrella of Oregon’s and other states’ solar rights because systems for hang-drying rely on the sun’s radiation to evaporate water in wet laundry.

***

It is winter. No-one hangs their laundry outside now. Those who are privileged to have dryers or basements with laundry lines have no worries. I am thinking, though, about what happens when poverty and restriction of energy sources soar, like now all across Europe.

Eugene Boudin, 1824-1898 Women Washing on the River Bank, n.d. Oil on panel,

Most severely in Ukraine, of course, where the war destroyed most electricity grids and basements are used as bomb shelters. Besides individuals for whom all reliable daily functions have been bombed out, think of institutions. Hospitals, for example. Can you imagine the volume of laundry that is now to be washed by hand and dried – where? And the implications of soiled linen for (re)infections?

Anton Mauve Woman at a Washing line in the Dunes/ Woman at a Washing line (both undated watercolors)

It is tempting to think of war as happening primarily on the battle field, soldiers and their families the visible victims, but the impact on civil society goes so much further than our imagination provides. Hunger, cold, unsanitary conditions fostering more disease are all cards played by the invaders.

Paul Gauguin Les Lavandières à Arles I 1888

And speaking of imagination – today’s paintings of washer women often repeat the tradition of depicting them as a busy bunch, happily doing their work outside, or in the calm of their yards.

Left to right: Edgar Degas The Laundresses (c.1884) – Hubert Robert Ruins of a Roman Bath with Washerwomen (after 1776) – Pierre-Auguste Renoir Washerwomen (188)

The more likely reality is captured here.

August Sander Waschfrau NB VI/42/14 CTC — ASA 3/42/17

Tourist snaps of pittoresque Italian laundry lines non-withstanding, laundry has been a hard and dirty business.

Antonio Donghi Laundresses (undated.)

Levon Helm from The Band sings about Washerwoman.

For the more classically inclined here is a spoof of Richard Wagner’s Flying Dutchman set in a laundromat by the German Pocket Opera Company.

4 Comments

Water is the Shovel of the Shore

Need a break from the tumult of this month, this year, from politics, war, pandemics? Never mind the nail biting over the run-off election in Georgia, as I write this?

I have just the thing – something to listen to that offers gorgeous, thoughtful music, surprising with the ease and elegance with which it fluctuates between traditional and experimental sound. The Water is the Shovel of the Shore provides at times a calming mix of folk tunes and natural sound and then it shifts to provocative ways to make you think about the historical implications of our relationship to water, the way it nourishes, punishes, bringing life as well as death.

From the series The Whale’s Perspective (2022)

OK, maybe not a break from politics, war and disease, after all, but time spent that fills you with beauty and, ultimately, hope for liberation from our burdens. The album is at its most effective if you reserve time to listen consciously, not just in the background. Even better with headphones, so many artistic subtleties otherwise hard to notice.

From the series The Whale’s Perspective (2022)

And in the department of “How could this be?”: it is again music that usually does not draw me in, namely one based in folk songs and rooted in British, Scottish, Irish and in this instance Guyanese tradition, beautifully sung both in chorus and solos. (The other was Simmerdim, reviewed here earlier.) The answer to that question is easy: the music goes way beyond tradition and explores and integrates progressive approaches to communicating with sound. It is thematically digging deep into our relationship with water, and artistically varied enough to satisfy my everlasting hunger for intellectual stimulation that does not come at the expense of emotional connection. The album serves both. Come to think of it, it feeds bits of my soul as well, given that it reminds me of formative times spent in England while still young and links to my collage work since 2019 which focussed on ships and water in climate change and pandemic contexts. (All images today are from the various series, using my photographs of ships, landscapes and paintings to be combined into photomontages, printed on German etching paper.)

In the Harbor From the series Postcards from Nineveh (2019)

The nine-person folk ensemble Shovel Dance Collective has made a splash on the scene after only a few years of existence, as evidenced in the glowing music reviews found everywhere. Much to be learned for us uninitiated, from the fact that folk tunes have no fixed composers and thus are open to reinterpretation across centuries, to the fact that love and loss seemed to be always anchored as a dyad in traditional folk songs.

I didn’t need the insights from the reviews, though, to be reminded that labor in all of its nuances and burdens was a traditional topic in folk music. Related to water you have the sea shanties, of course, easing the strenuous work load on merchant marine and war ships (thus extracting more labor, in the end), but the music also reminds of the dangers of industrial work, in harbors, oil rigs, and the likes.

From the series The Whale’s Perspective (2022)

And water’s gruesome role in the perishing of human beings exemplifies what this album manages to pull off: showing that exploitation, violent oppression, denial of rights to anyone outside the ruling class are not relegated to history, as captured in traditional song. An estimated 2 million slaves perished during the Atlantic passage. (I will never get over the fact that cargo insurance did not cover ill slaves or those killed by disease while covering drowned slaves – leading to throwing sick ones alive into the ocean for profit even from their death (Ref.) Maybe a small number of all killed overall, but showing the extent of the profit motive in the barbarism of slavery. )

From the series Setting Sail (2020)

From the series Setting Sail (2020)

Not just the past. Of today’s refugees crossing the Mediterranean, 25.313 have died since 2014 and, closer to home, over 800 have perished this year alone by drowning in the Rio Grande or the opposite – lack of water leading to heat death in their approach to the US border.) There is an unbroken chain of themes that these musicians bring to the fore in contemporary fashion, enduring content in marvelously adapted form.

From the series Setting Sail (2020)

The link between history and our present times is amplified by the various sound scapes recorded from rivers, harbor activity and other sources that firmly anchor the music by Alex Mckenzie, Daniel S. Evans, Fidelma Hanrahan, Jacken Elswyth, Joshua Barfoot, Mataio Austin Dean, Nick Granata, Oliver Hamilton and Tom Hardwick-Allan.

Integrating real life sound into music, or creating compositions made up entirely of that kind of sound, has been around for almost 80 years now, with the French broadcast technician Pierre Schaeffer recognized as the father of this musique concrète movement. Here is one of his extraordinary compositions using but train sounds, étude aux chemins de fer. Water was a preferred sound then already – here is one of my favorites, Hugh Le Caine’s Dripsody (for tape) from 1955. Most of us were likely more familiar with the inclusion of extraneous sounds in the realm of more commercial pop music. Remember the traffic noises appearing in the 1966 Loving Spoonful’s Summer in the City? Or the extraneous sounds so dominant in many albums by Frank Zappa, We’re Only In It For The Money, Lumpy Gravy to Uncle Meat included, way before he hooked up with Pierre Boulez, the French composer who is seen as one of Pierre Schaeffer’s successors? (For the fun of it, and I know I’m getting sidelined here, but since I am a fan: Here is Zappa’s Cough Drop commercial using musique concrète. )

Back to he Shovel Dance Collective. The immutable sounds of nature juxtaposed with the arrival of modern aural landscapes, from junkyard work next to Dartford Creek, or rigging and reeds at Erith Marina, to tourists feeding gulls, ferry noises east from London Bridge, and clergy of Southwark Cathedral and St Magnus the Martyr blessing the Thames capture continuity and change, with music as a mode that embraces both, water the vehicle to ferry that idea across, having us gently float on the stream of evolution.

From the series Setting Sail (2020)

As my regular readers know, I have become interested in acoustic ecology recently, given what I learned about Sonic Mapping, Sonic Spectres, Sound Analogies and Sound Variations. This album adds beauty to it all. For me, an awesome find. 

Pacific Sights (Los Angeles) From the series Postcards from Nineveh (2019)

Listen to the Water is the Shovel of the Shore here.

0 Comments

Elective Blindness.

“Magic consists in this, the true naming of a thing.” – Ursula Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea (1979)

There I was, making my way through throngs of revelers who had just disembarked the Santa Express, with another queue waiting to get on. Almost none of them wore masks, so I can be forgiven for thinking I had entered a wormhole – the very same thing had happened to me some years back. I was off to walk quietly at Oaks Bottom on a late Friday afternoon, not expecting anyone, and there was the spectacle of the steam engine, the Santas and reindeers climbing on board, the anticipatory joy in children’s faces.

Well, an occasion to photograph something other than herons and eagles and deer, although they did appear later in the afternoon in my field of view as well, with a howling pack of coyotes (heard, not seen) answering the locomotive’s whistle as a bonus.

My sense of duplicate experience was doubtlessly triggered by the book I’d been reading. Notice the past tense – the novel was so gripping that I finished it within a couple of days. The Anomaly by Hervé Le Téllier, translated by Adriana Hunter, winner of the 2020 Prix Goncourt, France’s highest literary honor, is a novel of dizzying complexity. It is a romp through various genres, sci-fi, mystery thriller, human comedy, romance, philosophical tractate, you name it.

The book also brims with literary allusions, thoughts about religion and politics, skewering with equal measure American and French politicians, the French and American media circus, evangelical crazies, the relentless hunger for fame and riches, the obscene black holes of capitalism, the emptiness of scientific prediction and discourse, the malleability of religious proscriptions, shall I go on?

Importantly, it asks us to think through how we construe reality and what would happen if we find out that we were completely wrong.

The author offers reflections on human psychology in considerable depth, and the possibilities of getting a second chance to do stuff over. None of it, amazingly, overpowers or interferes with the other – you can read this book simply as an amusing exercise in science fiction, or you can see it on par with serious philosophical texts that explore the notion of free will and the origins of consciousness. That in itself is a hard thing to pull off.

It looks like, and I would not be able to judge, that there is also linguistic slight-of-hand embedded in the pages. Le Téllier is part of a group called OULIPO, (Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle founded in 1960,) which explores the possibilities of verse written under a system of structural constraints. Founded by mathematicians, they ride on funny mathematics formulas, like “N+7,” in which the writer takes a poem already in existence and substitutes each of the poem’s substantive nouns with the noun appearing seven nouns away in the dictionary.” Lots of smoke and whistles. (Professional NYT review here. )

So what’s the set-up of The Anomaly? (Caution, some spoilers inevitable…)

The book introduces us to a cast of characters seemingly unrelated, ranging from young children to aging Romeos, professional assassins to Ivy League lawyers, some famous, some not, some struggling, some successful, some sympathetic when first encountered, others not. Their various fates converge, in slow rhythm, with a shared airplane ride that turns out to have a true Doppelgänger – an Air France machine lands after experiencing some turbulence in the U.S. twice, about 3 months apart. The very same people, doubles of the earlier arrivals, with just a quarter year-span of life events between them that are not shared, are crammed into a military air base in New Jersey, and later released back into society.

The novel proceeds on two basic levels. One is the overall reaction of governments, countries, the superstructure of science and religion, clambering to make sense of it all and contain the potential revelations or consequences of this inexplicable event (which turns out to be less singular than first assumed.) It is on this level that much sardonic humor occurs, originally overshadowing the more serious question what one would do when encountering possibilities that shatter everything we believed to be true. The number of answers offered, from religious elders to scientists of all kinds, mathematicians, astro-physicist, molecular biologists, computer scientists etc. are mind boggling. The author’s background as a mathematician and science journalists makes it all sound plausible but also graspable for a layperson like me. The work of the Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom concerning the dangers of unconstrained Artificial Intelligence and the possibility of virtual reality, living in a simulation, is also making an appearance in moving the plot forward.

The other level is the human interest aspect, in itself enough for a book of its own – how do you react when your double appears? Do you share, do you fight, do you integrate or destroy, do you want to continue as the same or take on a different persona (helpfully offered by authorities who seem to have the endless resources to double pensions, bank accounts, housing, job opportunities etc.)? What if there is one husband and two wives, one child and two mothers, one secret now shared by two with different motivations to reveal it? What if one of you got pregnant in the 3 months interval and the other didn’t? Additionally, how does the public in general react when confronted with the possibility that their entire world view is based on false assumptions? Will humans be violent, will they reform, will they reconnect with others in more humane ways when they are confronted with the explanations for this event?

The Doppelgänger theme is, of course, not entirely new to literature. Think of Vladimir Nabokov’s Despair, Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Sharer, Dostoevsky’s The Double, Poe’s William Wilson or Charles Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities. They all, though, had a way out, because it was really a different person that impersonated or was created to impersonate one’s own existence, if not an illusion to begin with. Le Guin’s protagonist in Earthsea is able to get rid of his evil double by finding out his name (sort of like Rumpelstiltskin, I thought.) None of this is applies to those who were created in the apparent anomaly during the transatlantic flight of the novel. They are exact copies of each other to the infinitesimal specs of DNA and experience, and here to stay. Moreover, it is not a scenario implicating two people, but one that affects the entire world.

How doubled individuals solve the dilemma is one question, answered by observing them. WHAT or WHO created this dilemma, and WHY, is the larger question and I will refrain from providing clues (assuming I came to the correct conclusion in the first place, which I would LOVE to discuss with anyone who is going to read this book.)

Let me just say that my brain had to digest some amount of moral philosophy and its role in a digital age that worships technology as well as military violence. A brain that was still humming from the shifts in perception when you get closer to the individuals faced with changing fates, a brain that was tickled by a lot of truly funny literary and cultural allusions to science fiction movies that made me laugh along the way.

One of the key figures in The Anomaly, a writer named Victor Miesel, answers the question about what he believes the true explanation of this doubling might be and what will change if an incredible revelation should turn out to be true: “Nothing. Nothing will change. We’ll wake up in the morning, we’ll go to work because we still have to pay the rent, we’ll eat and drink and make love, just like before. We’ll carry on behaving as if we’re real. We’re blind to anything that could prove that we are fooling ourselves. It’s only human. We’re not rational.”

The true naming of a thing, the magic of this book. Le Guin had it right. Again.

Music about our earth (Herbie Hancock) and a parallel universe (Bikram Ghosh.)

0 Comments

The Punch of Numbers

Do you know that feeling when you are focused on a particular thing and all of sudden you have experiences that are either directly or vaguely related? You hope to get pregnant, (all those decades ago, for some of us,) and start to notice pregnant women everywhere, baby clothes stores popping up in unexpected locations, lullabies being broadcast on your classical radio station? I’m sure you can come up with multiple comparable examples.

Lately, I have been focused on numbers. Numbers people are asking those poor doctors, who struggle to paint a hopeful picture, which might or might not be misleading. Number of stages, of treatments available, number of side effects, number of years that signal a future, or not. Numbers that are given in averages, since that is what basic statistical evaluations will provide. Averages that some happily accept if they speak in their favor, or qualify with “each case is special” if they don’t. Averages that might rely on way too few data points, or be weakened by insufficient randomization. Averages that mean, honestly, nothing if they are not accompanied by information about variability, which patients won’t receive, or might not even know about and consider relevant, if they were not trained as scientists.

Wouldn’t you know it, some complex issues around numbers promptly popped up in my daily readings.

A fascinating discourse on what numbers are used – and which are left out – in the reporting on countries’ death rates from Covid-19, for example. Here I learned about how informations is given in absolute numbers, by news outlets all across the world, telling us how many people died in each country. Huge numbers, to be sure, unfathomably horrifying numbers, if you look, for example, at India. Has anybody noticed that the relative number, when counting numbers of the deceased in proportion to the size of any country’s population, (India has 1.392 billion inhabitants) spells out that pandemic loss of life in the United Kingdom was much higher than what is happening in India? Even if you account for bad data collection and multiply the official numbers given by the Indian government by a factor of four?

Then again, (and I am summarizing what I learned) the numbers that are not captured, either by design or by the difficulty of collecting them, could tell a more complete picture. How many people were sent back to their Indian home villages, dying of poverty-induced hunger or disease, or accidents in dangerous travel condition? What hit did an economy take that had not provided an even barely adequate health care system in a country that has no social safety net?

Closer to home, what numbers were or are suppressed in regard to heightened endangerment of susceptible populations? The elderly are still dying in great numbers in nursing homes, but no-one mentions them anymore after the first wave subsided. The poverty divide, etched along racial lines, is not often captured in the numbers presented in the general news media. (You can get to them by going to governmental/CDC website, which I strongly discourage, given the depressing nature of the data.)

What other numbers never enter the printed press or the evening news? Have you had daily updates on tuberculosis cases, even if every year it causes the death of around 1.7 million people? Or the 1.4 million people who die every year in car accidents?

Was it just that the pandemic was new, affording heightened attention? Or did publication of these numbers have to do with the need to keep populations sufficiently fearful so that they would passively accept heightened lockdown measures and other deprivations, sparing the government the economic and political cost of enacting them by force, police measures included?

Numbers as a form of indoctrination might make you shrug, or confirm your beliefs about statistics as the biggest lies of all. They do have consequences, though. If people who work one hour per week are taken out of the unemployment numbers because, they have, after all, worked!, it points a certain picture that might benefit governmental goals and policies. These, in turn, might hurt some populations and help others, depending what kind of government we elected.

The consequences can be deadly. Here is an example of the typical number problem in service of Nazi Eugenics presented to my parents and their age-mates in the late 1930s in every German middle school book.(Source here.)

“To keep a mentally ill person costs approximately 4 marks a day. There are 300,000 mentally ill people in care. How much do these people cost to keep in total? How many marriage loans of 1000 marks could be granted with this money?”

I do not have to spell out the pathway from these seeds of numerical indoctrination to the T-4 Euthanasia program of 1940, which murdered 200.000 disabled people in the next 5 years.

Given how much of a punch numbers can pull, it is truly important to figure out how they were collected, which were included and which ignored, who collected them, and what purpose they serve. Now I am stuck with the question how all the media seem so seamlessly clued in as to what is desirable to report and what not, even outside of state-sponsored broadcasting. A better preoccupation than worrying about medical numbers, I guess.

Here are fewthrown out by W.A.Mozart, some happy numbers (Figaro) , and some cruel ones…(Don Giovanni.)

Here is a short article on Mozart’s fascination with numbers, as well as that of other composers. In case you need to read something a little more cheerful.

Photographs today are of patterns that invite counting.

3 Comments

Mother’s Day

Let me take yesterday’s Mothers’ Day as my annual occasion to remind all of us that mothering would not be possible but for those who support it, parents and non-parents alike. Let’s celebrate ALL who make raising children in this world a shared adventure.

In this particular year my heart goes out to mothers who have lost their children in the pandemic, upending the natural order of parents dying before their offspring. I cannot imagine anything more painful than to lose a child. The hardest hit geographic areas, Brazil, Uruguay, India have also seen a huge percentage of young people killed by a virus that could have been contained, the latter a fact that adds insult to injury for the bereaved.

Gustav Klimt Mother with two Children (1909/10)

I cry with the mothers who have seen their children killed by political violence. Scores of schoolgirls in Afghanistan, this weekend alone. In Syria, the war has injured or killed one child every 8 hours in the last 10 years. In Yemen, at least 3,153 children have died and 5,660 children have been injured, according to a report by UNICEF. On average, 50 children are killed and 90 are wounded or permanently disabled each month.

Kaethe Kollwitz Die Eltern (plate 3) from War (1922)

The numbers for the Palestinian territories occupied by Israel vary depending on what source you read, but they are shockingly high even when reported by neutral parties. The deaths caused by IDF or settler activity are just the tip of the iceberg. The threats to health imposed by blockades, restricted access to medical care, electricity, food and water have their own consequences. A Human Rights Watch report can be read here and one specifically for Palestinian children by War Child, an organization that supports children in 17 war-torn countries, here. While bereaved families on both sides try to work together and plead for reconciliation, the violence against Muslims continues to increase, as we have seen this weekend in the shocking events at the Al-Aqsa mosque during end of Ramadan prayers. As reported in the Times of Israel, the Red Crescent was blocked by Israeli forces to come to the aid of the 200 wounded, many under 18 among them.

Tears for the mothers in our own country, too. In the last 6 years police have shot 22 children under 16 fatally. According to the Equal Justice initiative, the risk of being one of those victims is 6 times higher for those kids who are Black. If we look at mortality statistics for young Black men and teens, the risk of dying in a shooting, by police or by gang conflict, is increased 20 fold. Black men and boys ages 15 to 34 make up just 2% of the nation’s population, but they were among 37% of gun homicides in 2019 according to the CDC.

Heartache for the mothers and their children who flee unsafe lives for hope of asylum, only to perish on the perilous path across seas or deserts, or to be separated violently at the point of arrival.

Diego Rivera The Family (1934)

Solidarity to the women activists, many of them mothers, who are willing to face separation from their children, and/or threats to their health and lives by torture in prisons around the world: in Saudi Arabian jails, in Iranian jails, in Russian, Turkish, Chinese, Egyptian and Philippine jails, a list by no means exhaustive.

Kaethe Kollwitz The Mothers (plate 6) from War (1922)

Children should be safe. From war, from political conflict, from systemic, state sponsored violence, from racism, from hunger, from being ripped away from their families. Mothers should never have to bury a child.

1 Comments
© 2024