Art & Document

New Deal

2012-02-23T23:02:00.003-05:00

Social Security poster, 1937

Alberto Cairo: "Dignity Cannot Wait"

2012-01-02T15:37:00.003-05:00

A TED talk by Alberto Cairo, whose clinic in Kabul has provided artificial limbs for Afghan citizens since 1990. Cairo's message is not just of physical rehabilitation, but of human pride and the healing power of self-worth. Delivered in Geneva in November 2011 as part of TEDxRC2; the RC stands for Red Cross and Red Crescent.

Pursuit of happiness

2011-11-16T17:07:00.005-05:00

Scene from "Happy" by Roko Belic, courtesy Wadi Rum Pictures

I have been thinking about happiness, in preparation for our screening Sunday of Roko Belic's inspiring new documentary Happy (see details below). Happiness is one of those big subjects that can occupy an evening till late into the night, one in which the phrase "define your terms" drifts repeatedly to mind. What are we talking about when we're talking about happy?

St. Augustine's observation about time is true of happiness as well. I know what it is until someone asks me to explain it. It's a great encompassing word, describing at once an inalienable right of man and a McDonald's Happy Meal. Of what is happiness made: joy? security? love? comfort? ease? wealth? Does it take Valium? or Viagra? Each writes his or her private formula, of different constituents and proportions. Yet what we might call "true happiness" is not so subjective as to elude science entirely. The field of "positive psychology"—the study of well-being instead of affliction—is less than fifteen years old, but in that short time researchers have reached conclusions on what constitutes the balanced sense of pleasure, engagement, and meaning that produces sustained and sustaining happiness. These findings, and how they manifest themselves around the world, are what Belic explores in Happy.

Not to spoil the movie, but come close and I'll whisper a secret: Happiness doesn't come from stuff. No TV or iPhone, yacht or home in Majorca, can in itself transmute an unhappy heart. Financial security is important, but not great wealth. Nor is fame or celebrity, style or fashion, power or beauty. Nothing our consumer culture works so hard to get us to covet is the secret ingredient.

Where does happiness come from, then? In a word, connection: the manifestation of our innate impulse toward understanding, sympathy, fellowship. This quality, and all that flows from it—curiosity, kindness, gratitude, attention—determine our individual happiness and our happiness as a society.

One important element of connectedness is the experience of feeling part of something bigger than yourself, which, among other things, also happen to be a working definition of democratic citizenship. It was this element that Jefferson invoked in the Declaration of Independence when he wrote that "the pursuit of happiness" is among humanity's inalienable rights. The great statesman was not referring to the treadmill of getting and spending when he penned these words. His use of pursuit had nothing to do with chasing acquisitions. It was the word's other definition that interested him, its sense of action, activity, even vocation. Similarly, when Jefferson wrote of happiness, he wasn't thinking in terms of pleasure. In the tradition of the Greek philosophers, the concept Jefferson wished to convey was closer to virtue.

To the Founders, the "pursuit of happiness" signified a calling to virtue, a calling only a free citizen could answer. Virtue, to Jefferson, was the exercise of power for the common good; the "pursuit" of such "happiness" was something one no good man with the gift of liberty could fail to take part in.Which brings us back to connection and Roko Belic's film. I have written in this blog before about the need for a new narrative that redefines our individual and collective desires and intentions, to help us better meet the vast challenges we face together. Happy leads us in that direction, embodying the positive energy it describes and advocates.

As I was preparing this post, I came upon a recent interview with a bestselling author. The author, a man much beloved by readers around the world, was asked the age-old, open-ended, loaded question, "Are you happy?" and without missing a beat, answered provocatively and definitively, "No!" "Are you ever happy?" he was asked again. "No," the bestselling author asserted. "I am never happy." And he went on:

It is not one of my goals to be happy. One of my goals in life was to have challenges. It was to have joy. And at the end of the day, it was to have fun, which I do have, and I'm sure you do have, in the sense that you and I were never satisfied, were never happy. We need the next step, we need the next mountain to climb, we need to take this pebble out of our shoes and continue walking.

This obviously struck the speaker as a heroic stance, but it's not one uncommon among artists and others with a higher purpose. One encounters a similar idea in Baudelaire and Joyce, Lawrence and Dylan, and countless others who have mined the depths: happiness is a trap; it blunts your edge and blocks the entry to regions where terrible beauties dwell. This is a thorny aspect of happiness, one that gives a welcomed texture to the pursuit of the idea. Is such a compromise implied in the notion of happy? Or does a false distance exist between freedom and connection? Roko Belic's Happy describes a potential we have in our grasp, one that, if set in motion, will transform lives. What role will, can, should artists play in that happy new world?

Happy will be screened on November 20 at 4 pm at the Opalka Gallery theater, Sage College of Albany. After the screening, writer and educator Mary Judd, who has written extensively on positive psychology and is associated with director Roko Belic, will lead a discussion. Further information about the film is here. Directions to the screening are available at the Opalka Gallery website.

Happy - A Documentary Trailer from Wadi Rum Films on Vimeo.

Attention

2011-10-11T14:35:00.002-04:00

Many terms have been used to describe Simone Weil—philosopher, activist, teacher, spiritual leader, Jew, Christian, mystic, prophet—yet in each instance the name circumscribes as much as it reveals the essence of her existence.

Weil (pronounced veigh) was born in Paris in February,1909. Her father was a successful doctor; her mother, cultured and ambitious, was from a family of wealthy merchants. Her parents were Jewish but, in the manner of progressives throughout Europe, strictly secular. Their faith was not in God but in education. Simone and her older brother André were raised in a home without toys or other distractions. Intellectual pursuits were the chief form of pleasure. André, who grew up to become one of Europe's most brilliant mathematicians, was doing advanced geometry at the age of nine. Simone could read Greek at twelve, and taught herself Sanskrit a few years later. Both siblings were prodigies in school, but her older brother's obvious genius instilled feelings of inferiority in Simone which she carried all her life.

She was, to say the least, a sensitive child, yet her sensitivity was not that of a spoiled schoolgirl but of a compassionate conscience. In 1919, though just ten years old, she was appalled by the punitive humiliation the Treaty of Versailles inflicted on Germany at the end of World War I—a prescient objection, since the humiliating conditions gave rise to Hitler a decade later. That same year, she turned up missing in the house and was found on the boulevard marching in a labor demonstration and singing the Internationale.

Acute awareness of suffering and injustice were a defining element of her life. Though highly educated—she finished first in the entrance exams for France's highest grande ecolé—she worked in factories, vineyards, and on farms to share with workers the hardship of manual labor. Throughout her life, she gave most of her earnings to humanitarian causes and the poor. She fought on the Republican side during the Spanish Civil War, but was so inept in the setting she ended up burning herself with hot cooking oil and being evacuated to a field hospital. It was one of many instances of excruciating pain and bad health she endured, including lifelong eating disorders and migraine headaches.

Through frail health and the upheavals of social activism, Simone continued to develop her personal philosophy of compassion and unfailing devotion to truth. She filled a great many notebooks with her thought, nearly all published after her death. She quickly moved away from the agnosticism of her parents toward a relationship with God that was radically spiritual and highly personal. "We do not pledge ourselves to love God," she wrote, "we give our consent to the engagement which has been formed within us in spite of ourselves."

The nature of this engagement, its meaning and practice, Weil described as attention. Attention, whole-hearted, selfless commitment to an external reality, be it picking grapes or studying Plato or alleviating suffering, was to Simone a form of prayer. Indeed, to her it amounted to our principle form of communion with God and humanity:

Twenty minutes of concentrated, untired attention is infinitely better than three hours of the kind of frowning application that leads us to say with a sense of duty done: "I have worked well!" . . . But in spite of all appearances, it is also far more difficult. Something in our soul has a far more violent repugnance for true attention than the flesh has for bodily fatigue. . . .

Not only does the love of God have attention for its substance; the love of our neighbor, which we know to be the same love, is made of this same substance. Those who are unhappy have no need for anything in this world but people capable of giving them their attention. The capacity to give one's attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing; it is almost a miracle, it is a miracle. . . . The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say to him: "What are you going through?"

It was this profound ethical stance that first drew Julia Haslett to Simone Weil. "Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity," Weil wrote. Inspired, and to some extent goaded, by the quotation's insistence, Haslett embarked on a six-year journey investigating the author of the idea and how one might apply it amid the myriad and endless sufferings of the 21st-century. The result is Haslett's extraordinary new film, An Encounter with Simone Weil, which is part bio-pic and part personal essay on the meaning of compassion, activism, care, and attention. Haslett's film engages courageously with the densities of existence, its quandaries, suffering, lack of clear solutions. It confronts what Weil called "the sacramental concept of the good," exploring questions of "moral and spiritual responsibility."

An Encounter with Simone Weil achieves this without a moment's preaching or evangelizing, through the sustained act of attending. Like Weil herself, Haslett's central motive is a quest for synthesis of the personal and eternal. The film suggests a more vital description of its subject and heroine. Weil, beyond the inventory of descriptions at the top of the post, was above all a spirit on fire. She died in exile in England at the end of World War II, just thirty-four years old. Her soul continues to cast light.

Helen Benedict to read

2011-09-30T13:22:00.007-04:00

The press release for the reading Helen Benedict will give from her new novel Sand Queen, October 23 at 4 pm, at the Opalka Gallery, Sage College of Albany. Helen was the subject of a blog post on these pages a few weeks ago, which included an interview and excerpt; to learn more, follow the links to that earlier post, to the interview with the author, and an excerpt of the novel.

Author Helen Benedict to read from Sand Queen, her new novel about women soldiers in Iraq, at Opalka Gallery October 23

Author and journalist Helen Benedict will read from her new novel Sand Queen on Sunday, October 23 at 4 p.m. at the Opalka Gallery on the Sage College of Albany campus. The reading, hosted by The Sage Colleges in collaboration with the Creative Arts Therapy Program, the Center for Documentary Arts, and Women Against War, is held in conjunction with the exhibit Windows and Mirrors: Reflections on the War in Afghanistan. The reading is free and open to the public.

Benedict will conduct a seminar on women in war the following day, October 24, at 11 a.m. in Bush Memorial, on the Russell Sage College campus in Troy. The seminar is also opened to the public.

Sand Queen follows two women whose lives intersect at the beginning of the Iraq War. Kate Brady is a 19-year-old US soldier stationed at a make-shift prison in the Iraqi desert, and Naema Jassim is an Iraqi medical student fighting to keep her family intact. Kate, the book’s heroine, joined the Army to bring honor to her family, but instead finds herself threatened both by the prisoners she guards and the men she serves with. Sand Queen exposes the brutality, hardship, and humiliation faced by women in the US military, while also revealing the humor and courage women on both sides of the battlefield use to endure war’s violence and destruction.

Pulitzer Prize novelist Robert Olen Butler praised Sand Queen as, “an important book by one our finest literary artists.”

“Every war eventually yields works of art which transcend politics and history and illuminate our shared humanity,” wrote Butler. “Helen Benedict’s brilliant new novel has done just that with this century’s American war in Iraq.” Kirkus Reviews called the novel “[an] unforgettable testament,” and the Boston Globe proclaimed, “This is The Things They Carried for women in Iraq ... feels right and true.”

Benedict is author of five previous novels and five books of nonfiction, and is a professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Her 2009 nonfiction book The Lonely Soldier: The Private War of Women Serving in Iraq, roused alarm in the Pentagon and Congress with its descriptions of the physical and emotional distress women face the military. Following the book’s publication, Benedict testified twice before Congress on behalf of women soldiers.

What Benedict learned writing Lonely Soldier became the foundation for Sand Queen. “I came to realize,” Benedict said, “even after interviewing more than 40 women who served in the Iraq War and doing a lot of other research too, that there was more to say—an internal, private story of war that lay in the soldiers’ silences, jokes, and tears. Those moments are closed to the journalist, but they are exactly where fiction can go.”

The reading is hosted by The Sage Colleges’ Creative Arts Therapy Program, in conjunction with Windows and Mirrors: Reflections on the War in Afghanistan, a traveling exhibit of 25 murals depicting the war in Afghanistan through the eyes of artists around the world. The exhibit was created and is being toured nationally by the American Friends Service Committee. Showings at both the Sage College of Albany and Russell Sage College are coordinated by Women Against War, a Capital District organization dedicated to peace. The exhibit will be on display at the Opalka Gallery, on Sage’s Albany campus, October 22-23, and at the Schacht Fine Arts Center on the Troy campus, October 24-28.

Benedict’s appearance was arranged through the Center for Documentary Arts as part of its ongoing series of film screenings, readings, and artist appearances. The Center for Documentary Arts, which is hosted by The Sage Colleges, is a not-for-profit cultural organization founded to raise humanitarian awareness and support compassion-in-action.

Film Screening: An Encounter with Simone Weil

2011-09-25T23:05:00.016-04:00

The following is a press release for the Center's upcoming screening of Julia Haslett's exquisite documentary An Encounter with Simone Weil. For more about Simone Weil and Julia Haslett, see my post here.

Quest for a compassionate life is subject of film to be screened
at Opalka Gallery October 16

Dialogue with director Julia Haslett follows exclusive presentation of her
acclaimed documentary An Encounter with Simone Weil

Acclaimed director Julia Haslett will lead a discussion following the screening of her new documentary An Encounter with Simone Weil on Sunday, October 16 at 4 p.m. at the Opalka Gallery at the Sage College of Albany. The exclusive Capital Region screening and discussion is organized by the Center for Documentary Arts at The Sage Colleges and the Opalka Gallery. The event is opened to the public.

An Encounter with Simone Weil is a moving portrait of French philosopher, educator, and activist Simone Weil (1909-1943), who spent most of her too-short life advocating for the socially and politically disadvantaged. Using Weil’s writings and teachings, Haslett tells the dramatic story of an extraordinary young woman whose decision to act on her convictions led her into hardship and spiritual revelation. In her quest to understand Weil (pronounced “veigh”), filmmaker Julia Haslett confronts profound personal questions about her own moral responsibility toward society at large and her family.

Haslett begins with Weil’s belief that, “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” With this quotation as the film’s moral center, Weil’s extraordinary biography is revealed through archival film shot during her lifetime, previously unseen family photos, and modern footage of places she lived and worked, as well as interviews with key people connected to Weil. Haslett then uses Weil’s experience as a framework for her own life, including intimate vérité footage of the filmmaker’s family and personal hardships. Drawing on current news and observational footage, Haslett’s narration draws provocative comparisons between Weil’s insight and the world today. The result: a deeply moving and unique film that questions what it means to bear witness to suffering, and plumbs the quest to live a compassionate life.

Filmmaker Michael Moore chose An Encounter with Simone Weil for a Special Founders Prize at the 2011 Traverse City Film Festival. The documentary was also an official selection at the prestigious Full Frame Documentary Festival earlier this year.

In her brief life, Simone Weil (1909-1943) fought in the Spanish Civil War, worked as a machine operator and farm laborer, debated Trotsky, and was part of the French Resistance. The daughter of affluent Jewish parents, she spent her life advocating for the poor and disenfranchised in France and for colonized people around the world, bravely organizing and writing on their behalf. A consummate outsider, who distrusted ideologies of any kind, Weil left behind a body of work that fills fifteen volumes and established her as a brilliant political, social, and spiritual thinker.

In her writings, she analyzed power and its dehumanizing effects, outlined a doctrine of empathy for human suffering, and critiqued Stalinism long before most of the French left-wing. She believed intellectual work should be combined with physical work, and that theories should evolve from close observation and direct experience. And, after three Christian mystical experiences, she began grappling with religious faith, its role in human history, and the shortcomings of organized religion. Her ideas have influenced countless people, including Susan Sontag, Graham Greene, and T.S. Eliot. The New York Times described her as “one of the most brilliant and original minds of twentieth-century France.” But by far her biggest advocate was the existentialist philosopher Albert Camus, who played a major role in getting her work published after her death.

“I made this film for personal and political reasons,” says director Haslett. “The questions it poses are fundamental and the stakes it raises are quite literally life or death. The film can take a while to sink in, but my idealistic hope is that once it does, it will bring a little more compassion into the world.”

Haslett will discuss the making of the film, and answer audience questions, immediately following the screening. The one-time-only showing will be in the theater of the Opalka Gallery on the campus of the Sage College of Albany, 140 New Scotland Road. Parking is free on campus. Admission is $5, free for Sage students with a valid ID.

The screening and discussion are a presentation of the Opalka Gallery and the Center for Documentary Arts, as part of the 2011 MoHu Festival of Arts. The event inaugurates the Center’s ongoing series of film screenings, readings, and artist appearances featuring narratives of hope, dignity, and compassion that can transform individual lives and impact collective experience.

“I am extremely pleased to host Julia Haslett,” said Timothy Cahill, director of the Center for Documentary Arts. “Simone Weil, and Julia’s film about her, embody the values of ethical engagement and artistic excellence the Center for Documentary Arts stands for.”

The Center for Documentary Arts, hosted by The Sage Colleges, is a not-for-profit cultural organization founded in 2009 to raise humanitarian awareness and foster compassion. Last year, the Center mounted the photography exhibit Battlesight: Dispatches from Iraq and Afghanistan by International Photographers at the Arts Center of the Capital Region.

Ten Years On

2011-09-11T15:45:00.018-04:00

I have been staying away from the television news this week, knowing as we approached the tenth anniversary of 9/11 that to watch TV would be to subject myself to repeated images of that airliner flying into the World Trade Center. Even as I write this, that horrifying vision revives itself and brings me back to that crystalline Tuesday morning in 2001. It had started so sweetly, taking my nine-year-old son to school, then turned suddenly bizarre when, just before 9, BBC radio reported an aircraft had hit one of the Twin Towers. This made me turn on the television, just in time to witness the second plane slice onto the screen and vanish in an orange fireball.

In the next ninety minutes, the first act of our decade-long tragedy unfolded: the Pentagon, the Pennsylvania field, the unimaginable collapse of the towers. The scale of the catastrophe was fathomless. The uncertainty of what was happening, dismaying. Around 9:30, I went to my newspaper job, where I was way past deadline with the lead feature for that Sunday's arts section. One had to feed the beast, so as the world disintegrated around me (literally; I could see a television screen in every direction from my newsroom desk), I dutifully struggled to complete a story about the opening of the new wing of a local museum. The disconnect was prodigious.

I wonder, though, how much more fully present I would have been had I not been distracted by my suddenly superfluous task. It was a morning of numbing shock and awe for everyone, beyond processing. And while I lived through it and paid attention, I'm not sure I've yet woken up from the nightmare of all that has followed either, never fully demarcated the facts and their significance. I doubt that I or anyone of my generation will. The chain of events set in motion by the attacks carry meanings that will only reveal themselves over decades, perhaps even centuries. We who are still steadying ourselves in their wake cannot completely understand them, and it is this impossibility of comprehension that makes what occurred on September 11 so fraught with peril and potential.

Since we place significance on anniversaries of the same measure as our money (ten, fifty, one hundred, etc.), this year—this day—is our first opportunity for deep, collective reflection on the meaning of 9/11. Of necessity, that reflection must be elegiac. Not only is our memory of that day too fresh; the wound remains open. America still bleeds, in Afghanistan and Iraq, as do peoples of other nations in battle zones and drone attacks, Guantanamo cells and dark holes we know nothing of.

Since 9/11, we have done little to heal our nation or the world. Ten years ago, after a pitifully brief period of collective mourning, the US set out to salve its grief with vengeance. Anger at such an attack is natural and appropriate, and the human mind is wired for retribution. Ideals of justice were devised long ago by men who understood the need for trial and punishment. America has from time to time attempted to emulate such ideals, but our bloody legacy of revenge and reprisal, from the burning of Atlanta to the firebombing of Dresden to the assassination of bin Laden, overpowers our better angels. Only in Nuremberg, when the US insisted on trying Nazi war criminals rather than summarily executing them (as the British wished), have we, in extremis, shown a prejudice toward law over wrath.

America is a country built as much on force and the will to power as tolerance and freedom. We are not, as our politicians occasionally warble at us, a peace-loving people. We groove on exerting strength. President Bush, in his address to the world on 9/11, was most himself when speaking of revenge. The Pentagon was still smoldering as Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defense, tasked aides to find a connection to Saddam Hussein that would justify military action in Iraq. The impulse to war was swift and sadly natural. As was, internally, the transition to lock-down and control. How quickly we accepted heightened surveillance and the intimidation of authority on our lives.

A vision of the US as a quasi-police state emerged in our language. At some point early in the aftermath of 9/11, the President began to refer to America as "the homeland," unconcerned that the term was rank with echoes of Nazi Germany and totalitarianism generally. The German word vaterland, which means much the same thing as "homeland," was used to stoke German nationalism during World War I, and adopted by Hitler's propaganda machine in the years preceding the Holocaust. It calls upon messianic patriotism über alles, over reason, over human rights, over liberty, over mercy. Fatherland, motherland, homeland—these are terms abhorrent to any notion of individual dignity or freedom, but ones perfectly fitted to a mentality of authoritarianism. We now live under the vigilant gaze of Homeland Security which, like the mythical Argus, never sleeps. Indeed, the exponential use of security cameras in every realm of our existence makes the hundred-eyed Greek giant seem ill-equipped. When we pass through the airport, surveillance is conducted by the hardened agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement; to paraphrase Robert Frost, some say freedom will end in fire, some say in ICE. We can't board an airplane without being X-rayed or patted down, and to get into the US, friends from other countries must agree to being treated like criminal suspects and submit to fingerprinting and retinal scans.

Such coercive authority, like all forms of absolutism, grows out of self-deception and enlarges it. We as a nation have yet to collectively explore why we were attacked, as if the answer doesn't matter, or simply raising the query is an affront to decency. So much easier to label what happened on 9/11 evil—a malevolence beyond our ken or control to which the only response is counterattack. But our enemies are nothing so simple as mere "evil-doers"; they are zealous, cunning men with grievances and hatreds. To understand their motives is not to shift responsibility away from their crimes, but simply to exert wisdom. Sages have long taught us that our nemesis has much to teach us about ourself. The mightier the foe, the greater the opportunity for enlightenment.

What does the past expect from us?

In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, the world came together in grief, mourning, hope. There were murmurs of a new beginning in the US, of the end of an era of cynicism and self-interest and the dawning of greater thoughtfulness and compassion. Seven years later, after that optimistic vision was dashed by hapless war and delusional wealth, it rose again with the election of Barack Obama. He has yet to prove he is equal to the dream, but the world remains weary for change. It is pent up with anguish and aspiration. There are those who believe humanity is in the midst of an evolutionary transformation as momentous as our shift from Neanderthal to homo sapiens; who sense, in everything from quantum physics to neuroscience to astrology, the emergence of a global awakening. This intimation of limitless change—not progress but metamorphosis—has been steadily increasing since the 1960s, and we are by now in the third or fourth generation of people who feel it imminent.

If I did not believe this myself, I would not have started the organization that supports this blog. I do not expect anything magical to happen tomorrow, don't think our fate is controlled by the Mayan calendar, am not waiting for the 2012 arrival of Quetzalcoatl, and have doubts that Next Age global "summits" will in themselves affect great change. And yet all such energy moves us toward an awakening around the world, one stirred as much by the awareness that we share a tiny planet with finite resources as by metaphysical epiphany. We must reform ourselves or perish. If indeed we are part of an evolution of consciousness, the fact that this notion has been around fifty years is not cause for cynicism or proof we're waiting for Godot. Quite the opposite. It means we stand at the beginning of something we may not achieve in our lifetime, just as the great grandfather who plants the tree never sees it in its mighty, shade-giving splendor.

What has this to do with the anniversary of 9/11? Everything, I insist. Because after the cruel destruction of that day and the bloodshed and devastation that followed, the one incontrovertible truth these events have demonstrated is that aggression never works. Not in the long run. It will not affect the change you imagine and cannot set you free. Aggression is slavery, and if we are not to destroy ourselves as a race we must, must, must reject it. We must rise above our baser instincts for viciousness and violence and accept our human capacity to cooperate, to collaborate, to experience empathy and feel compassion. Love—only love—is the hope at the bottom of Pandora's box.

So I will not subject myself to pictures of airplanes flying into buildings today, because that is a history we must purge ourselves of. I don't mean we should forget what happened ten years ago. But the past can gain no meaning when we simply replay it for dramatic effect. There is a residual light from the what-has-been that shines for our eyes. It illuminates a new narrative, which lies ahead.

Jean Alaux, Pandora Descending to Earth with Mercury, public domain

German WWI recruitment poster, public domain

Théodore Géricault, Trumpeter of the Hussars on Horseback, Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute

In One Minute You Are Transformed

2011-08-31T18:03:00.001-04:00

A talk by Dr. James Doty, Director of Stanford University's Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education, an organization founded "to create a community of scholars and researchers, including neuroscientists, psychologists, educators and philosophical and contemplative thinkers, around the study of compassion. Drawing from such varied disciplines . . . , [the Center] is working to gain a deep understanding of compassion and its associated human behaviors in all its richness."

In this address, delivered earlier this year in San Francisco, Dr. Dody describes how a moment of compassion can change lives, and, in the words of the Charter for Compassion, which first posted this link, "illuminates a clear path to a better world."

Sand Queen

2011-08-16T12:41:00.007-04:00

Once the ruckus has died down and we've left the guys to untie Mack, which they don't do till he's seriously late for his shift, we females douse off our running sweat with bottled water, ignoring the shouts of "Wet T-shirt time!" and take out our T-Rats. Morning is the only time I can really chow down, before the heat and my nerves get too bad—if you can call T-Rations chow. Tubes of green eggs that shake like a fat lady's flab, mushes of unidentifiable—well, mush. I shovel it all in anyway, needing the strength. Then we're off to our squads, and that's the last I'll see of another female till tonight—an American female, that is.

By the time my team arrives at the checkpoint, not only are the usual civilians already there, but I see that girl Naema right away, too. I'm heading over to say hi when Kormick barks, "Brady!" At least he didn't call me Tits or Pinkass. [Read more]

So begins another day in Iraq for US soldier Kate Brady, the heroine of Helen Benedict's powerful new novel, Sand Queen. Heroine may be entirely the wrong word for this teenager thrust into a world of brutality she can neither comprehend nor control, particularly in carrying out the unpleasant duties of a dubious foreign policy. As we follow nineteen-year-old Kate through the inferno of the Iraq War, we are repeatedly reminded that the most heroic labor a soldier may undertake is to survive the experience with her soul intact.

I met Helen Benedict last month when we both participated in the Festival of Writers at Rensselaerville, New York. I was showing photographs from the exhibit Battlesight and Helen read from Sand Queen, both of which describe the horrors and ambiguities of the war in Iraq. Our work was the common ground from which we embarked on a rich journey of ideas and observations.

Helen is the author of six novels and five books of nonfiction, which she teaches at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Her novels, quoting from Wikipedia, "explore the themes of displacement, isolation, racism, and sexism, often through the eyes of people who fall outside the predominant culture." Helen has written extensively about the effect of warfare on those who fight, in particular women in the US armed forces. In 2009, she published The Lonely Soldier: The Private War of Women Serving in Iraq, a nonfiction book profiling five women's experiences in the military. Lonely Soldier exposed the indignity, injustice, abuse, and neglect women endure when they place themselves in service to their country. Much of the mistreatment is sexual and sexist, including seduction by recruiters, harassment and rape by fellow soldiers and superiors, and contempt from commanders. These, on top of the pressures all soldiers face—the harshness of day-to-day existence, the atrocities of the battlefield, the estrangement, dislocation, and trauma of life back home.

The Lonely Soldier is one of those books that makes your anger rise the deeper into it you go. It cast a bright light on sexual abuse in the armed forces and raised the awareness of the public and the authorities. In its wake, Helen lectured at military academies and testified twice before Congress on behalf of women soldiers. Her achievement as a journalist gave her standing as an expert and influenced policy.

Having written the book, having sat before Congress, even having adapted the material into a play, however, Helen knew the work was not complete. The complexity of the subject was more than nonfiction could contain, she told me. At that point, we had entered the sphere that animates this site and the Center for Documentary Arts—a sphere where art conveys truths that lie beyond facts. Aestheticizing reality is often the only way to fully express it. The outrages and attacks Kate Brady suffers in Sand Queen are much the same as those described in Lonely Soldier, but for the reader the experience is far more intimate and painful.

"I came to realize," Helen said in an interview we did together, "even after interviewing more than forty women who served in the Iraq War and doing a lot of other research too, that there was more to say—an internal, private story of war that lay in the soldiers’ silences, jokes, and tears. Those moments are closed to the journalist, but they are exactly where fiction can go."

She expanded on this point in an essay "Why I Wrote a War Novel," in On the Issues Magazine:

I wanted to tell that hidden story, but I knew much of it lay beyond what these women were willing or even able to say aloud. Some couldn't speak because they didn't have the words, some were too afraid, others too proud, and yet others too ashamed. . . . So I turned to fiction, where I could combine my interviews, research and imagination to fill in those silences and get to the uncensored story of war -- to how it really feels to be in a war day in and day out, from the long stretches of boredom to the worst moments of violence, and all that happens in the minutes, hours and months in between.

✻

Sand Queen achieves this through the voice of Kate Brady, an innocent who joins the military in search of honor and finds instead cruelty that ranges from brutish to sadistic, a viciousness expressed physically, psychologically, psychically, existentially. As the novel begins, we meet Kate already affected by the experience, having adjusted to the barbarism by adopting it against her nature. The reader follows her as she wades ever deeper into this transformation, experiencing its effect through her senses and understanding it through her developing awareness.

Briefly, Kate's destiny crosses with that of an Iraqi medical student called Naema Jassim, whose family has been driven out of their Baghdad home only to have her father and brother imprisoned in an American raid. The novel cuts between the two women as their paths converge and separate and each endures her own descent into the maelstrom. The journey is harsh, as the excerpt at the beginning of this post suggests, and there were times I had to put the book down and reset. Yet nothing is gratuitous or played for sensation in the book. Never does the suffering seem anything but authentic, making it all the more gutting.

Helen and Soho Press have kindly allowed me to run an extended excerpt of the novel here; you can find it and my interview with the author on the Helen Benedict page at the top of the blog. The conviction of the Center for Documentary Arts is that certain artworks call us to higher awareness and deeper connection to the world. When I speak of the "documentary arts," I am thinking of a novel like Sand Queen as much as the reportage of the Battlesight photographers. It matters not if the art is factual or imaginative, narrative or lyric, unsettling or inspiring. Truth has many guises, but speaks in one voice.

Evelyn Glennie

2011-08-06T22:33:00.008-04:00

Evelyn Glennie is a virtuoso percussionist who has been profoundly deaf since age 12. She is an incandescent artist who continually expands one's capacity for wonder. This TED talk, recorded in 2003, reinterprets the act of listening, opening pathways for experiencing sound with one's whole body and being. It concludes with a sublime performance.

Photo: James Wilson/©Evelyn Glennie

Festival of Writers

2011-07-15T12:41:00.005-04:00

The Center for Documentary Arts will participate in the Rensselaerville Festival of Writers with an exhibition of selections from Battlesight: Dispatches From Iraq and Afghanistan by International Photographers at the Way Out Gallery, Main Street, Rensselaerville, NY. The Festival of Writers takes place July 28-31 in the Albany County hamlet of Rensselaerville and will include readings, workshops, book signings and more with such luminaries as Helen Benedict, Nick Flynn, Verlyn Klinkenborg, Francine Prose, and others. Battlesight features the work of photographers Cheryl Diaz Meyer, Balazs Gardi, and Teru Kuwayama. A gallery reception on Friday, July 28, from 5 to 7 pm, will be followed on Saturday morning with a public conversation on journalism, ethics, and the meaning of war photography with Pulitzer-Prize journalist Josh Friedman and Documentary Center director and exhibit curator Timothy Cahill. The Battlesight page on this blog has more about the exhibit.

Way Out Gallery installation views

It Is All One Water

2011-06-29T18:41:00.020-04:00

This short film by New Zealand artist and writer Claire Beynon has been accepted into the Possible Futures Film Contest, an international competition challenging storytellers of the world to create a new vision for the future of humanity. The aim of the films and the contest is to redefine our relationships to human justice, environmental sustainability, peace, and individual fulfillment.

Using footage shot at Explorer's Cove, Antarctica and around Dunedin, on New Zealand's South Island, It Is All One Water reflects the director's long-running response to the ocean as a symbol for the elemental interdependence of life. This new film is a mysterious and beautiful addition to that work. The director twice collaborated on ArtScience projects in Antarctica with biologist Sam Bowser, and the footage here reflects ideas she explored there, introducing artist-made objects into the polar environment. The results are often spellbinding, as the objects — a small boat and a leaf-like porcelain sculpture — seem at once to surrender to the sea and dialogue with it. This is a potent metaphor for an alternative relationship to the one we've been having with the world's oceans, the BP oil disaster and on-going radiation contamination by the Fukushima nuclear plant being just two recent examples. The film's soundtrack combines original music by South African composer Chris Tokalon and narration by CB of a poem composed by herself with contributions from five poets in the US and NZ. This spirit of collaboration is integral to the film's meaning.

Cave of Souls

2011-06-27T01:59:00.017-04:00

I am just back from Werner Herzog's extraordinary Cave of Forgotten Dreams, his exploration, visually and philosophically, of the Chauvet cave in southern France. There, in 1994, a collection of prehistoric art was discovered by three explorers who found a small opening in a cliff and soon were face-to-face with an almost unfathomable array of paintings. The French government immediately closed access to the cave to all but a select group of scientists and historians. Herzog's film, presented in vivid 3-D, is the closest any of us is likely to get to the art.

The paintings in Chauvet are more than 30,000 years old, making them nearly twice as old as those in Lascaux or Altamira, Europe's other great caches of Paleolithic art. They were made by our Cro-Magnon ancestors, literally at the dawn of Homo sapiens. When the paintings were created, Neanderthal man was not yet extinct.

The implications of this are profound, suggesting there is no gap between the emergence of modern man and the appearance of artistic expression. Art is intrinsic to our being. Imagination shaped our identity.

Perhaps the most extraordinary aspect of the paintings is their realism. The creatures in Chauvet are rendered with a remarkable level of detail and precision that Herzog's 3-D cameras richly reveal. The Chauvet artists expressed volume and mass with a highly sophisticated sense of modeling and chiaroscuro. There is a precise balance to the animals, even a kind of poise, and a sense of movement suggested through posture and the repetition of limbs or horns, almost a proto-animation. By far the most moving element of the paintings are the animal's eyes, which, through careful rendering of shape and size and gradation of light, seem filled with life, and an awareness that occasionally borders on pathos.

Throughout the picture Herzog describes the images as paintings, but I kept regarding them also as drawings, which raised an interesting thought. In the Renaissance there was a philosophical distinction between painting and drawing; painting being the expression of immediate, fleeting perception, drawing the contemplation of essence. Drawing was more than the definition of form; it was a revelation of underlying principles. There are moments in Chauvet when the same insight seems to be at work. Far from merely recording reality, these cave artists seem to probe it, and have already begun interrogating the meaning of life.

That this appears to be true, that from our earliest days art has been a way we created meaning, is suggested in the cave's most provocative image, dubbed by archeologists the Minotaur. The picture, drawn on a suspended pendant of rock, depicts a bison embracing a female figure. The naked woman, the only human depiction throughout the massive cave, evokes paleolithic carvings of Venuses, those primal effigies of sexuality, fertility, creation. The Chauvet Venus is represented only by her pubic triangle and legs, slightly spread. The bison appears to enfold her in an attitude of tenderness, contemplation, and what can only be described as wonder. Gazing at this picture is like being present at the birth of myth, the emergence of the collective unconscious.

This is the miracle revealed in Cave of Forgotten Dreams. Along with an astounding treasury of human ingenuity, Herzog's film presents us with the earliest expressions of our soul.

A Candle for Christchurch

2011-06-25T13:54:00.005-04:00

On February 21, a disastrous earthquake struck Christchurch, New Zealand, the country's second largest city. More than 180 people perished, great swaths of the city were damaged, thousands of people were uprooted, and much of the central business district was destroyed and is in the process of being demolished. The quake attracted the world's attention for three weeks, until Japan was devastated by an even more severe earthquake, tsunami, and ongoing nuclear disaster.

Since then, there has been almost no news about Christchurch in the US, leaving the impression that it's all over there but the clean-up. In fact, the city has been beset by an almost continual pattern of aftershocks, temblors, and convulsions these past four months. In some parts of the city water and electric service remain fragile. Residents have proved amazingly resilient, but the emotional toll of living under such conditions must be beyond imaging. On June 13, the city was rocked by two more quakes, one equal in magnitude to the February event.

Three days ago, on 21 June, Christchurch residents were settling into their longest night, the winter solstice, when still another earthquake hit, once more knocking out power to a population with frayed nerves and strained resources.

The human story always lies beyond the headlines, in the day-to-day struggle to survive, endure, build, and rebuild. Remember the people of Christchurch, that their nightmare will soon come to an end. If you pray, include them in your prayers. If you light candles, touch a flame to a wick. If you drink, raise a glass to better days. No action is lost to the universe.

Claire Beynon, Candles for Christchurch

Christchurch photos (3), New Zealand Herald

Unity is our essence

2011-05-26T21:48:00.014-04:00

At the same time, however, the relationship to the world that ... modern science fostered and shaped now appears to have exhausted its potential. It is increasingly clear that, strangely, the relationship is missing something. It fails to connect with the most intrinsic nature of reality and with natural human experience. It is now more of a source of disintegration and doubt than a source of integration and meaning. It produces what amounts to a state of schizophrenia: Man as an observer is becoming completely alienated from himself as a being.—Vaclav Havel

It is becoming clear to almost anyone who thinks critically about it that science as we have long understood it is no longer equipped to address the challenges of the future. This is not to say that researchers and innovators in laboratories around the world may never come up with a carbon-neutral replacement for gasoline or a safe way to dispose of nuclear waste, or that the age of medical breakthroughs is behind us. But the notion of traditional science as the dynamo of something called "progress" feels pretty much used up. Utopian visions of societies operating justly and efficiently on the ball bearings of technology are artifacts of the past, and there isn't a school child alive who doesn't see that the old mechanistic ideas of scientific thought are as responsible for our current crises, human and environmental, as they were useful in eradicating the pestilences of old.

We are in the midst of an unmistakable evolution of consciousness toward higher orders of compassion, cooperation, and love. This statement may seem willfully foolish given the intractable woe that exists everywhere, be it warfare, displacement, human trafficking, state-sanctioned rape, mass poverty, or any of the other countless horrors around the globe. Yet life is governed by laws of polarity, and the more monstrous humanity behaves, the more urgent becomes its need and response. The rise in a collective movement toward compassion is inspired in part by the crises of sustainability we as a race and a planet face. As populations grow and the biosphere depletes, as resources dwindle and distorted power structures appear to exploit them, people in every part of the world are waking up to the failure of the old systems and the imperative for a new way based on different values.

In this regard, the age of science as both ideology and faith must give way to something more humanistic and humane. Science as a model for how to engage and steward life has proven fatally flawed. Instead of empiricism's simplistic cosmology of predictable and controllable cause and effect, we live in a world of chaos, collateral damage, and unintended consequences. There are those who still believe human intellect, with the aid of supercomputers and nuclear microscopes, can think its way out of the labyrinth of life's ever-creative repertoire of complexity. Beside them, however, is an ever-growing movement turning instead to the intelligence of the heart, our remarkable fist-sized blood pump which is also the seat of our courage, kindness, and boundless power of love.

None of what I have written is in any way a repudiation of science per se, nor a turning away from its core value of discovery. Nor are the sentiments of Vaclav Havel, in the address quoted at the top of this post. This extraordinary speech, given in Philadelphia on Independence Day, July 4, 1994, was a prescient early expression of the awareness that has grown in the seventeen years since he spoke. “I think there are good reasons for suggesting that the modern age has ended," Havel said that day. "Today, many things indicate that we are going through a transitional period, when it seems that something is on the way out, and something else is painfully being born. It is as if something were crumbling, decaying, and exhausting itself, while something else, still indistinct, were rising from the rubble.”

The thing "rising from the rubble" is a greater understanding of the connection between observation and being, scientific law and human integrity, existence and love. "Inspiration for the renewal of [our] lost integrity," Havel said, "can once again be found in science, in a science that is new—let us say postmodern—a science producing ideas that in a certain sense allow it to transcend its own limits."

The idea that such a science is at hand forms the foundation for Tom Shadyac's documentary I Am. The film chronicles Shadyac's exploration of the new paradigm, conducted through interviews with leading intellectuals, scientists, and writers. By the end, the director discovers that, indeed, the world's great wisdom traditions had it right—we are all connected, and our connectedness is at the heart of our humanity. He sets his course not by religion or philosophy, however, but by conclusions gained from quantum physics, neuropsychology, evolutionary biology, environmental studies, and noetic science, the emerging study of the interface of consciousness and matter.

Shadyac begins by going back to Darwin, whose concepts of natural selection were popularized to assert the influence of competition over caring, a claim that was quickly extended into the spurious realm of "social Darwinism." Darwin made no such cultural claims himself, and many after him have observed that successful mutual aid among animals and humans is as much a definition of "fitness" as individual dominion. The idea that humans are wired as much to cooperate as compete has been bolstered by the discovery of mirror neurons, tiny brain receptors that make empathy possible, and the action of the vagus nerve (actually a pair of nerves) which, when we witness an act of kindness, releases oxytocin, a hormone related to nurturing and orgasm.

Shadyac ups the ante when he visits the Institute of HeartMath, a research organization that has, through controlled experiments, amassed evidence that the heart truly is one of the body's centers of intelligence. One of the film's memorable moments comes when the director's negative emotions apparently cause a dish of yogurt to emit its own negative feedback. It's the humorous illustration of a serious point, that emotions are physiological as well as psychological, and that kind thoughts alone can impact the behavior of others. I Am evokes the notion of quantum entanglement—the fact that atoms at an infinite distance react to certain stimuli simultaneously—to demonstrate the level at which all living stuff is quite literally connected. There is no separation, not of distance or time; in tracking the inert element argon, a part of earth's atmosphere, scientists have even concluded that we all breath the same air, and have since time out of mind.

The conclusion is inescapable: unity is our essence. This idea is supported by a growing weight of fact, and to believe it is no longer the stance of the dreamer, but of the enlightened thinker. This is Shadyac's conclusion and his film's manifesto. The movie ends by asking how we can change society; the answer: through a change in consciousness. Knowledge is transformational. Shifts in awareness produce changes in attitude. The process is natural and inevitable.

Here is where the artist becomes key. Artists, with their ability to express the subtlest and most complex truths, are called now to the forefront of the new consciousness, called to clarify, to illuminate, and to express. What is "art for art's sake" beside this vocation? The Dalai Lama, asked to name the most important meditation of our age, answered, "critical thinking followed by action." More persuasive than propaganda, this is how art will change the world.

Michelangelo, Phaeton, British Museum
Vaclav Havel, c. 1990, Council of Europe

"I Will Not Rejoice in the Death of One"

2011-05-03T00:46:00.008-04:00

In the aftermath of the US killing of Osama bin Laden, a quote attributed to Martin Luther King has been making the rounds in cyberspace. Here's how it came to me via Facebook:

Shared from a friend: MLK expresses the ideal: "I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy. Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that." -Martin Luther King Jr.

Curious to know when and in what context King said something so startlingly congruent with my own feelings today, I went — where else? — to Google. But all I could find were variations of the quote, disembodied from any larger source.

Then I found this, by Megan McArdle of the Atlantic: Out of Osama's Death, a Fake Quotation is Born. "Something about it just strikes me as off," McArdle says about the quote. She goes on to assert she can't find the quote anywhere on the Internet, and concludes it was made up.

But not so fast. Sifting through the rubble we call the World Wide Web, I found evidence that contradicted McArdle, at least to an extent. Someone referenced a passage from King's book Strength to Love, a collection of meditations on nonviolence he published in 1963. In a chapter titled "Loving Your Enemies," King did express at least part of the quote. Here's the section, which follows a discussion of the differing Greek terms for love, eros, phila, and the one King is interested in, agape, which he defines as "creative, redemptive goodwill for all men." I took a screenshot of the text from Google Books:

So the quote making the rounds isn't entirely specious. Intrigued now with what else the Internet would yield, I dug a bit deeper and discovered an earlier evocation of the same idea by King, using much the same language. On Martin Luther King Online, I found the text of a sermon the master preacher delivered November 17, 1957, also titled "Loving Your Enemies." The passage in question comes up in the lesson of a modern parable:

I think I mentioned before that sometime ago my brother and I were driving one evening to Chattanooga, Tennessee, from Atlanta. He was driving the car. And for some reason the drivers were very discourteous that night. They didn’t dim their lights; hardly any driver that passed by dimmed his lights. And I remember very vividly, my brother A. D. looked over and in a tone of anger said: "I know what I’m going to do. The next car that comes along here and refuses to dim the lights, I’m going to fail to dim mine and pour them on in all of their power." And I looked at him right quick and said: "Oh no, don’t do that. There’d be too much light on this highway, and it will end up in mutual destruction for all. Somebody got to have some sense on this highway."

Somebody must have sense enough to dim the lights, and that is the trouble, isn’t it? That as all of the civilizations of the world move up the highway of history, so many civilizations, having looked at other civilizations that refused to dim the lights, and they decided to refuse to dim theirs. And Toynbee tells that out of the twenty-two civilizations that have risen up, all but about seven have found themselves in the  junkheap of destruction. It is because civilizations fail to have sense enough to dim the lights. And if somebody doesn’t have sense enough to turn on the dim and beautiful and powerful lights of love in this world, the whole of our civilization will be plunged into the abyss of destruction. And we will all end up destroyed because nobody had any sense on the highway of history. Somewhere somebody must have  some sense. Men must see that force begets force, hate begets hate, toughness begets toughness. And it is all a descending spiral, ultimately ending in destruction for all and everybody. Somebody must have sense enough and morality enough to cut off the chain of hate and the chain of evil in the universe. And you do that by love.

So this concept of darkness begetting darkness, hate begetting hate, was an idea MLK had been developing over the years, borrowing from and slightly modifying his phrasing as he went along. Knowing this, I'm not at all sure King did not say the words quoted by my Facebook friend. He may well have spoken them, and if he did, my guess is it would have been near the end of his life, when he had turned his attention to broader issues of peace and justice, and was speaking out against the Vietnam War. Gut feeling.

All this is by way of broaching the larger issue, which is how to feel in the wake of Osama bin Laden's swift and sudden death. And in this I find myself torn. Viscerally, I cannot regret bin Laden's fate. Not long ago, I listened to Homer's Iliad, the whole long poem, while driving back and forth two hours a day to a work project. As Homer graphically demonstrates, bloody vengence is as much a part of our Western tradition as Plato and Pythagoras. Every one of the great Greek heroes took what you could only call sadistic delight in vanquishing the enemy in a stunning array of brutal, violent actions. Something there is in mankind that loves revenge. I'm just — I don't know what, American enough? male enough? human enough? — to thrill a little at the idea of our guys storming Osama's compound and taking him out.

But I get no lasting satisfaction from my own thrill. It comes back on me with a bitter taste. In my heart, I agree with Martin Luther King, however much of that opening sentiment he actually uttered. The reason the quote has gone viral is because there is wisdom in it, wisdom born of compassion, dignity, and respect for human life. The demands of love require us to, at the very least, be sober in the face of what took place in Pakistan on the first of May. In the 1957 sermon, King addresses this concept of love:

You look at every man, and you love him because you know God loves him. And he might be the worst person you’ve ever seen.

And this is what Jesus means, I think, in this very passage when he says, "Love your enemy." And it’s significant that he does not say, "Like your enemy." Like is a sentimental something, an affectionate something. There are a lot of people that I find it difficult to like. I don’t like what they do to me. I don’t like what they say about me and other people. I don’t like their attitudes. I don’t like some of the things  they’re doing. I don’t like them. But Jesus says love them. And love is greater than like. Love is understanding, redemptive goodwill for all men, so that you love everybody, because God loves them. You refuse to do anything that will defeat an individual, because you have agape in your soul. And here you come to the point that you love the individual who does the evil deed, while hating the deed that the person does. This is what Jesus means when he says, "Love your enemy." This is the way to do it. When the opportunity presents itself when you can defeat your enemy, you must not do it.

It is not necessary that we grieve for bin Laden, but I do not see how we can rejoice either. I wish we would have taken him alive, brought him back to this country and put him on trial, proved to the world that we are a country of laws, as we did in Nuremberg. There are conflicting reports from Washington in this point; some high level sources say taking him alive was an option, others say it was not. I hope the former is true, and that this wasn't an assassination mission. In any case, to revel in so violent a death is poisonous to our national soul. On this point, King was powerfully eloquent in 1957. He understood hatred as being most destructive to those who exercise it:

There’s another reason why you should love your enemies, and that is because hate distorts the personality of the hater. . . . There is nothing more tragic than to see an individual whose heart is filled with hate. He comes to the point that he becomes a pathological case. For the person who hates, you can stand up and see a person and that person can be beautiful, and you will call them ugly. For the person who hates, the beautiful becomes ugly and the ugly becomes beautiful. For the person who hates, the good becomes bad and the bad becomes good. For the person who hates, the true becomes false and the false becomes true. That’s what hate does. You can’t see right. The symbol of objectivity is lost. Hate destroys the very structure of the personality of the hater.

A decade later, in 1967, as riots were tearing US cities apart, King reaffirmed his belief in nonviolence:

I'm concerned about justice. I'm concerned about brotherhood. I'm concerned about truth. And when one is concerned about these, he can never advocate violence. For through violence you may murder a murderer but you can't murder murder. Through violence you may murder a liar but you can't establish truth. Through violence you may murder a hater, but you can't murder hate. Darkness cannot put out darkness. Only light can do that.

As we stand proud in this blow stuck against international terrorism, we might try standing tall too, and denounce hatred in all its forms, in thought, word, action, and reaction. That includes the varieties of hatred we are now seeing around this country wearing the cloak of patriotism.

Tim Hetherington II

2011-04-22T19:23:00.000-04:00

From Sebastian Junger's meditation on his colleague and friend, who was killed this week in Misrata, Libya, photographing the war there:

Maybe Misrata wasn’t worth dying for—surely that thought must have crossed your mind in those last moments—but what about all the Misratas of the world? What about Liberia and Darfur and Sri Lanka and all those terrible, ugly stories that you brought such humanity to? That you helped bring the world’s attention to?

After the war in Liberia you rented a house in the capital and lived there for years. Years. Who does that? No one I know except you, my dear friend. That’s part of Misrata, too. That’s also part of what you died for: the decision to live a life that was thrown open to all the beauty and misery and ugliness and joy in the world.

And the rest:

http://www.vanityfair.com/magazine/2011/04/sebastian-junger-remembers-tim-hetherington-201104?printable=true#ixzz1KIQWNiQ8

In Memoriam: Tim Hetherington

2011-04-21T13:55:00.007-04:00

I woke this morning to the sad news that documentary filmmaker and photographer Tim Hetherington lost his life yesterday in Misrata, Libya, covering the fighting between the army of Muammar Gadaffi and opposition rebels. The British-born Hetherington and an American colleague, photojournalist Chris Hondros, were both killed by a rocket-propelled grenade fired by Gadaffi forces.

Hetherington will long be remembered as a consummate war photographer and humanitarian. He trained his lens less on the drama of battle than on the terror and psychological assault that defines the war zone. Among the work on his website are portfolios of the civil war in Liberia, of war graffiti, and perhaps most subtle and affecting, a portrait series of US soldiers asleep in their outpost camp on the front lines of the Afghan war. In their faces and postures, Hetherington recorded the trauma many of these men are sure to carry long after their wartime service ends.

In Darfur Bleeds, a brief film made by Hetherington for Human Rights Watch, the humanitarian concerns that motivated his work are fully on display. The film documents the destruction of a village in Chad, ostensibly demonstrating how the war had spilled over the border from Darfur. But Hetherington refuses to turn the event into an abstraction, and pays moving tribute to the individuals who perished in the attack.

I had the good fortune to meet Hetherington this past July, when he was at the New York State Museum screening Restrepo, the documentary he made with author Sebastian Junger about American soldiers in the Korengal Valley of East Afghanistan. I had more than a general interest in the film. At the time, I was preparing the photo exhibition Battlesight , and knew the work of one of the photographers in the show, Balazs Gardi, depicted the same part of Afghanistan where the film was made. Indeed, as I discovered, Balazs's photographs were of the identical Army unit and villages in Korengal, even of the same four-day battle seen in the movie. It was remarkable; more than one combat scene in Restrepo was also documented in Balazs's powerful stills, and Balazs is among those acknowledged by Junger and Hetherington in the end credits.

Hetherington and I arranged to do a telephone interview a few days later, when he was back home in New York. He was called away before the interview was completed, so it went unpublished. I looked at it again today, and feel now as I did then, that I was speaking to an exceptional and courageous artist and man. In Hetherington's memory, I offer excerpts of that conversation now. It begins with my question about a scene from the film.

There’s a moment in Restrepo, just after one of the soldiers has taken fire. He’s almost giddy from the experience, and says, “Once you’ve been shot at, you can’t come down.” Somebody off-camera asks, “How are you going to go back to the civilian world?” “I have no idea,” he answers. Talk about that moment, that experience. Do you feel the same sense of a high in a war zone?

Tim Hetherington: When you hear what that man is saying in that clip, he’s specifically talking about the adrenalin of a battle. But I think for many of the soldiers there, the group experience of what they went through, that bombing, was very meaningful to them. I mean, if you take an 18-year-old and he’s part of that group, and the job he’s tasked with is defending the group, his life takes on a purpose and a significance, a meaning, that must be extremely gratifying. Then when that 18-year-old comes back to America, to society, suddenly he loses all that sense of purpose and meaning. I know many of the guys miss that meaning and significance.

I think it’s the same way with journalists—I know, for myself, that sure, adrenalin is a part of the experience. When I came out of Afghanistan in August 2008, it was like someone had pulled the rug from under my feet because I had been drip-fed adrenalin. So chemically that does something to you. But on the other hand, covering world events, covering these situations, gives your life a kind of meaning as well. It’s very gratifying to be at the center of world events as they unfold. You feel that you have some kind of significance. That is part of the reason you keep going back. It’s not purely a combat adrenaline thing; it’s more than that. And for Sebastian and I, we got close to these guys. That’s why, when I came out of Afghanistan, I missed them. I missed being up at Restrepo.

So there’s a sense that what you’re doing has a purpose, that it’s useful?

You’ve totally hit the cornerstone of my work. I always wanted to be useful and add utility. That’s why, as I’ve said before, I’m really not interested in photography, the art. I recognize that it is an aesthetic medium, so I pay attention to that. But the craft of it isn’t my primary concern. I’m not interested in the craft and art of photography per se; I’m interested in visual communication, and that ranges from the still to the moving image.

You have that perspective of working in these two related, but very different mediums. What are your thoughts about that?

The still image offers the audience a greater imaginative engagement with the subject. You look at a picture, you have to enter into a conversation with the image. That conversation is predicated on a lot of different things—your own personal experience, what you see in the picture, but also your own visual library, what you have stored in your head about the subject matter you’re seeing. When you see a moving image, especially video contextualized with sound, you’re literally being dragged through the experience. You’re not imaginatively as engaged in that. You’ve being shown something that’s more concrete.

I’m from the photographic trade; that’s part what I do, and I understand the strengths and weaknesses of it. I think [the photojournalistic] community is caught up with the aesthetic craft of image making more than what it says. We don’t unravel enough what images say; we’re too held up on the surface level. The problem with photographs is that they can be an unreliable form of witnessing. I understand we all want to believe in the veracity of a photograph. I have a photograph of my mother on my mantelpiece. I want to believe that that image is true. We need to believe images are true. I get that. But as the actual makers of images, if we are engaged professionally in the business, we have to understand that that is also a fallacy.

What did making Restrepo teach you about warfare, about yourself, and, more broadly, about humanity?

We sought to really mine the embedded process, deeper than anyone had mined it before, in terms of the amount of time we spent with the guys, the way we embraced the unit, for all intents and purposes became part of the unit. That was a very profound experience. I had never done that before. I had been embedded with a rebel army in Liberia for six weeks, but never reached that kind of connectedness with the individuals. As a documentarian, either still or moving images, you seek to have this very, very close connection with your subjects, and I really had that with the soldiers out there. Following on from the subject of young men and war, which is a subject I’ve been preoccupied with for some time now, I really came to understand how this bonding, this sense of brotherhood that soldiers attain, that that is really the heart of the war machine. You take a small group of guys, you get them to train together, live together, bond together, they form this brotherhood. This isn’t friendship. This is brotherhood. Guys in the unit admitted they hated each other, but they would die for each other. It’s this sense of brotherhood that’s the cornerstone of the war machine. It’s not Apache helicopters or aircraft carriers or missile defense systems; that is all icing on the cake. This sense of a small group of young men who will kill and be killed for each other is at the heart of it. That goes back to time immemorial. The siege of Troy would be the same thing. It’s an obvious thing but also quite a profound thing when you start to understand that.

Tim Hetherington at the New York
State Museum, July 2010

Love and Justice

2011-04-18T22:24:00.011-04:00

Hugo Perez

For the past week I have been ruminating on what was in every way a fine and moving evening last Tuesday, when we screened Hugo Perez's Neither Memory Nor Magic, a film portrait of Hungarian poet Miklós Radnóti. I had moist eyes more than once as I watched this beautiful and poignant work, which, though it depicts the life of a man who died miserably in the Holocaust, is ultimately about life, not death; courage, not fear; beauty, not brutality. Radnóti's poems, the few I know from the film and from Carolyn Forché's anthology Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness, have burrowed deep into me. He bore witness to the barbarity of the Nazi labor camps where he was imprisoned, with a voice at once elegiac and indomitable, and though he never flinched from the horror of his circumstance, his poems ultimately are expressions of profound love. Love for his wife Fanni, for the music of language, for the world:

. . . tonight the moon is so round!
Don't go past me, my friend— shout! and I'll come around!

I was just admiring, up there, your eyes' blue sheen,
when it clouded over, and up in that machine
the bombs are aching to dive. Despite them, I am alive

My definition of the "documentary arts" is broadly inclusive, as evidenced in the mission state on this page; it's meant to embrace all art that bears witness to the struggle, striving, and triumph of the human spirit. Bearing witness in this sense is no passive, legalistic stance. It demands an active engagement with the world and, perhaps more deeply, a committed relationship to soul. As Forché writes in the introduction to her book, witnessing art "will have to be judged . . . by its consequences." Among the consequences must include art's ability to advocate for life, to stand on the side of compassion, generosity, care; in short, to love. As a position, this is not at all simple or easy. The instinct of a great many artists who fall loosely under the heading "documentary" is, I observe, not toward love as much as justice. I once asked the poet Hayden Carruth which of those two imperatives was "more important"; he declared in favor of love, since love implied justice. I agree with his choice, but the logical equation is not at all straight-forward: all love may encompass justice, but too few things that pose as "justice" can be said to espouse love. Indeed, the concept of justice is commonly defined according to the duality of good and evil, a useful dichotomy if one is in need of enemies or dominion, but not one that accommodates grace. Grace, simply put, is treating others not necessarily as they "deserve," but as love requires — as fellow travelers on a divine journey. This is a radical notion, one that runs counter to logic and experience, yet it seems to me just where we can situate Radnóti, and where the artists I most admire all reside. This does not mean I take no interest in art that seeks to expose injustice or address suffering. Far from it. That is also an act of witness. Yet I have long believed, and maintain more strongly now than ever, that art's greatest power is not as a mirror, but as a torch, beacon, guide, path — whatever metaphor works for you — to higher consciousness. Art elevates humanity not so much via the enlightenment of argument and evidence as through the illumination of the soul's mysteries and wisdoms.

This is what Hugo's film accomplishes. There are passages in it as moving as any I've seen in a documentary film; in one, the screen painfully dissolves to black, a darkness broken by one of Radnóti's poems like a herald from heaven. I want to express my gratitude to Hugo for his work and for being my guest in Albany, and thank all those who attended and stayed for the lively Q&A afterward. More screenings are planned for the future; the Opalka Gallery, my partner in last week's event, will be co-host and venue for a series of four films beginning in October. I am currently programming that series and will have more information to share on it shortly.

The audience during the Q&A

Poetry excerpts from "Forced March" and "Letter to My Wife," translated by Emery George, from Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness, edited by Carolyn Forché.

Neither Memory Nor Magic II

2011-04-04T22:50:00.025-04:00

I fell beside him; his body turned over,
already taut as a string about to snap.
Shot in the back of the neck. That's how you too will end,

I whispered to myself; just lie quietly.

Patience now flowers into death.

Der springt noch auf, a voice said above me.

On my ear, blood dried, mixed with filth.*

When Miklós Radnóti's body was discovered in a mass grave in 1946, he had been dead a year and a half, one more of the staggering millions who perished in the shadow of Hitler between 1939 and 1944. Unlike most of the victims, however, Radnóti did not vanish after death nor remain silent. Already celebrated in his native Hungary as an important poet before his internment in German labor camps, Radnóti rose like a phoenix to bear witness to all he endured as an enslaved prisoner. When his body was exhumed, his wife found a small notebook in his pocket that contained his last poems, and many of his greatest. The so-called Bor Notebook, named for the Serbian copper mine where it was begun, is one of the twentieth century's abiding testaments of artistic courage amid barbarity and suffering. The poems Radnóti composed in Bor and on the forced march before his execution possess a strength, pathos, and compassion that take them even beyond literature, into the highest precincts of the human spirit.

On April 12, the Center for Documentary Arts will premiere an expanded and re-edited version of Hugo Perez's Neither Memory Nor Magic, a film portrait of Radnóti. The screening, presented in collaboration with the Opalka Gallery, will be shown at 6:30 in the gallery's theater, Sage College of Albany, 140 New Scotland Avenue, Albany. (If you haven't read my previous post about the event, there is additional information and a trailer there about Radnóti and the screening.) This is a proud moment for the Center for Documentary Arts; Hugo Perez is a gifted young filmmaker whose work is insightful and visually beautiful, and the opportunity to see this film in the intimate setting of the Opalka theater, with the director in audience, is a rare privilege. Perez and Radnóti each embodies the Center's humanitarian mission with work that speaks to individual conscience and calls us to empathy. Radnóti's poems are creative acts so potent they leave you changed. The same can be said of Perez's film, which was awarded the prestigious Chairman's Award of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

. . . Lonely the vigil I'm keeping;
in my mouth I taste that half-smoked cigarette, not your
kisses, and dreams won't come, no sleep will come to relieve me,
since I can face neither death nor a life any longer without you

Neither Memory Nor Magic—the title comes from a Radnóti poem—has been eight years in the making. Perez traveled to Hungary and Serbia to visit the places where the poet experienced his greatest triumphs and most desperate hours. He interviewed more than fifty people, including friends who knew Radnóti in Budapest before the war and a fellow inmate who shared the horrors of Bor. A poignant image early in the film shows an exhibit in a Hungarian school in which Radnóti's poems are displayed impaled on barbed wire. Later, Perez is welcomed by Radnóti's widow Fanni into the apartment where the couple lived together. And flowing like a strong current through the film are the poems themselves, which voice their author's hopes, joys, fears, anguish, and finally surrender in language both humble and haunting.

For its art, for its humanity, and for its portrait of grace in the face of brutality, this is a film not to be missed.

Hugo Perez, right, interviews Ferenc Andai in Serbia,
where he was interned in a forced labor camp with Radnoti

Perez graduated from Yale University in 1993 with a degree in English. His training as an artist began in Little Havana, Miami, amid relatives who fled Cuba after the revolution. He grew up suffused with a sense of exile, yet entirely at home among the movies and stories of his native country, America. His Hispanic heritage is the occasion for some light irony in the name of his film company, M30A. The appelation derives from the Latin American custom of naming a revolution after the day and month it was started. In Perez's case, the revolution was the launching of M30A itself, which took place the next to the last day of August 2003.

I spoke to the filmmaker earlier this month as he was putting the finishing touches on NMNM.

TC: What is the genesis of your film?

Hugo Perez: You could say that it started in Saratoga Springs, New York in the summer of 1996, when I had the pleasure of meeting Carolyn Forché and was introduced to her anthology Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness. The whole idea of that book is that poetry can be almost documentary in nature, a poem can be like a mini-documentary. The book covers the twentieth century from Armenia to Rawada through the eyes of poets. This idea of poetry as witness was one I was quite taken with. Right in the middle of the twentieth century—right in the middle of the book—is the Holocaust, and one of the poets featured in that section is Miklós Radnóti. In fact, the story of the Bor notebook is the story she starts out her introduction to the entire volume with. The first couple pages are about Radnóti, and the notebook coming out of the grave. I read it and was really moved by it. Then eight years went by. I met this guy named Gregory Carr, who had a foundation called the Carr Foundation and at that time was interested in supporting documentary film. He asked if I had any ideas for a documentary that would celebrate the power of poetry. That’s perhaps the only time I’ve ever been asked that question, and will likely be the only time for the rest of my life. He asked with the intention that he was looking for a film to support. I thought back to Against Forgetting, I sent him a copy of the book, we talked about it some more, and we decide that Radnóti’s story captured the essence of poetry of witness. Ultimately, the foundation wound up supporting my film. Sometimes you choose films, and sometimes films choose you.

Why Radnóti, of all the poets in the anthology?

A couple of things. There isn’t anything else like the story of the Bor notebook. Literally, his final poems were in a grave for a year and a half before anybody saw them. His notebook with his final poems were soaked in his blood, blood of a poet. It adds a special drama and quality to his particular story. And also the fact that it was the Holocaust, this monumental moment of evil—it captures everything we were trying to say about poetry in the twentieth century.

What was it you wished to say?

In the case of Radnóti, in the last weeks of his life he must have known he was going to be killed. He must have known that perhaps nobody would ever see these poems he was writing. And yet he continued to write. He wrote four poems while he was on a two-month death march, before he was shot into a mass grave. To me that’s very powerful— even when you’re a week away from your death and can barely walk, you care enough about what you do, and believe in it enough, that you write a poem. As a poet, as a writer, you can’t focus on the outcome of your work, who’s going to read it. There’s something about the act of setting things down, putting pen to paper, that is meaningful in and of itself.

And the documentary was a way not just for us, but for you yourself to come to know this man?

I went in not as a scholar but as a filmmaker and storyteller. I wasn’t looking to make the definitive statement on Radnóti. I was trying to find connections that would help me understand him and the story of his world in a way I could present to audiences. Over the course of a couple years, I was back and forth to Hungary six or seven times, we interviewed more than fifty people, including a handful of people who had known him; I literally walked in the same places he walked. I went to Serbia to see the Bor copper mine, where he was a slave laborer. We followed the course of the last hundred kilometers of the death march, the different places where he stopped and he camped. There’s not much left of that time, but you get a connection of the geography, the place he was in, the sky that he saw. The film is episodic in nature, especially the last forty minutes, it’s a string of little stories that take you from the labor camp to the death march to his death and after his death. There’s a voice in each of those little segments that takes you through.

The film is a portrait of artistic courage and a love story between the poet and his wife Fanni.

Oh, definitely. One of the great privileges and pleasures of this trip was getting to meet and spend time with Fanni Radnóti, who is still alive today and still lives in the apartment they shared together. She had never done an interview. She has really been the keeper of the flame for Radnóti, she has assured that his legacy lives on. Every significant project on him that has happened as happened with her blessing or some conversation with her. I tried to get her to give me an interview and she wouldn’t. I finally persuaded her to let me film her, which I use as the ending of the film.

How did the experience enhance your understanding of Radnóti's poems?

When I read his work, it felt very personal, like he was speaking to me. Making the film helped me understand his world better. The thing I came to understand more was how he developed into who he was. He was Jewish by birth but not by culture. He was a very secular guy who as a teenager got introduced to the great Hungarian poets, and decided he wanted to be one of them. He went and he made himself into a great poet.

* Excerpts translated by Emery George, from Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness, edited and with an introduction by Carolyn Forché.

Neither Memory Nor Magic

2011-03-21T12:57:00.006-04:00

On April 12, the Center for Documentary Arts is pleased to present, in collaboration with the Opalka Gallery at The Sage Colleges, Hugo Perez's Neither Memory Nor Magic, a stirring film profile of Hungarian poet Miklós Radnóti. The film, presented as part of Holocaust Remembrance Month, will be screened at 6:30 in the theater of the Opakla Gallery at Sage College of Albany, 140 New Scotland Avenue in Albany.

Radnóti is one of Hungary's foremost poets and a national hero. He was a fervent nationalist and anti-fascist; this activity and being born a Jew condemned him during World War II to internment in a series of forced labor camps, where he died.

Hugo Perez travelled throughout Hungary and Serbia to film NMNM, which is built upon the poignant, courageous poems found in the notebook Radnóti had when his body was discovered. This is the synopsis from the filmmaker's website:

In the spring of 1946, a mass grave was unearthed in the Hungarian village of Abda. Twenty-two decayed bodies were found sprawled in the pit. One of the bodies found in the grave was that of the poet Miklos Radnoti, shot into the grave by Hungarian fascists eighteen months earlier. Found in the front pocket of his coat was a small notebook soaked in his bodily fluids. It was laid out to dry in the sunlight and when examined later revealed the poets last poems carefully handwritten onto the ruled lines of the notebook. In the so-called Bor Notebook, Radnoti, through poetry, told the story of the last six months of his life, months spent first as slave labor in a Nazi labor camp in Bor, Serbia, and then on a three-month forced march from Serbia to the small village of Abda where he was killed when he was too weak to continue.

Radnoti’s final poems serve as the backbone of the narrative of NEITHER MEMORY NOR MAGIC to reveal the story of a poet who continued to write poetry even as he faced almost certain death. Through the use of evocative and lyrical Super8 footage, readings of the poems to represent Radnoti’s account of his life, and interviews with some of those who knew him best and who got to know him in his last days, NEITHER MEMORY NOR MAGIC tells the story of one poet’s triumph over the inhumanity of his age –a story previously untold outside of Hungary.

I urge everyone in the area who can attend to see this haunting and beautiful documentary. Hugo Perez will be present to discuss the work following the screening. More about Radnóti, Perez, and the film is forthcoming in a future post.

Air

2011-03-14T19:53:00.007-04:00

Dorothea Lange, Kern County, California, 1939

I was in Ireland for a couple weeks, which included time participating in N. Michael Murphy's Love, Loss, and Forgiveness workshop, a profound crucible of compassion and healing. Still wholly infused with the lessons of that experience, on the flight home I happened to watch Inside Job, Charles Ferguson's documentary about the 2008 financial crisis. The film won this year's Academy Award for Best Documentary, an honor richly deserved for the clear, courageous way Ferguson navigates us through the how and why of the world banking meltdown that cost millions of people their savings, their homes, their jobs, their security. How? Through manipulation of the US political process, eliminating regulations and safeguards that protected our economy and, by enmeshed extension, the rest of the industrialized world. Why? Why else? That particularly malignant greed of wealthy, powerful men for ever more power and wealth.

By the time I got to the film's credits, I was seething and emotionally spent, as anyone must be in the face of such monstrous avarice. The bankers, economists, politicians, and policy-makers indicted in the film, most of whom still have their fortunes and their jobs (including one or two running the US Treasury), devised and promulgated financial schemes designed entirely to enrich themselves and a relatively small number of shareholders, schemes they knew must inevitably implode and impoverish the rest of us. For a time, it seems, the whole monied world was enchanted by these men, or at least believed that those we wanted to trust had everything under control. You leave Ferguson's film knowing two things beyond a doubt, that the individuals and structures that caused the destruction remain firmly in power, and that nothing meaningful has been done to reform the system. The global banking and finance system is a vast humbug that must eventually fail under the weight of its own corruption.

A few days after I got home, I went to hear Dr. Lisa Dodson speak about her book, The Moral Underground: How Ordinary Americans Subvert An Unfair Economy. Dodson is a self-described "public sociologist," a kind of academic investigative journalist who spent several years interviewing the so-called working poor, people who often cannot meet their basic living expenses despite having one or more jobs. As an academic, she is in control of a raft of statistics, which together paint a horrifying picture of the American underclass. Here's one such number: In America today, fifty percent of all children will rely on food stamps at some point before they turn eighteen. This is unnerving. In the richest nation in the world, one in two children will require public assistance to keep from going hungry.

A friend of mine who worked in a large public hospital is fond of declaring that the United States is becoming a third-world nation. This was the picture in my head as I listened to Dodson describe the impossible compromises a brutal economy forces on the working poor in healthcare, childcare, housing, and anything resembling a family life. These compromises threaten children's health, their education, their happiness, and impact the social fabric in everything from drop-out rates to crime to psychological well-being and civic bonds. In other words, Dickens' shivering waifs Ignorance and Want are our own.

Dodson's book is not simply about the economic underclass, however, but about the middle-class men and women who work beside them, typically as managers and supervisors. Working-class jobs today are often service jobs, in retail, health care, food service and other areas that pay minimum wage and often provide few or no benefits. Those in mid-management positions know that the people they oversee often cannot support themselves on what they earn; they are all too familiar with the burdens their workers bring with them from home. Dodson's book is about those supervisors who go against company policy to help these workers, by allowing them to leave early for a doctor appointment, by not docking their pay for a school conference, by giving them food or other resources off store shelves.

Dodson calls these gestures "acts of economic disobedience," and they are not done without the potential risk of losing one's own job. The people Dodson interviewed said they took action despite the risks because they could not turn away from suffering, and because to not act would make them complicit in a morally corrupt system. (How corrupt? Consider this: The four hundred richest individuals in the US possess more wealth that the bottom fifty percent of Americans. Four hundred have more than one hundred fifty-five million. No wonder we need all those food stamps.)

Heroic acts of empathy like those Dodson describes are becoming more common as they become more necessary. Such empathy is essentially an act of imagination. One must conceptually experience a reality not one's own, and respond to it with compassion and creativity. I was discussing with a friend the other day her idea that service is essentially a creative act. This is an intriguing notion, that service, which we think of as a response to another's need, can in fact be rightly conceived as exploratory, imaginative, original on the part of the giver. And if from creativity one extrapolates creation, then service becomes in essence an artistic response to the world.

As one who has known a number of people deeply embedded in acts of service, this makes perfect sense. Many of the individuals I know who minister to the needs of others, whether as nurses, case workers, educators, or others, are deeply creative people. It is no easy thing to respond year after year to the plights and sufferings of those less fortunate, and to do so effectively takes passion, commitment, spontaneity, resourcefulness, and ingenuity, all qualities of the artist at work. It also takes high levels of detachment, of savvy, of penetrating intelligence, also provinces of the artist, and the results are often equally as enlightening and inspiring. Indeed, the main difference between an artist and a creative service provider may be intention; one strives to create an aesthetic effect, the other a practical one, although I'm not all that sure of this distinction.

Dorothea Lange (1895-1965)
photographing for the FSA in 1936.

This all brings me around to the photograph at the top of this post. Dorothea Lange, like poet Elizabeth Bishop I wrote about in an earlier essay, is an artist I responded to at a very young age, well before I could articulate exactly why. I don't remember where or when I found the postcard of this image, but I remember I was moved not only by the defiance of its message but by the passion and compassion of Lange in taking it. She was working for the Farm Security Administration when she made it, a US government agency that employed photographers to document the conditions of poverty to support legislation to alleviate it. This was in the years following the Great Depression, when it seemed, as it does today, that the "big men" had taken America for their own. (In Inside Job, there's a similar image, of graffiti on an urban wall demanding, "Where's my fucking bailout?")

The Depression was a turning point in American politics. I believe we are at the fault line of a similar paradigm shift now, on a far larger scale in which old orders of dominion and false ego, be they economic, political, social, or personal, will be replaced by new modes and methods of action. Dorothea Lange left a comfortable career as a studio photographer to go into the streets and express the suffering of men in bread lines. Her art was her service. I know artists today who are leaving the studio to engage the changing times in direct, sometimes unglamorous, ways. I believe that those who remain in their practice are being called to service of their own. Lisa Dodson told me that many of the people who come up to her after her talks are artists seeking to make a contribution with their work.

This, I believe, is where the muse wants us now, in the world, bearing witness to the needs of humanity and serving the higher consciousness of love and compassion. Really, it must be so. Otherwise, the big men who care nothing for these things will continue to control everything, even the air.

Compassionate Acts

2011-02-22T03:00:00.001-05:00

As a partner in the Charter for Compassion, Odyssey Networks is collecting stories of compassion wherever we travel. While in Seattle for that city's landmark signing of the Charter, ON asked James O'Dea for a memory of compassion in his life. He is co-director of The Social Healing Project funded by the Kalliopeia Foundation, immediate past president and member of the extended faculty of The Institute of Noetic Sciences, former executive director of The Seva Foundation, and was, for ten years, director of the Washington office of Amnesty International

Human Condition

2011-02-18T22:14:00.012-05:00

When I came up with the term "documentary art," I was looking for a phrase that was inclusive and fluid, one that would capture the narrative, "real life" essence of traditional non-fiction forms (photography, oral history, documentary film) while preserving the appeal to mind and soul that accompanies the fine arts of painting, drama, poetry, song -- as well as uniquely powerful creations like the AIDS quilt or Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial. I devised the term, and quickly discovered, of course, that on Google it was already in use more than seventy-two thousand times, usually meaning something far more restrictive than I intended. My conception remains unchanged.

The Center for Documentary Arts is committed to artists whose work captures the human condition -- artists who cut deeper than fact and draw out our understanding and compassion. From Art & Document friend Gayle Sulik comes this inspirational video by French filmmaker Philippe Joubert, a humane short that magnificently fulfills the meaning of what the Center is about.

embark on a journey

put yourself into the music

play the sport

feel your self-confidence

so that your resolutions

become revolutions

Elizabeth

2011-02-08T17:22:00.012-05:00

But I felt: You are an I,
you are an Elizabeth

Today is the hundredth birthday of poet Elizabeth Bishop, as fine a poet as America produced in the twentieth century. I have a sense that, for the most part, Bishop is a poet's poet, one of those brilliant souls known by everyone in the tribe and not much remembered by those outside it. That may not be true, judging by the number of books by and about her on Amazon, but whatever her popularity, she has been by my side all my adult life. She is one of my oldest companions and most enduring spirit guides. The connection we make with the poets closest to us, alive or dead, is a powerful and intimate one. They exist perpetually in the present tense, speaking in our ears or whispering to our hearts; singing, casting light, or simply standing beside us with the assurance we are not spiritually alone.

I have turned to Elizabeth Bishop time and again for a certain deft insight that is at once bracing and consoling. Her poems have the lonesome, soulful music of the muted trumpet, a sound tinged with pain but detached from nostalgia. They grow from incidental scenes and small moments, finding immense dignity in the simple act of being wholly present come what may. This is "simple" the way the Tao is simple: a state unburdened by fear, illuminated by humility, opened to life. Few of us dwell in such grace; Bishop's poems embody it.

--Suddenly the bus driver

stops with a jolt,

turns off his lights.

A moose has come out of

the impenetrable wood

and stands there, looms, rather

in the middle of the road.

It approaches; it sniffs at

the bus's hot hood.

Towering, antlerless,

high as a church,

homely as a house

(or, safe as houses).

A man's voice assures us

"Perfectly harmless. . . ."

Some of the passengers

exclaim in whispers,

childishly, softly,

"Sure are big creatures."

"It's awful plain."

"Look! It's a she!"

Taking her time

she looks the bus over,

grand, otherworldly.

Why, why do we feel

(we all feel) this sweet

sensation of joy?

Pansies, by EB, watercolor and gouache, 1960

Bishop possessed an enduring empathy for life's frailties, perhaps as a result of her own suffering. When she was a small girl her father died and her mother was institutionalized for mental illness, never to return. She spent the rest of her childhood living among relatives or in boarding school, one of those experiences, I have been told, that can be at once achingly lonely and liberating. A note of loss pervades her poems, but whatever torment she carried she bore with a sort of tender stoicism, if such a thing makes sense. Grief is always present in her work, but she treats it matter-of-factly, neither nursing it nor turning it away. Vulnerability was Bishop's path to comprehension; she held to it without possessing it. Her candor is not confessional but, to quote W. B. Yeats, "as cold and passionate as the dawn."

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster

of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.

The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:

places, and names, and where it was you meant

to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

. . .

--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident

the art of losing isn't hard to master

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

This is the first time I've been moved to articulate what it is about EB's influence that remains potent to me. I think that influence has everything to do with the recent recurring motif of this blog, love, that matter I have fathomed so incompletely. Through loneliness, failed relationships, alchoholism, and a pervasive sense of displacement, Bishop's spirit remained courageous--courage, with its French root coeur--heart--being love's essential element. True courage allows for passion, for commitment, for empathy, for vulnerability--the components of love, be it for another person, for one's art, for life. Sometimes the teacher appears before the student is ready, and remains patiently in waiting.

The world is a mist. And then the world is
minute and vast and clear. The tide
is higher or lower. He couldn't tell you which.
His beak is focussed; he is preoccupied,

looking for something, something, something.
Poor bird, he is obsessed!
The millions of grains are black, white, tan, and gray,
mixed with quartz grains, rose and amethyst.

Excepts from In the Waiting Room, The Moose, One Art, and The Sandpiper, from Elizabeth Bishop: The Complete Poems 1927-1979. Watercolor as seen in Exchanging Hats: Elizabeth Bishop Paintings

Beyond mortal need

2011-01-31T17:32:00.003-05:00

I ruminated all month about next steps for the Center for Documentary Arts, in the quiet that followed the close of Battlesight and the six months of daily effort behind it. By every measure the exhibit was a success, for which I'll thank again all who helped make that possible, and just as much an education. I've been learning how to direct this organization as I've gone along, and embarked on the exhibition a year ago with little more than a notion in my head and a date on the calendar. I'd never managed the logistics of printing, framing, designing, hanging, promoting, and representing an exhibit of that scale, nor had I ever raised a nickel's worth of donations for myself or any cause. I'm hardly seasoned at either of those things after one rodeo, but at least I now know something about what goes on in the arena and am eager to do it again.

Jack Delano, Vermont State Fair, 1941.
Library of Congress / Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI collection

The lesson that struck deepest had nothing to do with me or my skills, though, and everything to do with how deeply people reacted to the photographs by Cheryl, Balazs, and Teru. Much of that response was expressed in the notebook available in the gallery, a cathartic vehicle into which viewers expressed pain, frustration, pride, admiration, hope. What most heartened me and confirmed my judgment was the way the exhibit equally touched people with anti-war convictions and those with military connections. One man, a combat veteran and peace activist, told me the show captured the ambiguities of valor and horror he experienced in the war zone. I can't think of a more gratifying affirmation than that.

Page from Battlesight gallery book

When the Center launched in 2009, my emphasis was most firmly on the art aspect of the endeavor, on the production and presentation of aesthetically interesting work that addressed social themes. My thinking has become more complex, though I'm not sure where it's taking me. The powerful response to Battlesight among people from all walks of life hints at a hunger for art that speaks with immediacy and accessibility to the human condition, art that serves something bigger than itself. There have been times in the past month when I have wondered if what I am building is fundamentally an arts organization at all. Maybe the Center is closer to a humanitarian mission, in which art serves the cause much the same way public-service announcements do other initiatives.

I've even thought of changing the name of the Center, to something that more plainly states the social goals of raising awareness and fostering compassion. Among the names I've considered were, "The Center for Art and Humanity," "Empatheia: The Project for Art and Humanity," and "Eleos: Culture of Compassion" (somehow, Greek seems to fit the need in ways English alone doesn't). No sooner do I come up with a name, though, then I feel the weight of it dragging its chains. They all seem, for their high nobility, limiting. Humane, humanitarian, humanity--these words speak to that part of us that goes beyond mortal need to capacities of the heart and soul, to equality, fairness, justice, mercy, all the products of an intrinsic empathy that is as much in our nature as aggression and competition. In other words, to be fully human is to possess loving kindness, and the purpose of culture is to cultivate those creative aspects that forge human(e) connections.

If that's true, though, then can't all art be considered essentially humanitarian, since it all feeds the culture? Once upon a time I might have argued yes, but as I look around the contemporary art world, I cannot escape the fact that much of it is driven by conceptual, market, and personality concerns that no more serve humanity than social Darwinism feeds the poor. As I interrogate my thinking--and present it here, still raw and provisional--I find myself slouching steadily away from art that doesn't in some way--through protest, praise, prayer, witness, or wonder--aid the well-being of the personal soul or spiritus mundi. I'm not equipped to be the arbiter in all this, except to the extent that I have a small NPO with a mission and a world-view. As things are progressing, though, it seems that part of the mission is to engage in this discussion.

"Love in Action"

2011-01-21T17:42:00.008-05:00

Other work prevented me from commenting on the observance of Martin Luther King's birthday earlier this week, one of those rare American holidays that, like Thanksgiving and, I don't know, maybe Arbor Day, hasn't been utterly co-opted by commerce. Once a year, then, we are each reminded of Dr. King's power as a leader of the Civil Rights movement, power to both change policy and stir the soul, all within a framework of non-violence. Before his assassination in 1968, King had begun to speak out forcefully not just against racial inequity per se, but also the evils of the Vietnam War and economic inequality. As he told his supporters at the time, he'd reached the only logical ethical conclusion that injustice in one arena is lack of justice in all.

The foundation of King's philosophy was described with swift clarity by sociologist Gayle Sulik earlier this week in her website blog. I am just getting to know Dr. Sulik via email, and she has become a stimulating and inspiring new ally. Her new book Pink Ribbon Blues examines how activities of breast cancer awareness groups, while well-intentioned, often undermine efforts to improve cancer treatment. Her work has given her stark insights into questions of suffering, compassion, and hope, common ground we have begun to explore. Her recent posting, "The Heart of Social Reform: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr." begins with a brief explanation of how King came to his ethic of non-violence through the work of Gandhi and Hindu philosophy:

Martin Luther King, Jr. was a reverend and scholar committed to social justice and nonviolent action that, above all, emphasized the power of love as a potent social force. King wrote six books and numerous articles on the subject, stressing the rational and moral necessity of “Love in Action.” How often do we hear those words in public debate these days? Yet, the most influential leader of civil rights in this country lived by, and led with, an ethic of love that went beyond his religious upbringing or his pastoral career. In fact, King’s philosophy of love and nonviolent resistance reflect a long contemplative journey.

In his book Stride Toward Freedom (1958), King wrote:

“The intellectual and moral satisfaction that I failed to gain from the utilitarianism of Bentham and Mill, the revolutionary methods of Marx and Lenin, the social contracts theory of Hobbes, the “back to nature” optimism of Rousseau, and the superman philosophy of Nietzsche, I found in the nonviolent resistance philosophy of Gandhi.”

As I think about the direction I'd like to take the Center for Documentary Arts, I am increasingly drawn to the power of "love in action." The idea, as Gayle explains, is grounded in the Hindu concept of satyagraha, which designates a force "that originates in truth and love and is an instrument for social and collective transformation." The ways this applies to art become more and more obvious to me, but in fully embracing them I find I come up against decades of inculcation in modernist theories and notions of "art for art's sake." These ideas insist on the artist's essential autonomy and rail against expectations that art might, can, or even should serve a cause higher than itself. I am not at all prepared to reject these ideas, nor am I sure I even need to. My aim is to more completely articulate the intellectual foundation of the Documentary Center. I am aware, however, of how much the theories still define the mainstream of artistic thought.

Certain strains of post-modernism incorporate aspects of protest, activism, and critical commentary, though often at conceptual heights that elude the attention and comprehension of most of the population. So another part of my inquiry involves the familiar question of accessibility. I was moved by the quote Gayle chose from Stride Toward Freedom, in which King explains that the "moral and intellectual satisfaction" he sought to ground his instincts did not come from the western intellectual tradition, but from a love-based philosophy from India (which combined, of course, with his Christianity). My conclusions are far from complete on this issue, but more and more I suspect the truth I'm working toward does not so much resemble that of modernist thinkers or post-modern theorists, but rather is closer to King and others influenced by love in action.

Golden Rule

2011-01-13T16:28:00.002-05:00

Karen Armstrong is a scholar of comparative religion whose study of the world's sacred traditions has led her to identify the Golden Rule--do unto others as you would have them do to you--as the essential message of all scripture. This philosophy, first articulated by Confucius centuries before Jesus, is at the heart of what Armstrong calls the ideal of compassion, and as such, humanity's search for the divine. In 2008, Armstrong established the Charter for Compassion, a declaration of "absolute justice, equality, and respect" prepared by a council of multi-faith religious thinkers and leaders. (A Charter for Compassion button is in the sidebar of this page.) She was interviewed by Bill Moyers, on the much-missed "Bill Moyer's Journal," on March 13, 2009.

Bill Moyers: What is it that evokes the empathy--and the commitment, which you’re calling for--[in] people to put themselves in other’s shoes. What is it that evokes that in people?

Karen Armstrong: Basically, a sense of urgent need. If we don’t manage to do better than this, both in our own communities, our own nations, and as regards other nations far away, then I think we are in for a very troublesome ride. We’re not doing well at the moment.

Click here to view

Let us remember the primal duty of compassion.

Which is?

The words com-passio mean "to feel with the other," "to experience with the other"— do not do to others what you would not like them to do to you. . . . As Confucius said, who was the first to propound the Golden Rule five hundred years before Christ, "You seek to establish yourself? Then seek to establish others" . . . seek to practice the Golden Rule "all day and every day." You constantly have to dethrone your ideas from the center of your world and put another there, and realize that even in the most unlikely person there is a trace of the divine.”

*

The human race has never embraced compassion. Why did we create this compassionate ideal, when all the world’s great religions were created? Because societies had reached a point of violence and the religious people said – people like the Buddha, Confucius, the sages of the Upanishads, the prophets of Israel, Socrates – they all said, this aggression, even in a good cause, is not the way to go. And people found that when they did it, all day and every day, it worked, because when you get rid of ego, it does bring you a sense of enlightenment. But it’s not just a question of holding hands in church, or embracing when you make the peace . . . it is a discipline you have to practice all day and every day.

I used, you know, to be a really spiteful human being. I learned a vicious form of rhetoric from my religious superiors and also from my teachers at Oxford. People used to say to me, "I’d really hate to be your enemy," because I had a really sharp tongue and I knew how to use it. I’d get in there first before someone put me down, that sort of thing. I found that in my studies, I had to practice what I found called in a footnote "the science of compassion." It was a phrase coined by a great Islamist Louis Massignon. Science not in the sense of physics or chemistry, but science in the sense of knowledge, sceintia, the Latin word for knowledge. The knowledge acquired by compassion. Feeling with the other; putting yourself in the position of the other.

This footnote said that a religious historian, like myself, must not approach the spiritualities of the past from the vantage point of post-Enlightenment rationalism. You mustn’t look on this in a superior way, and look at the author of The Cloud of Unknowing, a 14th-century text, as "poor soul." You had to recreate in a scholarly way all the circumstances that had resulted in this spirituality or this teaching, and not leave it, or certainly not write about it, until you can imagine yourself . . . feeling the same. So when I wrote about Mohammed, for example, I had to put myself in the position of a man living in the hell of 7th-century Arabia who sincerely believed he had been touched by God. Unless I did that I would miss Mohammed. I had to put clever Karen, edgy Oxford-educated Karen, on the back burner, and go out of myself and enter into the mind of the other. And I found, much to my astonishment, it started changing me. I couldn’t any longer be quite as vicious as I was, or dismissive as I was, in clever conversation.

"What makes us vulnerable makes us beautiful"

2011-01-10T11:06:00.015-05:00

Here's a brilliant TED talk by Brene Brown, research professor at the University of Houston Graduate College of Social Work. She has spent the past ten years studying vulnerability, courage, authenticity, and shame, and is now using that work to explore wholeheartedness.

Dr. Brown's findings go to the heart of compassion. I was sent her talk in preparation for a two-day workshop on Love, Loss, and Forgiveness, founded and facilitated by Michael Murphy. The workshop was an exhilarating and occasionally harrowing excursion into vulnerability and bearing witness, which Dr. Murphy, an early leader in the hospice movement in America, identifies as an act of love. "We need witnesses to heal," he observed. "Our secrets are what kill us." To wholeheartedly bear witness to another's distress is difficult but intimately life-affirming and has implications far beyond the individual. As Brown and Murphy reveal, we cannot feel true compassion for others if we do not have it for ourselves.

Pietas

2011-01-05T17:23:00.029-05:00

Saratoga poet Marilyn McCabe has sent, via a friend, her poem inspired by Balazs Gardi's 2007 image of a man holding a wounded boy in the Korengal Valley in East Afghanistan. Nearly everyone who commented on this image compared it to some masterpiece of painting or sculpture, by Michelangelo, by Caravaggio, by Rembrandt, by El Greco, or just generally from the grand tradition of western art. Photojournalists and documentary photographers have long winced at the suggestion their work "looks like a painting," because the essence of documentary photography is that it decidedly is not a painting, meaning it is not manufactured, arranged, distilled, or otherwise interpreted to create or enhance dramatic effect. Traditionally, the first authority of a documentary photograph is precisely its literal truth, the spontaneous representation of reality it certifies and thereby honors.

El Greco, Pieta, 1587-97

More than once, I was asked if Balazs had "set up" his image; if, like a film director or one of the cadre of postmodern artists who create photographs from fictional tableaux, he had somehow staged the scene to heighten its impact. Though I have never spoken to Balazs about this, I am certain the answer is an unequivocal no. The verity of Balazs's work is its most obvious strength and virtue. (One does not endure, as Balazs Gardi does, the difficulty and sometime danger of documentary photography to create false images and present them as real.) Balazs does not call his photograph Pieta. He did not set out to create a pieta. Yet life, in its horror and beauty, offered him one and he accepted. And thus did he join a long tradition of images of suffering and pity.

Eos Lifting the Body of Her Son Memnon, Attic red-figure cup, 490-480 BCE

And yet, if a documentary photographer does not create like the masters of old, this does not mean his eye and soul are not moved to similar depths of recognition and compassion. This, I think, is a more agreeable and profound sense in which a great photograph can resemble a painting -- or symphony or any other sublime human creation. In her poem, Marilyn captures this affinity with eloquence, and mirrors it by concluding with a quotation from a master of her own medium, W. H. Auden, writing on Brueghel. The result is a richly-faceted meditation on how art reflects and magnifies our common humanity.

Afghan Pieta
  Eyes of the one holding the limp body,
  the grainy surface as of stone,
  or pigment made of rough powder.

  The triolet: help sought
  from the less of it, bonds
  broken, things cut down.

  There’s a body.
  There’s a body
  and there’s life

  left, it’s seeping,
  wounds we must look for
  in tell-tale places.

  There’s the cradle:
  the holder’s arms,
  chest to body.

  The ache the eyes
  are always turned toward:
  the third figure obscure.

  The matter is always
  man. The suffering
  old masters always knew.

     --Marilyn McCabe

Balazs Gardi, Afghan man and wounded boy,

Korengal Valley, Kunar Province, East Afghanistan, 2007

Best of 2010

2010-12-30T16:06:00.003-05:00

It is with pleasure I can report that Battlesight is on two end-of-year "Best-of" lists.

David Brickman, in his blog Get Visual, named our exhibit in his Best Shows of 2010:

Battlesight: Dispatches from Iraq and Afghanistan by International Photographers stood out as a hard-hitting, carefully planned combination of three photojournalists’ personal visions of war (oddly enough, it’s the only show of photographs that made this list).

And via Nippertown!, The Daily Gazette's Karen Bjornland included Battlesight in her recap, What We Loved This Year: Visual Arts.

Thank you, David and Karen (and friends at Nippertown!).

And thank you to all who helped me and the Center for Documentary Arts during our first year of operation. I am grateful to you one and all. And so we look toward 2011. . .

Poets of compassion

2010-12-25T09:39:00.010-05:00

from 1933 stage adaptation

As we observe this Mass of Christ, I find myself reflecting on Jesus-as-philosopher at least as deeply as Jesus-as-redeemer. At this time of year in particular, no author captures the essence of Jesus's teachings quite like Charles Dickens. Dickens was a poet of radical compassion, and this speech from A Christmas Carol, spoken to Scrooge by his nephew Fred, is one of the most succinct expressions of Jesus-mind I know.

Warmest wishes of the holiday to all.

Millstones

2010-12-07T07:46:00.020-05:00

I was on Joe Donahue's radio program "The Roundtable" yesterday to talk about Battlesight. The station reaches seven states and I'm grateful to Joe and WAMC for the opportunity to speak about the exhibit and photographers before such a wide audience. Here's the link to listen.

Today is Pearl Harbor Day, which when I was a boy was a somber day of remembrance and reflection for people of my parents' and grandparents' generations. Today, the attack on the US Naval base by Japan in 1941 is less reverently observed, as those who were alive that day more and more pass from our sight. As the paradigm of a Day of Infamy, Pearl Harbor has, of course, been replaced in contemporary America by the terrible events of September 11, 2001. That day, which we watched unfold together on television, will remain vivid in our collective memory until our grandchildren are old.

As I wrote that last sentence, a black image passed through my mind, of some future event even more horrific than 9/11 searing a new standard of horror on our psyches. It's dreadful to conjure, but how can anyone who's paying attention completely avoid it? As much as we live lives of courage and confidence, it is difficult not to harbor some fear for our future, some dread that America will yet again be the site of a monstrous attack. In this regard, December 7, 1941, was the beginning of an epoch in our national history of the omnipresent enemy, the evil Other bent on destruction. Hitler, Hirohito, Stalin, Khrushchev, Ho Chi Minh, Brezhnev, Khomeini, Noriega, Saddam Hussein, Bin Laden, Ahmadinejad, Kim Jong-il -- an unbroken chain of adversaries, some erupting on their own, others cultivated by our government inadvertently or deliberately to fulfill the requirements of a military-industrial economy.

It's a staggering thought, that this country has spent the whole of my half-century and more pursuing enemies. When I was in my twenties, a wave of articles and movies appeared detailing the consequences of nuclear war, and a threat that had been in the background through my childhood took on new urgency. I am too young to have experienced "duck and cover" drills or known anyone with a bomb shelter in their back yard, though I do remember the yellow Civil Defense signs in the steampipe-lined catacombs of my elementary school which led to a storeroom of mattresses and slowly rusting cans of food. The Bomb was a vague threat in my consciousness during the 1960s and '70s, when Vietnam, street protests, and Watergate were much more immediate. In the 1980s, though, when we all learned the term Nuclear Winter, the feeling that civilization was provisional struck me deep. I remember a conversation I had at the time with an old New Englander about a great granite millstone we were admiring at a farm museum. "A thing like that'll last forevah," the man said in his Yankee inflection. "Or until the bombs fall," I thought to myself, shuddering at the notion we'd created a world where such a possibility existed.

My fear then was the product of a twisted manufacture, just as our fear of terrorist attack is today. That manufacture is a complex system of technology, ideology, economics, and propaganda. It is impossible for Joe Citizen to know how much of the threat is real and how much a construct. I swing wildly sometimes, from "recognizing" how dangerous the world is to suspecting the whole thing is a put-up job, created, as Lucy says in A Charlie Brown Christmas, "by a big Eastern syndicate." What I do know is that we will remain at the mercy of tooth and claw as long as we continue to choose conflict over cooperation. The way to enter a new epoch of peace is to be exemplars of justice and compassion. The question is, has nearly seventy years of being on the defensive changed our national personality in ways that prevent us from doing so?

Bob Goepfert's "The Arts Whisperer"

2010-12-02T22:12:00.005-05:00

A friend recently sent me this fine posting about Battlesight from the blog of the Troy Record's arts editor. How eloquently Bob relates his experience of viewing the exhibit:

There is an eerie beauty about the photographs individually and collectively. While I found myself being hypnotized by certain images - especially the 2007 photograph by Balazs Gardi which shows an Afghan man holding a wounded child - when I stood in the middle of the gallery and slowly turned 360-degrees I became immersed in the whole to the degree it felt like an out-of-body experience. The circle transported me not to Iraq or Afghanistan but to a surreal world where pain, fear and suffering was the norm. This place is called war.

The rest of the post is here. (Scroll down the right sidebar there to the list of past postings.)

Battlesight is on exhibit through December 19 at the Arts Center of the Capital Region in Troy.

David Brickman's "Get Visual"

2010-11-23T13:41:00.009-05:00

I'm still a bit dazed as I post this, by the generous and enthusiastic review of Battlesight from the Capital Region's premier art critic, David Brickman. Here is how he begins:

It's as though the International Center of Photography opened a branch in Troy. The exhibition Battlesight: Dispatches from Iraq and Afghanistan by International Photographers is that good, and that important.

An extraordinary endorsement. The rest is here: http://dbgetvisual.blogspot.com/

Gallery Notes

2010-11-16T22:53:00.009-05:00

Comments left by visitors after viewing Battlesight,

to Cheryl, Balazs, and Teru for their extraordinary work.

Press: Albany Times Union

2010-11-01T22:52:00.017-04:00

War with faces

By TOM KEYSER Staff Writer

Published: Friday, October 29, 2010

The Blue Mosque, Mazar-e-Sharif, Afghanistan 2007 (Photo by Teru Kuwayama)

The 32 photographs in “Battlesight: Dispatches from Iraq and Afghanistan by International Photographers,” which is the inaugural exhibition of the Center for Documentary Arts at The Sage Colleges, draw out an emotion that fulfills not only the mission of the show but also the mission of the center.

“The show raises our consciousness, not about a certain political agenda, but about our fellow human beings,” says Timothy Cahill, the center’s director. “That gets to the big word, which is compassion/empathy. If you open yourself up and don’t come in with one agenda or another, if you just look at the pictures, I think it’s impossible to walk away not having connected to their humanity.”

Read article

Press: The Daily Gazette & Metroland

2010-11-01T22:20:00.018-04:00

The Daily Gazette (Schenectady, NY), October 28, 2010

Photos capture physical,
emotional impact of war

Views of Afghanistan, Iraq wars bring home reality

Thursday, October 28, 2010

By Joanne McFadden

TROY — One assignment, three different results,
all poignant statements about humanity.

That’s what visitors to The Arts Center of the
Capital Region will see in “Battlesight:
Dispatches from Iraq and Afghanistan by
International Photographers,” the debut
exhibition of the Center for Documentary Arts
at The Sage Colleges. It will be on exhibit through Dec. 19.

Timothy Cahill, founding director of the center, admits that there’s “something very
brave about launching a not-for-profit devoted to documentary art and compassion in
the midst of a great recession.” Yet he, along with founders Dr. Melvin Krant and
Steve Lobel, did just that.

“Battlesight” goes to the heart of the center’s twofold mission: to use documentary
arts to bring viewers into the lives of other people and as a result increase awareness
of what we share as humanity and foster increased compassion for one another.

In part, Cahill chose the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for the center’s first exhibition
because it will be on view at the same time as The Sage College’s Veterans Week
2010, and this was a way to highlight the activities of the center’s host institution.
Despite the subject matter, the exhibition is not a political statement. Neither it nor
the Center for Documentary Arts has a political agenda, Cahill said.

He chose three photographers who had worked in Iraq or Afghanistan on
assignment to provoke a conversation about how documentary artists work and also
to give the public a closer look at what is taking place in that region of the world.
“I wanted the show to begin to be a dialogue about various ways these artists
take reality and mold it into something that’s truthful and communicate that truth,”
he said.

Full article here

Metroland, October 28, 2010

ART MURMUR

THIS IS WAR An exhibit opened at the Arts Center of the Capital Region
(265 River St., Troy) last week that we all would do well to check out.
Curated by Timothy Cahill, Battlesight: Dispatches from Iraq and
Afghanistan by International Photographers is a powerful collection of war
photography by Pulitzer Prize winner Cheryl Diaz Meyer, Balazs Gardi
and Teru Kuwayama. The exhibit is on view through Dec. 19, but there
will be a reception tomorrow evening (Friday, Oct. 29) from 5:30-9 PM
during Troy Night Out.

The battle for Iraq on view at the ACCR: Cheryl Diaz Meyer’s Dust Storm (2003).

Battlesight: Installation

2010-10-23T10:16:00.005-04:00

Battlesight: Dispatches from Iraq and Afghanistan by International Photographers
The Arts Center of the Capital Region, October 22 through December 19, 2010
Opening reception, October 29, 5-9 pm

Press: The Troy Record

2010-10-22T17:33:00.003-04:00

The Troy Record, October 21, 2010

Art Center explores wars’ savage beauty

By Phil Drew
The Record

A man clutches a wounded child; both are grimy, peering out of darkness in the black and white photo. The man’s gaze is not toward the combat photographer who has snapped the image — embedded with U.S. troops fighting in the mountains and villages of eastern Afghanistan — but somewhere upward; toward an unseen soldier towering behind the cameraman, perhaps? Toward a bystander? Toward heaven?

Despite obviously severe wounds, the child appears calm, if grim, gaze directed the way as his protector’s. Are they imploring, accusing? Or simply presenting themselves to their unseen interlocutor, heavenly or worldly, proclaiming, ‘here I am,’ ‘deal with me?’ Crouching next to them, an older man touches the child; a doctor giving treatment? A village elder? A mullah? The youngster’s grandfather?

There is something almost spiritual in the pose of man and child, reminiscent of the ‘Pieta’ yet shockingly contemporary. And the man laying on hands? "Something almost, dare I say it, rabbinical about that," says Timothy Cahill, showing off the image by photojournalist Balasz Gardi – one of three independent photographers whose work is on display through Dec. 19 in the main gallery of downtown Troy’s Arts Center of the Capital Region.

"These pictures bring us to empathy," says Cahill. "It’s impossible to look at these photographs, to really look at them, and not, after going around the room, to feel connected with these other human beings."

Gardi’s work, along with that of Cheryl Diaz Meyer and Teru Kuwayama, makes up "Battlesight: Dispatches from Iraq and Afghanistan by International Photographers" – sponsored by the year-old Center for Documentary Arts at The Sage Colleges.

The images, curated by Cahill, the center’s founding director, are artful, beautiful photography, worthy of a gallery; but they are also reportage, unblinking, close-up, of the effects of war, psychological and physical and visceral. Their combined effect is not polemical and argumentative but a jolt of reality: "it strips us of abstraction," says Cahill.

Read full article here

The card . . .

2010-10-12T21:28:00.011-04:00


Arts Center of the Capital Region, Troy, New York October 22 through December 19, 2010 Opening Reception, October 29

Press Release

2010-10-05T17:29:00.007-04:00

For Immediate Release

October 4, 2010

Battlesight: Dispatches from Iraq and Afghanistan by International Photographers
October 22 – December 19 Reception: Friday, October 29, 5:30 – 9:00 P.M.

Free and Open to the Public

Presented by the Center for Documentary Arts in cooperation with The Arts Center of the Capital Region.

Curated by Timothy Cahill

TROY, NY – The Arts Center of the Capital Region and the Center for Documentary Arts at The Sage Colleges is pleased to present Battlesight: Dispatches from Iraq and Afghanistan by International Photographers, a new documentary photography exhibit opening in mid‐October. The exhibit is a powerful collection of wartime images from Iraq, Afghanistan, and beyond by three renowned photographers whose work records the realities of life for combatants and civilians alike in lands far from most Americans’ view. The photographers, Cheryl Diaz Meyer, Balazs Gardi, and Teru Kuwayama, all international award recipients, represent a variety of approaches to contemporary photojournalism, from traditional news reportage to intimately interpretative documentary art. Battlesight is organized by Timothy Cahill, director of the Center for Documentary Arts, in cooperation with the Arts Center of the Capital Region and the Sage Colleges’ “Veterans Week 2010.”

Cheryl Diaz Meyer Dust Storm, Second Tank

Battalion, U.S. Marines, Iraq, 2003

Cheryl Diaz Meyer shared the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Photography with David Leeson for their “eloquent photographs depicting both the violence and poignancy of the war with Iraq,” made while both were senior staff photographers at The Dallas Morning News. Diaz Meyer covered the US‐led invasion of Iraq as an embedded journalist attached to the Second Tank Battalion of the First Marine Division. After the fall of Baghdad, she continued to cover the aftermath as a unilateral journalist. She has returned to Iraq numerous times, to cover the capture of Saddam Hussein and the infamous “spider hole,” the Al Mehdi death squads, the Iranian infiltration into Basra, and the regions tormented women, who set themselves on fire in an ancient practice of self-immolation. Diaz Meyer's work in Iraq was also awarded the Visa D’Or Daily Press Award 2003 at Visa Pour L’Image in Perpignan, France.

Balazs Gardi, Afghan man and wounded boy,

Korengal Valley, Kunar Province, East Afghanistan, 2007

Balazs Gardi is a Hungarian photographer who documents the everyday life of marginalized peoples and communities facing humanitarian crises. He has photographed the effects of war in Afghanistan and Pakistan both as a unilateral journalist and embedded with troops from the United States, Canada, and Britain. His current long‐term project, “Facing Water Crisis,” examines, as he writes, “the vital yet destructive presence, crippling absence and strategic value of water worldwide.” Now working independently, Gardi was staff photographer at Nepszabadsag, Hungary’s largest national daily, from 1996 to 2003. He studied journalism and photography in Budapest and at the University of Wales, Cardiff. Among his numerous honors are the Prix Bayeux War Correspondents Award, the PX3 Photographer of the Year Award, three World Press Photo awards, a PDN Photography Prize, and the Global Vision Award from Pictures of the Year International. He is the recipient of grants from the Alexia Foundation for World Peace and Getty Images. He has photographed the effects of war in Afghanistan and Pakistan both as a unilateral journalist and embedded with troops from the United States, Canada, and Britain. His current long‐term project, “Facing Water Crises,” examines, as he writes, “the vital yet destructive presence, crippling absence and strategic value of water worldwide.” Now working independently, Gardi was staff photographer at Nepszabadsag, Hungary’s largest national daily, from 1996 to 2003. He studied journalism and photography in Budapest and at the University of Wales, Cardiff. Among his numerous honors are the Prix Bayeux War Correspondents Award, the PX3 Photographer of the Year Award, three World Press Photo awards, a PDN Photography Prize, and the Global Vision Award from Pictures of the Year International. He is the recipient of grants from the Alexia Foundation for World Peace and Getty Images.

Teru Kuwayama has published photographs in Time, Newsweek, National Geographic, Outside, Fortune, and Vibe, among other publications. His work on the Tibetan refugee diaspora received awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Alexia Foundation for World Peace, and were exhibited at the United Nations and the Open Society Institute. The University at Albany graduate was named by Esquire as among the “Best and Brightest” of his generation for his reportage on the occupation of Iraq, and PDN included his work on Kashmir in a selection of 2005’s most iconic images in contemporary photography. In 2006 he received a Nikon Storyteller Award, a Days Japan International Photojournalism Award, and a W. Eugene Smith fellowship for his work in Afghanistan and northern Pakistan. Kuwayama is co‐founder of Lightstalkers, a professional and social network of photographers, media professionals, NGO workers, military personnel, and other “unconventional travelers.” He recently completed a Knight Fellowship at Stanford University and received a 2010 Knight News Challenge award. He is currently a 2010 TED Global Fellow and 2010 Ochberg Fellowship at Columbia University's DART Center for Journalism & Trauma.
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Teru Kuwayama, The ruins of Kabul, Afghanistan, 2002

Timothy Cahill is founding director of the Center for Documentary Arts at The Sage Colleges, a cultural/educational initiative for using art to raise humanitarian awareness and foster compassion. The Center for Documentary Arts, established in 2009, defines “documentary art” as those narrative forms of photography, film, oral history, theater, painting, poetry, etc. that address social themes and bears witness to the human condition. The Center’s conviction is that this “witnessing art” is a vital tool for stimulating personal empathy and collective engagement. In addition to his work at CDA, Mr. Cahill is a writer, editor, and visual artist. He was the art critic and cultural reporter for the Albany Times Union from 1996 to 2006, and art correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor from 1995–2007. His writing has won numerous awards and honors, including a National Arts Journalism Program mid‐career fellowship at Columbia University. Mr. Cahill has exhibited his photography in journals, galleries, and museums. His photographs are in the permanent collection of the Albany Institute of History and Art.

Gallery Hours
Monday – Thursday | 11AM – 7PM

Friday + Saturday | 9AM – 5PM

Sunday | 12 – 4PM

About The Arts Center: For nearly 50 years, The Arts Center of the Capital Region has enriched the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. A regional arts center, it offers classes, camps, exhibits and performing arts events. Artists of all ages and abilities are encouraged, mentored, and nurtured in a collaborative, supporting and accepting environment.

The Arts Center’s 36,000 square feet of space include discipline‐specific studios for pottery, printmaking, culinary arts, jewelry making, woodworking, painting and drawing, stained glass and dance, among others. It also includes a 99‐seat theater for performing arts events, and its three galleries are noted for their critically acclaimed contemporary exhibits.

Learn more about The Arts Center of the Capital Region and its offerings at www.artscenteronline.org .

Contacts:

Timothy Cahill, Curator and Director of the Center for Documentary Arts

cahillt@sage.edu

(518) 292‐1951

Caroline Corrigan, Exhibits Manager at The Arts Center of the Capital Region

caroline@artscenteronline.org

518.273.0552 x 222

Homestretch

2010-09-15T16:07:00.019-04:00

We are halfway through our monthlong campaign to match the $10,000 challenge grant from Chet and Karen Opalka (see previous post, "A $10,000 Vote of Confidence," for details). Our goal is to double their gift by the end of September, and interest has been steadily increasing as a number of new supporters have come in to help with the effort. Every dollar we raise effectively becomes two when placed beside the Opalka funds. Thank you to everyone who has assisted, and welcome to all who will join in.

Balazs Gardi, Afghan man holds a wounded boy
outside their house in Yaka China village, Korengal Valley,
Kunar Province, East Afghanistan, October 2007

The funds are certainly appreciated now that we have moved into the production phase for the exhibition Battlesight. If you're new to the blog, please see the Pages section of the sidebar to read about this exciting exhibit featuring three international photographers covering the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is not a pre-existing or traveling show, but an original exhibit organized by the Center for Documentary Arts for the Capital Region. The show will feature new prints of all the images, printed by NancyScans Corporation in Chatham, New York. These are the same folks who printed the photographs for Richard Prince's 30-year retrospective at the Guggenheim three years ago, and the quality is stunning. The images themselves are powerful and important. The photographers--Cheryl Diaz Meyer, Balazs Gardi, and Teru Kuwayama--bear witness to the reality of war for combatants and civilians alike. There are moments of courage, of suffering, of heroic endurance and grace.

Battlesight opens October 22 at the Arts Center of the Capital Region in Troy, New York, with the public reception on Troy Night Out, October 29. The show runs through December 19.

Cheryl Diaz Meyer, US Marine Corporal Richard
Cope, 23, of Michaigan, enjoys the scent of a rose
from the gardens of Baghdad College, April, 2003

Shows of this technical and artistic caliber seldom originate in the Capital Region, and I am looking forward to presenting this work here first. My hope is that from Troy we will be able to travel the exhibit to other venues outside the region. Arrangements for that are in the works. I am in the homestretch with preparations, overseeing the framing, preparing the catalog, contacting the press, planning events. Lots of work, but it is a privilege and a joy to be doing it on behalf of the artists and their extraordinary work.

Teru Kuwayama, Ruins of Kabul, Afghanistan, 2002

Save the dates: Battlesight is organized in collaboration with the five-day conference Veterans Week 2010, organized by The Sage Colleges for November 8-12. For more information, follow the Veterans Week 2010 link in the sidebar. On December 9, the Center for Documentary Arts will hold a symposium at the Arts Center on battlefield photography featuring three generations of war photographers, from World War II to the present. I will post details about that event as it gets closer.

Thank you everyone for your interest and support.

A $10,000 vote of confidence

2010-08-12T17:28:00.006-04:00

As a small start-up nonprofit, the Center for Documentary Arts at The Sage Colleges deals with the same challenges many cultural organizations face, struggling against the vicissitudes of a sluggish economy and declining philanthropic resources. The Center was initially conceived in the fall of 2008, just as the financial bottom fell out of the US economy and we were facing the very real possibility of a new Depression. The winner-take-all ethos of mid-decade gave way to a growing awareness of America’s vast population of have-nots, which was growing every day as people lost houses and jobs. A period of collective concern emerged for the hardships of others, hardships many of us worried might be ours tomorrow. The decision was made to move forward with the Center for Documentary Arts, with a mission to foster and stimulate this emergent empathy through the power of art.

It took a year from that point to officially launch the Center with The Sage Colleges as our host. I am looking forward to my first anniversary in November by preparing exciting programming for the coming fall and beyond. We are just about to go public with a series of offerings in the months ahead, including an eloquent collection of children’s art from Vietnam, a moving and inspiring portrait exhibition of burn survivors by photographer Steve Lobel, and a documentary film series at an exciting public venue.

These programs are in addition to the Center’s major initiative of the Fall 2010 season, Battlesight, an original exhibition featuring the work of three world-class battlefield photographers, one a Pulitzer Prize winner, who have covered the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. These are images you won’t find on TV or in most publications; stark, powerful, haunting views of the wars we’ve been waging for nearly a decade. There’s a wealth of information about the show and participating photographers on the Battlesight page and links, both on the sidebar, and I invite you to spend some time looking.

Mounting an exhibit of this importance requires a sizeable financial commitment, which brings me back to where I began, thinking about fund-raising. One of the realities of an arts administrator’s job constantly attempting to attract money. The Center relies entirely on individuals and organizations who believe in our cause, and slowly over the past months has found a small-but-growing number of such generous souls, bless them all. Recently, our fund-raising efforts were raised to a new level with a single stroke, when prominent cultural philanthropists Chet and Karen Opalka announced a major gift of $10,000, with the challenge that we match the amount before the end of September.

Chet and Karen Opalka

This is an extraordinary gift, both for the material support it provides and the huge vote of confidence it represents for our vision and activity. I am more than a little overwhelmed by the Opalkas' generosity, as I have been by the open hand of all those who have come aboard to aid us. Now I am inviting anyone and everyone interested in our work to join the Opalkas, our other donors, The Sage Colleges, and myself as we move ahead to Battlesight and the future. In the immediate term, contributions will help cover the costs of printing and framing the exhibition, creating gallery labels and an exhibit catalog, transporting and lodging the artists for public programs, spreading the word about the exhibit, and other expenses. Remaining resources will be used to support the Center's mission.

As we cross the threshold into new levels of growth and accomplishment, this is an exciting time at the Center for Documentary Arts. If you can help with a tax-deductible donation in any amount, please contact me at this blog or call 518-292-1951. I will be happy to tell you more about the Center and send you an information kit that describes our activities in detail. Thank you for reading and for your continued support.

Restrepo

2010-07-22T13:09:00.000-04:00

Restrepo was the name of what was once the most dangerous outpost in the US military, in the Korengal Valley of eastern Afghanistan. The outpost was named for Juan "Doc" Restrepo, one of the first casualties of the Army platoon filmmakers Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger stayed with for a year in 2007-2008, chronicling life on the frontline of 21st-century warfare. Hetherington and Junger's feature-length documentary, Restrepo, is a powerful and important film, a "90-minute deployment" to Afghanistan and an homage to the soldiers who serve there.

I had an opportunity to attend a screening of the film on July 6 at the New York State Museum, in connection with the museum's exhibition Citizen Soldier. The experience was, to say the least, moving, both the picture itself and the discussion afterward. There's little question why the movie is getting universally excellent reviews; it is, at once, harrowingly dramatic and incisively deadpan, passionate and detached, engaged and cool. Restrepo takes no political stand on the war, yet in its apparent neutrality it is hardly passive. The filmmakers take as their cause the lived experience of men who fight for and are killed defending policies they didn't make, in the name of people who've mostly forgotten they are there.

The film will surely go down as a milestone of documentary art. It seems safe to say that when most people think of documentary film today, they think of the sarcastic polemics of Michael Moore, or the earnest history of Ken Burns. Restrepo has nothing to do with either of these styles; it harkens back to the best tradition of cinéma vérité, to pictures like Barbara Kopple's Harlan County USA and D.A. Pennebaker's Dont Look Back. Cinéma vérité, French for "cinema of truth," designates a naturalistic style of filmmaking where the camera becomes a fly-on-the-wall witness to real life. The ethos is one of transparency; filmmakers working in this mode want you to feel like your looking over a person's shoulder rather than watching him on a screen. Hetherington and Junger achieve this with startling clarity, producing an intimacy that at times is almost too much to bear. They did this by becoming part of the platoon, taking part in the danger, fear, boredom, isolation, brotherhood, and fun the soldiers themselves share.

Outpost “OP” Restrepo, Korengal

Valley, Afghanistan, 2008.

When you spend that much time with someone you become friends with them, and the filmmakers treat the trust they developed with the men in the platoon with a care bordering on reverence. Their bond extends to the way they portray the Afghan people, seeing them, as through the through the eyes of the soldiers, as starkly Other. This viewpoint produces perceptive, disquieting moments in the film, as in a scene in a tribal council when we watch a village elder attempt in vain to navigate a straw into a juice box. "Hearts and minds," one soldier says, evoking the goal of the US to gain the sympathy of the people. "Yeah," quips his buddy, "we'll take their hearts and we'll take their minds." At the end of the film, we learn that after five years of fighting, the US pulled out of the Korengal in April, 2010. The Washington Post described the decision as "a hard lesson in the limits of American power."

The audience in the State Museum auditorium was in no mood for geopolitical analysis during the discussion that followed the film. A few dissenters, including some veterans, attempted to steer the talk to politics and the morals of the war, to little avail. After what the people in the room had just seen together, the energy was about honoring the men whose lives are portrayed in the movie, not questioning the meaning of their service. Filmmaker Hetherington was joined by Brendan O'Byrne, a veteran of the Restrepo platoon, and Troy Steward, an Afghanistan veteran who monitors the war in Bouhammer's Afghan Blog. Hetherington began the discussion by explaining that he and Junger's sole

From left, moderator Troy Steward, veteran Brendan
O'Byrne, and filmmaker Tim Hetherington field questions at
the New York State Museum, July 6, 2010

objective as filmmakers was "to bring home the reality of what soldiers go through"; the experience, he said, "should be seen, digested, understood, and honored." From there, the attention quickly shifted to O'Byrne, who gave searing testimony to the effect of the war on his life. "I got home and all I wanted to do was fight," he said, ending up battling alcoholism until he was redeemed by his wife, who he creditied with loving him even when he could not love himself.

The courage of O'Byrne's candor unleashed a flood of emotion from the audience, particularly other current and retired service-members. One by one men and women rose to tell their own experience and offer their own love to the clearly distressed O'Byrne. At one point, he described the emotional torment of seeing a comrade killed in action, and criticized the military for not knowing how to deal with the trauma. Treatment for PTSD should be part of a soldier's basic training, he said. Discussions about the inevitability of death and how to process it ought to begin before men are sent to fight, not after they've been subjected to the horror.

I asked O'Byrne what the value of Restrepo is to him, who lived through the experience. "Discussion," he said. "That people see it and talk about it. Right now there are guys over there getting shot at and dying. People need to know about it, what it's like, and be able to discuss it. It doesn't matter if they agree or disagree. Just that they're talking."