'Nods with unsevered head'
Another round of things we will soon forget
On Sunday evening, Malgorzata – the bnb host who lets out a room in her little Warsaw flat – came into her own neat little kitchen taking off her long, red coat, and told me in her bitty Germany that she’d just been to the kitchen.
I must have had the blank look of ‘waiting to understand’ on my face. So she said it again: ‘Kirche.’ Which means church. I thought she’d said ‘Küche’, which means ‘kitchen’.
‘Ah! Kirche! Ding dong!’
‘Tak. Ding dong,’ she confirmed.
I’d also been to Kirche that morning.
I’d walked past a church and a high, lovely voice came floating out into the icy air on the notes of an organ. I put my ear to the heavy door, in the spirit of eavesdropping on music since I’ve been in Europe. Then I remembered that you can always go into churches and since I was freezing my noombies off, it seemed like a good idea to do so.
I stood in the entrance of a Catholic Church and spied on a part of the mass. The singing came from the nun who also played the church organ. I stayed for the Eucharistic prayer, admiring the priest’s green vestments, the stained glass behind him, the thick glass in the steel-framed doors that separated the back of the church from the pews and the rope with knots in it around the waist of the nun who came out to open the door and show me I was welcome to come inside.
I declined. I have often missed aspects of being Catholic (in as much as I was – my religious upbringing was not straightforward) but those aspects are always only the ritual ones. It feels wrong to go into a church to ‘fill up’ on those familiar and comforting liturgies.
On the train back from Warsaw I listened to a podcast in which the interviewee defined spiritual life as ‘interior life’, which she juxtaposed with our exterior lives, which can be read through our various performances.
In this definition of spiritual life there might be tolerance for someone using the liturgy as a way to access their internal life – the part of them that is compass and compassion – even if they felt the god-question was not just unsolvable, but violently divisive.
But maybe that’s too hopeful a wish. Or too wishful a hope.
Ding dong.
Surrounded and besieged: Warsaw + Leningrad + (pick a place you know of)
In November 1940 – which was not that long ago, although it is a time that is fading from living memory – the Nazis, who’d taken siege of Warsaw in 1939, walled off the ghetto area and herded Warsaw Jews and Jews from nearby towns into it. Just under half a million people lived in about three and a half square kilometres, on average nine people per room.
These people were allowed a daily food ration of 184 calories each. That’s about half a bagel.
The Polish people outside the wall were allowed about 700 calories a day.
The Germans could have 2 600 calories a day.
Nearly 100 000 people died of hunger. Around 300 000 Warsaw Ghetto inhabitants died by bullet or gas. In 1943, there was an uprising, and more people died.
Leningrad, which we now know as St Petersburg, was surrounded by Germany soldiers and besieged for almost three years from 1941, during which The Hunger Plan was put into action as a way to ‘starve into submission’ the people of the city.
The people of Leningrad were each given a ration of just over 100 grams of bread a day. That’s about as much as an lemon weighs. The ‘bread’ was ‘supplemented’ with sawdust and glue.
People ate wallpaper and leather, plaster and pets. There were stories of cannibalism.
Before the invasion, there were around three million people in Leningrad.
The siege was lifted in 1943.
Half the people who had been alive in Leningrad in 1941 were now dead.
Here we go again
It’s a month today since Hamas attacked Israeli civilians and around 1 400 people died. Israel moved in the big artillery. More than 10 000 Palestinians, surrounded and besieged – like the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto, and the people of Leningrad – have been killed now.
The End and the Beginning After every war someone has to clean up. Things won’t straighten themselves up, after all. Someone has to push the rubble to the side of the road, so the corpse-filled wagons can pass. Someone has to get mired in scum and ashes, sofa springs, splintered glass, and bloody rags. Someone has to drag in a girder to prop up a wall. Someone has to glaze a window, rehang a door. Photogenic it’s not, and takes years. All the cameras have left for another war. We’ll need the bridges back, and new railway stations. Sleeves will go ragged from rolling them up. Someone, broom in hand, still recalls the way it was. Someone else listens and nods with unsevered head. But already there are those nearby starting to mill about who will find it dull. From out of the bushes sometimes someone still unearths rusted-out arguments and carries them to the garbage pile. Those who knew what was going on here must make way for those who know little. And less than little. And finally as little as nothing. In the grass that has overgrown causes and effects, someone must be stretched out blade of grass in his mouth gazing at the clouds. By Wisława Szymborska Translated by Joanna Trzeciak From Poetry Foundation
Are these naive solutions?
If there is transcendence, if there is mystery, how do we live with that? How do you lead a worthy life? How do you love? Other kinds of [educational] formation we have don’t instruct us on that. We all learn, again and again and sometimes the hard way, that love is what it is all about. But in all the secular ways we are taught to be successful, that basic truth is ignored.
(Krista Tippet in this interview, which has a silly title, but thoughtful content. This quote is from notes I took while listening.)
Listen to this interview with two fathers, one Palestinian and one Israeli, who each lost a daughter to ‘the enemy’ but who refuse to hate.
The interview was recommended to me by Willemien de Villiers, whose incredible art I wrote about here. (The article is free to read.)
Read this incredibly succinct piece that summarises – if such is possible – the forces swirling in the bottom of the cauldron of whataboutery that fuels hate.
One of the most astonishing interviews I have ever done was one with Sally Perel, who survived the Holocaust by (accidentally) joining the Nazis. Read my interview with him here. (The article is free to read.)
I am currently reading, and highly recommend, Free by Lea Ypi, who grew up in Albania, religion-free but atheistically praying for communism. Until the rug was whipped out from under her.
(If you would like to comment on anything, please be aware that I will not entertain either antisemitism nor Islamophobia. Or hatred of any kind.)
With love,
as always,
K.
I listened to the interview. Some human beings are so astounding. That these men did not become angry & bitter in the face of their loss but rather they found meaning and a sense of belonging. I doubt I could do the same. But I would hope I could.
Wonderful piece. I love that I can be there with you for a bit through your letters