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Dear <<empyreans>>,<br>
<br>
Johannes, you ask about William mentioning a MicroTheatre and "The
Other Side"--I think, and William, please correct me if I'm wrong,
this is a fortuitous mislabeling of Minus Theatre's "The Other Side"
online at vimeo.<br>
<br>
Two longish quotations follow, the first in response to the
real-political social threat in the US, the second in answer to
Johannes's generous post.<br>
<br>
I.<br>
<br>
"For foreign-born Muslims and Latinos who are undocumented, related
to someone undocumented, or who might be confused for undocumented,
I’d say that the red flag is <em class="markup--em markup--p-em">up,
</em>and it’s time to consider exit strategies with a 6-month
window. US-born Muslims, Latinos who have more stability inside the
country, and Jews have a somewhat longer time horizon available, but
I’d start quietly thinking about options for when things change.
Advice for the black and trans communities is simpler, because
everyone already knows it: <em class="markup--em markup--p-em">Organize!
</em>The advantage there is in numbers and shared strength, and in
community. That’s also good advice for all of the other groups: even
if you’re thinking about your exit strategy, you have very good
reason to make common cause, and for everyone to work and pull
together. That’s the thing that has a chance of preventing all of
this, and of saving the most lives when that fails." - Yonatan
Zunger from <a
href="https://medium.com/@yonatanzunger/what-things-going-wrong-can-look-like-400f84a0cc3a">here</a><br>
<br>
II.<br>
<br>
<p>a group listen to Pavel Haas’s <i>Study for Strings</i>. A Czech
composer, Haas wrote the piece in Theresienstadt, shortly before
being transferred to Auschwitz, where he died.</p>
<p>“We listened to the piece standing, with the same grave
expressions as everyone else gathered there, watching other
spectators … In the end, a group of around thirty people formed,
who had followed the concert of violins and cellos with emotion,
remaining motionless and sunk in thought, moved, profoundly
silent, as if recovering from the collapse provoked by what they
had heard, and also by what they remembered, what had been evoked,
almost reenacted, I’d go as far as to say experienced, because it
wasn’t difficult to feel vulnerable and tragic there, like a
deportee.”</p>
<p>… “it seemed incredible to me I hadn’t been aware from the outset
that the political, or more accurately the eternal illusion of a
humanized world was inseparable from artistic endeavours, from the
most forward-thinking art.” …</p>
<p>“I would have like to say […]: How could I have been so stupid?
Or perhaps the opposite … Whatever the case, I opted to keep quiet
and devote myself to carefully observing the general mental
recovery of the people gathered there. I ended up identifying an
intense communion between all these strangers, who, having surely
come from such different places, had congregated there. It was as
if they were all thinking, we were all thinking: we’ve been the
moment, and this is the place, and now we know what our problem
is. It was as if a spirit, a breeze, a current of morally bracing
air, an invisible impetus, were pushing us toward the future,
forging forever the union between the diverse members of that
spontaneous, suddenly subversive-seeming group.</p>
<p>“This is the kind of thing, I thought, that we can never see on
television news programs. There are silent conspiracies between
people who seem to understand one another without talking, quiet
rebellions that take place in the world every minute without being
noticed; groups form by chance, unplanned reunions in the middle
of the park or on a dark corner, occasionally allowing us to be
optimistic about the future of humanity. They join together for a
few minutes and then go their separate ways, all enlisting in the
hidden fight against moral misery. One day, they will rise up with
unheard-of fury and blow everything to bits.”</p>
<p>– from <em>The Illogic of Kassel </em>(2015), Enrique
Vila-Matas, pp. 60-1 [from <a
href="http://squarewhiteworld.com/2015/10/23/a-quotation-for-the-minus-workshop-at-the-performance-of-hope-symposium-9-11-nov-2015/">here</a>,
where you can hear Haas's <i>Study for Strings</i>]<br>
</p>
<p>Best,</p>
<p>Simon</p>
<br>
<br>
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