Passion / باب المقام / Bab Al-Makam (2005) Dir. Mohammad Malas

The Choice of Evil        © Marilyn Kirsch Abstract Painting and Photography by Marilyn Kirsch

“If you’re walking for a long time, You can’t think about tomorrow. If you’re walking for a long time, keep your eyes down and don’t falter. Wolves are growling in the mountains, they will come if you’re not wise. Wolves are growling by the roadside, and robbers prowling in the trees. One eye open when you’re sleeping, the night has many arms that touch you. One eye open when you’re waking, sometimes day itself can snatch you. If you dream of grapes in the arbor, you’ll wake up with stones for eyes. If you dreams of rivers winding, there’ll be gravel where you lie. And when your father falls behind, don’t cry, there’s always someone else. And when your mother falls behind, don’t cry, and then, there’s no one else. Never ask where you are going, the wind might blow your ashes there Never also where you are going, The wind is blowing everywhere.”

—

“Children’s Lullaby,” from So I Will Tell The Ground, a book of poetry by Egyptian-Armenian Gregory Djanikian

Cited along the poem, the testimony of “an Armenian child-survivor of a deportation, 1915”

About this time, Turkish or Kurdish women would come and take children away. Realizing that there was nothing but death facing us…my mother gave me to them. So these two women held my hand and took me away.

Hannah Höch with Raoul Hausmann • Self Portrait 1919

Hieronymus Bosch - Scenes from the Passion of Christ, Reverse of Painting “Saint John the Evangelist”. 1489

EVA FERRI: You insist on the centrality of the writing, you called it a chain that pulls up water from the bottom of a well. What are the features of your approach to writing?

ELENA FERRANTE: I work well when I can start from a flat, dry tone, that of a strong, lucid, educated woman, like the middle-class women who are our contemporaries. At the beginning I need curtness, terse, clear formulas that are free of affectations and demonstrations of beautiful form. Only when the story begins to emerge with assurance, thanks to that initial tone, do I begin to wait with trepidation for the moment when I will be able to replace the series of well oiled, noiseless links with a rusty, rasping series of links and a pace that is disjointed, agitated, increasing the risk of absolute collapse. The moment I change register for the first time is both exciting and anguished. I very much enjoy breaking through my character’s armor of good education and good manners, upsetting the image she has of herself, undermining her determination, and revealing another, rougher soul; I make her raucous, perhaps crude. I work hard to make the fracture between the two tonalities surprising and also to make the re-entry into the tranquil narration happen naturally. While the fracture comes easily—I wait for that moment, and slip inside it with satisfaction—I very much fear the moment when the narrative has to compose itself again. I’m afraid that the narrating “I” won’t be able to calm down. But above all, now the readers know her calm is false, that is won’t last, that the narrative orderliness will break up again.

— Elena Ferrante, Frantumaglia, 2016 

Audre Lorde, (1976), Between Ourselves, in The Black Unicorn, W. W. Norton & Company, New York, NY, 1978, pp. 112-114

Usually we imagine that true love will be intensely pleasurable and romantic, full of love and light. In truth, true love is all about work. The poet Rainer Maria Rilke wisely observed: “Like so much else, people have also misunderstood the place of love in my life, they have made it into play and pleasure because they thought that play and pleasure was more blissful than work; but there is nothing happier than work, and love, just because it is the extreme happiness, can be nothing else but work …” The essence of true love is mutual recognition – two individuals seeing each other as they really are. We all know that the usual approach is to meet someone we like and put our best self forward, or even at times a false self, one we believe will be more appealing to the person we want to attract. When our real self appears in its entirety, when the good behaviour becomes too much to maintain or the masks are taken away, disappointment comes. All too often individuals feel, after the fact – when feelings are hurt and hearts are broken – that it was a case of mistaken identity, that the loved one is a stranger. They saw what they wanted to see rather than what was really there.

True love is a different story. When it happens, individuals usually feel in touch with each other’s core identity. Embarking on such a relationship is frightening precisely because we feel there is no place to hide. We are known. All the ecstasy that we feel emerges as this love nurtures us and challenges us to grow and transform. Describing true love, Eric Butterworth writes: “True love is a peculiar kind of insight through which we see the wholeness which the person is – at the same time totally accepting the level on which he now expresses himself – without any delusion that the potential is a present reality. True love accepts the person who now is without qualifications, but with a sincere and unwavering commitment to help him achieve his goals of self-unfoldment – which we may see better than he does.” Most of the time, we think that love means just accepting the other person as they are. Who among us has not learned the hard way that we cannot change someone, mold them and make them into the ideal beloved we might want them to be. Yet when we commit to true love, we are committed to being changed, to being acted upon by the beloved in a way that enables us to be more fully self-actualised. This commitment to change is chosen. It happens by mutual agreement. Again and again in conversations the most common vision of true love I have heard shared was one that declared it to be “unconditional.” True love is unconditional, but to truly flourish it requires an ongoing commitment to constructive struggle and change.

bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

Film still from “Si le vent te fait peur” (If the wind frightens you) directed by Emile Degelin, 1960.

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