I can never be reminded enough of what’s genuine in the world: music, art, literature, love, nature. That I shall take with me on my walk today, so often a way of synthesis. And thanks for the mention of my essay and photo of your Caragana (perhaps from Siberia?). We could spend days with those lichens and little tufts of moss, still not learn half their secrets, but find among them story and meaning. At the very least, that orange lichen, probably in the genus Xanthoria, which lives so many places around the world, is my first of two sunrises today.
Jan 29, 2023·edited Jan 29, 2023Liked by Antonia Malchik
I feel like other people's stories impact me much more than constructing my own stories. Like hearing about your father's, for instance, or some of your other anecdotes. To the extent that I construct any story for myself at all, it's a pale imitation and it always stays the same, almost like a script. But if I tell my stories to other people, they get fuller and more interesting even as they become less true. I'd much rather hear their stories, though. I like the way your father's account complicates the typical stereotype of living under a totalitarian regime having no degrees of freedom. Maybe it's the uncertain and inconsistent degrees of freedom - partly a function of people's own attitude, like your father's boldness in enjoying what he could - that is difficult for some, almost as much as the overt repressions.
You never told us what the Persian translation said!
This jumped out at me: "We knew that what you talk with friends about, you don’t talk to everybody. The official life was completely separate, and officially you would be somewhat a different person. And that’s what I call kind of schizophrenic society."
It speaks to how similarly totalitarian so many people allow this "free" society in the U.S. to be, and how so many live in fear without even realizing it, in service to jobs, commerce, whatever.
Thank you for this! I love that image of the loose pages, the careful, devotional reading. As I read your essay, I wondered if freedom and choice are inversely proportional to this sort of deep appreciation of literature. It’s too easy for people to choose some other form of “entertainment,” especially the easier, mindless forms, when no one is forbidding them from any of it. Videos of empty bookshelves in Florida schools are making the rounds - everything boxed up until certified librarians can certify the books contain nothing offensive to the white Christian nationalists’ agenda. Maybe we’re closer to those Soviet times than we realize.
And your thoughts on translations of Rumi are fascinating! Of course, how could our lens *not* distort his subtle layers of meaning? I wonder if Daniel Ladinsky is any more faithful to Hafiz’s meaning? 🤔 I will say, many a Rumi and Hafiz have shaken me to my core - in the best possible way. “Say Yes Quickly” changed my life and I knew it in that moment. Love the idea of translation being a conversation. It certainly made those mystics accessible to more people.
Unless I absolutely have to, unless it is required by forces beyond my control, I try not to do much regretting. But I've wondered from time-to-time what it would have been like to have family and friends who would be willing to read poetry together, or sing together, or do just about anything that doesn't involve television and mindless commercial culture.
A few times in the past when with others I've suggested reading poetry or a short story. Nobody has ever taken me seriously. They just laugh. Maybe they're afraid of the intimacy, or of the thoughts and feelings that a good piece of writing might evoke. Heaven forbid. Heaven forbid we should mingle our minds and our hearts in the pursuit of beauty and truth.
It sounds as though you have a wonderful and rich heritage from which your soul and your writing have blossomed. I know you cherish it. Thank you for sharing a little glimpse with us.
Jan 27, 2023·edited Jan 27, 2023Liked by Antonia Malchik
>>"It was, you know, outlet for ability to do creative thinking or enjoy something."
Well, this landed on me like a ton of bricks.
Because: so many of we modern Western folk don't have "an outlet" because absolutely everything is an outlet? It's an invisible privilege for us, to own a book and read it for fun. So it's so easy to not notice how precious that freedom is. To read for enjoyment, as well as for useful information, personal development, civic awareness etc. So easy to forget how oppression often includes the oppressors coming for the storytellers, by way of removing everyone's access to their work. Which of course is still happening, including in certain parts of the US...
And yet there's always that unspoken "make-believe stories are throwaway entertainment" hanging in the air with some folk (very often young upwardly-focused dudes extremely intent on only doing "efficient" things). Really? If they're so 'unimportant', why make a fuss over them?
How easy it is to forget that a story can deliver an incredibly powerful message all the way into someone's bones in a way nothing else can - sometimes under the guise of A Bit Of Light Entertainment. How dangerous, to forget.
A friend gave me Drehrer's "Live Not By Lies" a few years ago and I read it. I have several criticisms for the book, but one of it's merits is the volume of oral history he collected from religious dissidents in soviet bloc countries who describe what they did "underground" to keep and transmit their faith in the face of suppression. Growing up in a situation where going to Family Night at church every Wednesday, that mechanism seemed so bland, maybe even ineffectual. But, the people he interviewed described how they would hold "seminars" at families' houses, crowding maybe nine people into a kitchen and get lessons from someone in their spiritual community who had studied. Nine. That's a tiny audience. Barely worth the time. Or maybe not. The impact of little things like that, or like a family passing a novel around one sheet at a time, which will eventually get returned to the friend who loaned it, who will loan it out again to another family, and another, until the paper is creased and smudged- maybe there is something as culturally powerful in that than in a blog or podcast that I experience alone.
And, thanks for posting that tape, Antonia! Let me know when you are ready to start your podcast. Your audio intuition is excellent. :)
Inspiring to think of people craving reading like that, in community, around the table, page by page. I'm also fascinated by the many layers of translation, particularly with poetry. Have you read Christian Wiman's translations "inspired by" Osip Mandelstam? They're glittering and brilliant. Wiman talks of his translations as 'versions' of Mandelstam's poems, about how any translation is a conversation between writers, a 1 + 1 = 3 situation, where it's not word for word but there is a core of meaning that gets exposed. reverberated. Really love thinking about translations of poetry in that way.
I can never be reminded enough of what’s genuine in the world: music, art, literature, love, nature. That I shall take with me on my walk today, so often a way of synthesis. And thanks for the mention of my essay and photo of your Caragana (perhaps from Siberia?). We could spend days with those lichens and little tufts of moss, still not learn half their secrets, but find among them story and meaning. At the very least, that orange lichen, probably in the genus Xanthoria, which lives so many places around the world, is my first of two sunrises today.
I feel like other people's stories impact me much more than constructing my own stories. Like hearing about your father's, for instance, or some of your other anecdotes. To the extent that I construct any story for myself at all, it's a pale imitation and it always stays the same, almost like a script. But if I tell my stories to other people, they get fuller and more interesting even as they become less true. I'd much rather hear their stories, though. I like the way your father's account complicates the typical stereotype of living under a totalitarian regime having no degrees of freedom. Maybe it's the uncertain and inconsistent degrees of freedom - partly a function of people's own attitude, like your father's boldness in enjoying what he could - that is difficult for some, almost as much as the overt repressions.
You never told us what the Persian translation said!
This jumped out at me: "We knew that what you talk with friends about, you don’t talk to everybody. The official life was completely separate, and officially you would be somewhat a different person. And that’s what I call kind of schizophrenic society."
It speaks to how similarly totalitarian so many people allow this "free" society in the U.S. to be, and how so many live in fear without even realizing it, in service to jobs, commerce, whatever.
Thank you for this! I love that image of the loose pages, the careful, devotional reading. As I read your essay, I wondered if freedom and choice are inversely proportional to this sort of deep appreciation of literature. It’s too easy for people to choose some other form of “entertainment,” especially the easier, mindless forms, when no one is forbidding them from any of it. Videos of empty bookshelves in Florida schools are making the rounds - everything boxed up until certified librarians can certify the books contain nothing offensive to the white Christian nationalists’ agenda. Maybe we’re closer to those Soviet times than we realize.
And your thoughts on translations of Rumi are fascinating! Of course, how could our lens *not* distort his subtle layers of meaning? I wonder if Daniel Ladinsky is any more faithful to Hafiz’s meaning? 🤔 I will say, many a Rumi and Hafiz have shaken me to my core - in the best possible way. “Say Yes Quickly” changed my life and I knew it in that moment. Love the idea of translation being a conversation. It certainly made those mystics accessible to more people.
Unless I absolutely have to, unless it is required by forces beyond my control, I try not to do much regretting. But I've wondered from time-to-time what it would have been like to have family and friends who would be willing to read poetry together, or sing together, or do just about anything that doesn't involve television and mindless commercial culture.
A few times in the past when with others I've suggested reading poetry or a short story. Nobody has ever taken me seriously. They just laugh. Maybe they're afraid of the intimacy, or of the thoughts and feelings that a good piece of writing might evoke. Heaven forbid. Heaven forbid we should mingle our minds and our hearts in the pursuit of beauty and truth.
It sounds as though you have a wonderful and rich heritage from which your soul and your writing have blossomed. I know you cherish it. Thank you for sharing a little glimpse with us.
But the ring tone on that phone has got to go.
>>"It was, you know, outlet for ability to do creative thinking or enjoy something."
Well, this landed on me like a ton of bricks.
Because: so many of we modern Western folk don't have "an outlet" because absolutely everything is an outlet? It's an invisible privilege for us, to own a book and read it for fun. So it's so easy to not notice how precious that freedom is. To read for enjoyment, as well as for useful information, personal development, civic awareness etc. So easy to forget how oppression often includes the oppressors coming for the storytellers, by way of removing everyone's access to their work. Which of course is still happening, including in certain parts of the US...
And yet there's always that unspoken "make-believe stories are throwaway entertainment" hanging in the air with some folk (very often young upwardly-focused dudes extremely intent on only doing "efficient" things). Really? If they're so 'unimportant', why make a fuss over them?
How easy it is to forget that a story can deliver an incredibly powerful message all the way into someone's bones in a way nothing else can - sometimes under the guise of A Bit Of Light Entertainment. How dangerous, to forget.
A friend gave me Drehrer's "Live Not By Lies" a few years ago and I read it. I have several criticisms for the book, but one of it's merits is the volume of oral history he collected from religious dissidents in soviet bloc countries who describe what they did "underground" to keep and transmit their faith in the face of suppression. Growing up in a situation where going to Family Night at church every Wednesday, that mechanism seemed so bland, maybe even ineffectual. But, the people he interviewed described how they would hold "seminars" at families' houses, crowding maybe nine people into a kitchen and get lessons from someone in their spiritual community who had studied. Nine. That's a tiny audience. Barely worth the time. Or maybe not. The impact of little things like that, or like a family passing a novel around one sheet at a time, which will eventually get returned to the friend who loaned it, who will loan it out again to another family, and another, until the paper is creased and smudged- maybe there is something as culturally powerful in that than in a blog or podcast that I experience alone.
And, thanks for posting that tape, Antonia! Let me know when you are ready to start your podcast. Your audio intuition is excellent. :)
Inspiring to think of people craving reading like that, in community, around the table, page by page. I'm also fascinated by the many layers of translation, particularly with poetry. Have you read Christian Wiman's translations "inspired by" Osip Mandelstam? They're glittering and brilliant. Wiman talks of his translations as 'versions' of Mandelstam's poems, about how any translation is a conversation between writers, a 1 + 1 = 3 situation, where it's not word for word but there is a core of meaning that gets exposed. reverberated. Really love thinking about translations of poetry in that way.