A must-read!!!
" I did not have hearing aids until I was 16: As a deaf child I experienced my country as a nation without sound. I heard the #USSR fall apart with my eyes.
#Odessa architecture is scaled down, “human sized,” and there was an opera house before there was potable water. Odessa loves art, and it loves to party. In the summer, huge cages of watermelons sit on every corner. You break them on the sidewalk and eat them with friends. The city has an especial affinity for literature. There are more monuments to writers than in any other city I have ever visited. When they ran out of writers, they began putting up monuments for fictional characters.
All of #Ukraine has a sense of humor — think of the man who offered to tow the Russian tank which had run out of gas back to Russia. Humor is part of our resilience.
I see 1984 again, when kids are playing war: I see a 5-year-old buzz, pretending she is a helicopter cutting into the crowd at the fish market. Then, there is another helicopter. The two fly low, peer into windows. Then a third kid pretends she is a helicopter. An imaginary helicopter flies up, over the city, into the blue aorta of the sky.
All of which is to say: The #war never really left:
1918, the year my mother’s mother was born, her family crossed the border nearly a half-dozen times, without ever leaving their Odessa apartment. Month after month, the region was invaded by various foreign regiments: Greeks, French, Poles, Germans, Romanians, Brits, Austro-Hungarians. Of course, the border had been a struggle for them as the city of Odessa was so divided between governments — French, Greek, Ukrainian, Romanian — that the family needed a travel permit just to see their cousins in the next street. Yes, crossing the border had always been a struggle — but that year, 1918, the border crossed through them.
My mother was born in 1939. You don’t need me to tell you what happened in 1939. The war never left. When I was a kid: a flood of refugees from Transnistria, as I mention above. And, now people from Odessa are refugees, too. The war never left.
Another friend, who remains in Odessa, tells me he just got back from the store. “People are grabbing any food they can find. I’m trying to do art. Read out loud. To distract myself. Try to read between the lines.” I ask how I can help. Finally, an older friend, a lifelong journalist, writes back: “Putins come and go. If you want to help, send us some poems and essays. We are putting together a literary magazine.” In the middle of war, he is asking for poems.
We don’t read the poets to understand the moment. We read poets to understand ourselves. What do we know about ourselves in this moment other than the plain old fact that we are afraid? That we try to numb our fear with dailiness of shopping, flipping the phone, etc.
But if I must put it in terms of this moment: The purpose of the state is to numb the senses. The purpose of a lyric poet is to wake them up. You hear one poet and you over-hear the echoes of ten more. That is lost in translation, where at best the reader will only hear that one translated poet."
