One must imagine Sisyphus resigned to his country’s fate.
The film is created by Kelly Sauvage Moyer and Hunter Sauvage, starring Robert P. Moyer and Annie.
Category Archives: CHAOS
Essay from Zarifaxon O’rinboyeva
For My Mother
Anora’s life did not start easily. Her father abandoned her from infancy. Her mother, Yulduz, had also lost her parents early in life. Instead of comforting them, her only brother blamed her for everything: “It’s all your fault; if you had given birth to a son, not a daughter, he wouldn’t have thrown you out of the house. You shamed him in front of his friends, that’s why he kicked you out,” he said, refusing to let her into his home, as if Yulduz was to blame for bringing a daughter into the world.
The poor woman was left on the street with her little daughter. Life seemed to be utterly dark, yet a light appeared within that darkness. A kind person gave them shelter and even gifted Yulduz a sewing machine. She spent her days cleaning and her nights sewing, managing to enroll her daughter in kindergarten. Every morning, holding her daughter’s hand, she would say, “Behind every dark day, there is light.” Anora was still young then and didn’t fully grasp the meaning of those words, but she etched them into her heart.
Time passed, and Anora turned 5. Although she was not yet school-aged, her mother, wishing for her daughter to be educated, sent her to school. Despite being smaller than her classmates, Anora amazed everyone with her intelligence, shrewdness, and diligence. Every day after returning from school, she would run to her mother and proudly announce, “They praised me at school today.”
As the mother and daughter were living happily, God sent them another trial, and this trial was harder than any before. Anora was 14 years old, studying in the 10th grade, when her mother suddenly fell gravely ill. Doctors said that her heart function had significantly weakened and that a large sum of money was needed for treatment. Anora studied during the day, worked at night, and borrowed money from friends to spend on her mother’s health. Crying, she pleaded with the doctors, “Please save my mother’s life; I have no one else but her.” They comforted her, saying, “Your mother will surely recover, just pray.”
But her mother did not recover; she departed from this bright world. Her last words to her daughter were, “My daughter, I will die, but you will live. You will surely achieve your dreams. Be patient, bright days are still ahead.”
Unable to bear her mother’s death, the poor girl fell gravely ill herself. The kind person who had given them shelter and the girl’s teachers treated her. They told her, “If you want your mother’s spirit to rest in peace, you must pull yourself together and continue your education. We will never leave you alone.” She diligently strived to be the daughter her mother had dreamed of, achieving several great successes. Each time she received an award, she would think, “If my mother were alive, I would share this pride with her.” Her teachers had become like a second mother to her. But still, she missed her mother every single moment.
Years passed, and she fulfilled her mother’s biggest dream… she became a doctor. Now, every day, standing by her patients, she sees hope in their eyes. She treats every patient with kindness, as if she were saving her mother’s life.
Now people refer to her as “Doctor Anora.” And the young doctor hears a voice in her heart every time… “I am proud of you…”
My name is Zarina Oʻrinboyeva. I was born in 2011 in Oqdaryo district, Samarkand region. In 2018, l went to school No. 43 in Oqdaryo district to begin my education. I am currently an 8th grade student at this school, and I am 14 years old.
My favorite subjects are English, Russian, chemistry, Uzbek, literature, and law. In my free time, l enjoy reading books and writing stories. With my knowledge and hard work, l have won several high places in various republican competitions.
I still have many dreams ahead of me, and insha’ Allah, l will achieve them one by one.
Christopher Bernard Reviews UC Berkeley’s Cal Performances’ Production of Red Carpet
The Grotesqueness of Glamour, the Glamour of the Grotesque
Red Carpet
Paris Opera Ballet
Berkeley, California
Reviewed by Christopher Bernard
Cal Performances brought the legendary Paris Opera Ballet to University of California, Berkeley’s Zellerbach Theater over a sunny weekend this October to give the North American premiere of Hofesh Shechter’s new dance, Red Carpet.
The historic company, one of the world’s most celebrated (and the subject, some years ago, of a remarkable documentary by the almost equally legendary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman), traveled from its home at the Beaux Arts Palais Garnier to the modern concrete Zellerbach in a work that combines, mocks, plays with, celebrates, satirizes, and at moments transcends, the poles of an aesthetic whose tension keeps the arts alive: as Schecter says in the program notes, “between glamour and the grotesque.”
Red Carpet is a frieze of a little over a dozen vignettes complexly choreographed on a polymorphous, dimly lit space in a crowd of cohering and crashing styles. We begin in a timeless ballroom dominated by a magnificent chandelier lit by a blaze of artificial candles (a handful sometimes broken and unlit, in vulnerability and decay), beneath which—as it periodically descends to the floor, in full glory, or goes dark, withdrawing into its own ghostly shadow—more than a dozen dancers in a motley array of outfits, from an eye-catching core—a woman in a superbly glittering, blood-red ballgown and others sheathed in glitter-shouldered white—to weaving epicycles of strutters in the post-punk gear of an underground dance club, writhe and strut and wind and defy, as on any modern red carpet surrounded by an audience of obsessed fans, cynical press, and professional gawkers, to the grinding beat of a four-musician band hitting above its weight and whose pounding is layered, when the band falls silent, with the fluting whoosh of an electronically generated sound of perpetual wind.
There’s indeed as much grandeur here as glamour, and an always fascinating grotesqueness (as someone once put it, ugliness is its own aesthetic category, a kind of small change of the sublime).
Each section pits multiple styles against each other—from strained classical elegance to muscular modern, from the industrial synced in brutal competition to violent pop at the edge of disillusion and fury—in little troops of the mass dominating the piece.
There were only two extended solos, brilliant takes on a wild male chaos driven crazy in the dance of modern life, by Takeru Coste and a mohawked Loup Marcault-Deroud, in the performance I saw. And three quarters the way through, a quintet in sudden white dances against an ox-blood red curtain, suggesting the naked human form beneath the jungle of self-representative fashion hitherto on display, on stage as in human life.
Curiously, the representation of nakedness is often used to represent a kind of authenticity and purity that clothing supposedly hides. Yet here it had the opposite effect for this viewer: it is precisely clothing, makeup, style—the marks of individual choice and taste—that express the individual more directly than the body alone can ever do; the body merely bare, like the skeleton, is anonymous, a ghost, almost a nothing. It seems, if anything, less truthful, less communicative, than the elaborations of personal design. Nakedness, like sexuality, has the paradoxical effect of destroying the individual.
Red Carpet is an exhilarating experience, with many stunning moments and memorable gestures—a hammering of fist on fist in a forest of ecstatic writhing, a disco mass pointing skyward, an old-school butter-churn at one moment, at another an indrawn intensity apparently unaware and uncaring of being seen. Above all the deliberate density of movement, the obscurity and obscuring, of each dancer’s actions, like a fugue so densely worked out you can’t possibly follow any individual voice, or like the rituals of certain religions that are seen by parishioners behind a screen so their exact character is never certain, only their importance to the parishioners’ salvation.
And yet I came away with the frustrating sense it could have been even better than it was. It is such a fine piece, brilliantly danced by the company, yet it missed that perfect sense of rightness that the greatest dances, even those expressly aiming to express chaos, can provide.
Too much of the inventiveness in the piece is front-loaded, giving it little space to grow into later. In the final third, there was a feeling of exhausted inspiration, of repetitiveness, even of silliness (the quintet aforementioned quickly devolves into a series of pantomimes that, for this viewer, were both too obvious and too disconnected from the rest of the piece). And the ending of the piece was strangely unsatisfying; the world may or may not end in a whimper, but this dance, alas, does.
Nevertheless, what I remember most vividly is the grand ball of a crowd endlessly diverse in style, approach, movement, and form that, seemingly despite itself, combined in a strange rightness that was as moving as it was exciting: like a great abstract painting in motion, at those moments (and there were many) everything fell into place. Or like a living, moving forest that Shechter himself evokes: “[Choreographing a dance] is like being in a forest. . . . I continue to explore. I haven’t left the forest.”
Red Carpet was created by the Paris Opera Ballet’s multi-talented Shechter along more dimensions than usual: he also designed the atmospheric set and wrote the unrelenting music, which was performed by Yaron Engler (who also collaborated on the music) on drums, Olivier Koundouno on cello, Marguerite Cox on double bass, and Brice Perda on an array of wind instruments. The moody lighting was by Tom Viser. It frustrated some members of the audience, as they loudly proclaimed in the lobby afterward—but not this one: straining to see what was going on, as suggested above, seemed part of the point, though the point was sometimes over-drawn. But I’m a bit of a sucker for ghostly effects, so I have few complaints.
_____
Christopher Bernard is the author of The Socialist’s Garden of Verses, which won a PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award and was named one of the “Top 100 Indie Books of 2021” by Kirkus Reviews.
Poem by Perwaiz Shaharyar, translated by Maria Miraglia
DONNA, OLTRE L’INDICAZIONE DEL CORPO
Occhi come lago/ Labbra scarlatte come corallo/ Capelli ricci e sinuosi
Attragono in tutte le quattro direzioni
Questi sono labirinti
Il viso e il fascino fisico sono delle tende, in vero
Un’arma per tenerti lontano dalla dimora desiderata
Una vera donna vive altrove
Oltre l’indicazione del suo corpo
Seduta accovacciata come una reclusa
Proprio come una cosa astratta
Come un sogno di nuvole bianche di neve
A volte, simile alla notte senza la luna
Fulmini dormienti, pieni della loro potenza
È necessaria una meditazione estremamente dura
Per aprire gli strati più profondi del suo cuore,
L’amore è considerato la vera perla di una donna
Questo può essere scoperto procedendo oltre il suo corpo
Altrimenti, nulla giace nel vortice del corpo
L’uomo vuole sopraffare
Il corpo urlante di una donna
Ma il corpo è una duna di sabbia/ una fiera di desideri
C’è solo miraggio e poi miraggio
La donna è solita nascondersi,
Da qualche parte nel suo io interiore,
invece di essere trovata nel suo corpo manifesto
che è come il centro epico di un vulcano attivo
un uomo per tutta la sua vita
corre sempre dietro a volti affascinanti
come quegli uomini idioti
che sulla superficie dell’acqua
spesso fissano le onde che s’immergono e galleggiano
con i loro occhi curiosi
giocano tutto il giorno con le conchiglie delle spiagge
forse non sanno
che le vere perle si trovano inutilmente
nelle profondità di un mare,
dove il respiro non sostiene molto i subacquei
per raggiungere perle così sconosciute nelle profondità del mare
bisogna aspettare che le valve della conchiglia si aprano
per arrivare all’essenza originale di una donna
dovrai alzare la cortina del volto ingannevole
dovrai scendere
nella stanza nascosta del suo cuore
dovrai bussare e bussare ancora
alla finestra ermeticamente chiusa della sua anima
una donna non è un un oggetto di lusso
non una merce di compra-vendita
Nemmeno un corpo fatto solo di carne e ossa
Il vero nome di una donna è ——
Amore, amore e solo amore!
Translation in Italian by the esteemed poetess from Italy Hon’ble Maria Miraglia
Original poem in English by Dr. Perwaiz Shaharyar, Editor, NCERT, New Delhi, India
WOMAN, BEYOND THE INDEX OF BODY
Lake like eyes/ Scarlet coral-like lips/ Curly-curvy hairs
Attraction all four directions
These are mazes
Face and physical charms are curtains, indeed
A weapon to keep off you from the desired abode
A true woman lives in somewhere else
Beyond the index of her body
Sitting crouch like a recluse
Just like an abstract thing
Like a dream of snow-white clouds
Sometimes, similar to the moonless dark night
Dormant lightning, full of its potency
Extremely tough meditation is needed
To open her inner layers of heart,
Love is considered to be the genuine pearl of a woman
This can be discovered by proceeding beyond her body
Otherwise, nothing lies in the whirlpool of body
Man wants to overpower
The screaming body of a woman
But the body is a dune of sands/ a fair of desires
There is only mirage and mirage
Women used to be hidden,
Somewhere in her inner self,
Instead of, being found in her apparent body
Which is like an epic center of a live volcano
A man in his entire life
Used to run after fascinating faces
Like those idiot men
Who is on the surface of the water
Often, stare at diving and floating waves
With their curious eyes
Use to play, the whole day, with shells lying on beaches
Perhaps, they do not know
That the true pearls are senselessly lying
In the depth of a sea,
Where the breathes not much support the divers
To achieve such unknown pearls in the deep sea
Needed to wait till the lips of the shell get opened
To get the original element of a woman
You will have to raise the curtain of deceitful face
You will have to step down
Into the concealed room of her heart
You will have to knock and knock again
At the tightly closed window of her soul
A woman is not a thing of luxury
Not a commodity of marketing
Not even a body of only bone and flesh
The true name of a woman is ——
Love, love, and only love!
Poetry from Fiza Amir
The Barren Lands Of My Heart
She sat on a greenish boulder beside a lake beneath a maple tree. Her soft little hands were trembling with the weight of the letter she was holding, a letter of goodbye from someone who once used to sit next to her on this same boulder. They used to compete on who could throw rocks farthest into the lake. In her mind, she was lost in a typhoon on a wrecked ship with no signs of shore.” Tears kept running down her eyes from her cheeks to her chin, later turning into white shiny pearls dropping on the letter, blurring the words:
“My love, you are the sole beacon of fire, Fervor of my life, Elixir of my soul’s Obscurity. I forget how to breathe in your absence, I’m just a body whose soul is entrapped within yours. Each night I spend in this dugout staring at the stars, the brightest of them reminds me of you. The cold dazzling wind in my ear whispers your name. I close my eyes and see you in my arms, as if Vega itself has landed on Earth. Sometimes fire shells land near my dugout. Every day feels as if it’s going to be my last. It does not unnerve me, for love of my soil steels my heart.”
“It ignites a fire of passion in me, laying down my life for my country, so that I can honor the oath to which this uniform bound me. And the thoughts of me returning to you bloom a garden of daisies in the barren lands of my heart. If death finds me, when we are apart, I promise you to accompany you as a sheltering maple tree beside the lake where we sit, play and laugh. As a full moon brightening your darkness, as night jasmine blossoming a fragrance around you, as the rainbow that comes after rain. As the spring that comes after the autumn, and as a melody of love that adds rhythm to your a capella. If Death takes me away from you, I shall return to you as my letters of love to you, and if my corpse is placed in front of you, just know I’m standing right beside you, grasping your shoulder, holding you close to me, and like a brave lady, accept my keepsakes of valor with a smile.”
Amidst the typhoon on the wrecked ship, she was moving towards shore, but suddenly someone called her name. The shore disappeared, she began to drown. She screamed, struggled to reach the surface, but it was no help. She fell deeper and deeper, but it wasn’t merely a physical ocean, it was the oceans of her sorrow, which engulfed her and her world, bit by bit.
“Amber, Amber! The ambulance is here!” said her childhood friend Anne. Anne paused, looking at the ambulance. “He kept his word. He came back.”
Fiza Amir is an emerging writer, poet, and medical student from Pakistan. Her work explores the intersection of empathy, memory, and the human condition. She has been published in Fevers of the Mind and Pandemonium Journal.
Poetry from Taro Hokkyo
WINGLESS ANGEL
I was born in a kingdom with underground passages. The king was a tyrant and the queen a woman made up of lies. Poverty, lowliness, and humiliation. I was raised like a guinea pig for experiments. I was raised with the seed of a soul. I have wanted wings since I was a child.
Since I was a child, I wished to fly away from the harshness and darkness of this life. An old man once said to me: “I want to fly. Nothing is certain in this world, but whoever denies heaven will be denied by heaven. I believed it.
I began to have a will to the sun. I knew that even in the land of underground passageways, we are made up of the power of the heavens and the earth. It is not a flight to the top. Rather, we fly to the bottom. To the very depths of humanity.
The ugliness of human beings, their meanness toward the upper class and their pride toward the lower class, became my strength. Wingless flight. I descended to the bottom of the underground passage. There, the living had no purpose, and their souls were as good as dead. Here it became clear to me for the first time that I was an angel without wings.
I planted the seeds of my soul in them without reserve. The will to the sun. With their last strength, they ran up the underground passageway and escaped to the earth. To a land without a tyrannical king and a false queen.
Burnt by the sun and with blinded eyes, they ran up to a high cliff. Then, arms outstretched, they soared toward the sun, one after the other, light and full of happiness.
Press release for Alexandros Stamatoulakis’ novel The Lonely Warrior: In the Wings of the Condor
The Lonely Warrior: In the Wings of the Condor, the new novel by Alexandros Stamatoulakis, has been released by Adrahti Publications. This is the second novel in the saga of the Lonely Warrior, Alex Kosmatos. (In the first novel, Alex turns from a young kid, scared and isolated, into a winner of life in the hands of Akira, a descendant of the Samurai).
In the luminous city of New York, the Lonely Warrior continues his initiation in the high Art of Living after having infiltrated the colorful world of advertising, under the guidance of his boss, Peter Drakos, and Laura the beautiful director. At his side is Akira, the incomparable mentor.
The love of his life, Sogia Aguile, is stressed out at work in the women’s magazine of the bossy and perfectionist Maggy Smith. Sofia’s grandfather, Don Giovanni, is the target of lethal threats.
At the same time, in the shadow of the defeat in Vietnam and the big economic interests, a conspiracy is brewing.
But then, a shocking event sends Alex away to Peru, where he encounters the samans of the Andes and meets his spirit animal, the condor.
The footnotes in the final section of the book constitute a valuable guide to survival and everyday life.